The Tease of Things I Don't Need

New Troops

I am decidedly not finding myself interested in writing the comics reviews tonight either - talking with a couple people about the recent batch today is as far as I've taken it, and I still have a couple more issues to hit. No rush, it's not as if it's racing a deadline.

So, instead, I just finished off a different item. Here instead are the two most recent LE additions to my Heroclix forces.

From out of Armor Wars we have a variant of Captain America, a version nominally intended to represent someone who took over the role for a time: John Walker... or, at least, that's what we're told.

The mini-bio they provide is as follows:

Ex-soldier John Walker gained superhuman strength from the Power Broker. To pay for the treatments, Walker became a wrestler and "hero" named Super-Patriot. When Captain America was forced to resign, Walker was recruited to step into the role. He received extensive training under the tutelage of the Taskmaster. However, Walker became increasingly violent after his partners and parents were injured and killed. He was eventually forced to give up the Captain America role and became the hero known as the USAgent.

A look at the dial, however, reveals at least one flaw in this description --
--- no Super Strength. That's one thing Walker's supposed to have -- something that the real Captain America only had for a short time. Granted, the two clicks of Flurry (the red at the top of the 2nd and 3rd slots) does give the appearance of someone who's in a violent mood, and the lack of any Outwit or Leadership also doesn't seem indicative of the real Captain America -- all items that appear to fit Walker - but the Flurry's also a handy item to have if he find himself based by two opposing pieces.

Since I don't particularly care about John Walker, this is a Captain America sculpt and this is the only version of the character with Running Shot, I've picked it up as an unaffiliated variant verrsion of Captain America. At only 58 points there's plenty of room for some other Feats, from Armor Piercing to help those 2 Damage values count to In Contact With Oracle to help boost the Attack Values.

Or, I could do the same and have him be USAgent, as they'd loosely intended, if I wanted to put together a West Coast Avengers team of a particular era.

With John Walker I believe that wraps the last of the Armor Wars LEs I was interested in. The Psyloche version of Captain Britain is a curious piece, but nothing that drew my attention, and Gennady Gavrilov is no one I know -- I still can't figure out why Seth chose some relatively recent miniseries version to base a character on when the real deal's passed through multiple hands since the mid-60s -- nor care about, and I believe I have all of the other LEs from this set.

Moving up to Sinister, I picked up another one from that set. Technically I don't have it yet, but we're in that any day now stage, so I'm counting the unhatched (but paid for) chicken.

Since some LEs for the set haven't been released as prize support yet (the ones that are out there are either from factory sets from major prize packages or from people who are sufficiently connected to get a supply of items they're not supposed to have) and it's best to let matters cool down a little, I'm taking picking up LEs for this set at a slow pace. So far I've picked up Soulsword Wielder, Abner Jenkins, Kyle Richmond, Dr,. Chen Lu, Aleksei Mikhailovich and The Kingpin of Hell's Kitchen, and now I've added Brunnhilde.

I'll be the first one to admit I don't know where this LE version of the character is meant to be from. I'm getting mixed signals.

She begins and ends her dial with Phasing/Teleport, leading me to think this is more like the Enchantress or one of her directly-controlled pawns, but this one's also a Defender... so... I don't know. Maybe after a while, as she came closer to or embraced the traditional duty of the Valkyries as escorts for fallen warriors to Valhalla, she tapped into some teleportation powers. Whateve the reason, here's her 69 pt dial: I like that her Attack Values and even Damage swing up at the end, and that she has a potentially useful blend of powers and can be a threat at almost any point on her dial.

I'm also expecting that - eventually - we'll get a Feat card that will allow Phasing/Teleporting figures to move and attack, as one would expect someone with the power to suddenly appear should be able to do. With characters such as the Vision and (reportedly) the Red Ghost in Supernova, maybe this could be the set..?

As I said, it's an eventuality.

So, that's it for the latest.