Hello, denizens of the internet! It has been quite some time since I have written an article – its has been a long summer – but now as the colder times draw in I find I have a little more time to write, so I will be publishing more regular articles again.
Like last time we met, I am writing a series of articles that focus on one of the team boxes that Corvus Belli produces, and how it can be played as a team.
Today I will be looking at the Smoke and Mirrors boxed set, containing the following four Aristos:
Kozmo
Murtair
Padre-Inquisitor Mendoza
Taowu
Ok, so let’s look at the characters, and after that I will look at which cards I would pick for this team.
Kozmo
Kozmo is a highly versatile tank. She is able to take a fair bit of damage, deploy smoke to protect your team from strong ranged attacks, move pretty quickly in a turn when she needs to, and deal damage. That was quite a full list that probably warranted more than one sentence; so let’s break it down.
Tanking wise, Kozmo has above average defence and decent health. Also with the help from smoke from Nebula or her switch which is easy to hit she can prevent ranged attacks from hurting anyone. Also, cards like Asteroid Belt allow her to soak attacks that target her team from anywhere on on the board. She has a good brawn so she is relatively ‘sticky’ and hard to disengage from.
Damage-wise her attack only costs 2 action points so she can potentially attack twice. The damage output isn’t that high until she deploys smoke, which she can do first easily first. If she is adjacent to one (or more targets) she can set people adjacent to her on fire. Due to all of this she is able to get quite a number of surprising take outs given her normal tanking role.
She is normally very slow, with a speed of 3, but with Meteoric Charge she can be much faster and she gets a super high agility as well.
That ended up being quite a long chat, didn’t it? Her versatility makes her an often-picked Aristo. In this team she is the anchor, able to stand in zones early in the game and take damage, dish it out where needed and make sure your team is able to do it’s job.
Murtair
Ah…Murtair. It must be my snowflake genes, but I quite like him, even if most of the internet doesn’t.
He has pretty poor defensive stats, and terrible initiative. That said he has good health, so is unlikley to be taken out in one shot unless he is unlucky or poorly positioned.
In this team (and, in my opinion any team he is in) he is a scorer. Repeat after me: he is a scorer. If he attacks someone that is nice and all…but he is fast and able to jump over blocked spaces. If he is engaged and unable to move; great – bite their head off. His damage is potentially very high indeed.
The threat alone of bite should put people off from being base to base with him, which suits him fine, making him more able to super jump use his movement to get into a zone. And, if next turn he is in a scoring zone next to an opponent who also was there – well….it probably lets you know which model they will activate first, as a bite is coming. This can be pretty handy knowledge to have, and is a form of passive control which can be overlooked.
So, in this team Murtair will want to run towards zones and try and score, and put pressure on those who want to be near zones themselves.
Padre-Inquisitor Mendoza
Mendoza provides support to the team. His healing abilities are the strongest in the game, and his ranged attack from Flamma Veritatis is relatively low on damage, but the switch all but guarantees targets will have several flaming tokens on them. He is better off targeting Aristos who have not activated yet, so they will take the fire damage as soon as possible.
This team has two high-wound targets with Murtair and Kozmo, so his switch and passive ability will be useful – especially as Murtair’s wounds are basically a resource he can spend with cards to get more mobility or damage.
Taowu
Taowu is the control piece of the team. He can very easily make sure that your opponent has very few cards he can use, and Paralyzing Terror can lock down strong melee or scorer models.
If he is taken out, he will punish your opponent by making them lose even more cards, and you lose very little as a result – in many ways it can be an advantage as it can allow you to reposition and immobilize another target.
In this team he is very good at locking down models that could potentially harass Murtair and Mendoza, who both have very poor agility and so risk being prevented from moving and scoring.
Cards
I have picked cards that I think work well for this team, given the roles in the team I want them to have.
For Kozmo I picked Asteroid Belt to help with her tanking. Gravitational slingshot is such a versatile card it is very hard to ignore, allowing my team to reposition or prevent my opponent from scoring can win a game. As this team has a lot of healing, I decided to go for Unbridled Fury and Beserker charge. Ironically both these cards can allow Murtair to run away from a fight and get into a scoring zone.
Hic Et Nunc can give a huge reposition to a benched model, and as this team can be pretty mobile it can allow a huge swing in scoring from out of nowhere. Fiat Voluntas is healing that can be done in anyone’s turn, which can be super useful before making an attack or using one of Murtair’s cards.
Taking a second No! card should be fairly self-explanatory, and Confusion can prevent an Aristo from activating at all in a turn, which can be crippling to any team.
And there we go! Let me know what you think either here, on facebook or on Twitter @Ihexadome.
Thanks!
Bye!
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