Team Planning – Hammerhead

Today I am going to return to my initial Blog idea, and base a team around a model who I particularly like and base a team around them. The team may be the best team to ever grace the Hexadome, or it may be horribly sub-optimal. Let’s be honest though…does it matter? The world is a dark, dark place. It is full of horrors and shadows and bears. Just read this, have a nice warm glow of reading an article about a game you love. Afterwards you can jauntily skip back into the abyss and get on with your lives.

Ahem. Right, enough of that. It’s time to run through walls!

I was wrong when I first saw Hammehead. At first I discounted him as his artwork made him look like a Decepticon. I thought he was a damage piece. I was dead wrong.

He is a mobile scoring piece who can do some damage when he is set up to do so, but with his strange attack dice of a green and two blue – which is normally the sort of dice you would roll when defending – he is not going to roll a large amount of hits. His displacement and movement affects are very strong, so he is able to potentially move 3 hexes, displace a target 4 hexes away, and place himself 2 hexes away from that.

What does all that mean? It means in a turn he can potentially be 10 hexes away from where he started, ignoring a lot of agility rolls along the way, and maybe having pushed out an opponent from a scoring zone.

As this is a ranged attack it has all the problems that they have – namely a vulnerability to dazzle, and of course line of sight issues. It also does very little damage unless he is poisoned. While Overdose helps with that, it does slow him down a little and it can fail if he rolls poorly. And while Meta-chemical frenzy can help with his damage dealing and agility it relies on action points being spent to poison himself.

So, let’s see what we can do about that.

It’s Eclypse again! In this team her ability to mark with a switch is the main attraction. A marked target can be seen without needing line of sight – so Hammerhead is free to charge through walls at whoever he likes. This boost to his threat and mobility might mean he doesn’t need to get the angle to see a target and so doesn’t need to move first, so he can poison himself, or simply help him get to places he never normally would be able to.

Moon Cycle will help if Hammerhead is dazzled or otherwise controlled, and Black Lightning is a decent ranged attack. Some Dazzle doesn’t hurt either. Moon cycle can also help pick off targets who are poisoned, but have not activated yet that turn.

Now, did someone say poison? No? Well tough that’s what i’m going to do next.

Dart is a strong ranged damage dealer. In this team she is the main person that will take opponents out. She also loves anyone who is marked, as she is able to stay very far from any targets to keep herself safe, as she is very vulnerable to being taken out in a single hit if caught by surprise.

Dendo-nanoids will help with state removal, as well as letting Dart do immediate damage to anyone poisoned by herself or Hammerhead.

The fourth slot is tricky.

When Hammerhead commits to a zone, the chances are he will not be able to get to the next zone as fast as he would like. Gaia helps a lot with this, being able to use Siren to bring Hammerhead back from a previous scoring zone to a deployment zone near the new scoring zone., so he can go off charging again. This will be useful in scenarios like Assault and Scorched Earth.

To be honest, she will be less useful in scenarios where the deployment zone is fixed (but I can see both her and Hammerhead being good in ziggurat scenarios) – but I don’t think Hammerhead is great in those either.

Now for some cards!

Predatory Instinct can allow Hammerhead to, in his turn, poison himself as long as Dart is nearby. Combined with Forbidden Substances he is able to give himself 4 poison tokens without rolling any dice. Note that due to the timing on this someone else will have to poison him the activation before.

When he charges into a zone, he can then use contagion to poison any people who are also in the zone with him. This may mean he has some activation issues, as he might want to move into a zone near the end of a round and so poison won’t take immediate effect, but it can help with removing models the round after.

Veil of Darkness combined with Surprise Factor will make Hammerhead, Dart, or anyone Eclypse is near, very speedy for a scoring threat out of nowhere. Bailey’s Bead helps with marking targets Eclypse can’t get to.

Epirogenesis should be self-explanatory – it means this team can be re-committed to a new fight elsewhere on the board. Alternatively it can be used to fling threats far away from the action. Obliteration will mean that Hammerhead can target an obstacle, so if there is no target for him nearby he can bounce off an obstacle instead.

This team has some weaknesses of course. It is fairly low on initiative, which could mean Hammerhead is forced to commit too early. It also has no healing, so if Hammerhead ends up being damaged to much he might not want to risk poison. Likewise he can be vulnerable to a poor attack roll meaning he can’t get rid off all of the tokens he has accumulated.

Why didn’t you include Bachmann in this list?

I might as well talk about it, as it is bound to be a comment somewhere. Yes, Bachmann has obvious synergy with Hammerhead. However, I find that hammerhead often wants to charge off somewhere Bachmann often can be left behind, kicking his heels. Whilst he can also do his own thing (and he does it well) I wanted the synergy of marked to let Hammerhead charge anywhere he wanted to.

Honorable mentions and other characters that can work include Major Lunah, as Holographic Sight works wonders with Hammerhead. Also Maximus as Scram! will let Hammerhead completely clear out a zone whenever he feels like it.

That’s all for now. Follow me on Twitter @Ihexadome, or on our Discord at https://discord.gg/A7yZGEQ