Where does Willoughby keep his armies?

Up his sleevies!

It’s an old joke, but today I have for you a couple of very special army characters from the new Green Lantern set—one for each sleeve.

The strengths of army characters are many. Assuming that they are of reasonable size, one can go for consistency when constructing a deck by assuring that there are enough copies of a given drop without ever having to settle for second best. Additionally, there is the benefit of greater potential to power up your characters. While slightly less flashy than, say, the navy, or a deck with lots of individual characters, decks focusing on the army mechanic tend to be pretty consistent.

One element of army cards that is less often utilized to any great extent is their “swarmy” capacity. In theory, because there is no concern with the uniqueness rule, one could happily go about one’s business recruiting lots of copies of the same character for the entire game. The reason why you don’t often see it happen is because of that age old tradeoff of resources that makes the Vs. System so clever.

If you decide to play a deck full of copies of, for example, Random Punks, then you’ll be able to beautifully swarm out each turn . . . right up until turn 4, when all of a sudden you won’t have enough cards in hand to support playing so many characters. Sooner or later, you won’t have enough cards in hand to swarm effectively. The way the game is designed, you draw two cards for your turn and it’s normally optimal to play one card as a resource and to recruit one character. This way, you never diminish your hand size just to recruit your characters. Instead, you do it to play fun effects like Have a Blast! or Children of the Atom. Additionally, with the way the curve works, it doesn’t take long for your three copies of Random Punks to get outclassed by a single character with a recruit cost of 3.

What if you chose to play with lots of copies of Sentinel Mark V? If he were a man, he’d be a very good man. As it is, he (it?) is a robot, and one that does double duty as both a 4- and a 5-cost character. Seems pretty amazing, right? Well, yes he does, but unfortunately, if you play with lots of copies of him, you’ll have these nasty dead turns where you cannot spend all your resource points (bad) while your opponent is recruiting characters on the curve that are just bigger.

Is there a solution, I hear you cry? Well, unbeknownst to you*, there is, and it’s coming to a store near you under the guise of the army Manhunter.

Feast your eyes.

Not the prettiest of characters, are they? They get the job done, though. Both Manhunter Guardsman and Manhunter Soldier have reasonable enough stats. The Guardsman has a DEF value high enough to make him very well suited to his task of standing in front of somebody and making sure that he or she lives. He even sneakily doesn’t have range, as if those clever people at UDE R&D are suggesting to you that that is what he might best be suited for**. The Soldier seems more ideally equipped for getting involved in the odd fight, as his ATK is 5, which tends to be enough to be of concern to most 3-cost characters in the game. The guardsman stands out front like a lineman ready to stop any attempts at a sack, while the soldier is the quarterback, who with flight and range can pick exactly where he wants the action on the field to be—quite the little team right there.

Of course, their real interest lies in their ability. Conveniently, for those of you that aren’t big on reading a lot***, each of the two have the same pretty saucy ability.

Look at the faces on the cards. They don’t look very funny or happy, do they? They don’t look like clowns. It does not matter. These guys are still ridiculous. They each have the nifty little trick of letting you pay 2 resource points to put an Army Manhunter character with a cost of 3 or less into play. This means, assuming you have the characters in hand to do it, that you can play two of these mean machines on turn 4. While each individually is not the size of a 4-drop, I would quite happily take 6 resource points worth of characters two turns early when I get the opportunity.

The Manhunters were not originally created on Oa to be evil, but instead to be the guardians of the galaxy. Unfortunately, these mechanical men got a bit too big for their metal boots, and with their somewhat simplistic views on right and wrong, they created all sorts of havoc. The Guardians at Oa had to create the Green Lantern Corps as a replacement set of peacekeepers for the universe. Suffice it to say, these two groups have a history. The two cards you see today represent the relentless force that a nigh infinite amount of robots can exert on an unwary opponent.

I strongly suggest that you hunt down these particular Manhunters in Booster Draft. With each being common, there is every potential to engineer crazygonuts turn 4’s and beyond. All the willpower in the world will have trouble against a swarm of this quality.

Have fun at the Sneak Preview!

Tim “Master of the Hunt” Willoughby

timwilloughby (at) hotmail (dot) com

*Unless you very cheekily scrolled right through the little bit of tension-building theory that I so painstakingly wrote.

**At this point, I have put my tinfoil hat back on. While I’m pretty sure that Dave Humpherys’s mind control beams get scrambled up as they cross over the Atlantic Ocean, he did travel across to Amsterdam, and I may now be more susceptible to his machinations than before.

*** You picked exactly the right article to look in on. Well done there.

Tomorrow's Preview: