How I’d Do It: Episode 3

This isn’t the topic I originally planned to cover this week. My original plan was to write about the whys and wherefores of inventing new keywords, but partway through last week I had a great surge of inspiration on a different topic, and, ADD being what it is, I couldn’t let go of it. So, I’m going to postpone the keywords article until next week, and instead, I’m going to completely gut and rebuild from scratch the central theme of a team that’s always just felt wrong to me.

That team is, of course, the Sentinels.

The Sentinels were VS System’s first army-based team, and with the game state being what it was back then, I suppose they were the best the devs could do. The basic idea of the Sentinels back in MOR was that they acted as a swarm; you used a large number of low-cost Army guys to swarm the board and overwhelm the opponent’s quality with your quantity. The individual Sentinels were relatively puny, with stats that were at best average, and at worst, painfully small. This really, really bothered me. Sentinels are supposed to be huge! They’re supposed to be imposing! ALICIA MASTERS SHOULD NOT BE ABLE TO KILL ONE IN A FIGHT!

Once the Spider-Man set came out, the Sentinels got some new toys– the Mark III gave a board-wide ATK pump (to assist the swarm theme), but also the Mark V– an army character with standard stats for a 4-drop OR a 5, and an ability that made it quite difficult for your opponents to pump over your guys for break. With the latter in hand, Team Realmworx (I think?) came up with the Curve Sentinels build. Instead of the annoying swarm build, it used a curve of large characters to dominate the largely curve-based meta of the time by simply being a tiny bit bigger than all opponents. This was much more in line with how I felt Sentinels should operate, but I still wasn’t happy because it created a whole new thematic problem for me: the deck was far too diverse. It played a human being on 1, a mutant on 2, a named Sentinel on 5, a cyborg on 6, and razzer-frazzing Magneto on 7. MAGNETO! IN A SENTINEL DECK!

*shakes head*

While the playstyle was closer to what I wanted to see, the deck was barely bothering to play any giant robots! It was all named characters and behind-the-scenes manipulators, with hardly a chiseled face to be seen. It just didn’t feel right to me. I couldn’t do anything about it at the time, but hot damn, I’m gonna do something about it now! I’m going to finally do for the Sentinels what they’ve deserved all along– I’m going to make them feel like Sentinels.

So What Do Sentinels Feel Like?

To my mind, there are two main elements to a Sentinel attack. The first, and the one that we’ve never really seen done properly, is that these things are freaking enormous. A Sentinel is, depending on the source, anywhere from 18 to 60 feet tall. It’s strong enough to knock down a building, and much faster than you’d expect something so bulky to be. It’s covered in thick armor plate, and equipped with dozens of weapon systems to cover every possible tactical situation. It’s loaded with its own sensors to keep track of bogeys all around it, and supplemented by a direct connection to orbiting satellites to help track targets who drop out of sight. A Sentinel is just a massive walking weapons platform– death on legs. It finds you, tracks you, and takes you down. It is very important to me that whatever we do for these things, they should be an absolute nightmare in one-on-one combat. As in the comics, a careful application of teamwork and joint attacks can take one down fairly handily, but if you get cornered by one and have no friends to help you, then you are not going to be walking away from this fight.

The second important thing about capturing the thematics of a Sentinel is that they should be entirely devoid of character and personality. Sentinels are by and large not self-aware; they have enough intelligence to handle themselves in a fight, but the “feel” of a Sentinel attack should be cold and faceless– when a Sentinel brings in backup, it summons an exact duplicate of itself. This was another problem with the original character selection for the team– in trying to curve out, the developers gave us different versions of the Sentinels that we’ve seen over the years. So your 2-drop is a 1960s Sentinel, your 3-drop is a 1970s Sentinel, your 4-drop is a 1990s Sentinel, etc. But that’s not how Sentinels work in the comics; once a new version is created, we generally don’t see the old ones anymore. Old technology simply isn’t as effective as the new. The MOR selection was too diverse; our new build will exude uniformity. Once the proper attack starts, you are simply going to be swarmed by the more and more copies of the exact same hulking behemoth.

Now, I am not saying that there is no place for variety in the build. The Sentinels are agents of someone’s will, and they would not act without the go-ahead from a human being at some link in the chain of command. We will be including a few non-robots in the character set, but they will not be doing much of the fighting for you. They are there to supplement the robots, to drive them on, and to make them work better. And there will be multiple different robots; but instead of calling on different versions from throughout history, our robotic diversity will draw from different classes of Sentinel. Because while there would be no reason for anyone to dispatch a shiny new giant robot and a rusting one on the same mission, there would definitely be some justification in sending out, alongside the frontline fighters, some smaller units to perform specialized roles.

