GCF - Grishnakh Custom Superhero Cards

[Grishnakh]

The Complete Fantastic 4!


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Mister Fantastic

Notes:
Mister Fantastic is a Heroclix figure.

The leader of the Fantastic 4. This guy is a blast if you use
my custom buildings. He can stand on the ground, stretch up,
and punch figures standing on any of my tallest buildings. Plus,
being the genius he is, he can use Super Science to negate
the powers of most any superhero or super villain.
That means you Doctor Doom!




http://www.heroscapers.com/community...=1&c=newimages



http://www.heroscapers.com/community...=1&c=newimages

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Invisible Woman

Notes:
Invisible Woman is a Heroclix figure.

Position her in the middle of the Fantastic 4 and let her do her
job sending force fields of protection to all the members of the
Fantastic 4, including herself!

Or, take those psionic projections and slam them into you enemies!

Plus enemies have to be adjacent to her to be able to attack her.
If you screen her and keep her protected she's a powerful force
on the battlefield!

Another one of our favorite figures to play!




http://www.heroscapers.com/community...=1&c=newimages



http://www.heroscapers.com/community...=1&c=newimages
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The Thing

Notes:
The Thing is a Heroclix figure.

When designing the Thing we wanted him to be as tough as the Hulk.
He really had to stand toe to toe with the Hulk and hold his own.
After all the Hulk is one of Ben's toughest recurring opponents.
However, we did not want to make him just like the Hulk.
The Hulk is all about growing power through anger and rage.
The Thing is about durability. But in increasing his defense and
or life points we were just arriving at a over powered character,
too similar to the Hulk. We needed to find the character
of "Ben" in there.

"This is what the Thing has always feared more than anything
else, that he would lose control and really clobber somebody."
(- Stan Lee, in "Marvel Comics: The Untold Story")

After reading that quote it became simple, The Hulk never pulls
his punches, but the Thing nearly always does.

So, the Hulk's defining psychological characteristic is anger.
The angrier he gets, the stronger he gets. The Thing's defining
psychological characteristics are compassion and stubbornness.
These traits combined is the Thing's equivalence to the Hulk's rage.

Therefore, at first our Ben holds back. But as time goes by and
the situation gets worse, well, then comes clobbering time and
the kid gloves come off. And as hard as you knock him down
he can just keep getting up. Now that's the character!

The Thing is a two sided, flip card. We've included his bio
which can be placed in the sleeve between the front and the
back of the card and pulled out to read.



http://www.heroscapers.com/community...=1&c=newimages



http://www.heroscapers.com/community...=1&c=newimages



http://www.heroscapers.com/community...=1&c=newimages

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The Human Torch

Notes:
The Human Torch is a Heroclix figure.

Happy October 1st! Since the days are getting shorter and the
weather is getting colder (at least in the Northern Hemisphere)
I thought I'd warm things up a bit and release this guy!
(Besides, Lockjaw? You knew the FF4 couldn't be too far behind!)

I'm giving you two versions. The only difference is that the paper on
the second card is not burned at the top. I thought some of you might
not like that look so I'm giving you a non-burned option.

Johnny can do just about everything you'd expect the Torch
to be able to do. Stealth Flying, throwing fire, really fast, etc.
Water really hurts him however. Good luck battling Prince Namor!




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The Fantastic 4!


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[johnny139]

I really love the way you did Reed. Wrap and Elastic are pretty obvious choices, but Stretch Special Attack is just brilliant in its simplicity. I mean, yeah, of course - he's not firing a gun, so it's nothing like a normal attack. He can get anyone, wherever they are, even if he's engaged. I can perfectly picture him stretching away from one guy and punching out his buddy on the roof of a building. And the Super Science power is icing on the cake. Definitely did justice to the character!

[Grishnakh]

Originally Posted by johnny139

I really love the way you did Reed. Wrap and Elastic are pretty obvious choices, but Stretch Special Attack is just brilliant in its simplicity. I mean, yeah, of course - he's not firing a gun, so it's nothing like a normal attack. He can get anyone, wherever they are, even if he's engaged. I can perfectly picture him stretching away from one guy and punching out his buddy on the roof of a building. And the Super Science power is icing on the cake. Definitely did justice to the character!

