And Now For Something Completely Different

So, we mentioned in our last podcast that Evan had chosen to skip out on his option to join a local Organized Play because of a slightly odd rule: no 2 cost characters. We all found it a little odd, but at the same time it's easy to see why these sorts of rules spring up; Tsarina and Beast: 666 are monsters, they facilitate churn and damage and generally keep the games moving at a very brisk (and deadly) pace.

The introduction of the Rainbow Draft is also geared towards avoiding these meta defining cards that make it hard to play a slower-paced game. This is an effort by WizKids to slow down gameplay (and sell product once there is actually product to sell), and while shops aren't WizKids, they come at it from the same perspective, to some extent.

Today I want to talk about some of the house rules we've encountered, pros and cons, and why they are cropping up in such a new game.

At first glance, the globals on NOGG (if you're new to the blog, Green Goblin "Norman Osborne") and Silver Surfer are pretty different. One deals damage at the expense of a bolt and a sidekick, the other has you spend two life and a shield to prep a die.

You're well versed in this already, in all likelihood, especially if you read Evan's recent article that analyzed all of the global abilities.

And really these two globals are pretty different if you look at them conventionally.

But why would we do that?

This has been a big debate on the forums for the game on BGG and I wanted to put this out there in hopes of settling it.

The questions is this: The FAQ clarifies fielding as something that happens whenever the character moves to the field from another area, excluding the attack zone, which would trigger "When fielded" effects.

So, does the basic action Invulnerability trigger the same effects?

The debate has gone into a long, circular argument about what constitutes fielding, what triggers "when fielded" abilities, and how moving a die from prep to the field is the same as fielding.

Still, the answer is most definitely no, and the reason is because the discussion has centered around the wrong idea and the wrong rules. The why of it is on page six of the rules.

In this episode of The Reserve Pool, Dave, Katie, and Evan discuss the OP that they wish they'd been a part of. Then, we analyze all of the information that we've seen so far from the next set. Exciting? You bet! Also included - Mailbag, and FAQTalk! 



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Welcome back, dicefans!  We're over two months out from launch, and somehow we haven't managed to take a thorough look at the globals available to us yet.  We've covered some of them here and there - several are key to Dave's Control Deck - but it's well past time for a more comprehensive review, because correctly picking which globals to have available is really important.

The thing to remember about globals is that they are, in general, a double-edged sword.  You can use them, but so can your opponent; if you want a Mr. Fantastic (or Phoenix) around to pull those pesky Human Torches and Lokis out from the backline, keep in mind your opponent is equally able to do the same to your artillery and effect characters.  The only advantage you may have is that you got to choose to bring it, so you may have tailored the rest of your deck to make sure you have the right flavor of energy available to make use of it.  That said - if you feel a global is vital to the success of your deck, don't shy away from taking it because your opponent might use it too; knowing how a global fits into your plan will make it a lot more valuable to you than it would just shooting from the hip with it, so to speak.  It might be a good thought exercise to look at the list of globals and think how you would - or would not - use each of them to support your deck, just so that if your opponent brings one, you can best use it to your advantage.

Anyway, enough preface - on to the abilities!

The overwhelming winner of the last character poll was Wolverine. I'm not shocked. Long before he was made the centerpiece of the film franchise in the form of Hugh Jackman, he was a fan favorite. His edgy attitude, stubbornness, and independent streak made it easy for him to appeal to everyone as both the "tough guy" and the "bad boy."

Wolverine is a favorite in this game. He's useful in all forms, though not equally, and while initially Canucklehead was in demand, it's now up to individual preference.

Here's the information on the next poll, on signing up for BGG so that you can participate in the polls, and joining our guild, which you totally should do. While we're at it, would you be willing to click the little "heart" here on Board Game Links? We appreciate it!

Let's explore the world of Weapon X.

You've probably heard me say that I favor 'faster' play in Dice Masters once or twice.

