Welcome back to the last of my introductory series on choosing a squad for your Marvel Dice Masters games!  This time, we're going to focus on tying together what we've learned when we looked at purchase and fielding costs, and see how we can use that to smooth out the process of cooking up a squad.

Let's dial back to a couple of weeks ago, and remember the three things every squad should have:

In this episode of The Reserve Pool, Dave, Katie, and Evan discuss their recent gaming. Then, we discuss the thoughts that go into choosing the two basic actions that everyone must bring to the table. We also debut a new segment - Combo Killers - and complain a little bit more about the rules!

Would you like to submit something for our mailbag? Email us. We look forward to it!


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There's definitely been some buzz on the street about the upcoming Organized Play for Marvel Dice Masters Avengers vs. X-Men, along with a little frustration. I know The Reserve Pool's own Dave doesn't have an OP scheduled anywhere near him yet, and I'm looking at a long trek to make it to mine. Hopefully as the second shipment of Starter Kits is shipped, and the game gains in popularity in stores, people will start to be more interested in the OP. Sadly it's a recipe for a lot of frustration in the early months, but I hope it can land on its feet.

I can't stress this enough: if you want the OP in your local store, make sure you talk to your Friendly Local Gaming Shop. They want your business, I promise, it's just a matter of staffing that could make things a little difficult. To look up OPs in your local area use the WizKids Event System

So, this news is coming a little later than the actual news post itself, but a few teasers of all of the cards became available on Dicemasters.com in their Organized Play section! They seem oriented to not give us too much, so we can't expect all the information from the cards, I'm afraid. Dave already given is a peek at the full cards for the first month of Organized Play, but we only have low-res cropped images of the remaining cards. What can we learn about these cards from the little clues?

Katie here, coming back at you with a bit of a character review and podcast followup! We talked about him in this week's podcast, but I want to touch on him again today in more detail: Ghost Rider: Brimstone Biker can be a cornerstone of your team and really speed up the rate you can bring your hard hitters to the table.

Ghost Rider, in comics, has gone through more host characters that Wolverine has guest appearances, so it's only fitting that two of his forms are geared around churn. It might be tempting to pick up Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance for the dice draw, but the truth is that the value of knowing exactly what you're going to get cannot be undervalued.

Here I'm going to be talking in a more open-ended fashion about how you might want to bring Brimstone Biker to your team, and the sorts of characters that can most benefit from his amazing ability.

I think it's possible that I've mentioned just a couple of times that a certain energy-infused card-spewing member of the X-Men is my favorite Marvel hero or something? Maybe once or twice? I guess that made it a pretty easy place to start for my non-starter set character overviews.

For future overviews, I'm going to try something a little different.

This link right here is our guild page on Board Game Geek. Every time we do a review, I'll have a poll topic up for who the next one should be. It'll be a choice of four, and I'll try to be creative with my distribution of it. So while you won't be able to specifically request the next character, you will have a voice in the process!

Before you do this, you'll need to do the following:

• Sign up for BGG - this is absolutely worth it; the site isn't as modern as it could be but it's a fantastic gaming resource, the best one out there.
• Join the guild, which you can do from the guild page.

And finally, here's the link to our first poll topic. Tell me who I should review next! And feel free to get some discussion going on the boards!

I'll be honest - while Gobby Green Goblin has gotten a lot of discussion since Dice Masters hit the streets, I don't think it's the biggest kid on the block; heck, we've discussed several ways to best deal with it here on The Reserve Pool.  To me, Gobby isn't the best of the Green Goblin picks; no, that would go to his rare form, Norman Osborne - NOGG, for short.  It's probably my favorite card in the initial set, and I'm going to show my appreciation for it by taking a break from my usual strategy pieces to explain why I like him so much, and how you, noble reader, can also take advantage of him.  Without further ado: A Love Letter to NOGG.

