Send in the clones – a ramble.

Clone Saga is a difficult format for me to write about. You see, the current incarnation of the “gdaybloke” character really developed on the Freedom Reborn forums for the Freedom Force PC game. My friend Rob, Hellscorp, was running around in-persona cloning everything in a sufficiently evil manner. They would even shave off their goatees so that we couldn’t tell the evil ones from the good ones. Thus agent Graham Day (G.Day) became to CEO of H.A.M.S.T.E.R., an agency dedicated to eradicating clones before they replaced regular humans. You know, the ones that get their fibre.

The first power on the card, originally designed some years ago, represents my shutting down of cloning by negating power-up potential. Since my weapon of choice was a minigun that fired specially-trained exploding rodents, the second power represents my laying down a spray of incendeniary gerbils, forcing people to keep their heads down.

And yes, in the art there you can catch a glimpse of the then-2-yr-old Gdaygirl in her little gyrocopter, and Gdaysheila packing heat as well. 

Nonetheless, after years of fighting clone villainy in all its forms on a handful of online fora, I now find myself contemplating just what I should clone.

And of course, this is completely distracting me from thoughts of what I should play for the City Champs in two week’s time, with its precious cargo of Fantastic Four characters… le sigh…

This brings us around to the question of what the smeg to play for the Clone Saga format.

I’ve spelt out before that we’re a very casual playgroup – we generally discourage netdecking, and tend to favour fun decks over Tier One stuff. As such, we’re putting a self-imposed ban on cards such as Omnipotence, that completely shut down characters based in the name alone.

We’re also ruling out the obvious candidates for cloning – Spider-Man, Batman, etc. The joy here is that it forces us to think outside of the immediately obvious options and to get a little more creative with deckbuilding. Again, the end results may not be Tier One, but they’re more likely to be fun.

Of further consideration for myself is my love of the Legend concept. Building decks around central characters is just so much more fun than toolboxing a whole bunch of random malarkey, even moreso than building for a single team affiliation. It doesn’t hurt that the Legend support cards are generally fifteen colours of groovy as well.  

This doesn’t mean, however, that every Legend (or even mini-Legend) is suitable for Clone treatment. Depending on the drops, it must be considered whether or not said Legend is worth underdropping for to get multiples of the same drop. Thankfully, in the case of Jean Gret, the answer is yes. Considering that with some work her 5-drop can have the stats over and above the standard for 6-drops, having two of her in play on turn 6 isn’t a bad thing.

It's okay. You can admit it.

And what of the non-Legends? Is it worth it to try and build a deck specifically tailored around getting multiple Barbara Gordons in play? Sure, if you’re talking Card Draw Barbie your hand-size is going to be phenomenal, but what precisely are you going to do with it? The marquee format demands Silver Age only, so no FatBat, and you better pray your opponent’s not running Injustice Gang.

Now, despite all these natterings I do have a couple of characters I’m considering building around.

Red Skull could be fun; as much as I generally loathe trying to set up characters around multiple leader effects, that would largely be alleviated if they just happened to be the same effect entirely.

Human Torch may have lost some of the burn potential without his now-Golden stuff, but there’s still something to be done there, I’m sure of it.

… and would it be nice to finally build that Thing deck without needing to run Crisis or Clash? Mmm beaty.

So here’s my question, and challenge, for you, my Fellow Lost. If you disallow the obvious power characters in the format, if you go for something fun rather than something that’s pretty much immediately suited to wreck house, if you have to think outside the immediate comfort zone -

- Who would you clone?