Battleworld is out and it’s time for some team builds! It’s been some time since I did a team build, so I figured since I actually really dig this set, why not start now! I’m going for my top pick first with Prime Thanos. Let’s see what kind of nonsense we can come up with!

If you read my Top 10 (early look) article on Clix Fix, you’ll know that the Common Prime Thanos is my #1 pick of the set, and not just for Uni-Mind. Oh yeah, if you didn’t know, he’s going to be the de-facto Uni-Mind Eternal. No, he’s my #1 pick of the set because he’s just insanely good… and he’s Thanos. Pretty tough for me to not favor him.

Thankfully, Thanos Prime is a Common, so he’s not that difficult to get ahold of. I put that part in italics because as of this writing, it’s the day after release and he’s sitting at $25 for a Common! When was the last time we saw a Common Prime go for that much? Not even Red Leader pulled that kind of money.

Let’s just dive right in and see how good this guy really is.

So right off the bat, we can see that Thanos Prime has some pretty good stats and powers with Power Cosmic to back him up, although his values are a little low once he passes his first two clicks. He also does have a smaller point cost at 140 where he starts at click 3, but once I’m finished talking about him, you’ll understand why there’s no point in playing that dial because those top two clicks are extremely worth the 35 extra points.

Thanos first trait is just fantastic. Giving this dude uncounterable Stealth is very strong and adds a big safety net to a character that’s usually not afraid of being the center of attention. However, the better part of this trait is that Thanos can pick up ANY generic keyword during force construction (or Battleworld keyword)! It doesn’t even have to be a keyword a friendly character shares; this dude can just pick anything and utilize it. Playing Golden Age and need a Robot for Juston Seyfert? Thanos can do that. This allows Thanos to cheat his way onto practically any generic theme team as well.

His second trait is a bit of a mixed bag and doesn’t really make sense without his third trait, so let’s go over that one first.

The third trait on this guy is just dumb and gives Thanos probably the biggest power boost we’ve ever seen for the Mad Titan. +2 to any number of values, even if just 1 every single turn, is pretty crazy. If you tack on +2 to defense, your opponents have to deal with 20 Invincible with Power Cosmic, Stealth, AND Probability Control. If you get two of these tokens, he’s going to turn into a 6 damage dealing beast, and it just keeps continuing. This trait alone makes Thanos the biggest target on the board, but as long as you can draw first blood, it’s going to be insanely difficult to cut through it.

Now then, back to his second trait.

So aside from KO’ing opposing characters that are worth 25 points or more, Thanos can hit his own allies that are in combat for 1 unavoidable damage. If he manages to KO them, he’ll end up with an Infinity token, so this is a nice little strategy we can play around, albeit a little difficult to really take advantage of.

Last up is Thanos special damage power.

Prob is always, always good, especially so on big bricks as it’s pretty much the best damage power in the game. Thanos takes an already golden power and then throws it into the wall continually until it’s more refined. If you happen to reroll something that would hit him into a miss, you get a fantastic Thanos Duplicate worth 0 points, and they are certainly no slouches:

See what I mean? Even with their situational Prob, they have really good numbers and will cause a lot of trouble since they can easily clog up the board around the real Thanos.

There’s so much aggression in this dial that it’s almost laughable that he’s only 175 points. A year ago, this would have been 200 points easily. 2-3 years ago? 300 points, without a doubt. Power creep once again rears its head, and while you could argue that the Prime rarity makes him a little cheaper since he limits what else you can run, frankly you don’t need another Prime with this guy.

Tools for Success

Without a doubt, the most important thing for Thanos is going to be map choice. Without any improved targeting or movement, he’s going to need to pick a map that has plenty of cover for himself while not providing much cover in the middle of the board for your opponent. If they happen to bring Stealth themselves, you could be in some real trouble. For that reason, picking a theme team is going to be our best bet. Luckily, his first trait pretty much makes that almost a guarantee. Look for strong generic keywords. Mystical gives him the ally of Shifting Focus Dr. Strange who can cart him around or give him even better stats. Scientist has a lot of good support pieces. Monster has tons of aggression. Cosmic is one of the best in the game right now. These are all great options as are others (Police, anyone?)

For regular support powers, Thanos already has Prob covered, so I would recommend Leadership to remove tokens from him, Outwit to counter out problematic powers like Invincible on opposing characters (or Pulse Wave), and Support to help him stay healthy since he has no way of healing himself.

TK isn’t necessary with him, although it will help him move around hindering terrain since he stumbles over it, so that could be a very good option. A Taxi works as well, but you lose a lot of timing since you’ll have turns where Thanos doesn’t do anything, although carrying him back into Stealth is a great strategy.

Perhaps the biggest thing Thanos needs though is a reliable source of allies to self-KO so that he can start building Infinity tokens. He’ll need at least 1 to get the party started, and it’s going to suck super hard if he gets hit before gaining access to his gems. I spent a lot of time looking through Modern pieces and looked for a ton of different ways to make this work, and at the end of the day the best source for achieving this goal are Colossal Retaliators. They meet all the criteria; they only have a single click of health but usually have a defense power that can’t be countered built-in, they reposition themselves easily next to opponents, and they’re low-cost. Just make sure you’re including retaliators that are 25 points or more. Sorry, no Groot’s here.