Okay, I lie; you've probably heard me say something to that effect in almost every article I've written about strategy.  There's a reason - I really do feel, down to the bottom of my heart, that speedy play, and not in the 'chess timer' sense, is the way to go in the current meta.

"Well okay, Evan," you say, "you can say that, but clearly there's signs they don't want the games to be all about speed - the large numbers of expensive characters, characters getting rerolled when they get knocked out rather than going to the used pile, and so on.  So if they're trying to make the game not all about speed, why do you think it is anyway?"

Well, dear reader, that's an excellent question!  I'd like to share some thoughts about why speed is good, and the first of them is one word:  momentum.

Wow, it's been a busy week. Lots of news, lots of things happening. Here's a quick week in review, just in case you missed any of it.

Join us after the break.

With Evan bringing you his own thoughts on Squad Building, and Dave sharing his Control Deck with you, I thought I should throw my hat into the ring a little bit and move focus on an actual squad that you might like to bring to an OP Hybrid Format play, rather than just talking about cards here and there. (Interestingly, I'd written this article just before news of the Rainbow Format came out from WizKids, so we might see less Hybrid offerings in a month or two due to this. As you'll see below, there's a certain focus on making sure you have a good, solid core to your deck, and Rainbow Format is going to combat that issue.)

I'm still in a phase of the game where I like to experiment and try a lot of different ways of constructing decks - trying to find different cards to play with, how to pull them together, and so forth - so you won't find perfect decks here by any means.

WizKids recently put out a release, following up on some earlier issues.

Supply and Demand

First off, they gave an update on the supply issues Marvel Dice Masters has been seeing since launch, and unfortunately it's not great news - well, it's good to hear, but not exactly good for people looking to get their hands on product.  They've stated that additional starters will be out in late June, and booster gravity feeds will be arriving in late July, but it seems like they're saying that demand is still so high that most of these waves are already spoken for.  The bright side: WizKids has increased capacity - they're saying they are, or will soon be, the largest die manufacturer in the world - and will be getting another wave out in September; they indicate that these reprints should not impact the next set (I assume they mean Uncanny X-Men). Hopefully that will finally bring us level.

While it's great to hear the game is so popular that even with amped production and multiple reprints, it's still selling out in preorders, we're now months into release and things haven't stabilized.  If it's sounding like it'll be September before things really start to level off, that doesn't bode well for the OP - sealed deck hybrid will become impossible without boosters, which will make it harder for FLGS to turn a profit from hosting organized play.  It's good to hear that the additional waves will impact Uncanny X-Men, though - there were some worries that given the need to get more base set product out, it would delay UXM, and maybe D&D DM.

Rainbow Draft

Speaking of tournament play, they outlined a new tournament play format!  It's called Rainbow Draft, and it works more or less like your standard booster draft: players open some packs, sort the cards into piles and pool the dice into the center, then take one pile per 'round' of drafting (dictated by number of packs - they recommend 12 packs in 2 rounds of 6),  look at and select one card from it, and pass the rest of the pile to the next player.  Once everyone has all their cards, everyone takes the dice matching their cards, and uses it to create a team of 8 - no core you get to bring along for this, outside of the basic actions.  WizKids is stating that they expect it to be very popular for tournaments; we can read between the lines and assume that means that it will be the favored OP format going forward.

The format has some interesting gameplay and logistics ramifications.  Gameplay-wise, not having a solid core you can rely on means that it will be very luck-of-the-draw; you're only getting 24 cards to make a team of eight with, and we're well aware of how lopsided the energy costs for this set are, so picking something useful and especially something cheap in those first few drafts will be very important.  Related to this - you can't use starter characters, at all.  If you're wondering what that sound was, it was the collective gasp at not being able to use Beast Mutate #666.  That's probably the most relevant loss, but there's several other good characters lost there, and it also means that dice for the eight characters that appear in the starters will be pretty rare; don't expect to have more than one Storm die available even if you're lucky enough to draft it.  It also removes almost half the two-cost cards; I suspect Black Widow will be a hot pick in this format.

Logistics-wise...there's a few things that just don't make sense.  First off, we're in a booster pack shortage - they even acknowledge this makes talking about tournament formats hard - but this format recommends using more boosters per person.  Secondly, the suggested groups and pack amounts don't divide so well with the current gravity feeds; they recommend six players per draft group, but that winds up being one and change booster feeds.  It'd have made more sense for them to recommend five per draft group - that way you'd need two gravity feeds per ten-man OP tournament.  They do say you can tweak the numbers, but I wouldn't recommend bumping the number of packs down to ten - I'd worry about winding up with a really bad selection of cards to build a deck with.

We'll keep a lookout for more news from WizKids on supply issues and OP developments as they come in.  Until then - happy rolling!

So thanks to Marvel.com for 'breaking' the story of the new Organized Play card for Month Two. We've already had a peek at the Thor from this month, but now we're getting our first hints of exactly how beastly some of these Organized Play cards can be. It's Spider-Man: The Amazing. He's our Month Two Organized Play. We already knew his name, and how much he cost, as well as his brand-new Avengers affiliation, but his abilities are new.

When Spider-Man attacks, pay three fist to make your opponent lost half his life, rounded down. Well that's rough. Unlike his uncommon, Wall-Crawler, you only have to attack, not to hit your opponent. I'm also surprised how comparatively little this costs at 'only' 6. I'd really expect something this beefy to demand a 7, because it's actually not too difficult to get 6 energy pretty early on with a lucky roll or two. Indeed with a Tsarina (or other Black Widow) it's more than possible to be able to pick him up turn three or four, and it makes it far easier to get those 3 fist energy as well.

Let's do some analysis under the cut.

In this episode of The Reserve Pool, Dave, Katie, and Evan discuss excellent Dice Masters resources that are out there. Then, we take a hard look at the Super Rare cards - are they really as good as people think they are? Also included - Mailbag, and FAQTalk! 



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Our friends over at DiceMasters DB have added a team builder, and we were only too happy to help them with their launch!

I can say that it is exceedingly easy to use - and when you're done, everything ends up being based upon the link for the page when you're done building. There's no need to login, register, or do any of that to build your team. Simply save your URL somewhere and that'll take you right back to your deck.

To use the builder, you simply scroll through all of the cards, narrowing your options with the filter function to the left of the page. Click the arrow next to the character to add the card. Now, an image of the card will appear on the right! Above it, you can choose how many dice you're bringing with that card.

Don't remember which version of the character's card that you want? Just click on the little picture to the left of the name and a big scan of the card will appear on the screen to jog your memory. That same icon is below the cards that you've already added if you need a refresher.

Decide that you don't want a card anymore? Just click the trash button. In all, it's really easy to make changes at every stage of the game here. To the surprise of probably no one, I elected to put the control team there. This was very fast and easy to use. Evan and Katie also gave it a shot and both had no issues. It's pretty easy to see the value here.

This is a wonderful tool for team building wherever and whenever you'd like. To that end, I tested it on my tablet and while I couldn't move quite as fast, I had no issues putting together a team on my iPad.

The team builder supports both the basic game and the tournament game. Happy building, and thanks for the folks at Dice Masters DB for giving us the opportunity to collaborate with them on the launch!

Welcome back, Dice Masters fans!  Now that we're mid-OP season, I imagine many of us have been seeing the same characters coming up frequently.  Maybe you're getting a little sick of seeing Mutate #666 in every single team.  Maybe you wish Human Torch didn't seem like an eternal flame on the opposing lineup, or that Wind Rider would lose her grip on the reins.  Maybe you feel guilty about using that stuff, and you wish you could branch out a little more, but in the interest of staying competitive, you have to use that streamlined, optimal team.  What's a dieficianado to do?

