Angelo M. D Argenio
7/18/2008
One of the oldest comic ideas of all time is to take a band of superheroes and make a more hip teenage version of them. The Young Avengers, The Teen Titans, Appropriate Third Teen Superhero Group, all of them followed in the footsteps of their older counterparts. Well, today we take a look at one of those young up and comers in this week's
Marvel Heroclix:
Secret Invasion preview, proof that it touches heroes of all ages. Our unit of the week is Hawkeye, i.e. Kate Bishop, one of the few Marvel Universe heroes to fight without any actual superpowers. Mechanically, this means that Hawkeye has fewer powers than other
Heroclix miniatures, but what powers she does have still add quite a bit to her repertoire, and considering her point cost of 57, she is still effective in several different army builds. Let's take a closer look.
Hawkeye manages to bring 2 speed powers, 1 attack power, 2 defense powers, and one damage power to the table and they all tend to work off each other. Her full power list ends up including Running Shot, Flurry, Incapacitate, Combat Reflexes, Willpower, and an interesting version of Perplex. We covered a lot of these in our last preview so let's go over those that we did cover really quickly before we get to the new ones.
Flurry is your standard double attack action that Iron fist also had. Hawkeye, obviously being an archer, can use this ability at range, which is of course useful. Combat Reflexes increases her defense against Melee attacks and nullifies knockback damage, and finally Willpower also reduces pushing damage to 0. All of these are your standard jack of all trade abilities that increase defense and allow you to act more than once. Nothing bad there.
The powers we didn't go over were Running Shot, Incapacitate, and her custom version of Perplex. Running Shot reads “Give this character a power action; halve its speed value for the action. Move this character up to its replacement speed value and give it one ranged combat action as a free action. This character must declare a target to which it can draw a clear line of fire from the square where it intends to end its move in order to use this power.” As you can see it is a basic move and attack action, which works very well with her other powers, which seems to make sense with the whole “combat archer” feel Hawkeye has in the first place.
Her Battlestaves (incapacitate) read “Give this character a close combat action or ranged combat action; its damage value becomes 0 until the action has been resolved. If this character successfully hits a target that has zero or one action token, give the target an action token.” Essentially this lets her trade damage for the ability to knock someone out of the battle for one turn. A character with an action token on it is treated as if it has already taken its action for the turn. That means that a successful battlestaff hit doesn't damage the enemy, but instead removes its ability to act for the round. This is an especially good ability to use against people who load up their armies with high point cost units. The bigger they are the harder they fall so to speak. With Hawkeye and other incapacitating units, you can simply lock the more powerful units your opponent controls down while your other units nickel and dime them to death.
Finally we have Perplex or “Focused Training” as Hawkeye's ability is called. Normally, Perplex is used to simulate confusion by increasing or decreasing a stat by one. However, Hawkeye's version of Perplex only lets her use it on herself. So in essence she can increase (or decrease but why would you want to do that) any of her stat's including range by one. Nothing too spectacular but it may be just the boost you need to win a battle.
Hawkeye is best used for what she was used for in the comics, Archery. All of her abilities work together to create a superb ranged attacker. She takes less damage from melee ambushes, she can increase her stats (remember, she can increase range too and that is important), and she can even attack twice. With running shot she can move and attack at the same time allowing her to set herself up in exactly the right position. Ducking in and out of cover and peppering the enemy with arrows is probably your best strategy, however when you consider her teammates, it might simply be better to send in a towering lummox of a meat tank in front of her to keep the enemy in place. Then she can move slightly to the left or right to get Line of Sight and finish them off with arrows.
For more Marvel
Secret Invasion information, keep it right here at TCGplayer.com
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