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The last time I ran this comic-accurate team of the underage progeny of supervillain parents, I found them to be weak yet better than expected, sporting a lot of surprising tricks and mobility but lacking in offensive ability.
Now, with Web of Spider-Man, original members Chase Stein, Gertrude Yorkes & Old Lace, Karolina Dean, Molly Hayes and Nico Minoru have a new friend in Victor Mancha, another teen “born” to a supervillain.
Victor Mancha 96
Nico Minoru 84
Karolina Dean 55
Gertrude Yorkes & Old Lace 54
Chase Stein 45
Molly Hayes 43
= 377 points. Enough room for feats or the Runaways ATA (at 3 points per Runaway keyword).
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TOURNEY ONE: All characters must have the Kid of Teen keyword. No feats or BFCs.
Basically, this was identical to my “EAT IT, GRANDPA” scenario in the newest section of the site. Perfect time for this build:
Victor Mancha 96
Nico Minoru 84
Karolina Dean 55
Gertrude Yorkes & Old Lace 54
Chase Stein 45
Molly Hayes 43
+ Runaways ATA 18
+ Yellow Lantern 5
= 400 points. With Molly safeguarding the AV-boosting Lantern, Victor would get better odds at landing hits and thus giving the rest of the team a resultant bump to their follow-up attacks. Here’s how it actually went:
FIRST, against Paul’s Kara Zor-El, Dream Girl, Shrinking Violet, X-23 (Web of Spider-Man), Wolfsbane (Web of Spider-Man) and Dawnstar, I landed the first hit against Dawny with a one-two shot on the wall she hid behind (thanks, Karolina-backed-by-Nico’s-Staff-of-One’d-Enhancement-followed-by-Victor). Kara was the next to fall victim to Victor’s shots.
Things got dicey, then. Nico got KO’d in short order by Shrinking Violet and Wolfsbane despite a surprise use of Poison against both. Vic stayed tied up for a long time, leaving the still-Invulnerable Kara, well…invulnerable to most everyone else. And Molly ended on the short end of the claws of X-23. Fortunately, I finally took down Kara, Wolfsbane and Vi in the end to make up for the losses of Nico and Molly.
SECOND and final round, I faced Conrad’s Nico, Firestorm (Justice League), Wiccan, Spider-Girl, Robin (“Emo” Crisis vet) and Vet Spider-Man (Ultimates).
The kid still plays recklessly even after a couple of years. (His math wasn’t so good this time, either.) He jumped Robin to a rooftop to counter Karolina’s Energy Shield/Deflection without making sure he’d stay Stealthed. The landed hit wasn’t worth it when Vic knocked Robin off the roof for 5 total damage. From there I used my superior rules knowledge to thoroughly pounce on every mistake he made.
Conrad actually got a little rules-lawyery when I forgot to declare Chase Stein’s Close Combat Expert. But hey, he’s keeping me honest, and if it helps him play better, I’m for it.
End result: I KO’d all but Firestorm and lost only Karolina and Gert & Old Lace. As winner, I got  LE Daken.
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TOURNEY 2: 400 points, Modern Age.
I used the same team in this casual home game.
FIRST ROUND I faced Andy, using Iron Man/War Machine, Peter Parker, Ben Reilly and a Nurse on my chosen Prison map.
Key moments:
  • As I hunkered down in a hallway, Andy made a crucial misstep in using his Kinetic Accelerator. He got a high enough roll to make a Running Shot attack on my Victor Mancha, but none of us saw it until well after his move action was made. (And, in any case, he should’ve declared the Running Shot power action from the start anyway, according to the rules of this special object — which he’s only started using because I use it all. The. TIME 😉 )
  • Vic’s counterattack on the big duo was a critical miss. Two moves later, I realized I could have used the first of my three themed-team Probability Controls to reroll the attack. Ugh.
  • But that was a blessing in disguise as it left Chase free to run the team away from IM/WM without pushing.
  • Between IM/WM’s frequent misses and Psychic Blasts/Outwits from Vic and Nico, the Runaways, er…ran away with a surprise victory, KOing the 300-point duo and Ben Reilly/Scarlet Spider while losing only Molly and Gert & Old Lace.
THEN I faced the host Thomas and his Cosmic Spider-Man, Batgirl (Arkham Asylum) and Checkmate Knight (white) on my choice of the Arena map.
Unable to target any of the opposing figures (due to their Batman Ally-granted Stealth) and with Cosmic Spidey able to, via his HSS and his never-blocked Line of Fire trait, attack my pieces at will, I spent much of the game cowering my team in one of the corners. Though I eventually got the  Checkmate Knight, my whole team was slowly wiped out in the least fun game I’ve ever played against a non-colossal character.
(Digressional rant: Cosmic Spider-Man is a point-and-click character…as in, “point it at your opponent’s characters and click their dials.” It takes no actual strategy to play him effectively. Heaven forbid you actually do use strategy when playing him, like Thomas did in this team build and game. Extreme HSS, 10 range, Power Cosmic, perma-Line of Fire AND a wild card? Really? In good conscience, I can never give fellowship to a player who uses him unless they’re using him against a powerful colossal figure.
Digression over. Back to Runaways.)

