The main path by which your characters start leaving the board is when more than one gets stunned and you are put in the unenviable position of choosing which one to keep. Continually losing your characters in this manner will cause you to fall behind in the game. Discarding a character in hand and flipping Children of the Atom from you resource row is a small price to pay for keeping a character that you have already taken the time to play from getting KO’d.

Let’s take two common scenarios in which you might want to play Children. First, in the case where you have only two stunned characters, Children allows you to keep both of them around for later turns, since you recover one with Children and one during your auto-recovery in the recovery phase. Second, if you have more than two stunned characters, Children effectively gives you the option of recovering a second character (in addition to the free recovery you get during the recovery phase). And if you happen to have two Children, suddenly your opponent’s best-laid plans are for naught.

Just how exciting are the implications of these situations alone? Well, I’d argue that the card would be excellent, and I haven’t even discussed two ways in which you can use it to frustrate your opponent to no end.

Imagine your opponent has out one large character and two mid-sized characters. Meanwhile, you have out one large character (let’s say Wolverine) and one small character (Dazzler) positioned in the support row behind him. Your opponent first attacks with the large character, stunning Wolverine. He or she expects to follow up that attack by attacking and stunning Dazzler (and probably also causing breakthrough endurance loss) and then sending his or her final character through uncontested, smashing yet further into your endurance total. But since you realize that Wolverine is too large to be stunned by either of your opponent’s mid-sized attackers, you play Children, leaving your opponent without any fruitful attack options now that Wolverine is once again protecting Dazzler. The net gain (over not having Children to use in that situation) is that Dazzler survives (she would have been lost during recovery in the first example), and you save yourself plenty of endurance. And this scenario assumed you only had one stunned character; if you had two stunned characters in a similar circumstance, imagine how devastating that would be.

The final scenario where Children shines will likely occur less frequently and involves your opponents playing a specific ability that targets a stunned character. As you may recall, Finishing Move KO’s a stunned character, and there are other similar effects in the set. If your opponent goes to finish off one of your characters with such a card, responding with Children should make your opponent a tad unhappy. Your character will not be stunned when the effect of Finishing Move resolves, and so your character will not be KO’d. Be warned, though-this interaction is a double-edged sword. If you play Children, and your opponent responds with Finishing Move, you will be the one with the frown. Fortunately, your opponent will often play Finishing Move when you have only one stunned character, and there isn’t much reason for you to be playing Children then, other than for stifling a series of attacks as outlined above. As a result, this timing interaction should generally work out in your favor.

Tune in tomorrow for one way to make the most of your resources.