This Martian Manhunter popped out for me when Justice was first released, but he just never made it to the table. Tonight was my chance to rectify that oversight.

His ability is just awesome in a game that is not lacking in good Villain cards. All that you need is an opposing Villain and all of a sudden your entire Field becomes a combat threat. It reminds me of the good old UC Grodd days.

So, my strategy depends on my Opponent having Villains. What happens if they don’t? I will need the help of the only current Modern Villain Maker, the Rare Danger Room. Now I will be swimming in Villains and all of my pieces will benefit from Martian Manhunter to gain Overcrush.

All of this is good… but not great. Really, to only way to make this great is to have some large stats on the Board. I would like to say I was creative with the last piece of the puzzle, but I went for the low hanging fruit here.

Yup. The much beloved Kree Captain would be the beat stick that benefits from the Martian’s powers. His Global will also make it easier to reach for the Martian. With the Danger Room in play, I think I have a win condition.

What Did You Play?

The Team: Mars Attacks!

The core of the Team is set and depends on Villains being everywhere. If I am going down that road, I am fully committing to the theme. Nick Fury makes the Team because there is still that smell of Sage locally, and free Fielding Costs is always a good thing. It frees up energy for other things.

One of those other things that I thought was key would be Wonder Woman. She serves two purposes here: 1. Kree Captain would be pretty easy to ping off with the Danger Room Global if there are not Villains present, and 2. Static Field just ruins my day. She stops both of those things from happening.

Here is where I noticed that many of the pieces that I had in place had fairly ample defensive stats. I thought this might be a chance to make use of the Bizarro Global. All of a sudden my defensive pieces become offensive threats when the time is right. Also, Wonder Woman prevents my Opponent from using the Global against me to undo all of my hard work.

With a couple pieces left, I put in some old favourites: Mimic is still the best removal for those pesky pieces and the Supreme Intelligence Global is a great way to move those Danger Rooms around much easier.

For the Basic Action Cards, I again went to my reliable cards and included Resurrection for Ramp. Misdirection was my second choice to help maybe get things out a little faster.

The strategy was fairly straight forward:

Get Danger Room/Nick Fury early.

Buy Wonder Woman/Martian Manhunter ASAP.

Sprinkle in some Kree Captains.

Cycle the Danger Room dice with Supreme Intelligence Global in order to set up lethal.

With all of that in place, let’s see how it ran.

Game 1:

Up against a pure jank Team using Energize Domino and Magik – Limbo Control. His goal was to buy tons of cheap characters and use Parallax to get them on their energy side when he fields Magik. Between the Domino burn and Magik, lethal could come pretty quick (thanks to old school PXG Ramp).

I wasn’t sure if I would have the speed here as I needed lots of pieces. I decided to gamble and drop Wonder Woman from rotation in this game. I went for Nick and Danger Room as quick as I could. Then added in a couple Captains before my Martian finally hit. Luckily he was focused on PXG and bag manipulation with Resurrection, and never really kept the Shields back to use Bizarro against me. I managed to set up the lethal turn and had enough Shields to flip Nick and a level 3 Martian. He didn’t have the stats to defend against mine.

1-0

We were done fast enough that we played a second game. This time, his engine fired fast. He burned me to death with his crazy rerolling machine. It was actually cool to see this Team fire off. I love when this goofy stuff works.

Game 2:

The second game was against another cool (less janky) Team that puts a different spin on the burn damage from Rocket Raccoon – Not A Raccoon. I will leave the details of this up to Son of L, since it is his build. Basically, every Raccoon attack was burning me for 2 and him for nothing. He was effectively burning me down and there was not much I could do about it except slowly build what I needed to. Eventually, I had the Team on the Field (including Wonder Woman), but only had a single Kree Captain.

I was down to low single digits in life before I started to see light at the end of the tunnel. I like to call this last turn “I hate math”. I had close to enough damage on the Field, but was missing just that little bit. I had bolts to spare, but pinging off his Sidekicks would actually weaken my Kree Captain. It took my longer than it should have to remember that I could ping down his larger defense characters in order to increase the Overcrush damage. That was the damage I was missing in my original calculation.