I’m going to feature two different builds today, both of which will be 300 Modern Age. One will be more focused on building a great team regardless of the cost of the pieces while the other will be about players who don’t have a lot of money and an emphasis on the new set so those of you who bought a brick or case and opened this guy can easily throw something together. First up, the harsh team.

300 Point Modern Thanos Prime Team – No Limits

My apologies for those that read the article before I could fix it – I had made a mistake with Carnage in that I thought the increase in his cost meant his point value was raised as well, but that isn’t the case.

To start for this team, I took a look at all the retaliators available that were over 25 points. While favorites like Groot would make a killer Cosmic team, he’s only 20 meaning he won’t be able to trigger our ability to generate Infinity tokens. Instead, I went with the new kid on the block with the Tri-Sentinel for a Mystical team. The Tri-Sentinel has some fanatic numbers and Indomitable, and he destroys blocking terrain as he moves. This means we don’t necessarily have to wait for retaliation to KO him if we want. He can simply move to wherever he needs to grant us tokens. The major upside to the Tri-Sentinel is his ability to use Pulse Wave as his retaliation power. This is huge and even with that 10 attack, the pair of them will be insanely vicious. Perhaps my favorite part of the Tri-Sentinel is the fact that he punishes opponent’s for hiding next to walls and can put out free damage much like Shredders. He’s an A+ ally for Thanos, hence why I doubled up on them.

Next up is our taxi service that also serves as the jack-of-all-trades for the team with Dr. Strange in the Shifting Focus department. Strange is honestly my favorite Shifting Focus piece for all-around utility and he does wonders for Thanos. He can serve as a means to run Thanos into hiding (or bail him out to get him back into Stealth later), swap to a defend click to heal him if he manages to actually get hit, or my favorite, swap to his rare to give Thanos a +1 to attack and damage to any attacks while also being a heavy attacker himself with 11 Pen/Psy and 2 damage. What’s better than +2 to attack and damage? How about +3 instead! Strange will no doubt be a target since he doesn’t have Stealth, but he most likely won’t go down in a single hit, so you can use him at the end of the game to get more tokens so you don’t have to rely on being adjacent to him any longer.

With only 15 points remaining, I decided on Thunderstrike as an item for the mad titan as a way to both control the flow of the field with Force Blast (knock them into your sentinels to gain tokens or walls to gain some free damage from the sentinel), and to give him some wonderful free healing to keep him healthy. This can be swapped out to your favorite equipment, but I think Thunderstrike is best in slot for offense.

5 points is perfect for an ID card and I went with Iceman using the Chase. At the same point value, Thanos can call him in for a single turn Pulse Wave attack with good values AND he gets the Ice Clone to stick around and help out with it’s Incapacitate. Again, you can substitute this with your favorite ID card, but you have a lot of options since Thanos is 175 points. The other option would be to go with something like Wolverine where you can sideline him at his 50 points cost in some games so that Dr. Strange can dash to the enemies starting area, call him in, and then take a hit the following turn to trigger retaliation. That’s a pretty good plan.

This team is terribly efficient for the points it uses and has a lot of ways to chuck in damage. The Sentinels will do a great job of softening targets so that Thanos can get the killing blow, and Strange pulls so much value for his cost that you’ll think he was more. Once I get ahold of two of these sentinels, I can’t wait to try this build out.

Next up is the Battleworld focused team that’s a little more scaled back and everyman friendly.

300 Point Modern Thanos Prime Team – Battleworld Cost Friendly

Sure, it might look like I skipped out on a build by just throwing two other pieces on the team, but hear me out on this.

Next to retaliators, Thanos own Duplicates are actually quite good at triggering his own trait. Since they have 8 movement and Sidestep, they can easily get up next to someone in a turn and tie them down using their own Prob to more or less make the opponent land that 17 defense twice. While that isn’t too difficult, it does sway the odds in your favor slightly. With Willpower, they can take the next turn to hit for either 3 damage against no reducers, or 1 damage with Precision Strike before Thanos stabs them in the back. I initially had two of these on the team, but then I looked Worldbreakers.

These guys are great with Thanos. Three clicks of Invincible with a STOP means that more likely than not, Thanos will be able to KO them on his turn since the odds are they’ll get hit to STOP without dying thanks to the reducer. In the meantime, they might be a bit slow, but they have Super Strength and Indomitable (meaning our entire team has Indom), so they’re terrific tie-up pieces that actually bring a lot of hurt.

Another variation of this build would be to drop the two Worldbreakers and just run Maestro at his 100 point line. While he doesn’t play well in the “kill my dudes to get power” that the Worldbreakers do, he has the popular Baron of Battleworld trait which will give Thanos a +2 bump from the get-go while being a beast himself. I think it’s a little more dangerous with this route but you have quite a bit more aggression, so the choice is yours. I would still run a Duplicate on this team, and you still get a Battleworld: Other Named Theme Team of +3.

There’s just so many ways to make this Thanos work, and I’m really excited to playtest him and see what works and what doesn’t. I’m really happy we got two different Thanos in this set and they’re both extremely good, let alone one of them being a Common! (okay, Prime, whatever).

What are your thoughts on these teams and this Thanos? Do you think there’s a better team out there for the mad titan hiding as a Nova, or do you like the teams I’ve built for him? Let me know in the comments!

See you guys next week on Clix Fix with another Battleworld team build. Until them, remember, the real fun begins when you’re Two Clicks From KO!