The "New" Fantastic Four vs. The Intelligencia

With Wednesday's release of the new Marvel Heroclix Hulk-themed set, we clix addicts got some wild new gamma-irradiated characters to add to our battles, the kind that remind us all of the good ol' days when exposure to radiation meant awesome upgrades to our physique rather than horrific and un-fun cellular degradation. (Gee, thanks reality.)

Within the set is a subset of four characters that had never before been made together as a deliberately-designed team in a single product release...a team that most would consider the severest of milkings of the sacred cow of creativity...a team that one can only take seriously at the age of eight or after eight shots of tequila...

Do you remember the "New" Fantastic Four?

It was the early 90's, when the Marvel editorial staff saw a good thing and then jammed that good thing into its readers' eyeballs over and over and over and over again. For three issues, a new foursome had to become fantastic in order to investigate the supposed deaths of three of the original Fantastic Four. The new team comprised some of Marvel's top-selling characters at the time - Hulk (in his Joe Fixit persona), Spider-Man, Wolverine, and Ghost Rider - and now, we clixers have them as they were back then in an all-new, finely-tuned 400-point force!

Unable to resist the kitsch-factor of such a team, I knew these four had to be in the first solo game I played with the new set using my Solo Wargaming Rules for Heroclix. Opposing them would be the much more recently published Hulk-based conspirators called "The Intelligencia."

The members of the Intelligencia I selected were the Leader, Doc Samson after a multiple-personality meltdown, some Hulk Robot the Leader plucked from space, and General "Thunderbolt" Ross. Ross allowed himself to be turned into the Red Hulk by the Leader, so in clix terms that means when I get to Ross's special power on his dial, I can switch him out and put the Red Hulk piece in his place!

Anyway, I was all prepared to make jokes about how sucky the New Fantastic Four was in the game just like in the comics, but Wizkids did too excellent a job of creating team synergy among the four pieces. Though a long-range shooter would have been the icing on this 4-man cake of destruction, each team member is so mobile that I didn't see the low-end range values of Spider-Man and Ghost Rider to be a problem. The New FF is a bulldozer of a force, fearlessly barreling through the opposition. I was shocked!

Right from the beginning, the New FF dominated. The Leader TK'd the cosmic Hulk Robot to a great location for putting the hurt on Wolverine and Hulk, but the robot never hit, and it didn't take long for the New FF to render it as useless as a Zune on green legs.

The robot is KO'd in two turns. Yeah.

Doc Samson - looking more like a shirtless Latin ballroom dancer than a villain - rushed after Spider-man, but the Wallcrawler f'd him up with a single punch that sent him tumbling backwards!

Dancing the samba...Doc Samson and his partner, Peter Parker.

Spidey moved on to confront General Ross. It was an anticlimactic fight as Ross got knocked out before getting the chance to turn into the Red Hulk. (Drat.) Nearby, Ghost Rider easily finished off Samson.

Ross's tactic of pointing and saying "Bang, bang," proved ineffective.

So, in an impressively short time, the hardly scratched New FF bore down on the evil mastermind of the Intelligencia. On his own, the Leader fell quickly.

"This is going to get worse before it gets better..."

I wish I had more to say about innovative strategies or whatever, but, clearly, somebody at Wizkids disagrees with me and thinks the New Fantastic Four was and is an awesome team that should be respected and feared.

Either that, or the Wizkids staff drinks a lot of tequila.