The Tease of Things I Don't Need

Another sign I
have too many things to do

Instead of getting them done - or writing about something more immediate and/or of substance - I'm finding myself stumbling across some shots of clix from February's Collateral Damage Heroclix expansion. (Clix is all there'll be to see here, so unless you're interested then don't bother with the rest of this post.)

The next DC expansion for the Heroclix game isn't due until February. As of this writing there were 14 items in the official gallery for the set, 2 of them Battlefield Condition cards (the only two in this set), four Feat cards, six new objects (each with special properties) and two special character pieces one will only be able to get in special ways. I'll talk briefly about these before getting to sculpts of eleven of the clix they haven't officially previewed. The shots are a little blurry, but one takes what one can get at this stage. I'll get to all those once I've walking through the official stuff.

All of the cards in this set continue the trend in Icons of being visually lacklustre. The official word is that, unlike Marvel, DC/Warner's legal department insists that the use of any artwork on the cards result in additional fees being paid to them. So, as a result we can expect to see bland cards from DC for the foreseeable future, while the Marvel cards will at least have some artwork on them.

The Battlefield Conditions are Debris and Proximity Mines, each of which emphasizes this expansion's focus on more objects in the game.

Debris calls on each player to add three objects to the usual pool of six in a game. A four-way game could quickly become cluttered with eighteen objects on the map! This reinforces my early thought that the Collateral Damage map will be mostly an outdoor one. They could surprise me, but I'm expecting an urban setting. Every sculpt we've seen aside from the exclusive LEs Superman and Krypto has rubble, debris and/or brickwork as part of the base.

Proximity Mines is a little wordy, but it turns uncarried objects into mines with a 33.33% chance of going off at the end of each player's turn. This could add an extra strategy to the game, as trying to end a turn either carrying objects (which only characters having Super Strength or Telekinesis can do) or more than one square away from them will be important.

The previewed Feats are:

--- The 15 pt. Inspiring Command, which encourages a player to build a team around a higher-point piece with the same Team Symbol who also has Leadership and/or Mastermind.
--- The 5 pt. Flashbang, which allows characters with Smoke Cloud to move up to half their speed and use Smoke Cloud as a free action either before or after the move. Anything to help Smoke Cloud is a plus, and this gets us one step closer to a more natural use, since characters routinely use this to cover them while moving. I suspect that Dr. Midnight will have a dial especially crafted to make best use of this. I predict Smoke Cloud, Stealth and Willpower showing up at the same time, so he can move, into the open, provide cover for himself, and on the next turn move again - hopefully this time onto hindering terrain for cover.
--- The 5 pt. Ambush, which allows a Stealth character to have a +2 to his Attack Value when making a close combat attack from Stealth, though the character will be exposed to ranged attacks until the beginning of the next turn. I'm undecided on this one, though I agree with it thematically.
--- The 8 pt Movethrough allows characters with Charge to ignore other characters for movement purposes, though it still has to break away.

Hopefully we'll be getting more Feats than usual in this set, since the wise decision was made to cut far back on the number of Battlefield Conditions. Among others, DC's been lacking a Pounce card and given many of the pieces in this set I'd say its appearance is overdue.

The six new objects are Teleport Pad, Kinetic Absorber, Separation Field Generator, Laser Turret, Aerial Baffler, and Fuel Tank.

The special objects and their rules are discussed over here.

Okay, now for the unofficial clix previews. (As always, click on the images for larger versions.)

Captain Boomerang II may be suffering from a particularly poor angle and/or this being an early mock-up, but it's by far the worst looking thing we've seen from this set so far. This is the new Captain Boomerang, though - son of the original who was killed during Identity Crisis - so he should have Hypersonic Speed in there, too. If he's made with reasonable attention to the character he could be a useful piece. The base shown is a unique, which fits the debut of a new character.