Alrighty, that’s enough theory. All of that is the “feel” that I think the Sentinel team has been missing; let’s take a look at how I’d solve the problem.

Colossal Menace

Methodical, precise, unsurprising, and huge.

So, yeah. It’s a 9/9 4-drop; very few 4s can stun it, and very few can dodge it. We’ve only ever seen two 9/9 4-drops before: one, Goldface, required a double-discard of affiliated characters before he’d come out to play. The other, Alan Scott, loses you the game, full stop, if he gets KO’d. Jumping a full point up the curve is a non-trivial thing, and it needs a hefty cost associated with it to prevent abuse.

Or, yaknow. Three costs.

The first cost is that you can’t target it, and that one is largely for flavor reasons. As I said earlier, one of the huge thematic elements I wanted to convey is uniformity. Sentinels should not be delivering flying kicks, or dodging acrobatically. They do not “pour on the juice” at one point more than another; Sentinels are nothing if not consistent. They behave the same way all the time; one Sentinel is going to attack you exactly the same as the next one. Of course, the restriction was necessary mechanically as well; with their stats starting out so huge, opponents are already guaranteed to need some sort of pump to get through them. People often start by declaring a “working” attack, and then hold their pumps in case an opponent tries to use their own pumps to get out of the attack. Since we’re forcing them to use that “reserve” pump up-front just to make the stun possible, it would be a little cruel to let the Sentinel player start out higher and then pump normally. It would just utterly shut down curve combat decks.

The second cost is that our Sentinels can’t cause breakthrough. While a 9/9 isn’t a huge breakthrough threat (no more so than any other 8- or 9-ATK 4-drop), as you’ll see in a moment, you’ll be able to fairly easily get your Sentinels– plural– to much bigger numbers, and with all of them having flight and range, they’re almost begging to be a “break up formation and SMASH SMASH SMASH” team. That wasn’t what I was after; I want my Sentinels to be precise, with their focus on defeating their opponents, full stop, and no consideration given to making it hurt. Our robots are all about the job. Don’t worry, though– the damage they lose from Breakthrough will be made up in other, more consistently applied ways.

The last restriction, if you’re playing the deck as I’m envisioning it, isn’t even a restriction at all. On turn 5, you’ll have one Sentinel from last turn, so after your resource “tribute” you’ll have 4 resources left to recruit a new Sentinel. On turn 6, you’ll have two leftovers, which once again leaves you… 4 resources. Unless your resources get nuked (and how many of those effects even exist in Silver anymore?), you can simply recruit one new Sentinel, every turn. Your survivors’ payments will always leave you at least 4 resources to recruit them a new friend. This is the main tool I’m using to enforce tempo and reinforce thematics– Sentinels don’t have a quick, surging swarm; they call in reinforcements which arrive at a consistent rate. Every turn they haven’t won yet, another identical drone arrives to provide more help.

Of course, 9/9 isn’t “huge” for very long. It’s overpowering on turn 4, but on turn 5 and onward, it’s anywhere from average to “laughably small”, especially since the Sentinels can’t pump directly. To ensure that your Sentinels remain large enough to represent a credible threat, I’ve given them a few tools to make sure they stay above the curve for at least a few more turns.

Colossal Menace is the main stat-booster for the team. Getting as many copies of this card face-up in your row as you can manage will be a primary focus for the Sentinels; its build phase restriction stops it from being pulled as a surprise, but surprise isn’t all it’s cracked up to be– seeing the train coming does you no good if you’re tied to the tracks. Colossal Menace is the main reason the Sentinels couldn’t be allowed to do breakthrough– having three 13/13 characters with flight and range is almost guaranteed to be a game-ender on 6 otherwise.

In addition to Colossal Menace, the Sentinels will have one other significant tool for remaining beefy as the turns stretch on. Target Sighted looks like it’s just a weaker version of Menace, and to a degree it is. Consider, though– if we assume you’ll get, on average, two copies of Colossal Menace in play, then you’re going to have a board of 11/11 dudes for your opponent to break through. These will be big enough to dominate the opponent’s 4 and 5, but will run into problems with their 6. So, that’s really the only character you need to be worried about pumping over. In that case, Target ends up being just as good as having Colossal face-up, and is even somewhat better– it doesn’t require a discard to play, and hey– if you want, it’s just copies 5 through 8 of Colossal.

The idea with these three cards– the core of your deck– is to always force your opponent to pump or team attack to take your Sentinels down. None of your effects are a surprise to your opponent since most of your important ones are Build-restricted, but it almost doesn’t matter; knowing in advance that your characters are completely outclassed isn’t particularly helpful toward changing that fact.

Support Group

So, the basic gameplan up to now is this:

• Turn 4, recruit Sentinel
• Turn 5, recruit Sentinel. Flip Colossal Menaces to retain size advantage.
• Turn 6, recruit Sentinel. Flip Target Sighted to retain size advantage against 6-drops.

So far, the theory’s pretty sound. That said, there are two gaps– what you do on 1-3 to ensure that this gameplan can be played consistently, and what you do on 6+ to ensure victory, since you’re not doing the breakthrough a normal combat deck would be to bring the opponent’s endurance down. Let’s take a look at the setup and support first.

I love throwing small sub-themes into my cards, so when I noticed that I’d assigned a cost of 1 to most of the Sentinels’ support cards, I figured I might as well run with it. I’ve given the Sentinel support suite a small theme of having all 1-cost resources, both in the enablers and the benefits. The Sentinel Gantry is the main card to take advantage of it– the more 1-cost resources you have, the deeper it digs each turn. I chose to let the Gantry create card advantage (by not requiring a discard) because it would feed into all of the Sentinels’ themes– swarm needs lots of bodies to play, Curve needs guys to pitch to Bastion, and our Towers build needs them to pitch to Colossal Menace. It’s non-unique, so the player can flip and use as many as he draws, though he’ll need to be careful– any old-school Revenge Squad player can tell you how difficult it is to be paying 3 or more endurance every turn just to hit your curve.

Next up in the 1-cost support suite is Command and Control. This location has two primary uses; firstly, and most obviously, it helps the Sentinels shine a searchlight on the hidden area, and smack into its denizens as ably as they do the braver visible characters. Our Sentinels are rather vulnerable to the common occurrence of receiving multiple stuns, and being able to take swipes at your opponent’s large hidden beaters on your own terms can go a long way toward making sure your towers stay upright. The second half of the Command and Control effect is essentially there to stop your opponent from using bounce and KO shenanigans to escape your bots. It puts a huge wrench in Kree press chains, and stops players from Substituting characters out of play in favor of more robot-smashy ones.

It’s always very tempting to give custom teams a plethora of search and sift effects to help them combo out, but I always try to avoid it if possible. In my first build of the Tower sentinels, they had a Demon’s Head-like card that let you exhaust a Sentinel to search and row anything with a cost of 1. It would definitely be fitting, but ultimately it just seemed like it made the combo too easy to pull off– it gave you another four copies of your main combo cards, and it just made the “nuts row” of four Colossals and a few Sighteds a little too easy to put together. That said, since I’ve made the Sentinels pretty damn dependant on their row contents, I do need to give them SOME help in setting it up. To that end, I’ve given them the Scout Unit. By investing some points in one or two of these early on, you’ll really help yourself out in the long run by keeping your row tidy and flush with global pumps and other helpful effects. I considered making them Concealed-Optional, but ultimately I decided that they should probably be kept available to your opponent, for two reasons. First of all, it’s a powerful ability, and hiding it makes it way too easy to keep firing. And second, there should be something for your opponents to hit if they’re staring down a board full of Sentinels they can’t stun, to stop them from having to completely waste their attack step.

One potential problem with the Sentinels’ picky row requirements is that you may simply run out of room. Like many resource-row-intensive teams before them, you may end up rowing the locations early on, or playing a Target Sighted on a character who’s since left the board, and then later on draw into a copy of Colossal Menace that you’d love to row, but can’t. Well, that’s what Larry Trask is for. With Larry available to you, you can row utility cards early without worrying that you’ll suffer for it later on.

The 1-cost resource theme is admittedly kind of a silly gimmick, but I like silly gimmicks. They let you keep a fun tone to the cards, and in cases like this one, they can really add to the overall feel of a team. By keeping our row as uniform as our board, we continue to reinforce the feel of a mindless bunch of robots. Actually, I was originally going to make the theme “resources with a cost of 1 or less”, to let you have a full-on Binary row of “0110001″, but it made the cards too cramped.

One thing you may have noticed about the Scout Unit above is that I let it grab 1-cost Army characters. Well, so far I haven’t actually shown you any of those, but surely you didn’t think I’d forget to toss a cookie to dear old Stu?

As you’ll often find with certain members of teams that have two very different builds, my Wild Sentinel is equally at home in two wildly divergent builds. Its main effect lets you build up a few Wilds in the early turns, and then nuke them on 4 or 5 to keep your Towers chunky. The other effect, on the other hand, lets them act quite easily as a swarm– which, before you rag on me for contradicting myself, is sort of appropriate for Wild Sentinels. My Wild sentinels let you dodge the hand-size issue that every swarm build has to deal with somehow, by letting you recruit them straight out of your KO’d pile. The removal of another Army card isn’t so much a cost as it is a tempo-reducer– you can only ever get half of the Wilds in your KO’d pile into play, so if you’re not making efforts to fill your pile (say, by also investing in some Scout Units), you’ll end up with a KO’d pile too thinly populated to fill all of your recruit points.

