Crime Lords Month: You give me fever…

Yes, it’s April, and welcome to the first rambling diatribe of Lost Hemisphere’s portion of Crime Lords Month. The Brave and the Blog should be picking up the slack, so don’t forget to go and check out the ramblings there too.

I thought we’d take a little walk on the wild side, sampling the twist psyche of one of the loopiest femmes ever to make out with Daredevil….

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you…

Typhoid Mary

Call her by any of her pseudonyms – Bloody Mary, Mary Walker, um… Mary… – one way or another she’s a homicidal fruit loop whose personality has more twists  than a pretzel vendor. 

So let’s take a look at our sultry psychopath and see how she fits into our VS world…

Every once in a while we see character than both repulses us while simultaneoulsy tugging on our heartstrings. This is kinda the feel I get for Mary, who just hapens to look hot in fishnets.

The tragedy of the character is that she truly is mentally ill. I’m not talking she has a bad case of agoraphobia or wants to wear a tinfoil helmet – she has dissociative identity disorder, inadvertently caused by (of all people) Daredevil, who put her through a window when she (and some of the other “working girls”) came at him when he tried to apprehend a villain in a house of ill repute.

All of a sudden we have the shy and demure Mary Walker, the violent and lustful Typhoid, and brutally sadistic psychopath that is Bloody mary.

Add to the mess constant manipulation by the Kingpin, who quite favoured Typhoid as a merc, assassin and legbreaker, and the poor girl is a real mess.

She’s suppressed the nastier personalities a couple of times, even getting a career in show biz going at one point, but every time someone has deliberately brought Typhoid back to the surface.

Poor Mary Walker.

Now that we feel all sympathetic for her, let’s consider that she’s left a trail of corpses in her wake, her aggressive personalities have a strong dislike for men (Bloody Mary in particular), and that she’s just plain twisted – even to the point of using an image inducer to imitate Siryn to spend a little “quality time” with Deadpool, who naturally thought he was getting the girl of his dreams… not his nightmares.

 In terms of capabilities, Mary is highly athletic with great agility and reflexes, and can use pretty much any bladed weapon you toss at her. Throw into the mix low level telekinesis and a heavy dose of pyrokinesis, and you’ve got a woman who can impale you on a selection of her favourite pointy things, and then set you on fire, without even raising a hand.

So let’s bring this all around to VS.

And before anyone asks, yes I did put the pic of the card right after the pic of Mary in the same costume for a reason. Every other time I’d seen Typhoid prior to MMK’s release she’d been wearing the one-sleeved pink number; it’s always a good thing to show that the artist wasn’t just making stuff up when he created the card image.

Anyway… 

Typhoid came to us in MMK as the expansion’s only location hate. That alone’s pretty cool, and fits nicely in with the pyrokinesis powerset.

Fire being the nasty little hard-to-control thing it is, combined with the sheer unpredictability of working with Mary, means one of your own resources gets blown up in the process….

… look at that, you’ve got a resource control effect right there.

Unfortunately, resource control simply wasn’t a theme for the Crime Lords in MMK. Add to that a fairly uninspiring 10 DEF on a 6-drop and well, despite being the only way to kill Quentin Carnival in the set, Mary didn’t see a lot of play.

Why would she? Even within the MMK we had Jaime Ortiz stealing attackers, Kirigi providing hidden hate and getting obscene attack boosts, and Nuke coming out of the gate anywhere from 14/14 up if you wanted to shotgun him. With Bullseye waiting to punish attackers on turn 7 (another character with a high attack and sad defence - but that’s for another diatribe), Mary’s resource control just wasn’t in demand.

So the question remains… MUN previews are around the corner. Crime Lords will be making a comeback (with a vengeance, I tells ya). Will we see a more potent Mary?

Time will tell…