Friday, December 3, 2004

The case of the maddened mutants

So, I got my case of Mutant Mayhem at about 11:45 this morning.

This is much earlier than I normally wake up, and last night I didn’t sleep well at all, so, if I seem tired and snappish, that could be why.

Or it could just be that, as a recent correspondent of mine has perhaps-cogently noted, I am “an often inconsiderate asshole, verging on a bully”. You pays your money, you takes your pick.

Anyway, it was, a tremendous relief to get the case so relatively early. UPS is always erratic, and I’d been very much afraid that they wouldn’t show up before I had to leave for work, meaning I’d come home for dinner at 6 and find an appalling little yellow note stuck to my door, instead of, you know, my case containing 42 booster packs of plastic crack.

I managed to hold off on opening any boosters until I’d showered myself into something approaching wakefulness. Then, with a long slender filleting knife in one hand, I began opening and pulling stuff out and staring all googly eyed, all the while chortling with child-like (and, no doubt, childish) glee.

The way I open booster boxes of HeroClix is, I find the seam where the cardboard has been joined together down one of the long sides and wedge it open again with a fairly sharp knife. This lets me pull open one entire side of the booster, which is, all told, much easier than opening the tall, narrow boxes at the top and then digging down with your fingers after the clix towards the bottom.

Back when I’d decided against getting a case, because I really didn’t think I could spare the money, Mike Norton had told me that my decision was probably wise… there’s a thrill in opening the boxes and a lot of pleasure in seeing what you got, of course, but as you work your way through it and the extra figs you don’t need start piling up and the unopened boosters steadily diminish, you become more and more aware of just how much money you paid for the dubious privilege of doing this. And when you get done, there’s an appalling moment of clarity, where you look at all this plastic crack on your kitchen table and say “My GOD I paid $230 for this crap!”

Well, he was right… Mike is generally right; it’s one of his more irritating qualities… and all that happened, but, still, it wasn’t as bad as I’d expected. I did indeed pay much too much for a pile of plastic crack, but, on the other hand, it was a lot of fun opening that case and I got some cool stuff that I wanted and what else was I going to do with $230 anyway? Other than, I know, save up for a computer and/or buy Christmas presents for folks… the voice of reason can now shut up, please.

I had fun. It was, for the most part, a good case. So now let’s talk about that.

Rather than waste a lot of time typing in everything I GOT, it’s probably easier to talk about what I didn’t get, at least, in terms of actual figs. So… looking at the cool poster showing every fig in the set (other than the Deluxe Editions, I mean), I am fairly sure I have full REVs of every figure with a Rookie/Experienced/Veteran version except for Havok, Man-Thing, Bishop, Cable, and Deadpool. (I am, naturally, missing Veteran versions of each.)

One of the really delightful little details of this set is that the Experienced Spider-Man figure has a Fantastic Four team ability. One can justify this by saying that there’s a What If? story where Spidey does join the Fantastic Four, and he also becomes a member of a really lame substitute FF at some point in the late 80s or early 90s (the other three members are Wolverine, Hulk, and Ghost Rider, so honestly, you can see just how idiotic this whole frickin thing was), but we Silver Age fan boys know better. This Spidey has the FF team ability for no better reason than that he used to hang around with the FF a lot in the Silver Age, and they with him. I’d love to see a Black Panther with the FF team ability for similar reasons, and a Silver Surfer with one too, for that matter. But this Spider-Man is just wonderful to me. Giving him the FF team ability is a useless gesture, since the Spider-Man Ally team ability, which the Vet Spider-Man has, allows a character to copy any other Team Ability in play on his side, so that Spider-Man can just as easily go along on FF based adventures. But still, it’s one of those touches that brings a smile to my face, albeit, in this case, an expensive one.

Unfortunately, I only got one Experienced Spider-Man (annoying, as I got two Vets and about 4 Rookies) and, naturally, he’s the only fig in the case who came out a little dinged up… either because I cut too deep with the knife, or just because, well, he’s dinged up, with two spots where paint has flaked off and you can see little white bits underneath. However, with all the extra Spider-Man figs I have, switching this fig for a better one will be easy... once I get myself some more superglue. (The problem with superglue is that once you open it, it always dries out before you can use it up.)

In other REV comments, well, this Blade is better than the previous Blade, because he has a range attack, which he should. However, I honestly do not see how either of these Blades has ever managed to kill a vampire. They’re just wimpy.

I have no idea who Vertigo is, and her costume is just plain damn ugly, but any click with Incapacitate, a range of 6, and the ability to hit three targets in one attack is a friend of mine.

Puck, on the other hand, just baffles me as to his utility. He’s yet another addition to the growing list of clix with SuperStrength who still only do two damage, but I don’t consider that to be a good thing.

Havoc seems mostly like a waste of time. Cloak and Dagger, on the other hand, seem startlingly effective, especially if Cloak uses a Feat card called Passenger to carry Dagger around with him.

Firestar is nearly useless, but with that sculpt, who cares? Hommina hommina hommina. If you haven’t seen her, you don’t understand what I’m talking about, but trust me, she’s very decorative.