While you don't need to have characters specifically focused on 'assassination' in your deck, the value of being able to pick a character of your opponent and kill it outright cannot be overstated. Today I want to talk about the assassin archetype of card: who is in this category, what the strengths and weaknesses of the characters are, and how to figure out which one or two to bring to the table when you are building your deck.

These are some powerful cards, and I think you really need to have a strong idea of what your strategy is if you don't have any characters on the table who fit this type. It's going to make it very hard for you to deal with that annoying back-field character of your opponent if you don't have at least one of these guys.

Hello everyone! We're taking an oh-so-short Memorial Day Weekend break from some of the Dice Masters content. I'm working on editing the podcast that'll drop on Thursday, but we wanted to take the time to say -

Thank you so much for the incredible response to The Reserve Pool so far. We can't thank you enough. This has just been too much fun and we're truly lucky to have received the support that we have thus far.

If you like the content that we have, there are certainly some things that you can do to help us make the site more visible. Some of these are incredibly easy!

Board Game Links

BoardGameGeek Guild

Other Media

A concept that's been popular in competitive collectable games as long as Magic: The Gathering's "Counterspell" has existed is the control deck.

The purpose of a control deck is in the name - to control everything that your opponent does to the greatest extent that you can. An MTG Salvation article notes two flaws that are common to a pure control deck:

1. In order to reach the point of total control, one needs many resources and access to many cards
2. Generally, if one's opponent can play more spells and threats than one can respond to, pure Control decks can have difficulty recovering.

HULK FIELDING COSTS SMASH PUNY HAWKEYE

We've reached a milestone - with today's character feature, we've finished with the starter set!

Thor is one of the more notable characters of late, starring in two movies as the headliner and a third as part of a certain super hero team - all smashing successes.

They also feature Natalie Portman, but that's a discussion for another day. Also, don't tell my wife about this.

Today's overview is a little bit unique in that we can also include Thor's organized play card in the mix. This is our first opportunity to do so.

Ok, all of that said, let's get down to business.

In this episode of The Reserve Pool, Evan joins Dave and Katie as we answer some reader mail, discuss the all-important facet of the game - churn - and dig further into some of the cards that we think would benefit from a FAQ. What's churn? You'd better listen to find out!

Would you like to submit something for our mailbag? Email us. We look forward to it!


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We're getting close to the end of our starter set hero recaps, and soon we'll be into the heroes and villains that we'll only find in the wild. You can almost taste it - but we're not there yet.

Our penultimate starter set overview is Spider-Man. The lone unaffiliated hero contained within the starter set, Spider-Man's cards have some interesting effects. I'd assert that the potential of a couple of Spidey's iterations have not yet been fully realized - though it is also possible that we don't have all of the tools to let these abilities shine the way that they could.

Let's dig in a little deeper to the things that Peter Parker brings to the table.

Last week we talked about a pretty plain team up: Hulk and Human Torch, an interesting little offensive combo that has a lot of potential to clear your opponent out of his or her defensive line. It gives you a really beefy blocker in the form of The Hulk, and some nice direct damage to your opponent from Human Torch. It's a solid combination and I have a feeling a lot of people will enjoy it. This time, I've decided to go a little more out there: Hawkeye and Doctor Doom.

This isn't a team-up that immediately springs to mind as obvious; clearly Hawkeye still has some latent annoyance about that time he hooked up with Wanda and it turned out she was a Doombot... and Doctor Doom has never been the greatest team player except for the love of his quasi-niece Valeria, but they can maybe set aside their differences and learn to make an interesting team that also has a few nice side benefits.

You might think that this topic is redundant given that the rules include a beginner game, but I don't find that the beginner game does enough to demonstrate the potential that Marvel Dice Masters has. This is a great time to discuss it, as new base sets should be right around the corner and lots of folks will be looking to get into this.

The rulebook gets it right in that it starts with the simple and moves to the complex.

And in that way, the beginner game described in the rulebook is good as a walkthrough for a new player, but I recommend that it should not be played to completion - rather, it should be used only to explain the mechanisms involved in the game as three to four turns play out.

