Ned! Ned Ryerson!?

The problem with resources and broken pieces is that they allow pieces to completely break out of the design of the game.

A designer may design a piece to be at strength 8 (on a 10 point scale), knowing it will be a strong figure in the meta.

Once you put a resource on that piece, it will jump to a 10, maybe past that. You end up with a piece that is so outrageously powerful that it breaks the game. Even other really good pieces have trouble matching up with it.

It's not so bad when a resource boosts a 4-5 to a 7-8, but boosting a 8-9 well past the intended balance levels the designers intended for the game doesn't do the game any good.

We saw similar things with Feats. Find the right pulse waver and put Nova Blast feat on them and watch them wreck the opponent's team in one action.

But it was a once-per-game effect and if you missed, it left the character damaged and out in the middle of nowhere.

Resources have no downsides and aren't once-per-game effects. They boost figures permanently.

They are Feats on every drug in the world combined. In every single way they are more useful than another piece of the same point total.

Some are worse than others. The Infinity Gauntlet, in my opinion, is the strongest resource, definitely for boosting a specific character. +2 ATK from Hammers is really useful and can be just as much a game ender when paired with other utility abilities like perplex/enhancement/outwit.

I kind of wish they'd put Resources in a different format, so they wouldn't be legal in Modern Age, but if you wanted to play an Epic Age event.

Best quote/reference in this thread and many others. Perhaps WK hasn't seen this one.

Heroclix has always been a rock, paper, scissors game at heart. You play Batman? Superman TA beats stealth, lol. At least it wasn't two options like before resources (crawler or bullseye for example).

I JUST played a friendly with my brother in law. We come up with a build and don't show our teams until we're ready usually. We decided to go 300 Roc rules. I plopped down LE Absorbing Man, he smiles and revealed his Malekith... Son of a... It was funny, I got as lucky as I could've hoped for and still got destroyed, lol! Nature of the game. We didn't play resources but I was dead before the game began.

I think it's weird that your AVX had no restrictions (Mine only allows the Phoenix Resource and you have to play theme with two figs from your starter each month. Also, you can't reuse those two figures again until the finale. That build made for lots of variety btw and ensures each starter fig is used once before you put together your team for cyclops).

So that aside, you were at a competitive event and saw 4 "categories" of teams and within those categories you saw sub categories (plant teams, lipbook teams, etc) and even more variety after that (some built around characters like Ghost Rider's high exploit damage and free actions, while some built around Iron Pharoh's shoot while hiding style).

We might have different definitions of variety, but it seems very few teams were the exact same though they may have had a similar thought process (building a paper team, thinking their opponent might throw rock).

Out of curiosity, who won?

Yesterday was an AvX 500-pt. build, only stipulation was that each build had to include one Avenger or X-Man from the starter kits. All sets/feats/resources/relics/ATAs etc. legal minus Pacific Rim and Star Trek.

There were 14 players, a record for this venue. And this was the first week of 500 pts. (Each month is growing by 100 pts. so March will see 600-pt. builds).

I saw 3-4 loaded power plants and just as many Books of Skulls, a Thanos on a Shrine of Death, a full Utility Belt, an Infinity Gauntlet. Maybe a Phoenix resource? Not sure. Lots of printed-and-played feats. Surprisingly, no team bases.

I don't know what a "Lord Veratrix" is, but I saw two of those being fielded. Fought one myself, who was decked out in Mandarin Rings.

Figuring this would happen (but not to this degree — I was surprised to see Thanos), I included Mjolnir in my build (0 points, yeah boyeee). And in three separate games with 6-7 separate attempts by different characters — even with Splitlip and Thule Priest helping me with a 4-6 roll — I could not make the roll for Mjolnir. Even Cosmo failed, which was unfortunate because I so wanted to have a Russian golden lab carry around a hammer in his mouth. So my relic went unused. I went 1-2, both losses were against a Utility Belt and a power plant.

