Updates schmupdates

SuperGirlfriend just called and advised me she'll be getting off work early enough to drive me to my job, meaning I don't have to catch my usual 9 o'clock bus to get to a job that starts at 11:30, so I have way more time to work on this blog. I win, you win, the girl wins... everybody wins! Or something like that.

Let's see... I recently got some email from an old friend (who at this time shall remain nameless) and I'm diggin' on that. SuperGirlfriend and I, after my egregious misstep of earlier this week, are getting back into the Christmas spirit... we're off with the SuperKids tonight to hunt down and slay The Dreaded Christmas Tree, after which we'll drag it home and dress up its corpse in Yuletide gaud... a good time we're all eagerly anticipating. Our front porch looks, honestly, gorgeous, with the lit garland and the fake tree I bought last year all festooned with lights and little red velvet bows and the multicolored lights on the bushes.

So all that's cool.

In HeroClix... since getting my birthday clix brick, I've picked up 6 more boosters of ARMOR WARS, and added the House of M Wolverine (sigh) and Sentry (heavier sigh) to my Uniques for the set. No Crystal yet, dammit. On the flip side, I got a couple of rookie Executioners with the MOE TA, which I'd actually wanted more than the Vet I got, and both rookie and experienced Banshees. I also picked up a rookie and a vet version of Wendigo.

Now, explain this to me:


Crystal, a character with a genuine character arc over the course of the forty years that Marvel Comics has been putting out superhero stuff, who is an Inhuman and who has been a member of the Fantastic Four (in two different eras) and the Avengers... get's done, finally, as a Unique.

The Executioner, who is an immortal of Asgard, and the Wendigo, who is a frickin' brainless monster, both get full Rookie/Experienced/Veteran sets.

I mean, come on now. The Executioner's REV covers the maybe-ten Marvel-time years that occurred between his first appearance on Earth as a member of the Masters of Evil fighting the Avengers in their early issues, to his more or less heroic death in a Simonson THOR in the early 80s. And, as stated, he's got to be several thousand years old. I seriously doubt he changed very much in that time period. If anyone should be a Unique, it's him.

The Wendigo, as stated, is a brainless monster... a man eating carnivore that, according to Canadian legend, is what someone becomes when they eat human flesh (and apparently, the legend has the strength of a working mystical curse in the Canadian North Woods, at the very least). Once again, you'd figure pretty much any version of the Wendigo is going to be the same as any other, so if you're going to give us a Wendigo fig (and while I love Steve Englehart's writing, and the story in which he created the Wendigo, there are about 70 Hulk villains I'd put into plastic before I reached this far down into the bin), shouldn't it also be a Unique?

Someone at HC Realms mentioned what should have been obvious to me... that game mechanics also come into picking who is going to get a REV set, instead of Unique status, because the rules of HeroClix forbid playing with more than one Unique figure, while you can have a rookie Saturn Girl, an Experienced Saturn Girl, and a Veteran Saturn Girl all on the same team... which is one reason, of course, why I only play clix under
Doc Nebula's House Rules, to avoid such egregious bullshit.

Still, looking at Crystal's dial, it's hard to see exactly what WizKids was afraid of. Yeah, yeah, the front loaded Pulse Wave, combined with the inevitable Nova Blast feat card, will tear some stuff up, but it's not like they gave her Running Shot to let her move into place and get it off... and it's not like they'd have to give every version of Crystal in a REV that front loaded power. They could have saved the current power array for the Vet version, if they were so worried about it being duplicated, and made the Rookie and Experienced versions less susceptible to abuse... give the rookie some Force Blast, some Energy Explosion and maybe a little bit of Incapacitate, at, say, a 6 range, add some Perplex and some Quake to the Experienced version, then kick out the jams and give the Vet all that Pulse Wave. Then we could have had an Experienced Crystal with the FF TA and the Vet with the Avengers TA... but... well... they didn't.

It just aggravates me. But, hey, at least they finally gave us one. We're only about four sculpts away from an entire Inhumans Royal Family...