I love my Heroclix, and have played for some time now, but I am pretty unfamiliar with the rest of the gaming scene.

A few months back, I started playing a game called Epic, and ran across
their "Banned" list. Cards that were banned from Tournament play for various reasons, but including unforeseen, exploitative, combinations with other cards.

Is this a concept that has ever been introduced into Miniature gaming?

Is it conceivable that we could see a 'figure' made that would deserve this honor?

Heroclix doesn't work that way. I think we'll always see errata before ban.

Is this because of the capital investment involved with making a miniature versus making a card, or is it just a different ideology?

Heroclix has some banned figures. Any figure with a purple ring is banned. It's dial is the same as a non purple, but it was prize support for Pre-releases. The other 2 are the Promo Spider-Man and Promo Batman from the very first Marvel and DC set. Batman has a 2 colored damage slot on his first click.

The Batman and Spider-Man have different dials than the ones you could pull from the sets they came from.

No idea. It just seems to be Wizkids policy.

Combos don't work in Heroclix like they do in say, Magic. We'll see a degenerate special power combo eventually I'm sure, but errata gives more freedom than a ban. Some companies are ban-happy, but Wizkids doesn't seem to be one of them.

Edit: Actually partly it's probably for the benefit of theme teams. If they banned say, the only Hitman or the only Chase Stein or whatever that we have (I'm just pulling figures off the top of my head, not suggesting that they're ban-worthy) nobody will be able to make the appropriate theme teams any more.

The Team abilities that are feats have been "Banned"

Back in the day Firelord (IC) and Thor (UL) had many people calling for them to be banned.

Jesse

Well, sort of. Those were never legal to begin with. They weren't later banned do to imbalance.

This is true- but it's not that he has both powers. They were just following the standard MageKnight protocol of indicating the starting click with a green damage power. When the figure already had a power, it was split.

As far as banned figures go- I would really hope game design would know enough not to make a figure that should be banned. It's actually a lot different than M:tG, in that the interactions between figures don't have to be mapped out quite so much. Sure, there are nasty combos (R Shazam+E Question+Warbound springs to mind), but it's not quite the same as a one-turn win or infinite life in Magic.

The dual colors on the damage slot was on all original mage knight figures as that represented what spot to to start on. it was a shared green spot with what ever power the character had.. so it wasnt "enhancement" like most people think.

After seeing and playing some of the crazy good figures in this game that have been made but not banned...I doubt you'll EVER see that happen in the future!!

Now I know SOME stores and judges ban certain figures due to their own bias or preference of what the game and what characters SHOULD be like, but that is not an official policy from Wizkids/NECA.

Yeah, but in the case of the figures they opted to tweak the mechanics in response. Which sometimes is needed.

In IC's era you didn't NEED to play anything other than Firelord and Wasp.

I have always supported the Batman and Spider-man bans as they are different and have no true starting line.

I have also always hated the banned purple ringed figures- give me a break already, can we come to our senses? Just say purple = unique and problem solved.

I always "house ruled" that purple ring promo figs were legal for play. The only ones I didn't allow where the Promo Spiderman, Batman, Johnny Alpha & Judge Dredd figures. The last two would have been alright too, now that I think about it.

Like Matt said, locally, there are some venues that do choose "ban" certain figures, but Wizkids as a policy has never banned any figure I know of.

Locally we had some problems with players who would just play Icons Superman to death just to win the LE prizes everyweek. The store began to lose players because it wasn't any fun for anyone, so I understand what happened in that circumstance, but in general, I like people playing whomever they enjoy playing.

I don't think game design does know enough to not make a figure that should be banned.

But the real reason that Heroclix doesn't ban figures is that Wizkids would rather change the rules to the game than ban a figure. Firelord's overpowered? Okay, FCCF and NAAT. Con Artist's overpowered? Okay, Rule of 3 and change to Pulse Wave. Superman's overpowered? Okay, let's change HSS.

The problem is now that Special Powers may be overpowered and a broad rule change won't fix those, so they have to give individual errata to each figure. For example, I expect some errata to Big Figure. He's clearly overpowered, but he won't be banned, just errata-ed. And it's possible that Nightcrawler will see some errata (at least a point cost increase).

I don't know if there are any other games that are as willing to change the rules rather than ban an overpowered game element.