This article is going to serve a dual purpose. I will get to the WHYP (what have you played) portion at the end, but I wanted to highlight this round of our Achievement League.

You may remember my previous article on our Achievement League from a few weeks ago. If you don’t, take a quick look here. The basic premise of this League is not to crush your opponent into submission, but to highlight more creative ways to play. You are going to do things differently here. You may give up on the optimum play in order to score points for Achievements. The winner of our last round of this League was actually not the person who won the most games. It was the person to scored the most achievements. You have to be willing to use sub-optimal tools and make the best of it. It is definitely a different mindset when you play this way.

This round of our League had the return of some of the same Achievements, some new ones, and some character specific ones. For this round, the achievements have been broken down into four categories:

Win Based Challenges Build Based Challenges Gameplay Based Challenges Character Specific Based Challenges

Win Based Challenges

Win a game only with combat damage, without using Overcrush .

. Win a game through non-combat (direct) damage only, without using and Super Rares, Rare Cosmic Cube, or Vicious Struggle.

Win a game using only cards with blank text boxes.

Build Based Challenges

Create a Team using only cards from Organized Play (Blue Stripes). No alternate art character cards allowed.

Create a Team consisting only of Common Cards.

Create a Team consisting only of Uncommon Cards (No Gorilla Grodd).

Create a Team consisting only of Rare Cards.

Create a Team consisting only of Super Rare Cards.

Create a Team that is Modern legal.

Create a single Affiliation Team using only S.H.I.E.L.D., Crime Syndicate, Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, or Inhumans.

Create a Team where all 10 cards must have a Global Ability, and you must use each Global at least once in a game.

Create a Team where all of your dice share a single colour.

Create a Team with no 0 cost fielding characters and no way to field characters for free.

Create a Team using only unaffiliated characters.

Create a Team using only 8 dice and no Super Rares.

Create a Team using only characters with a purchase cost of 6 or higher. You cannot use PXG, Collector, or Limited Wish.

Create a Team where all of your cards share a single energy type.

None of your cards can have the letter “A” in the title, including Basic Action Cards.

No cards on your Team may have more than one vowel in the title. The vowel may repeat, so Batman is ok, while Batgirl is not.

Each card must have the maximum allowable dice, and you must have 20 dice on your Team.

Gameplay Challenges

Purchase all of your dice. You must have a 20 dice Team, and no Fabrication is allowed.

Play an entire game where every one of your characters is assigned to attack every turn.

Play an entire game where you re-roll your dice every single turn.

Play an entire game where you field every die that rolls on a character face.

Play an entire game without using any Action Dice.

Play an entire game without adding dice to your Prep Area. This excludes dice that are KO’ed.

Purchase all of your dice in numerical order. (All 2’s, then 3’s, then 4’s… You do not have to buy all of your dice.)

Roll 10 dice at once in the Roll & Re-roll Step. No PXG or Darkseid SR allowed.

Have 8 different dice (not including Sidekicks) in your Field Zone.

Have all 8 of your Sidekick dice in the Field at the same time.

Play an entire game without fielding a Sidekick.

Play an entire game without using a Global Ability. Your Team must include at least one Global.

Gain 20 life in a single game.

Purchase and use at least one of each BAC in a single game.

Have 3 copies of a single character in the Field Zone, with each one at a different level.

Character Specific Challenges

Creating teams around these characters will earn you extra points for the league. These characters must be an integral part of your team in order to earn points. You can’t just throw eight of them on a team and expect to get points for it. You may use any rarity of the character from that set.

AVX: Rogue

UXM: Emma Frost

AOU: Bucky

ASM: Blade

CW: Moon Knight

DRS: Dormammu

DP: Evil Deadpool

IMW: Howard Stark

DF: Iron Fist

MC: Black Cat

GOTG: Nebula

XFC: Ice Man

TMT: Kate Bishop

JL: Swamp Thing

WOL: John Stewart

WF: Harvey Bullock

GAF: Jay Garrick

BAT: Owlman

SMWW: Cheetah

YGO: Saggi The Dark Clown

BFF: Owlbear

FUS: Intellect Devourer

TOA: Birdsong

TMNT: Fugitoid

HHS: Triceraton

One of our local players, Jason, created a spreadsheet to track our League results. He has graciously agreed to share it for you to download and modify as needed.