The Bone Claw Wolverine seems awfully stupid to me, but this is, at the moment, the only Veteran Wolverine fig I have. The Grey Hulk also seems rather idiotic to me, but better players than I am are drooling over a more cost effective Hulk with a few clicks of Charge, so, fine, whatever.

I really like the Vanisher being green in his Rookie and Experienced versions, and Red in his Veteran version. He’s another one who will become very useful with the Feat card Passenger, although the click of damage he’ll take after each use will burn him out fast.

The rookie Sasquatch is apparently arch enemies with his own Veteran version, Tanaraq. It’s interesting, if confusing. I gather John Byrne wrote the story that these characters come from, which, you know, doesn’t surprise me.

Speaking of confusing, several of these figs were utter mysteries to me, so I went over to Whoclix, a project by some group of fans designed to identify all the various different HeroClix, to find out what was up. I discovered that Chris Claremont has done more damage to Marvel’s mutant continuity than even I knew, and apparently Grant Morrison followed in his footsteps. For existence, here’s the opening sentence of Bastion’s description: “When the Mastermold and Nimrod were merged in the Siege Perilous; they magically combined to form Bastion, the ultimate Sentinel.”

And we wonder why people who’ve never read comix give us that look when they find out we like them…

Let me say right now, Mike Norton had sent me an email listing what REVs he failed to procure from his own case -- vet Wonder Man, experienced Firestar, experienced Bishop, and Tanaraq (vet Sasquatch.) I pulled extras of all of them, so they will be going out in a package to Mike, along with a few other items, probably on Monday, if I don’t get around to walking over to the post office tomorrow before work. They ain’t trades; Mike sent me something like a thousand of his extra clix back when I first got bitten by this bug, and this is just a little karma rolling around his way.

Back to my case -- In addition to the REVs, I pulled the following Uniques:

I also got the Ultimate Giant-Man double sized fig, which apparently everyone who buys a case gets. I’m rather annoyed with him for various reasons, which I’ll probably detail later just to bore all of you to tears.

In addition to those Uniques, I got an extra Mimic figure, on an extra N’astirh base. Which is puzzling. I can send it back to WizKids and they will send me either a full Mimic or a full N’astirh, but as I already have both, I’d really rather have a Count Nefaria. However, the nice lady named Rose I spoke to on the phone earlier today said it doesn’t work that way.

I will most likely get another N’astirh. He looks cool, and seems to have a better dial than Mimic, and I imagine I can play two monster-demons on a team more often than I can play two Mimics. Also, I’m disappointed in the Mimic figure itself. I mean, the fig itself is pretty cool, but Calvin Rankin just doesn’t look right without the great big hourglass goggles and the gigantic M on his chest.

In terms of Uniques, I’d have been just as happy not getting a Bastion or a Fantomex, especially if one of them could have been a Count Nefaria instead. Nefaria was about the only fig in the set I really, really wanted that I did not get; unfortunately, as he’s arguably the most powerful fig in the set, he’ll be tough to trade for and expensive to buy.

Conversely, I’m getting the feeling that that rotter Fantomex is just a drug on the market, since Mike Norton got TWO of the fucker in his case.

In addition to Nefaria, I’d also like to get a Longshot, a Black Queen, and a Shadow King.

On Limited Editions, or Super Rares, or whatever you want to call them, I got a Simon Williams (Wonder Man), a Wade Wilson (Deadpool), a Tyrone Johnson (Cloak) and an Alex Summers (Havok). Comparing the dial on the Wade Wilson and the Tyrone Johnson to their REV versions, I have to say, they seem eminently tradable to me. The Simon Williams and Alex Summers LE’s vary enough from their REV versions to be worth using in and of themselves.

Other than the Super Rares, the other thing that made this particular expansion so very temptingly collectible was the presence of Battlefield Condition and Feat cards, which will introduce new elements into standard HeroClix play. Battlefield Condition cards effect the setting for the game as a whole, creating certain generally disruptive conditions that effect either all clix, or certain types of clix. For example, Crosswinds effectively grounds all flying characters. Darkness reduces all range attacks to a limit of 6 squares away. War Zone makes the much despised Medic figs much less effective, and White Noise has a similar effect on the even more despised powers Outwit and Perplex.

And there are various others, like Earthquake, which when it goes off, does three clicks of damage to every non-flying character on the board, and the no doubt much coveted Ordinary Day, which can be played to cancel out any one other Battlefield Condition in play.

Then there are Feat cards. Feat cards are generally declared to be attached to a specific character at the start of the game. They have a point cost, and that point cost is added to the point cost of the character they are assigned to (for example, if you assign Pounce to a 50 point Daredevil figure, then that Daredevil figure is now worth 65 points, in terms of fitting into, say, a 300 point team, and also in terms of how many points an opponent gets if he takes DD out of the game).

These cards also have various effects, from allowing a character with the power of Regeneration to use it as a free action at the beginning of your turn, to allowing a character with the power of Leap/Climb to move up to his full Speed and then make a free Close Combat attack.

After opening my case, and the 8 other boosters I mentioned getting last week, I now have the following Battlefield Condition cards: