Now & Then
A change of plans and a welcome arrival. (All ultimately Heroclix-related.)
By Thursday afternoon the plans for a clix match planned for this Saturday (as mentioned a week ago) were already taking a hit.
Eric wouldn't be able to make it because an old friend and his wife had just lost their baby extremely late in the pregnancy.
I don't know the specifics aside from an emergency C-Section, momentary stability with life support equipment and then a drop into the black. Understandably, he wanted to go spend some time with the couple -- all the moreso since they live out in the same area where his parents are and he hadn't been there in weeks. Definitely a weekend for him to head for home.
We were going to press on as a gaming threesome, but Abbygal had a mishap early this morning that grew more irritating through the day and would have likely found her uncomfortable tomorrow trying to play a game. No good would come of that.
So, since Eric (in theory) will be available next Saturday (the 26th) - probably his final free weekend for a while, as his Penn State season tickets will consume most weekends for the season starting the weekend after that - and A-gal should be recovered, we decided to shoot for then.
I have more than enough to do this weekend, including getting the kids' wardrobes up to speed for the post-Labor Day kick-off, so it's not a problem. Obviously I'd rather be playing a game with friends, but these other things need to be done, too, and it plainly wasn't turning out to be the weekend for games. Given the devastation being faced by Eric's friends even my mentioning gameplaying in the same posting approaches callous. Come next weekend I'll be happy it's happening then and not already a week in the past anyway.
So, next Saturday for that.
Today's mail brought me what I'd been watching for since last Friday, the Venom mail-away figure I'd gotten as part of the clix brick program for Sinister.
Regardless of what one might happen to think of the character...
-- by the way, for the old-timers, this is meant to be the person currently bonded to the alien symbiote, Mac Gargan (formerly the Scorpion) --
...it's a wonderfully-detailed sculpt and a potentially very useful piece.
Sure, at 105 points he's a bit pricey for a member of the Sinister Syndicate TA, but it's a mobile piece with generally good stats and a nice, rainbow dial. Since the Sinister Syndicate TA allows them to share their attack values so long as they're adjacent, those 10s and that 11 in particular will come in handy for a canny player.
Even solo, away from any considerations of being a source of higher attack values for teammates, Venom's a dangerous close combat piece. He doesn't have a click where he's not potentially a danger to most opponents.
I've already placed him on an appropriate team for next week. As I believe I noted in the earlier run-up we'll be playing with a certain Battlefield Condition card in play -- a card I like enough that as far as I'm concerned it'll be used in every game: Assembled. This'll help raise the attack values of many of the pieces and make the choice of building larger teams (five or more have to be on the map) with the same team ability all the better.Also in the box were coupons for the Invincible set (which I could order now, but I'm not interested in), the Green Lantern Corps set (which I discussed in detail earlier) - which I can't order until September 6th - and a coupon that'll let me trade in up to 12 clix (three groups of four clix, each group being the same sculpt) for random replacements from Sinister. That last program is as outlined here; I'll be sending my 12 extras out Saturday morning.
Much, much, much else to do tonight and this weekend.
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Comments
While I can't argue with the utility of Venom's dial -- an 11 attack on a Seth designed character is nearly enough to make one swoon these days; the fact that it appears in TWO slots makes me think Seth must have a near obsessional nostalgic fondness for the McFarlane Spider-Man era -- still, I also can't get past my own obsessive hatred of Venom enough to be willing to do anything with him even if I had him.
Although I admit, I hadn't realized that the Scorpion was no more. With Warbird back to being Ms. Marvel in her own title, doesn't she need goobers to fight?
I like the ASSEMBLED mechanism as well. However, with my JLA TA that provides a +1 to attack per 2 members of the team on the board (once per turn to one team member), I'm thinking that simply incorporating the mechanism as a full time element in my own games would give the JLA and the Avengers (when they Thunderbolt the JLA TA) a really lopsided advantage.
Off into my Saturday. Have a good one!
While Venom (the symbiote bonded to Eddie Brock) was an idea I didn't mind he certainly was one of the poster children for a morality slide in Marvel as he was occasionally treated as a hero. Add to that they he was so desperately over-used, and, well, I may as well be talking about Wolverine, eh? Still, I believe in trying to conserve the elements of history in comics universes, so I've accepted his existence as part of the Marvel universe.
Additionally, it struck me as a reasonable shift when Eddie Brock found himself apparently in the end stages of cancer that the symbiote go to some other former foe of Spider-man's (the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and all) who had a very physical style. The Scorpion strikes me as a nice choice, all the moreso as it potentially opens that costume and character up for a successor. (Something that apparently hasn't happened so far, but it's just a matter of time.)
Really, given what passes for editors at Marvel these days I'm mostly happy we didn't end up with it approaching Norman Osborn and us having a "VenoGoblin" slavering to eat Peter Parker's brains.
Concerning Seth's dials I've been finding that when playing the characters within the boundaries of the official rules -- a structure Seth's pointedly working within -- they've generally been working well. The Electro, Hydroman, Wizard, Trapster, Stiltman, Beetle, Vulture and Bullseye team I played several weeks ago, for instance, did better than I'd expected going up against both an extended Fantastic Four and the Defenders. They might have done even better had I been trying to use them to best effect, ganging up on key pieces.
The Imperfections and trade-offs at almost every turn that make for a very selective interpretation at any given moment, sure, but they actually play fairly well. While many characters have both a shining reputation from some point in their career and the stamp as "(one of) the best [fill in the blank for specialty]" on the whole they tend to be far less effective. If that weren't the case they'd likely end up being boring. Most one or two attempts at taking down a foe in comics don't work for one reason or another, as we've seen from almost innumerable pages of fight scenes over the decades.
For all of his early success (something we know is tremendously common as it's usually given to the new guy to come in and momentarily mop up the joint with the heroes) and his reputation as the greatest swordsman the Swordsman's overall career marks him as something of a schlub. Oh, to be sure, he went out on a noble note and definitely had his moments -- Seth absolutely cheated him of that Avengers TA on the vet -- but by and large, on a day when everyone is neither at his best nor worst, as I see how these pieces play within the confines of the official rules. Moreover, knowing that a given group of characters will almost always be played with Armor Piercing or some other, appropriate card, I find myself with fewer complaints than I initially did. The odd Exploit Weakness or Psychic Blast on a dial can stand revealed as a means of representing someone pulling off a surprising upset rather than some established and codified power.
Each piece is a push or bit of damage away from changes in stats and powers of the moment, so interpreting a dial becomes more a work of statistical art than a static set of specs as if one were looking at a piece of equipment. Vulnerabilities, longevity on the field of combat under given circumstances, how much of a team's build points the piece represents, all of those things have to be taken into consideration by someone designing a new set.
I'm sure we'll each have groaners in Supernova - the more connected we feel to a given character the surer it is that we'll see him or her as cheated - but I'm gaining more of an appreciation of Seth's approach.
If we could get him to pay more consistent attention to who deserves a given TA -- to not be so tight-fisted with them -- for me, at least, that would take care of much of the problem. In the end I'm still expecting that much of my aggravation and ire will still be focused on the competitive play program and the LEs, as I consider that high end REVs (Thor, for instance) will have some prize-only LE version.
Oh, hell... that's off in October, this is too, too long for a comment on a comment, and my Saturday morning's burning away!
I'm off, too!
I only got recently acquainted with her via the pocket reprint edition of her mini-series collected from the latest iteration of Amazing Fantasy. Blame the SHIELD connection for at least part of my interest... :-)