The answer - well, an answer, anyway - comes from Katie and I messing around to try and figure out a format that encourages use of more offbeat cards, without outright banning anything.  We also wanted something that evokes something of the luck-of-the-draw, do-with-what-you-get element of sealed deck hybrid without actually making you buy boosters every time, to help you practice that aspect of the game.  We settled on a draft-like format involving blind die pulls, with a few mulligan rules to keep things interesting.

We're calling it Daredevil Draft - DDD for short - for entirely un-PC reasons.

It's been some time since I posted the initial article on a control deck, and since that time we've even put out a podcast episode that featured a segment trying to debunk the deck the best we could.

Also since that time, we've seen a video go up from a fellow Dice Master who used the squad against a Gobby archetype. He and I chatted briefly about it and he felt that what let him break through was some poor luck on part of the other player, but I think that this deck can get there even if the other player has the normal amount of luck or better.

Today, we'll look at a little bit about using the deck and talk about some long term strategies and situational tactics to use here.

Are you planning on making a squad that features a lot of Avengers? Then you may have already met today's subject, Nick Fury. The head of S.H.I.E.L.D. narrowly edged Wolverine in the most recent poll, and so here he is in all his glory.

My dad was a Marvel fan back in the day (he was a charter member of the Merry Marvel Marching Society) when he was growing up and Nick Fury was one of his favorites - though back then he was Sgt. Fury and went around with his Howling Commandos. And of course, my grandma threw out some of the coolest stuff that Dad had back then... ah, well... but regardless, my first memories of Nick Fury came from his recollections of the exploits of the Howling Commandos. I share this as a way of saying - Happy Father's Day, Dad!

Before we go on, our next poll is once again ready to go. You can find that here. If you haven't signed up for Board Game Geek yet, do so here. And, of course, join our guild - then you'll be able to participate in the polls.  Each time, I'll remove the one who got the least votes and replace those who won.

So, as you may have noticed, I've been spending the last few days looking at pretty much every promotional picture under the sun to try to find more about the upcoming dice for Uncanny X-Men, what that means is that my eyes are a little out of focus, and maybe I'm starting to see things that aren't there.

Months ago, a very blurry image, seen to the right, was released to the internet and many voices started to speculate on who, exactly the dice represented. We've now pretty definitively identified them, seen the actual dice, as well, but one of them has given me some pause: second row, fourth column. I glanced at it earlier - 'oh, that's Emma Frost' I said to myself - but the more I looked at it the more I realized that the shape of the picture on that die was nothing at all like what we'd seen for Emma.

I'm not even going to pretend this is definitive, but I'm going to point out what I've seen and perhaps, just maybe, we can expect Sue Storm. I'm definitely biased; my annoyance at Sue not being a part of Avengers vs. X-Men set has been well documented, but see the pictures up close, under the cut, and you tell me.

I'm playing around with the navigation bar right now; at present, to de-clutter, "FAQ" and "Contact" are nested underneath of "About."

In this episode of The Reserve Pool, Dave, Katie, and Evan discuss their recent gaming. Then, we look at all of the things about Dice Masters that we would want to see change as the game evolves through its future iterations. Also included - Combo Killers, and FAQTalk!

Want to correspond? Email us! We may use what you send us on the show.


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Welcome back, dice fans!  Today I will mostly be taking a break from torrents of numbers - I think we had plenty of that last time.  Instead, I'm going to take a look at a class of cards that we refer to all the time here at The Reserve Pool; I've even highlighted them as vital to good squad creation.  That's right - it's time to take a look at the assorted characters (and one basic action) that let you get extra dice.

There are two categories of dice-drawing aids out so far - ones that have you straight up draw more dice, and ones that have you grab dice from somewhere, typically the used pile.  I'm going to label these as "draw" and "fetch" cards, respectively, because they're a little different in how we use them, and, accordingly, how useful they are.  Overall, I feel "draw" cards are a little better, as they usually aren't limited in what you can take (outside of number), and they help you go through your bag faster, letting you get back to stuff you've had to let go to the used pile sooner.  This isn't to say "fetch" cards are bad - their lack of randomness lets you plan what to do with them a little more clearly, which helps in its own ways.