Piece-by-piece:
Chase doesn’t have the sexy AV or DV, but he’s such a key to this team it’s not even funny. His ability to carry the team in and out of trouble was invaluable in the first games (even if I didn’t use it so well a couple of times). It’s telling that he was the first target of the CSM team.
Gertrude Yorkes & Old Lace were useless except for taking theme PCs and occasionally forcing drive-by damage with their AV SP; in both tourneys they were KO’d in a single round of attacks. I need to either use them to plug up Hypersonic Speedster lanes on indoor maps or hurl them at foes to using Nico’s occasional TK after Vic’s softened a target up for the Runaways ATA.
Karolina was little else but an attack magnet and damage sponge. But that’s OK now that she’s not the only shooter or natural 10 AV on the team.
Molly was hobbled by her Super Strength forcing me to choose between her doing extra damage with an object or being taxied. More often she served as the best tie-up piece on the team.
As Nico lives or dies, so too does the team. That’s how it used to be, anyway, before Victor Mancha, a true attacker for the team who combines elements the others only provided piecemeal before: double-digit AV and Running Shot for a ranged threat (Dean), good damage (Molly) and a way to deal with Invulnerability-plus (both Molly and Nico, sometimes), strong defenses (Molly), taxi skills (Chase, Dean), and via his Indomitabilty, extra actions (Nico). His being able to press the attack or hasten the retreat makes the rest of the team better as well.
I want to play a Golden Age version of the team with Feats and Battlefield Conditions. Contingency Plan is a given on Nico to boost stats as needed. Armor Piercing, while good with Gert & Old Lace’s auto-damage “Arsenic” SP, might be too many points to put on this inefficient duo. Instead, Gert’s BF Chase can get excellent use from Lunge to give him move+attack ability in addition to taxiing pals. The 5-point Yellow Lantern is probably still the best use of the remaining 6 points to help Vic land his all-important Running Shots. With no team abilities, both the Alpha Strike and Disbanded BFCs work well on this build.

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Huh. I was certain I hit “Publish” on that Runaways article I promised for last week, but it didn’t happen, I guess. Now it’s time for another Monday mod article, so the Runaways will have to wait until Tuesday.

WINTER SOLDIER (Avengers)

Nice that they painted him in his Bucky costume colors. The trouble with that is, well, he never really wore his Bucky costume colors as the Winter Soldier:.

That's blue-black leather, yo.

I like my clix sculpts a lot more comic-accurate than that. So here’s what I did:

  • Painted mask with solid black acrylic paint.
  • Painted blue clothes with a translucent black ink wash.

 

Completed mid-2009. Simple and the thing looks WAY better.

Next Monday: Instead of painting one near-black, I go completely the other way.
Tomorrow: The Runaways!

Later this week: I actually never finished my Event Dials series, leaving the final (?) two — Warrior Madness and Atlantis Attacks from Hammer of Thor — unexamined. I rectify that oversight.