It actually surprised me how much of the “big guys” tech translates easily into the theoretical “New Vomit” build as well. Sentinel Gantry feeds your hand; Scout Unit lets you throw away Wilds to get even more Wilds, filling your pile and letting you swarm out more easily from there; Colossal Menace works just as well as a Faces of Evil analogue as it does a Shaw Industries, and Target Sighted lets you get even more swarmy pump against single targets. Larry Trask lets you row Wild Sentinels early on if your draws aren’t so hot, and then clear them into the KO’d pile to be recruited once you’ve got something more useful to put down. I never really intended these interactions, as the Wild was the last card I made for this. It just occurred to me as I was writing how well it synergizes with… well… everything.

It’s neat when that happens.

A Closer, and the Cutting Room Floor

So you’ve set up your row, and recruited a Sentinel on turn 4, 5, and 6. You’ve kept them alive, but even your colossi are going to be outstripped by what your opponent can muster on 7. You’re going to need a way to match the size of your opponent’s big beater, so that you can continue to dominate his lower drops without being disrupted by a one-sided smack, but your resource tribute stops you from bringing out your own big beater.

Well, worry not. Daddy’s here.

So, yeah. Once you hit turn 7, your big beaters aren’t all that big anymore. Bolivar keys on this in two ways. First of all, they’re no longer really worth a resource tribute every turn to keep around, as your opponent can likely beat over them with little effort. Bolivar acknowledges this by saying that you don’t need to worry about that anymore. Even if you don’t plan on making him your turn 7 recruit, you’re at least free to make SOME higher-cost investment with your resources than simply another Sentinel reinforcement.

If you do decide to bring him out, your Towers, which were being marginalized by your opponents’ increasing size while they themselves weren’t growing much anymore, get an instant boost– +4/+4 apiece. If you’ve managed to row all four copies of Colossal Menace and keep all your recruits (both are wishful thinking, admittedly…), you’ll have three 17/17 guys with flight and range to tear your opponent apart with.

There are a ton of other effects I wanted to do, but I’ve given myself a 10-card budget each week to stop myself from going too insane on any one idea, so I’ll just talk about some of the effects that I wanted to do, but couldn’t quite find the card room to squeeze in, or that I was unsure of for some other reason. First up, a card I really like, but I can’t quite shake the feeling that it’s too good. Nerve Gas is like a variant on the Steel Girder, except a little crappier since it only stops people from readying. That said, it’s also a little better, because it can be recruited for free onto someone who is absolutely freaking enormous and is almost guaranteed to stun everybody who enters combat with him. I just worry that letting the Sentinels lock down their opponents’ biggest guys will make them too MUCH of an overwhelming force, so I’d submit this one for testing with a sticky note of caution attached.

Another one I wasn’t sure about was a way for the Towers to cause something more than stun damage in combat. I definitely didn’t want them causing breakthrough, but it seems like they’d end up with a pretty awful endurance deficit as the game progresses. I tried to work some burn onto a couple cards, but kept cutting it for space– something like,

• “Whenever an Army Sentinel character you control stuns a character an opponent controls, that opponent loses 3 endurance.”

Or maybe tie it to some board clearing:

• “Whenever an opposing character becomes stunned by one or more Army Sentinel characters you control, KO it unless its controller pays 3 endurance.”

I couldn’t really decide how best to set it up, and I was already at my 10 card limit, so I figured I’d leave that decision for a year down the road when UDE hires me to finish the team for real.

End Of Line.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how I think the Sentinels should’ve been done all along. Coming up with Army was a great first step, but that was the only thing they did that really made them feel like Sentinels should. I’m not sure if we’ll ever see a refeature for the Sentinels, but if we do, I hope we see them with a bit of a tweaking, because their old themes just don’t quite fit.

Oh, and before we go, I’d like to welcome a new member of the formerly one-man How I’d Do It team. Getting all the art done for these things every week has been a real nightmare, so I’ve recruited my bestest buddy from another life, the incomparable MJB_1977, to pitch in on the art duties. His art’s got a much more exaggerated and colourful look to it than mine, so you’ll hopefully get a lighthearted break from my incessantly gloomy stuff from now on. He pinch-hit on the Nerve Gas card at the eleventh hour tonight when I realized I hadn’t found anything for it yet, so I’m already very grateful for his assistance.

Alrighty, that’s me for this week. See you again next time!

-Spud