Board Game Breakfast @ Dice Tower

Board Game Breakfast at Dice Tower is at it again and has released some more pictures for some new dice coming to us as part of the Uncanny X-Men release this Fall. The expected release date is September 3rd, and it's available for pre-order on many online retailers. Given the rush for Dice Masters: Avengers vs. X-Men, I definitely encourage anyone who is interested to PRE-ORDER NOW.

So, what do we have here? Let's go under the cut and make a few guesses.

Deadpool likes to break the fourth wall. If he could, he'd probably leap out of a card and change the name of one of the board areas to "The Dead Pool," perhaps replacing "KO." A lot of people like him and so it's no surprise that he quickly amassed the votes needed to tie with Angel.

All of that said, now that we've taken care of the ties, it's time for a new poll. Here are the usual details:

Our next poll is once again ready to go. You can find that here. If you haven't signed up for Board Game Geek yet, do so here. And, of course, join our guild - then you'll be able to participate in the polls.  Each time, I'll remove the one who got the least votes, in this case Dr. Strange, and of course I'll replace those who won - in this case, that means I'm getting rid of two. 

An almost entirely new poll! Excitement!

Unable to wait for the official solutions, but wanting to upgrade from the printed paper that I had in binder sleeves to play this game, I sought other options for Dice Masters playmats.

Luckily, the community is on the ball and the answers are out there.

I found a solution at the website CowCow.com. CowCow, it seems, is a site where users can create and order customized products like mouse pads and such - and it just so happens that their large sized mouse pad is a nice size for a dice mat for this game. Several users have designed them and I've ordered mine. Here are my impressions and some details on how you might acquire one.

On this week's poll, Angel and Deadpool tied - not surprising considering that these characters are fan favorites. For my money, I thought that Deadpool would win going away - he's pretty well-liked - but what do I know? I flipped a coin, and it came up Angel.

Not to worry, though - due to the tie, I'll do Deadpool next. That also means that we'll be delaying our poll until Deadpool's overview goes live.

My first memories of Angel are from the X-Men Animated Series, when Warren Worthington III was featured in the episode "Come The Apocalypse." For the life of me, I don't remember a single thing that happened, but I remember that this was the first time that I saw him. He's also a character that some want to see featured in the announced "X-Men: Apocalypse."

I can't promise much here, but I can promise that I'll treat him better than X-Men 3 did.

As we've mentioned several times on the podcast and in articles here and there, we at The Reserve Pool kind of get the feeling that there are too many expensive characters in the game - that there's too many large, smashy guys, and not enough options for a smaller, agile game.
Given the relative difficulty in fielding said big guys, and the importance of getting early damage in so that capitalizing on a later opportunity is more likely to result in a win, this is probably part of why we see the same few characters coming up over and over again when we talk good characters for decks - the best of our limited lower cost options, like Tsarina and Beast.

That got me to wondering - just how bad is it?  I decided to sit down with Dice Masters DB and Clear and Draw, plus a handy Google spreadsheet, and find out.

Guess what I learned?  Spoilers: dice are expensive.

While other members of The Reserve Pool team bring you articles based on 'logic' and 'strategy' and 'sense', I like running around and making posts around strange themes. Maybe this says something about me; maybe I don't care. So today I want to talk about all the cards that make your opponent take 2 damage.

The thing about characters that do two damage to your opponent is that it's Direct Damage, and Direct Damage can be the key to your win. Even if your opponent brings out loads of blockers, and is attacking you a bunch while you can block, at the end of the day, you're still blocking! Many of these guys don't give your opponent a choice, and some of them do give them the choice but it's still usually 'better' for them to take the damage.

Let's take a look at these cards, and you can consider whether the Direct Damage dealers are right for your deck.

