“It’s like our sergeant told us before one trip into the jungle. Men!

Fifty of you are leaving on a mission. Twenty-five of you ain’t coming back.”

—Mr. Payne, Dazed and Confused

The X-Statix guys are all about the media. They are all about the talk show circuit and the gift shops and the action figures. For those of you who have no idea what the heck I’m talking about, I’ll give you a little rundown on the team.

The X-Statix was originally the X-Force. No, not the X-Force you know and love, but the X-Force after that X-Force. They decided that the best way to deal with all of the mutant hate going around was to sell their services as real-life action heroes, taking suicidal yet heroic missions and televising their experiences. What better way to gain popularity than to get yourself killed for a good cause, right? Enter endorsements, toy contracts, and popularity levels the likes of which no mutant team had ever even dreamed. Everyone had to have that U-Go-Girl lunchbox and that Henrietta Hunter shirt. Oh, and enter the X-Statix revolving door, as member after member was killed each mission, often on the first mission. Still, if you had a boy band in need of rescue, or a little boy kidnapped by an evil dictator, X-Statix was your team! They happily fell all over each other to die for the mission at hand.

Enter today’s funky preview card:

Every media personality needs a good spin doctor. A spin doctor puts a positive twist on anything. No matter how dismal your failure might be, the spin doctor sets it right by making it seem like you not only accomplished every goal you set out to accomplish, but also that you saved the world a dozen times over on your coffee break. A member of your team got killed needlessly? No, he didn’t! He died valiantly and heroically while saving the entire team from impending doom! Innocent bystanders were killed? Many more would have been slaughtered wholesale if the team hadn’t put a stop to the evil overlord’s evil plans! A city got leveled? Imagine what would have happened to the entire world if the X-Statix hadn’t saved the day!

This card has a way of turning the worst situation into something positive. The X-Statix constantly loses its members to . . . well . . . death. They would go out on a mission and lose half the team. Well, that . . . erm . . . characteristic of the X-Statix is reflected well in Marvel Knights, as the team often finds itself with just one character left on the field. When you play X-Statix, expect to lose a character or two every turn, sometimes voluntarily.

On the other hand, many X-Statix cards are configured to favor the one-character situation. Spin Doctoring is a perfect example. This plot twist does two things—one, it allows you to recover a character, and two, it allows you to use that character to your advantage.

Let’s look at a sample scenario. You have one character. Your opponent has two. You use your character to take out an opponent’s drop, and they both get stunned. Your opponent has a free swing, right? Wrong! Enter Spin Doctoring, and boom, take out the second character. You don’t cause breakthrough, but you gain some valuable board presence by (most likely) forcing your opponent to KO a character while you retain yours.

This works on defense, as well. If it’s your opponent’s initiative and he or she takes down your only character, won’t that player be surprised when you use Spin Doctoring to recover and ready your character during your attack step and take back your pound of flesh?

There is a cost, however. Running four copies of Spin Doctoring might be a bit much, since there is a discard attached to every usage. There are some ways to make that payment a little easier to stomach, though, and it’s a small price to pay for increased board presence (not to mention the look on your opponent’s face when you play the card).

Spin Doctoring is just one of several X-Statix cards that focus on single-character control. There are also a few cards in the X-Statix lineup that can help eliminate the characters you don’t need, dropping you to one character so that you can make use of those cards. Let’s just say that X-Statix characters have a nasty habit of killing themselves for glory. Often, you’ll glean a beneficial side effect from their vainglorious, media-hungry suicides. The X-Statix team focuses on their fight for media attention and the likelihood that when you hire the X-Statix, you’ll probably lose a few pieces before they come back. In the meantime, you might as well make the best of the situation, right?