So what should you do after that?

Why we need a change

The ideal first game 

What you actually do should be a bit fuller. You can still provide some simplicity but on a scale that actually communicates the potential of the game.

What I've found to be successful is the following -

1. Four Characters
2. Two dice per character
3. Same basic actions as the basic game
4. 12-15 life
5. One of the following means of character selection:

Drafting

This is good if your "student" is a more experienced gamer. I like to use the cards from the base set for this, but you can use whatever set of cards you choose. This might be useful if you know that there are a few in the Marvel universe that they gravitate towards - if Ghost Rider is their favorite (despite his horrible movie), you might want to make that option available.

Of course it's important to give advice about the choices that the new player is making.

I lay out each of the cards in sets, by character. Players take turns drafting - but they're drafting the character itself, not the individual card. In other words, if they want Iron Man, they're taking every Iron Man. Once each player has four characters, they then pick which iteration of those characters that they actually want to use, ending with a squad of four.

If you've advised them well and explained some of the choices, then they ought to have a serviceable team.

The Set Squad

This would be a better one to use if the new player is more of a novice to these types of games.

Here, you want to use two predefined sets of characters for each side to use, sticking to the same limits as above. This can be variable for you, but should include something fairly balanced. The archetypes that you may want to fill are:

1) One character that helps with churn (Beast "666", Gambit "Ace in the Hole, and the like)
2) Two pieces of a combo (Torch/Hulk, Iron Man/War Machine, etcetera)
3) One utility (Storm, Loki, and so forth)

Chosen carefully, you'll have two sets of small squads that each have a means of efficiency, a clear way to win and the ability to counter the other. This is easily justified - consider the duel decks that Wizards of the Coast releases for Magic: The Gathering. The two are made to play one another and the box includes strategic information for each deck.

If you're using just the base set, it's a little more complicated to set this up because it's hard to get the costs to align perfectly. I recommend the draft there, just because of the limited selection.

Merits of this method

In a lot of ways, we probably should have mentioned Tsarina in our first podcast, as she is meta defining in her own right. People talk about Gobby more, but there is nothing more terrifying for me than looking across the table and seeing 4 dice sitting neatly atop a Tsarina card. She is FAST. She is BRUTAL. If all goes wrong she can clean you out for sixteen life on your opponent's third turn. If you are going second and your opponent first, you must be prepared to take a violent hit on that third turn and salvage the rest of the game if you can.

I hesitate to say it, but if I were going to nerf a card, it would probably be her. There are no hard, fast counters for her, but today I hope to address how to weather the storm and hopefully pull out the win. Keep in mind, even if you manage to pull out the first few turns, there is still a great deal of danger as you move into the mid-game.

As I'm not up on Marvel Comics, it seemed a bit weird to see a member of the Fantastic Four included among the Avengers vs. X-Men starter set. Considering that all of the other starter characters are either part of those two teams or unaffiliated - and even Spider Man has worked with the Avengers - I was unaware of any additional affiliations that our boy Johnny Storm had. Wikipedia tells me that he was a part of the "Secret Avengers" for maybe a year.

I have no idea what the "Secret Avengers" are. Though I don't want to make light of it - as a DC fan, I'm the first to admit that there have been many odd variants of the Justice League. It's just off-putting for someone that you immediately associate with the Fantastic Four to be the oddball among a bunch of Avengers and X-Men.

Regardless of all of that, Katie went into a bit of depth already about some of the combo opportunities that Human Torch presents. Now, it's time to analyze all of the Human Torch variants, see what we like, and see what we don't.

So powerful...but so expensive!

Welcome back, True Believers!  Today I'm going to talk about how to go about buying your dice.  Some people may be thinking, 'don't I want to just field all the characters I can, and pick up the awesomest things I can with the energy I have left?'  As Dave alluded to in To Buy Or Not To Buy, no, not always.