In this episode of The Reserve Pool, Dave, Katie, and Evan discuss their recent Dice Masters sessions. Then, we discuss all of our thoughts surrounding the various tournament formats for Dice Masters, such as what we think of them and what our preferred format is. Also included - News, Mailbag, and FAQTalk!

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


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WizKids sent out an email this evening to those who have registered for the event system.

The gist of it is that they're migrating over to a new system for the entire thing. This is a welcome change, as the current system is quite archaic looking.

They're also adding the following enhancements for players:

• Follow your favorite stores to keep up to date with them
• Select an option to be notified when your favorite stores host a new event
• Select an option to receive reminders about upcoming events for which the player has registered
• Find players by email or last name and look at their player profile (based on their privacy settings)
• Adjust privacy settings for your profile information to control what you share with other users

Cloning is the term that I coined about three minutes ago for the dice that allow you to pull a copy of that die from the used pile. Think about Human Torch "Matchstick" or Hulk "Annihilator" for examples of these types of cards.

My biggest issue is that they pretend to be tutor cards - like the famous one from Magic the Gathering pictured here - and yet they don't provide anything at all like a tutor.

Hawkeye has won this round of the character review polling, and so that is who I'll be taking a look at today.

On a side note, there seems to be a curse surrounding "Doctor" characters - both Doc Ock in the first poll and Dr. Doom in this one were the lowest vote-getters, meaning that they'll drop off until a later, arbitrary time.

Our next poll is once again ready to go. You can find that here. If you haven't signed up for Board Game Geek yet, do so here. And, of course, join our guild - then you'll be able to participate in the polls.  Each time, I'll remove the one who got the least votes, so two will remain from before and two will be new.

I don't know much about Hawkeye beyond what we saw in The Avengers movie. I'll say that I appreciate these people who don't have any particular "super" ability, they're just people with an intensely trained skill. That's pretty awesome -  though in a battle of Hawkeye and Green Arrow, I'll take Arrow every time.

Their secrets, revealed!

If you've ever taken a probability class, you've probably had to solve a few problems involving a deck of cards - maybe calculating the probability of getting a straight, or something like that.  It doesn't take a lot of mental acrobatics from these sorts of questions to realize that keeping track of what cards have already been played will let you have a better idea what might come up, and let you play (and bet) accordingly.  Counting cards, as this is called, is a pretty vital skill for a lot of trick-taking games like bridge or spades, and can give you a big advantage in things like blackjack or poker...which is why most casinos play with multiple decks at once and frequent reshuffles to make it extremely hard to do without outside assistance, which is forbidden.

What does this have to do with Dice Masters, you ask?  Well, we can use the same principle to get a better idea what you - or your opponent - will be likely to draw on a turn.  This lets us plan our current moves accordingly, and makes it less likely that we'll be surprised by a really strong turn on the opponent's end of things, or let us take advantage of the fact that they'll have a relatively weak turn.  And the good news is - you don't need to remember which of fifty-two things have been played!

So we were pretty tough on Basic Actions in our latest podcast, because so many of them just seem so... situational. We had our few that had globals that we liked, and such, but really we were all a bit stymied by what WizKids was trying to get out of the Basic Action cards in general.

I did say I thought they would find their place especially in Hybrid Format tournaments, but they still have only a few times when I'd really want to grab one over a character.

But there are a few characters that really compliment these dice, any one of these dice, characters that make actions Soar, if you'll pardon the pun. We're going to check them out today.

We've decried the lack of options in the two-cost slot here and there. Worse, not all of those options were created equal.

Ghost Rider's "Johnny Blaze" varient is hailed by some - and, actually, it's card text - as a cheap and solid means of getting some lightning energy in your hand.

I can't agree.

With the highest fielding cost that we have in this game - and no stats or abilities to match - Johnny Blaze is more often than not one of the worse buys that you can make. Especially early on in the game. The cost just isn't worth the potential benefit in this case.

Let me explain.