Speedy II is Green Arrow's new, HIV positive (the mark of Winnick!) female protege', recently added to the Teen Titans' lineup. The sculpt is nice enough, and maybe we'll get a good ranged hitter out of this. (Hopefully we'll get something more interesting than was done with her predecessor.) This is one of many characters where we'll be watching to see if the set designer follows through with similar stats to what he did with Armor Wars, or if these will fall more in line with the most recent DC set, Icons. Early word was that we should expect stats more in line with AW, which will - on the whole - be fine with me.

Azrael (seen way up top, on the right) is one of those characters much-anticipated by people who were heavily into DC comics during the 1990s. The piece looks nice, and I'll mainly be interested to see how much of a variation this is on the Batman dials we've seen.

The OMAC in this set is the first generic piece we've seen in a long while. These are the nanobot-infested, human hosts created to take down superhumans. Given the source material I'm anticipating these to have activation clicks, which will be a little irritating. I'm also presuming that in the usual mode of these early display pieces we'll find that the end product will be mounted on a flight base.

Adding to the Crime Syndicate of Amerika, we have Owlman. In most ways he's an evil Batman, and I'm expecting something between a Batman dial and what we'll expect with Dr. Midnite. He'll also have that CSA Team Ability to give him built-in Probability Control (at the expense of one of his teammates, who'll have to take a token for it) which should make him more interesting.

The Manhunter we have here is the most recent, female incarnation as best I understand. My expectation is that she'll ride fairly low in the set numbering but should still be a reasonably good, low-cost, Leap/Climbing close combat piece. The pose is certainly dynamic.

"Superman Red" has to be another unique in the set, and I don't find myself wanting to speculate on what the dial will look like. All of these will be folded into the plastic army soon enough, and as this isn't a character I have a deep attachment to... I find it easy to wait and see. As with most in the set, though, he looks cool enough.

Ragman (top, left) is a brilliant sculpt, and while I won't speculate on the dynamics between them I'm expecting we'll see Leap/Climb, probably some Charge, and smatterings of Super Strength in there, too, as much was made of his ability to draw on the soul-power of the patchwork of spirits making up his clothes during the recent build-up to Infinite Crisis. Hopefully there won't be much Plasticity, though I could see that getting into the mix to show how the living garment can wrap around an opponent.

Providing yet another wonderfully bizarre addition to the stable is Metamorpho, the Element Man. Given that he's someone who can alter his chemical makeup and physical state at will, I don't know how crazy a set of dials we should expect. Leap/Climb and probably Super Strength are likely givens, and I'd expect some Phasing from a guy who can seep in through the air vent or under a door. I expect that this sculpt will be used for a prize LE of Shift, the independent shard of Metamorpho who's a member of the Outsiders.

While it's fitting that Monseur Mallah & The Brain should act as a unit, I do wonder how odd the combined dial will be. Seeing these old Doom Patrol villains appear gives me hope that we'll eventually see the Doom Patrol themselves in time -- at least the classic team. Maybe a unique of Niles Caulder (The Chief), and an In Contact With Oracle-like card to use with him? Some say no -- claiming that that's one of the cards too many have screamed bloody murder over for Wizkids to do again -- but I'd be happy to see it, and it would be wonderfully fitting.

Adding another of Flash's rogues to the mix is Captain Cold. I'm expecting a reasonably effective ranged hitter with lots of Incapacitate and probably Barrier -- much as what we saw with Mr. Freeze -- though I don't expect him to end up with Stealth the way Freeze did. If game designer Seth Johnson has something trickier but still thematic I'm game to see it.

This will be the first DC set from the new factory, and as we've come to expect from most DC sets it's apparently going to set a new high bar for the quality of the sculpts -- though the past two Marvel sets have shone in terms of appearance.

The improved manufacturing and coloring techniques are helping to make eventual remakes of early figures doubly welcome, between the appearances and new opportunities on the dials. Not that that's much of a factor this this expansion, as they made the point early on that only three or four characters in the set will be in any way remakes of pieces seen in earlier sets.