Always run the numbers kids.

2-0

Game 3:

The return of Rare Raven and Magneto to reroll Villains… oh… and Surtur with Confront the Mighty. My stuff would not be lasting long here. Wonder Woman as bought as fast as humanly possible. He was also making use of the old school PXG, and I broke the number one rule by breaking Ramp in order to throw a monkey wrench into his plans. I took the first chance I could to buy up all of the Confront the Mighty dice in one turn. They were not great for me, and did mess with my bag, but it also took away the easy KO with Surtur. At least now he would have to attack or block with him in order to clear my side.

And he did just that. It was taking longer than I wanted to get set up in this one as a Giant Surtur kept pounding me and I lost everything. Eventually he hit me for an early 7 with the big guy when I was lacking Blockers… thanks in part to his Villain Maker Global and Magneto allowing him to reroll my dice. Once Wonder Woman finally showed her face though, this part of the game was over.

Now, it was about surviving the dance with the devil until my side was set up. Miraculously, I kept rerolling my KO’ed stuff back when needed and always had something to block with after the early hit. Then another 8A Surtur came charging at me. I saw in my bag that I had a Danger Room coming and I could theoretically get lethal if I had my stuff as is. I took the hit to the face and gambled on the next turn.

Everything rolled and I had the numbers lined up. Except, I neglected to calculate that he could just chump one of my Sidekicks to negate my lethal damage. Thankfully I did the math before I committed to the attack (did I mention my dislike for math?) and held back for another turn.

I had to endure another Surtur bomb as I no longer had enough life to spare. Still my Field kept returning (although on lower levels). After an erroneous reroll on a turn where I could have won, I got a second chance thanks in part to a missed roll on his end.

The stars aligned and the engine fired again.

3-0

Post-Mortem:

So… this Team is not bad. I like combat damage based Teams and this one scratches that itch well. The core Synergy is actually really good here. Danger Room, Martian Manhunter and Kree Captain are pretty much made for each other. The Kree Captain Global makes reaching for that 6 cost Martian that much easier.

While Sage was not around tonight, I still think Nick Fury is a good addition to the Team. Whenever there is a way to mitigate Fielding Costs, I am all over it. It also helps that his defensive stats are a little higher. Making him a much better attacker with Bizarro on the Team. The low purchase cost also fits well with my cycling mechanic.

On that note… any Team that requires I actually use Danger Room kind of needs Supreme Intelligence on it. That Global is just too good to leave off of the build. With it, I can set up when Danger Room was going to show up and trigger the endgame much easier.

Wonder Woman was excellent protection for my characters as well. Static Field could have made my life really difficult tonight and she would have prevented that from affecting me. Even though that did not come up, I liked having her around to prevent my stat flips from getting flipped back on me. She’s a definite keeper.

Mimic never came out to play today. In game 1, there was no time to go for him. In game 2, I struggled to get the core set up enough that adding and extra piece of the puzzle seemed crazy… even though he would have helped here. In game 3, Raven prevented targeting so he was eliminated right away. I’d still keep him though as he does suit that purpose to deal with things like Shriek.

Resurrection is reliable and I wouldn’t change that one. Misdirection on the other hand was not purchased once. I like this card, but I struggle to actually find a use for it. The only game I even thought about purchasing it was my last game, and by that time my bag was clogged with Confront the Mighty dice. The second BAC is something I would likely experiment with in another version of this.

So… would I play this again? In a heartbeat! Is was super fun and satisfying to see the puzzle pieces fall into place. The Team is a little on the slower side and does require some time to set up, but I love the longer games. It is probably not going to win any major tournaments, but it is a great local area build to play around with.

What do you think of the new Martian? Have you made use of his global Overcrush ability? What accessory pieces did you use?

Let us know in the comments below.

Thanks for reading!

– jourdo

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