I missed out in the first week of our League, so I am jumping in a week late. Read on for the WHYP for this week.

After looking through the list of Achievements, I decided I would use some cards I would never use under normal circumstances. I have always loved the alternate art of Black Bolt from the Deadpool set and decided this was as good of a place as any to use him.

What Did You Play?

The Team: All Hail The King

I know, I know… the title and image are more or less click-bait. No King Black Bolt here. Just his poor cousin Plain Black Bolt. I didn’t want to go the Black Bolt/Medusa combination here as I have done it before, and I needed to use this beautiful piece of art. The whole idea here was that if I was going with solely Inhumans, he could buff things when he was fielded. I just needed to find a way to get him across the board. Overcrush seemed like a no brainer, but I wanted to try something different. I decided to go with unblockable and settled on Dimension Door as the source of that ability.

Since I started with a Common card, I decided to continue the theme and threw on every single Common Inhuman character. Crystal will give me some better luck with actions, Karnak and Medusa will be excellent blockers. Lockjaw is just a great removal option and fun to use. Luckily, the common version was the good version here.

Rounding things out, I needed some other tools. Nova Corps uniform was extra pump to hopefully attach to whoever was the biggest character at the time. The Chalkboard was to get things into Prep quickly, and with an overall cheap Team should work well. The last slot, I threw on the Dragon Statue Trap from TOA. It clears out things when you are attacked and I needed board clearing/thinning options. Unfortunately, with this build, I was limited with what I could use. I could not use any other characters that had an affiliation, otherwise Bane from WF would have made the list to pair with the Trap.

Definitely, not the best looking Team, but lets see how it ran.

Game 1:

Morph/Betrayal was the main problem here, along with UC Kate Bishop for her Global. Lockjaw was helpful keep the Field thin, but the BishstractionTM Global was keeping my attackers back. I could not break through and Morph Betrayed me a few times to kill me.

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Game 2:

Remember the Team we showcased for Valentine’s Day? Well, here was another version of the Sam-Spot machine with some different parts. Wong, Jarvis, and Aunt May (mostly for her comedy value) were some key pieces of this build. The Team was just as efficient this time as it was the last time. Jarvis proved to be excellent removal as you were fielding a crazy amount of characters each turn. He was easily dealing 7-10 damage to my characters when fielded. This was the first time I had seen that character actually work. It was cool. What wasn’t cool was when Team Up (actually two of them) showed up and I think I took eleventy billion damage. However, I did block Aunt May as I refused to die at the hands of the little old lady.

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One thing that popped in this game that I had not experienced before was with Lockjaw. Now, I know that he will only deal damage once during the Clear and Draw Step regardless of how many of the named characters are drawn. The question came, what happens when that character is drawn later in the turn? This came up once, and we played it as this was a new instance of drawing the die, Lockjaw was able to deal 2 damage again. It was definitely up for debate, but the writing on the card made us go that way. Was this right? Wrong? Let me know in the comments.

Game 3:

Bye! I will gladly take the free win here. I got to watch the Sam-Spot show again.

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Post-Mortem:

That Sam-Spot machine is definitely something I need to try. It is insane how fast it gets when it starts moving. The Team I played however… is not fast or efficient at all. I think Black Bolt can be a good damage producing character on a different build. I might have to revisit this card on another build.

For today, I checked off quite a few boxes on the Achievement list. This was the goal of today’s build and it met that. Is it competitive? Not in the slightest.

Was it fun to play? Meh is the best I could say. I want to use some of these pieces again in a more open format, but it was not the worst thing I have ever played.

As always, feel free to leave your comments and suggestions in the section below. I would love to read your ideas on how to make this Black Bolt something to fear. Thanks for reading!

– jourdo

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