Thanks man! What a great review! We had a lot of fun playing this team during our play tests. In one of our last battles the FF4 went up against Doctor Doom, 3 squads of Doombots, and the Hulk. The FF4 barely squeaked out the win. But it was really cool to see Doctor Doom use his version of Super Science to negate Sue's Force Field SA and then smash into Mr. Fantastic and the others with his Electrical Armor SA. We even had an exploding Doombot almost take out Sue at one point.

We gave a lot of thought about adding in some sort of team bonding with these four but in the end they just worked so well together that we deemed it unnecessary. You have to work on order marker management with them and play to their strengths, just like the characters. As usual lots of options with each one of these guys on any given round. There's a lot to take in but once you understand them they are very easy to play.

Again, thanks for the kind words!

[Porkins]

Wow! The art on these cards is amazing! I love the way the images 'pop' out of the image box. Batgirl and Iron Man are probably my favorites.

Nice work as usual Grish! I've been using C3G superhero cards almost exclusively for a long time because of the consistency of the cards and how well they work together and are generally well balanced. But they still haven't given me a Batmobile card, so I'll be printing yours out along with some others to try out.

P.S. - I'm almost done with my store flat Baxter Building, so I'll definitely have some pictures up when that is completed.

[Sherman Davies]

Some of those Fantastic Four cards look kind of familiar...

[Grishnakh]

Originally Posted by Sherman Davies

Some of those Fantastic Four cards look kind of familiar...

In what way Sherman?

Edit: Hmm. These are the cards we've gamed with before. In fact you've played them. There maybe some similarity to cards you've done if that's what you are referring to. There's bound to be some overlap since a lot of us (you, me, C3G, others) are doing the same characters with the same powers. If that's what you meant then my apologies. There certainly wasn't any intent. I'll dig up your cards and take a look. Besides, I've found that some of our design philosophies completely coincide with yours.

[Grishnakh]

Sherman. Your post kinda concerned us. And we took it very seriously. So we just downloaded your cards and compared our cards to yours.

Anyway, as we looked them over we wrote out our thoughts:

All of the stats on all four cards are completely different than yours. Except for Size. Medium 5 is pretty standard. The point costs are very different as well.

Our Human Torch is completely different than yours. Both can fly. And flame. But the mechanics are quite different.

Invisible Woman: Sue has Invisible Platforms, that's what they are called. We basically did a version of our Batman/Batgirl/Robin's Grapple Gun, pretty much using the same wording. Now that I look at it it is similar to yours. The rest of the card is pretty different. Our force field re-rolls dice, for her, friends, and ITFs. We don't have any type of Transport like on your card. Phantom Walk is a no brainer, of course she can do that. We have Mental shielding, yours does not.

Mister Fantastic: We pulled Super Science from our already published Doctor Doom. Now that I look at it it's really close to what you did with your Mr. Fantastics Brilliant Gadgeteer, except we have you rolling for it, and some of the wording is different. Not too sure where that SA originally came from but it could have been your card that was the original inspiration, I really have no idea. The rest of his SAs are not close to what you did. I mean the character is Elastic and he does Stretch but our power mechanics are not the same as yours.

The Thing: Rocky hide is pretty much the same, except you worded it differently. The same with Sunday Punch. The rest is different. I'll admit, on this one he's pretty close to what you had come up with.
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Look, we always do our cards the same way. The first step is to research the character. We google search the character and then visit four or five sites to copy down the characters powers and abilities. The next step is to try to find a way to translate the characters powers into Heroscape powers. We use a list of already established, official powers, along with a growing list of powers that we have already used. I do the initial design, then my son reviews them and tells me where things are going right or wrong (usually wrong). Then it's back to the drawing board. This keeps going until we get a rough card.

The next step is to play them, which generates more ideas and really shows us what's working and what's not. Then we usually hang on to them for a long while, looking back on them every now and then. Sometimes seeing them with a fresh eye really helps us tweak the powers,or even come up with new ones, which we do quite often.

After a few more games we go into final art. That means spell checking, listing the powers in the correct order, and finalizing the wording.

