I've tried to have a discussion about the OP reward cards with each one that has come out - either on the podcast or here - and the next one up is Wolverine: "Walking his Own Path."

Well, ok, we missed Thor, but you might know that we're not huge fans of Thor here. Well, not his cards. The movies were fun.

Unlike Spider Man, I don't know that I have a deck for this one. It doesn't seem like a card that you build around, but rather something more like a safety valve.

Walking His Own Path (which fittingly lacks the X-Men affiliation) has a pretty interesting ability and with the cost of the card combined with the necessity for your life total to be under 10 to get any benefit at all from the card, it's clear that this is intended as a late game fix.

...because today's character study is all about Doctor Doom.  Nemesis of Reed Richards aka Mr. Fantastic, godfather of his daughter, Valeria (it's a long story), Victor von Doom is one of the iconic Marvel villains and I'm not surprised that he made the cut into AvX (unlike Sue Storm).  Oddly enough for someone frequently defined by an antagonistic relationship, in the more recent Fantastic Four comics, it seems like he's helping the F4 as often as he's facing them.

Anyway, on to the rundown!

Today we discuss the supply issues and wonder - was the starter set a mistake? How else could WizKids have gotten folks into the game? We also have a brief conversation about nonsense and the difficulties that siblings present when gaming. Included: Mailbag.



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In baseball, you rarely see a team aggressively steal bases, pinch hit for the pitcher, or use a play like the suicide squeeze early on in the game. These strategies are called "run manufacturing" because they're used specifically for the purpose of getting a person in position for a key score.

You don't see this early in the game because there is plenty of opportunity to score the regular way. Outs are less valuable at that time because there are plenty of them.

Later in the game, if it's still close, outs are more valuable because you now have fewer opportunities to get that run that you need, and so these plays start to happen. The need for a run becomes more important than the risk of an out because the team is running out of time to even the score.

There are many situations in Dice Masters that relate to this. Don't believe me? Let me show you.

Astute reader Andrew sparked a conversation with an email that he sent, and the three of us couldn't come to a consensus. This issue is not explicitly stated in the rule book or the FAQ so far as we can tell, so let us know in the comments what you think the correct solution is here. Let's have some fun.

Still here on a Thursday, just a few hours late. GenCon has come and gone and we want to see what it all means. What can we expect from Uncanny and what does it mean for the future of Avengers vs. X-Men? Also included: Mailbag!



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Hey guys, you can expect to see the podcast up sometime Thursday night. We're really excited about this one - it was a great conversation - but due to some work stuff, I got home a bit late tonight and will need some extra time to finish editing it.

Thanks for understanding!

Spider Man "The Amazing" came out and, from the looks of it, had two main reactions. It was either Wow, that ability looks powerful" or "Wow, that ability looks expensive." I've fallen on the latter side, but I'm an optimist!

So, I've been trying to find the core of a team that could get enough fists to power him and get us to a point where we could win. I don't know if I'm there yet, but I'm making some progress.

From Roll for Crit

So it's GenCon, and that means new cards, more cards, new news, and so forth. Sorry I didn't post this earlier, but I was waiting to see if we could collect a little more news, and I'm actually pretty happy that I waited! So let's get down to business and talk about what we know and what we've learned since SDCC.

The big news, if we can call it that, is that the contents of the Starter Kit for Uncanny X-Men has been definitively confirmed. During one of my last articles: Introducing your Starters and Super Rares, I guessed that Magneto was going to be the 8th character in the Starter Kit and I was.... Correct!

Roll for Crit got to get their hands on the Starter Kit (visit their site for even more images) and as you can see: Juggernaut, Quicksilver, Iceman, Cyclops, Wolverine, Kitty Pryde, Magneto, (and a not-shown Angel) are the starter cards. Roll for Crit, sadly, didn't take advantage of the opportunity to photograph everything, because they thought it would be more available to look at, but we'll have to get by one what they did. We'll also be including some pictures from Crit to Hit.

We're coming at you with a mini-sode just before the storm of GenCon. Included here is a brief commentary of what the best we could hope for out of GenCon would be, another entry in the Mailbag, and finally, a FAQTalk.



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Evan here, picking up the character studies while we amble through the remainder of AvX on the way to UXM's release.  We don't have too many left to go, if I'm remembering right, so we shouldn't have too much of a problem finishing them out before the probable release of UXM at the end of October.  But who do we go with?

From the polls, apparently no one likes Doctor Strange.  You know what?  Tough.  I like Doctor Strange.  I was introduced to him reading Ghost Rider (the second series, where Danny Ketch was GR), where he was an occasional guest, and while he wasn't my favorite character, he seemed like a pretty interesting character.

What I'm trying to say is, today we review Doctor Strange.

I wish that we were THERE, but we're not, so we'll just be in a holding pattern as we wait for news. I'm hoping for something of significance - perhaps something about a FAQ or a lovely solution to the supply issue - so for right now we're laying low as we wait for some kind of news from the con later this week.

Otherwise, the meta is the meta right now and there isn't a lot to say about it. We're anticipating taking it a little slower until we have more to dig into with Uncanny.

In this week's episode of The Reserve Pool, Dave, Katie, and Evan talk about recent games that they've played. Next, FAQTalk! Finally, we have our final faction discussion - the X-Men.



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With the Month One prize winners announced* and their prizes on their way out to them, it's time to move on...to the Month Two contest!  Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get quite the supply I was able to last time, so for this contest, and likely the for the remainder of the OP, we're probably only going to be able to offer the basic action, which in this case is Rally!  Gobby-havers, rejoice, because there's four copies of it up for grabs for our lucky winners.

This is the followup to the recent post about deck building and the team with Beast "Genetic Expert." If you missed that, you can find the article here. I'll also give you a link to the makeup of the team itself.

I finally got to use this and in short - it was awesome. I'll need far fewer changes than I thought, and I'm still in the midst of deciding what those are. That said, there were lessons learned.

Woah! Got a little behind there, didn't we? Lots of news in other areas - as well as a busy day-to-day schedule - put us off track on these character reviews. Let's try this again, shall we? No poll right now - it's time for me to get come catching up. Today, we get things (re)started with Cyclops.

I had some junior novelization of some X-Men story growing up - I couldn't tell you what it was about - but in those pages, Cyclops was the dry, by-the-book guy. Not in a lame way (though Wolverine might say otherwise); there really was a sense of weight, of gravitas, with him.

So we could focus on that, or we could do something with his powers. WizKids went with the powers, but that's probably for the best.

Still can't find organized play in your area? Neither can I. While it's wonderful that we can now filter for Dice Masters events on the WizKids Event system - something they recently added - all it's done for me is confirm that there's simply nothing at all within 100 miles.

But don't let that get you down! If you don't know, there's a lovely subreddit over on Reddit dedicated to Dice Masters - and they're putting together a digital organized play.

Greetings, readers!  Now that the tide of new info on UXM from SDCC has diminished, I figure it's a good time to continue my musings on the basic action cards.  I've had some thoughts rattling around about Invulnerability and Take Cover for a while; despite what I said when comparing their globals, I think they're actually pretty similar in effect.

And what happens when you have two similar cards vying for one spot?  That's right - a knock-down, drag-out fight for supremacy!