Saturday, April 26, 2008

Fantastical Zombies! The Marvel Zombies Essential Collection.


Little late, um, oh yeah, I meant to do this Monday... LOL Yeah. Reason being the DC announcement kinda depressed and scared me to be honest. BUT! Soldier on, is my motto.

So, the theme of the Marvel Zombies is weenie rush with lots of dead bodies sticking around. You've seen Hawkeye, I flirt with broken-ness a bit more, but not a LOT more, I promise. Hehe.

So Loyalty - Hardfast prevents you from playing Zombie Thing with anyone but the FF and MZ, otherwise you KO him. Zombie keeps you in play if you're recovering somebody else in the recovery phase.

His other restriction prevents him from having greater than 3 attack. This builds in a limit to how much damage he can do. The reason is because, obviously, he's free. What is his real purpose if you can't even play a flying kick on him?

He's there to be a body. There are multiple effects for the Marvel Zombies that care about bodies. KO'ing bodies most specifically. There are also costs that require you to control stunned characters or give you bonuses based on the number you control. So Thing and his 0 defense are very friendly to the deck.






Zombie Invisible Woman is the best bet to keep the deck on track. She searches for your key plot twists she grabs characters and she fulfills the stunned character requirements that fuel some strong effects.

A nice 2/3 for a 2-drop with concealed-optional. I've always loved Concealed - Optional. You can either protect her and use the ability every turn or you can put her out on the lines and attack with her... And if the attack goes bad, use her effect to go set up next turn. Or, if your opponent's attack goes a little too well, then you can use her effect and negate the effects your opponent has played on an attacker.

I'll make sure to show one of the awesome Ongoing plot twists she can snag next week!




Continuing up the curve is Zombie Human Torch. Human Torch usually is a burn character and he usually has good attack and bad Dee, so he was rather easy to design. 6/3 is good, but his real power is in the ability!

"Activate -> KO a character you control, target opponent loses endurance (uh oh, typo!) equal to that character's attack. Use this power only once per turn."

Is your attack about to go south? Did somebody negate a lot of your attack long pumps by killing a defender? Are they going to remove an attacker? Force Field Projection, Science Spire? Kill that attacker and do all that damage straight to the face! Characters still have attack while stunned too, so remember that zombie sitting around, doing nothing for you? Kill it, hit the face, make use of them! Hell yeah!

Flight and range make him a good attacker, but I think you'll often find yourself activating instead of attacking. And obviously make Human Torch a very strong defender. Again he's Concealed - Optional, so that you really have the choice of what you want to do with him. I think it adds a very interesting and fun level of strategy to your rush decks having a lot of Concealed - Optional.

Thematically Concealed works well for zombies, but I thought at the time it worked especially well for these four because they end up coming across the divide and into the Ultimate Universe. They do this when Zombie Reed tricks Ultimate Reed into building an interdimensional teleporter that then brings Ultimate Reed to Zombie Earth and allows Zombie Reed to take his Frightastic Family to the Ultimate Universe where they do battle with the rest of the Ultimate Fantastic Four.


What is the cost of 3 resource points? You can get 1 for free many ways. Including the new, awesome, previews of MUN that StuBarnes revealed on his blog (see link to your left!) where Squirrel Girl pops out a one drop friend when she comes into play. Shadowpact lets you pay 15 for 1 resource point up the curve and it's restricted to only Shadowpact character cards, period with it's "printed" restriction. But down the curve is much less expensive, your 3-drop Nick Fury can bring in 2 characters each turn for the cost of an exhaust! With a team-up for Anti-Matter that's a pair of 4/4 Anti-Green Lanterns! 8 damage a turn!

By limiting Zombie Mr. Fantastic's effect to Zombies, as well as forcing you to bring out 3 characters, it makes it much harder to just power out a sick 3-drop. Ahmed? No need to apply here, buddy. This is another reason for the 0-drops. It rewards you with the ability to bring out the undead Torch (...or Wolverine! More on that later.) with his buddies Thing and Mr. Fantastic. Still, there's plenty of good 1-cost targets for this ability.

And there you have the Zombie Fantastic Four! Please feel free to comment here or if you want to start a thread on VSRealms and link it in the comment section!

See you next time, when I show you some Zombie plot twists!

-Mike

4 comments:

Pi_3.14159... said...

To be perfectly honest, the "keep your zombies in play" theme is interesting, but not something that I find I like a whole lot. Also, I am not liking the 0-cost characters, because as difficult as it is to get them out (Loyalty-Hardfast is interesting), in this deck, they are just free characters. With so many ways to get free characters, just a team-up or something with IG gives you Infestation. Sure, you've put a lot of restrictions down, but then again, they have a lot of restrictions. I like simple cards that don't really overcomlicate things. I never would have come up with the "King" ability on Checkmate cards. I like power and trying to balance it is hard. I'm not sure if you've balanced it all that well.

RanmaSolo said...

Yeah, balance is tricky. It's harder because I've never really gotten to playtest these much more than to figure out the other team is very, very broken. lol

When I first started this I think Haywire had just come out and Frankie Raye was not yet so obviously retarded.

In the end, I'm really doing this for fun, but I will revise. So I appreciate your input. It's all I've gotten so far. :(

The two 0-costers are mainly to let you get full potential out of certain cards. I didn't want them going anywhere else so I figured an extreme Loyalty made sense. At the time UDE was having a lot of trouble with making mono/duel-team decks playable and that was my idea to force on team plays.

-Mike

helios12 said...

so far i really like all the cards and both Loyalty-Hardfast and Zombie fit perfectly with how zombies would really work. I had been thinking about makes a fantasy set about marvel zombies too didn't get far but i did have one idea.

Zombie Bruce Banner
Cost 1 Marvel Zombie
1/1
At the start of the combat phase put a hunger tonken on Zombie Bruce Banner. When Zombie Bruce Banner is stunned with two hunger tonkens you may KO him and put a Zombie Hulk from your hand or KO pile into play.

Zombie Hulk
Cost 2
4/4
When Zombie Hulk is stunned or stuns another character you may return Zombie Hulk to your hand and put a Zombie Bruce Banner from your hand or KO pile into play in your front row. If you do not Ko Zombie Hulk.

They both work with the whole swarm idea and work almost the same way they did in the comic book. If there is another Zombie Hulk all you can do is make Zombie Bruce target only a cost two Hulk or a Hulk with only a certain version.

RanmaSolo said...

Those are pretty cool. I really like the idea of a Hulk/Banner change represented via switching cards. I'm sure it could be made to work, just a matter of sussing out the right wording.

-Mike