We post them as we finish them. And when we feel confident that they are ready to go. We don't really consider the cards we post as final until they've been out for a while. We're not above tweaking the very first card we posted if it would help make them better. We try not to do this too much though,

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So here's the deal. You're a good friend. We got the impression from your post that you thought our cards were too close to yours. In looking them over Mr. Fantastic has one similar power and The Thing has two. So we are going to pull those two cards and rework them to be different. The same with Doctor Doom. Maybe there's a different way to represent Super Science than what you did.

What bothers me is that we are late to the party when it comes to designing supers. And since we are all modeling the same powers, and the mechanics for Heroscape works the same for all of us, there's bound to be both some overlap and some similarities. I can't imagine trying to check our designs with everyone else's past designs over the past 10 years to see if we are too similar. If that's the case then this project will have to come to an end.

[Porkins]

Don't rework them; no need to reinvent the wheel when it was independently developed.

[Gurei-Ornery]

I wouldn't worry about it too much. I don't think there is a way to not infringe on powers at this point, since people have been attempting to capture supers for 7-8 years. Keep up the good work. Your cards are turning out beautifully and they have possibly reinvigorated my son's interest in SuperHeroscape.

[Grishnakh]

Originally Posted by Porkins

Don't rework them; no need to reinvent the wheel when it was independently developed.

Originally Posted by Gurei-Ornery

I wouldn't worry about it too much. I don't think there is a way to not infringe on powers at this point, since people have been attempting to capture supers for 7-8 years. Keep up the good work. Your cards are turning out beautifully and they have possibly reinvigorated my son's interest in SuperHeroscape.

But I do worry about it. And if you know what line of work I'm in you'll know that I take plagiarism very seriously. I can only assume that's what Sherman was concerned about. And it does make a lot of sense. We do game together on a regular basis and both my son and I have indeed played his cards. And he knows that we highly respect his designs and really like them. They are a bit simple for our tastes but that's exactly what I believe he is shooting for in his designs. Absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Regardless we did see similarities. The Fantastic 4 were the first customs my son and I made, well over two years ago. In fact it was the FF4 and Superman that started us doing these. It's quite possible that Sherman's cards influence us more than I realized, especially after all of this time. And it's something that never even dawned on me to check on.

Regardless, we've altered the SAs and updated our cards. This includes Mr. Fantastic, The Thing, Doctor Doom and Thanos.

With Super Science we always wanted something similar to Morsbane's ability to negate powers. We think this tweak improves the power. You'll notice that Thanos is a bit better at it than Doctor Doom or Mr. Fantastic.

The Thing changed the most. Rocky Skin now doubles all shields, thus his defense went down a notch. Invisible Woman will really aid him in defense now making it even more important for an opponent to take her out quickly. He can attack all adjacent figures using his signature Roundhouse Sunday Punch. We thought about making it one bigger attack against a single figure but in the end couldn't quickly come up with a way to do that. And, when he flips to the clobbering side, he now doubles all skulls. That meant we lowered his attack stat from what we had. So now his base stats do not change when you flip the card, yet Clobbering Time makes him much more dangerous.

Of course he has had no play testing done on him. I'm pretty sure these changes will not affect him too much. I would like to ask that if any of you do give him a try to please let me know if he's over or under powered. We'll be doing the same here in the next few weeks. We will definitely adjust him if need be.

[Gurei-Ornery]

I didn't mean to tell you how to feel, I apologize. If it helps you sleep better, then it is the right thing to do. I just wish I would have saved the old cards before you changed them.

Hopefully this all turns out to be a big misunderstanding. Sherman is one of the coolest dudes I have played with and would hate for there to be an issue.

[Grishnakh]

Originally Posted by Gurei-Ornery

I didn't mean to tell you how to feel, I apologize. If it helps you sleep better, then it is the right thing to do. I just wish I would have saved the old cards before you changed them.

Hopefully this all turns out to be a big misunderstanding. Sherman is one of the coolest dudes I have played with and would hate for there to be an issue.

Naw, I'll speak for myself but I'm sure all is good with us. In fact I don't think there was anything wrong, and I'm sorry if I came across that way. We've known each other for years now and are both pretty laid back.

And I meant to tell you that's pretty cool about getting your son interested in supers again! Nothing better in this world than gaming together!