There are three philosophies that I see discussed frequently in regards to the first turn of the game, and additionally, one that I don't see discussed very often at all. Options are fairly limited when you're talking about this early point in the game - all you have are your sidekicks.

One of my favorite X-Men (but not the favorite - that honor is reserved for a certain cajun card dealer) has always been the Beast. I love the dichotomy between his extreme intelligence and his uncouth, almost animal appearance. It was interesting to see how he would react to people - and how others would react to him - given his mutation and the results of his genetic manipulation.

The Beast is an integral part of this first Dice Masters set, with one of the absolute best dice that you can field on your first turn - and that's just a common from the starter set! Let's get up close and personal with dear old Hank McCoy.

The iTunes listing for our podcast is now live!



The show image is still propagating around the interwebs, so that's not there yet. Note that this Thursday's episode is the one that's on there now - as I said before, it was done early for logistical reasons.

ALSO: We're migrating the feed over to a different location so that those who are just subscribing to the podcast feed have no issues. This feed will be just the podcast. Give it a day and it should all be in the right place. You don't have to change a thing - I just changed where I pointed Feedburner.

Thanks for the support, everyone!

It's Episode One of the podcast, a little early so that the podcast services get the listing! Dave and Katie introduce themselves and get right down to business - what cards are shaping the meta? What cards should be but aren't yet? And finally, we close with FAQTalk, a segment dedicated to the cards, abilities, and rules that we think need to be covered on a FAQ or errata.


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First off, I was looking at referring sites and hello Sweden! Thank you for reading!

Next up in the character review series is Mr. Tony Stark. It seems that Iron Man has a lot of fans these days. It's pretty easy to see why. After all, in The Avengers, he got to spend about 20 minutes fixing a plane. Woo!

He also upgrades his power suit like Apple upgrades smartphones - every year, he's got something different. To that end, we have four different iterations of ol' Iron Guts to discuss here.

Ok, and before we begin, I'll admit that all of my snark, every bit of it, is out of jealousy - who wouldn't want to fly around in that suit? It's crazy awesome. Especially when you have a plane to fix.

Katie will be joining me on the podcast. She'll also add her author's voice to the blog. We've just finished recording a pilot episode and everything went incredibly well - look for that to drop on Thursday, and every Thursday thereafter.

Evan will also be a writer for the blog and will guest on the podcast for some of the meatier strategy episodes.

I don't want to put words in their mouths so I'll let them introduce themselves later on. It will be a little bit before we get scheduling figured out, but rest assured, you'll start to see content from them before long.

I'm really excited at the early response to this site. Now, we'll be able to have even more quality content for you. After talking to these two, I'm convinced that they'll be outstanding editions!

Welcome, Katie and Evan!

WizKids released an update detailing the future of the Dice Masters game. You can find the full update here. The first item is that the reprint is on its way - of course, we all knew that. The second is that new shipments of boosters will hit in July. I don't think anyone had worried too much about this given the availability of the boosters to this point. Another reprint of starters is on its way, but won't hit until August.

The other big item is that Uncanny X-Men (currently slated for launch in September) will have gravity feeds that feature 90 packs, up from 60. This should help with the rarity distribution.

The main question that I have: Is the projected September release of Uncanny X-Men realistic? If starters for Avengers vs. X-Men will only be in wide availability in August, is it feasible to release an entirely new set in September? No one likes delays, but I myself wouldn't mind a delay on the release of Uncanny X-Men.

After a few days of character posts, everything seems to be off to a good start. I'm going to get back to some strategy articles, which should be what the majority of the Monday/Thursday posts are (though not always) and get posting to a normal rate from the accelerated one that I'd been doing.

An article on Marvel.com revealed the organized play exclusive cards today and also gave us an idea of the structure of the Avengers vs. X-Men storyline. It's slated to take place over six months of events and these exclusives will be available through participation.

Here's a link to the article.

