The Game: AvX Month 1 (Finally!!)

The Stipulations: 400 Points, Modern Age. Must use at least one figure from an AvX starter; the rest of your army must share a keyword with that figure (I have the Avengers starter). No relics, no resources (that’ll come next month!).

The Build: Finally, AvX Month 1 is here!! About bloody time (our venue’s been awesome through this, but he had distributor issues I wouldn’t wish on anyone)!! We actually played for Month 2’s prizes under the Month 1 rules (since we got Month 2 before Month 1 and–oy, my head hurts!).

This game goes tonight, so y’all should have an update tonight or tomorrow about how things went, but for tonight, after much deliberation, I have chosen:

-AVX006e Scarlet Witch w/Secret Avengers ATA
-IIM040 Shaman
-IIM051 Iron Pharaoh
-ASM017b Brother Voodoo
-GG014a Astral Dr. Strange

Why: One big advantage I (and, I guess, everyone else at my venue who wanted to peek online, as the info’s been out awhile now) have in building this team is knowing what maps we’ll be playing on, since we’re running AvX so much later than most other shops. As soon as I saw one side of this month’s map, I fell in love! Why? Well…

Essentially, as you may have already guessed, this team is trying to take advantage of Wundagore Mountain! Hideous, dirty, nigh-broken advantage. You know that Anna Kendrick song “Cups” from “Pitch Perfect?” “I’ve got my ticket for the long way round/The one with the prettiest view.” Well, my strategy is to make my opponents sing that song all night.

Shaman is the key. Once per game, he can be given a free action to turn off flying for everyone but himself. Take another look at that map and tell me that looks fun with no fliers. Beyond that, everyone phases on this team except for Shaman, but I’m not concerned about that since he’ll be the only hero left in the sky his “No Flights” spell.

To take even more advantage of this, I’ve included Iron Pharaoh. One of his biggest drawbacks is that his “I See Everything” Golden Falcon can only move three spaces a turn, so it takes a hot minute to get into position. Well, now I have that hot minute. And while I don’t have much move and attack (Brother Voodoo has it in a roundabout way with his Mind Control SP), after, like, turn 3, I should have a major positioning advantage over my opponent. I have two top dial Probs as well as 2 Perplexes and two characters who either start with Support (Scarlet Witch) or get it mid-dial (Shaman). My attack values hold mostly steady at ten with some figs going up to eleven (before Perplex), but Pharaoh’s Fight the Future Trait should go off a decent amount given how ubiquitous I’m expecting AvX Cyclops and AvX Magneto to be (they all share the Ruler keyword).

Shaman himself does three damage and he’s a great secondary/tertiary attacker in this format. And Astral Dr. Strange is another plus 1 to Map Roll in addition to being a general nuisance, and AvX Scarlet Witch is nearly broken just on her own.

So with all this “brokenness, what are my weaknesses? Who DON’T I want to see tonight?

-Ghost Rider: He’s a strong piece already, but I don’t need someone with Move and Attack and Improved Movement: Hindering Terrain, Elevated Terrain. coming after me.

-AvX Spider-Man: For the same reason. He can Move and Attack with ease; my dirty Shaman trick doesn’t matter to him.

-Fear Itself #007 Iron Fist: Again, he can move and attack (Charge) while ignoring both Hindering and Elevated Terrain.

-Swarm team (particularly, like, S.H.I.E.L.D. with Agent Sitwell, or something); basically, while there’s a decent amount of hindering terrain and a tiny amount of elevated terrain on the Savage Land side of the map, my whole strategy is built around winning the map roll and taking my foes to Wundagore. So any swarming THEME TEAM is really what would scare me, because they’d probably get a bigger map roll bonus than me.

-Any piece that can carry and phase or carry with Improved Movement of some kind. That would be completely unacceptable!

 

Okay!  More analysis versus actual performance after tonight! Here goes nothing!!

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