Victory points are tallied each week for the Dark Phoenix Cyclops prize, of which I have no interest in winning. I'm just there for the game, trying some strategies, playing some favorite Marvel pieces, picking up participation prizes and maybe an LE if I have a good month (hasn't happened yet, or rather, a good month by me ≠ a good enough month to get one of the three Cable LEs).

This is personally my issue with competitive/meta-heavy play: It. Is. Boring. As. HELL.

Seriously, if I walk into a venue and see that sort of thing running rampant, I'm likely to just find another venue. "Yay! MathClix!"

Again, I see variety which is cool.

As a side note on the above, Mjolnirs relic roll cannot be modified so Lip-Priest is of little use anyway. Just something for the future.

I tend to enjoy math clix from time to time as a mental exercise to see how far I can push the game, but more often than not I just want to play Night Stalkers or something theme and call it a day. But like I said, I do enjoy a good min max game.

I don't think I've legit enjoyed a min/max game any time I've tried to do it. It either doesn't work out the way I want it to, or it works optimally and I feel bored/bad for having used it.

I play much better when I'm using a straight-up team and can navigate positioning, dice rolls, etc. If I use pieces to take those things out of the equation (in part - EXAMPLE: Team Bases, or something like pre-WL Spiral) then I have trouble visualizing the game the same way.

I don't like min/maxing if I'm the only one that did it, but if I know a few others are going to be doing so it can be fun to watch the fireworks. Basically come to a consensus before the tournament what kind of a style we are going for then do that. I only felt dirty one time for doing it because we were playing for a brick of IIM and I was the only won that built like they wanted to win the $100.00 brick.

I've definitely been there. I remember playing in the finals of the Coming of Galactus, and I used Stardust as my herald along with Moon Knight and a pog (I think). One dude ran 275-pt Ares as a tentpole. Another guy ran multiple Shang-Chis. In fact, I think only two other people ran Heralds and I found myself wondering why.

You said it yourself. Back in the days of the beginning of the game, it was "this TA works best against this other TA, or this power counters this other power" BUt there was alot of choice of figures with said powers or TA and it enabled a game with diversity. Right now, it's crawler vs bullseye, or it's resource vs iron-man : the diversity has drop to below zero for competitive play IMO. Hopefully, the watch-list will not be a "one-time" measure and will be used to enhance the game further soon.

I think your statement is too broad. My venue has a pretty good mix of different playstyles, and we all tend to get along pretty well.
I got you covered with my reply to your previous post.
I think the Book is actually the strongest resource, although it works best with a very different kind of team than the gauntlet.

I would probably rank them as
1. Book
2. Gauntlet
3. Belt
4. Power Plant
5. Phoenix Force
6. Batcave
7. Penguin

in descending order of potency.

Wow this thread got much larger than I thought it would. But I have reformed my opinion on resources. While I understand use of them in meta, I still believe they are broken regardless. The stat boost once you get it is insane. Where is the fun in having to roll a 2-4 to get an attack off? I enjoy the idea of making a non-competitive team competitive, however when you have a solid team already I don't see the point of equipping a resource unless you are in a big high stakes tournament. I feel in the future if Wizkids continues to make resources (which they probably will) they should not only balance (no insane stat boosts, and if there is, there should be some limitations, like "can only be used with one attack" that way you don't have people with Flurry demolishing a team.) As well as counters to resources. One in particular being the disintegration beam ring, maybe they could work something like that into a trait for a character. Another problem I see is how the game becomes less about the characters you're using and more about the resources. This is just a personal problem honestly because when I started playing the main appeal to me was building a cool team with some of my favorite comic book characters, not a team based around the infinity gauntlet, or the book of the skull, or the batman utility belt. This disheartened me even further when I made a solid X-Men team, that could be competitive against teams without a resource, but essentially useless against a team with one. I realize it's pretty useless to argue, the game seems to be going in a direction where more and more resources are springing up, and there's nothing we can do to stop it. I'll probably end up getting the Infinity Gauntlet, have always enjoyed that story line, and equip it to someone on my x-men team, to make it a tournament competitive team. Hopefully in the future the resources will get more varied, and there will be counterbalances put into place.