The new Thor uses the same dice but provides a new card. Like the rest of the Thors, this variant has to do with controlling fist characters; the life gain is a nice bonus, too. I'm not certain how effective this is in the current card environment, but more options are always better than fewer options. This is a good counter if you find that fist characters are ruining your day, but otherwise, I don't know that this one does enough for a seven-cost card.

The basic action provides rewards for team affiliations, meaning that there is now a potential reason to match up teams that don't yet have synergy, like the Fantastic Four (currently the Fantastic Three). It also has the potential to make Avengers and X-Men teams more dangerous. This could be a scary pairing with a Black Widow rush, especially if other Avengers are involved in that team.

One way or another, organized play is coming. I hope to get my hands on Teamwork at the least!

EDIT: Shaudius states below in the comments that the basic action cards will be the monthly participation prizes - so that'll work!

Hulk may have been played by approximately seventeen different actors in the last decade, but in Marvel Dice Masters, there are just four cards that feature our green gamma-ray-bombarded friend.

Continuing with our trend started by Captain America, the Hulk is one of the starter set characters, and there is one additional uncommon hidden amongst the booster packs at your friendly local gaming store or wherever you choose to buy them.

As you might expect, the Hulk is a heavy hitter and features high-damage attacking and knocks out opposing characters with ease. Let's have a look.

And is that ok?

Loki: Gem Keeper is one of the more interesting cards out there because, when fielded, it prevents your opponent from fielding any dice from a specific character. This is pretty huge and can have quite the impact on someone who is relying on one character to drive their car.

Imagine - one player quickly buys three to four of Black Widow: Tsarina within their first two turns and their opponent manages to field Loki and bring the character ability to bear upon Black Widow. Now 50% of the faces on that die are useless until the first player finds a way to deal with him.

Perhaps you've recognized the synergies that your opponent has out on the table, the strategy that they are working towards  - now you can disable the character that is essential to it. That's powerful stuff and will disrupt a lot of strategies.

This will be the first in an ongoing series of reviews of the cards found in this set. We'll go character by character looking at all of their cards at once, discussing what I like and what I don't. I've arbitrarily decided to start with Captain America. There isn't going to be any particular order except that I'll look at the starter set characters (along with their uncommon counterparts) before I get to the rest.

Found on Flickr, user wgunther. Some rights reserved.

I know that I said that I would hold off until Mondays and Thursdays in my prior post, but some of the traffic makes me want to give people more of a reason to visit in the early days of this site.

A lot of strategy comparisons - some of them by me - have put this game up against collectable card games like Magic and others. The collectable nature of the game, as well as the combat system, helps to drive those comparisons.

While those games can absolutely inform the decisions that we make in this young game, there's something else that's at least as important to consider with Dice Mastesr: Its similarities to deck building games like Dominion, Ascension, and all the rest.

Just a quick note for how I'm going to try to go about things here. Plan on seeing larger posts on Mondays and Thursdays, with the occasional character discussion thrown around in between and/or as one of the Monday/Thursday posts. That'll depend on the length of the post and how some of those things turn out. Several articles are still in the planning stages, and so I'm not 100% on how they'll turn out yet.

I'm currently considering options for the podcast. Really, I just need some inspiration to strike - I'm trying to determine what topics to discuss without either taking away from the blog OR being redundant. Please get in touch if you have thoughts to share. Thanks for reading!

Every competitive game has the ideal structure that everything becomes centered around. For example, if you've ever played Magic: The Gathering, you know that you want to stick to 60 cards, and that 20 of those should be lands. If you play Android: Netrunner, you know that the corporation should stick with 49 cards so that they don't have to include extra agenda points.

Now, these are never unbreakable rules, but they provide a starting point for players that are new. And right now, we're all new.

This game, too, will certainly have some of those guidelines develop as it gets into the hands of more and more gamers, as the meta develops, and as archetypes evolve. Some of the most fun that you can have with competitive collectable games - apart from playing - is through building your forces, and the more of us that discuss it, the faster we'll find the best answers.