And, speaking of Atlantis…

By Friday: A look at every extant figure bearing this keyword, including Aquaman from the soon-to-be-released Brightest Day action pack!

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Sorry again for blowing my deadline last week! To make up for it, here’s a double feature of girls from the 2007 AVENGERS set who got makeovers.

First up is the big girl I promised: Stature of the Young Avengers.

She doesn’t look really great in photos. Even in hand she’s not so glamorous. Maybe it’s because she’s part of a fairly exclusive club of HeroClix sculpts based directly on an image from the comics.

 

Seriously. Hold the Stature figure at this same angle and you'll see it for sure.

 

Wonderful art by Jim Cheung from Young Avengers # 5 or 6 or something. But what looks great in Cheung’s 2D style wound up looking less-than-glorious in 3D. And besides, the costume’s wrong. By the time she chose the Stature codename (over Ant-Girl), she was wearing this:

…and has been ever since. So here’s what I did to make this big girl right:

  • Repainted her costume details with acrylic paint. Specifically, I swapped her suit’s color palette: red to black and dark-blue to red.

Completed early 2009.

Simple, huh? :) A nice side effect of the mask is that it covers up those unattractive-in-3D furrows in her angry brow.

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Stature wasn’t the only chick in AVENGERS to need work on her face. Here’s the original look of Super Rare WASP from the same set:

 

I call her Crash Test Dummy Wasp.

 

Terrible, huh? Doesn’t look a thing like this little beauty.

It was only made worse by the announcement of the then-new 60-figure sets made that spring. The brand manager at the time declared that Super Rare figures would be of markedly higher sculpt quality than the other rarities. Common rarity pieces in particular would be cheaper, lower-quality single-mold pieces.

In reality, though, all four of the “old-school Avengers” characters in the set — Hawkeye, Quicksilver, Scarlet Witch and Wasp — are cheaper, lower-quality single-mold pieces despite their Super Rarity. (I’m convinced they were intended to be Commons but got moved to the Super Rare slots late in the game.)

Anyway, Wasp is by far the worst of the lot, both in playability and sculpt quality. So when I lost her sculpt in the washout that also claimed my original Aquaman mod, I wasn’t too perturbed…I knew I could get a replacement for just a few bucks.

And I did shell out those two bucks because I’d always intended to give Janet Van Dyne a proper face:

  • Painted in eyes, eyebrows, lipstick with acrylic paint and drawing ink.

 

Photo by Antonio Cade.

 

 

...and my photo.

 

These pictures don’t do her justice at all.

Next week: One more AVENGERS Super Rare repainted.

Next post: Either a Runaways battle report or DC Alternate Team Ability cards with art!

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Many apologies to readers faithfully following the My Custom Mods feature. I’ve missed my usual Monday deadline by a couple of days. To make amends, I’ll likely do a double feature on Monday, Oct. 11.

In the meantime, there’s a new feature you might’ve missed: SCENARIOS. It’s a page full of (mostly) simple ideas to both change up the usual mode of play and, perhaps, to lessen certain players’ reliance on the same 20 figures every stupid week. :)

Just click the tab at the top right. And hey: feel free to leave your scenario ideas in your comments here! If I like ’em enough, I’ll add ’em to my list!

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Rookie MISTER MIRACLE (Origin)

This sculpt, different dial.

The REV set of Mr. Miracle was a good representation of Scott Free of the New Gods. But I would have preferred that the Rookie be  Scott’s Earth-born protegé Shilo Norman.
Here’s what I did:
  • Removed cape portion of sculpt (it seperates from the main body).
  • Filled in resultant gap in back with some hobby clay-like product I can’t recall. It wasn’t anything like Green Stuff or actual sculptor’s clay…I don’t recommend it. But it did this job.
  • Used a needle file to shave down details of Mister Miracle’s sculpt that are not reflected in the Shilo Norman version of the costume.
  • Painted in the new colors using acrylic paint.
Completed late-2008, in time for use in my Seven Soldiers team.
Next week: a big girl gets a makeover.
Next post: More DC cards from The Brave & the Bold with art.

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Y’all know I love me some Guardians of the Galaxy. Great title that I apparently learned about almost too late (it’s now “on hiatus”— read as: “soft-cancelled” — as of May  2010’s issue #25) that I got interested in because they’d been made into HeroClix. But until Web of Spider-Man, the tallest member of the team had been missing:

He is Groot.

I haven’t actually quite acquired the big guy, but a pair of friends generously loaned him to me for a game, knowing I liked the character. So I tossed aside the all-Web of Spider-Man team I was considering and instead ran this:

Groot 152
Phyla-Vell 138 + Protected 8
Star-Lord 90 + Contingency Plan 12
Rocket Raccoon 65
Rookie Aleta 51
Bug 44
+ Guardians of the Galaxy alternate team ability 30
= 590 points. This was a last-minute team build, so I didn’t have any clear idea of what the last 10 points ought to have been used for. I faced my friend (who loaned the Groot) using this team: Deadpool (Web of Spider-Man), Bullseye (Web of Spider-Man), Nightcrawler (Web of Spider-Man), Scarlet Spider (Web of Spider-Man), Peter Parker (Web of Spider-Man) and Solo on the new Bridge map in the set.

Key factors/moments of the game:

  • His team had a pair of 12 AV ranged shooters, each of whom could use Running Shot for good damage. So after landing a very solid first hit on Scarlet Spider, I retreated most of the team to avoid retaliation.
  • Unfortunately, I made a bit of a repeat of a FAIL moment (see my FAIL series from a while back) involving Bug and Phyla-Vell that again cost the heavy-hitting cosmic girl her life in this fight. Using Aleta’s TK, I pulled Bug back out of range (rather than push him to retreat) while leaving the pushed Phyla a few squares out, just in range of Nightcrawler.
  • Nightcrawler, in particular, has been the focus of much nerd rage due the figure’s unique ability to snatch enemy figures into the range of his teammates, and that’s exactly what happened here: Phyla was grabbed and then attacked until defeated by the end of the round despite having the Protected feat to absorb one of the blows. Lesson Learned (again): Don’t be so concerned about protecting Bug from attacks, especially at the expense of much, much costlier and important figures.
  • However, Nightcrawler is not without his own glass jaw. Despite his multiple layers of attack evasion (Stealth, Shape Change, high DV and Super Senses), he was the victim of a one-hit KO by Groot.

    "I AM GROOT!!!"

  • Sadly, my attack rolls with Star-Lord — normally my MVP — were all ice-cold and he simply couldn’t survive another turn himself. Lesson (re-)learned: Make sure Star-Lord stands in, directly in front of, or behind hindering terrain when he makes a move that will expose him to counterattack…that way I can use Stealth (if he’s hit hard enough) to be shielded from most followup shots (using Combat Reflexes to take knockback into the hindering if necessary).
  • Similarly, I mis-moved Groot somewhat, not immediately taking advantage of his Special Power allowing him to heal for free when occupying hindering or water terrain. And at the end of the game, he probably took a KO shot he shouldn’t have, since we all forgot that Earthbound/Neutralized giants lose giant status.
  • I didn’t mind so much, since he’d landed a near-KO punch on Bullseye a turn or two earlier. :)

    “GROOT!!!”

In the end, Aleta was my last piece standing and, after she finished off Bullseye, my game was done. As evidenced by the Lessons Learned above, I could have played the team better, but it was going to be an uphill fight in any circumstance. More to the point of the article: does Groot enhance the Guardians of the Galaxy? What does he need from them?

  1. He’s got great defense. Now that the GotG ATA doesn’t wipe out their natural Defenders TA, he can chain his 18 DV with weaker members.
  2. He’s another taxi. Being a giant affords that. But…
  3. He’s terribly slow. Without Aleta’s TK or the speed boost of the Kinetic Accelerator special object, it takes him a looooong time to get in the fight. This game wouldn’t have gone half as well without either of them.

So it’s a bit tough to use him. He’s priced as a tentpole but is frankly better used as a backfield diversion for ranged shooters or a shield for lesser pals to hide behind. But if he gets stuck on his immovable clicks while too far away to attack, it could be disastrous. One must really carefully gauge the tempo of the fight when running Groot.

But then, isn’t that just good gameplay?

P.S.: one more rule of using this character: [Non-optional] At least once per game, you must shout, in your best Cookie Monster voice, “I AM GROOT!” when giving or resolving an action involving this character.

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BROOD (Mutations & Monsters)

When the Crisis set did away with the Soaring mechanic in early 2008 and thus the need for flight stands, I jumped at the opportunity to make a slightly more compact version of this huge model:
  • Used a hobby knife to cut sculpt away from flight stand “pancake”.
  • Snapped off flight stand.
  • Glued sculpt to base.

Completed late-2008.

It’s actually barely any smaller than the original, though, and not really worth the effort.

Next week: one well worth the effort.
Next post: GROOT!

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Apologies for the lateness of this update, readers. Although I’ve got a bunch of mod articles in the can, I seem to have forgotten to upload (or forgotten where I uploaded) two of the photos for this extra-large Skrull edition of My Custom Mods.
In Secret Invasion, a bunch of characters got both human and Skrull dials, but the sculpt itself was either human- or Skrull-looking, regardless of which dial it had. So, upon deciding I wanted to retain each figure, I decided to repaint their respective sculpts to fit the dials.
But, I soon found out, it was often a bit more involved than simply mixing in the right ratio of white, yellow, red and brown acrylic paint for the flesh tone I was seeking.

Human YELLOWJACKET (Secret Invasion)

Here’s what I did to make Yellowjacket human:
  • Used a needle file to shave down his big Skrully chin.
  • Painted his black mask a bit more (down to his upper lip), covering his eyes.
  • Painted the rest of his exposed face in a (human) flesh tone.
  • Painted in new white eyes on his mask just below the originals.
  • Painted in a new mouth.
  • Painted over the Skrulls team symbol on the dial base.

That's a human Pym, there.

Completed late 2008. Fixing him was more complicated than I anticipated!

Human MS. MARVEL (Secret Invasion)

  • Used a needle file to shave down her Skrull chin a little bitty bit.
  • Painted her exposed skin to a flesh color.
  • Painted in gritted teeth in her previously wide-open mouth.
  • Painted over the Skrulls team symbol.
Completed late-2008. Surprisingly simple to be so dramatically better-looking :).

Skrull DUM DUM DUGAN (Secret Invasion)

The lone human-appearing version of the Skrull sculpts, Dugan was the simplest of all to alter:
  • Painted his flesh green.
  • Painted over the SHIELD team symbol.

Completed late-2008.

Human ELEKTRA (Secret Invasion)

  • Used a needle file to shave down her big Skrully chin.
  • Painted her exposed skin to a flesh color.
  • Painted in eyes and red lips.
  • Painted over the Skrulls team symbol.

She's better this way. (Actually, I may have taken and uploaded this pic before painting in her lipstick.)

Human CAPTAIN MAR-VELL (Secret Invasion)

  • Used a needle file to shave down his big Skrully chin.
  • Filed down his pointy ears, but not completely.
  • Painted over the tops of the ears in yellow to match his hair.
  • Painted his exposed skin to a flesh color, including the bottom half of his ears.
  • Painted in white eyes on his mask.
  • Painted over the Skrulls team symbol.

Now THAT'S a human Mar-Vell — er, wait. He's actually NOT human.

Completed late-2008.
Next week: another alien made tackle-box friendly.

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Since I’ve heard no news of the return of WizKids-printed checklists (as in the sets from Armor Wars through Crisis) in Web of Spider-Man, I’ve made my customary personal PDF version available. And this time I’ve also got slightly prettied-up versions of the ones I did for earlier set available as well. Just click the “Pix & Downloads” link in the header!

9-9-10 EDIT: Those who downloaded and printed the Web of Spider-Man checklist may have noticed it was teeny bit…unfinished. Now that I’ve gotten the actual names and set numbers of the Web and Webbed Person objects, that information is corrected and each has a check box now.