[AotV] Unit Mechanics

[Pumpkin_King]

Don’t get me wrong, I like Mind Jack a lot. But it may be worth trying to simplify it.

[Pumpkin_King]

Something that may be worth keeping in mind is a point total spread.

[flameslayer93]

Originally Posted by Pumpkin_King

Something that may be worth keeping in mind is a point total spread.

Yup. That’s part of why I’ve been rooting for some of the squads to be cheaper if possible.

[flameslayer93]

Just a quick note, somebody noted that of our squads the vast majority of them paint themselves as melee. A few may be passable as range, but we don’t have to force it.

Of those that are passably ranged we have:

-Illusionary Projections: These are the most obvious ranged squad. The illusions appear to be wielding blue fireballs or something.

-Flamewing Phoenixes: The firebirds could have some sort of short range firebreath, either as a special or normal attack.

-Eldrazi Scions: They have tentacles that we can tag as Reach-capable, or they could have some sort of time/gravity special attack at range. Either option is feasible here, being shrimp from outer space.

-Lantern Geists: Theyre already well along in the process, but if we route back to design on them we can give them some flavor of range. Could be a shriek, could be magic. That would also help distinguish them from existing ghosts if Last Will doesn’t pan out.

With a total of 9 squads, several of whom will likely be beefy melee guys, I think if the AotV group can find room for 2 or 3 ranged squads that will go a long way towards diversifying and making the final project feel complete.

Edit: We’ll also have to worry about all the melee squads being beefy. I think we can task ourselves to keep them all from being 100 pointers.

[NecroBlade]

As long as we get a little bit of range on one non-Projections squad (Phoenixes or Scions, most likely) I think we're fine. It just is what it is with what's available, trying too hard will probably produce poorer results than just sticking true to theme.

The squads (especially melee) being mostly the same points is certainly a concern we will have to keep an eye on.

[caps]

I like the idea of giving the Lantern Geists 4 range.

I'll look through our designs again with an eye for simplicity soon

[NecroBlade]

I'd like to try some other tweaks first, but that could be a possibility.

[flameslayer93]

Hopping back in here, I did a little ticker of where the units are currently at to see what variety is needed and if we should be changing anything based on those numbers...

life(hero) 5 5 5 5 6 6 6 8
troops(squad) 2 3 3 3
move 4 4 5 5 5 5 5 5 5f 5 6f 7
range 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 5 7
attack 2 3r 3r 3 3 3 3 3 4 4 5 6
defense 2 2 3 3 3 4 4 4 4 4 4 4
points 50s 60s 80 90 100s 110 110* 110s* 120 190 ?** ?**
total units: 12


f indicates flying unit
r indicates ranged unit
s indicates squad unit



*based on suggested price changes so far for Ukushisa Pride and Vekhor

**the two ?'s are heroes who are likely to be 90-110 pts

Based on this, I think the squads are in good points diversity shape, though future designs can certainly go for the 70-80 point range and 130+ range without feeling like they are stepping on others's toes within the master set.


The heroes are less well spread, but there are a lot more heroes to design. I would encourage 1-2 filler heroes, some 40-80 point heroes, and maybe an expensive hero or two to fill the void that Velkhor left (145 now, but probably going down to ~110). I would recommend that nothing goes past Ozuul's impressive 190 points, but a unit at Drake 2.0 levels would certainly be within reason.


For life on heroes, the most common numbers in RotV were 5 and 4 (and comically, the life number on heroes matched the number of heroes with that life for all 3 life scores ). Right now most of the heroes have 5 or 6 life. It would be cool to see some low life units again, even if they have deathwalker syndrome.


For troop counts, we don't have lot of control over that. I mostly included the stat so that I could keep track of the ticks .


Move counts, 5 is the most common number. Interestingly, both of the 4 move units designed so far have some sort of movement bonus built in (Headlong Charge and Shift). This is probably in-line with RotV, since one of the two 4 move units had a movement boost (however unreliable). I wouldn't be entirely shocked if either of the shadow squads ended up having a static move of 4. We probably should try to include more 6 movement units in AotV.


Basically, everything is melee so far. Ozuul can proxy short range by sucking units in, but he's still technically melee. Pyria is ranged, but she encourages getting into melee too. So, we really only have 1 unit who plays like a ranged unit rather than a part timer. We haven't gotten to most of the mage planeswalkers yet, but I would suggest 1 or 2 are dedicated ranged units. We can't really sell melee units as ranged, so lets make the apparently ranged units, really ranged.


For attack scores, there's lots of 3's. And honestly, I think it's too many 3's given the troops we have done and then we have to consider caps's question/suggestion to lower the attack and raise defense of the Velnesh Alphas. Our saving grace right now is that some of our units can boost their attack scores (or use a special attack with a higher attack score). But since there were quite a few 2A's in RotV (and 3 of the units in SotM even had 2 or less Attack despite many of the units getting scaled up in terms of raw power), I think we can do a little bit of scaling units down. The Alabastar Sentinels would probably be good unit to have their attack go down to 2 to make them similar to the Izumis since they are situationally tough or fast. If we did that, we could give Headlong Charge a +1 Attack bonus to actually let them deal damage.

Defense... it's all 2, 3, or 4. And a lot of 4. I know there's a lot of hate for making high defense units, so we only went with part-time high defense units so far. We could reasonably give something a higher defense, but I'm not 100% sure if we should hack away at the Alabastar Sentinels or the Honored Soulguides's current designs since right now (other than Dienekes or Ozuul), they are the only two units who could feasibly be higher. The 2 heroes can slide by because they already have extra life to make up for a lower defense score. An upside to hacking up Soulguides is that the Soulguides have been in editing limbo and may end up getting redirected to design if we deem to too complex to proceed with. Alternately, the Alabaster Sentinels haven't even seen a proof of concept game to my knowledge. Another large factor is that outside of the Eldrazi Scions, we don't have a super strong argument for any other naturally high defense unit in this set. When compared to RotV... they've had 3 (NGS, Zettians, DW9K) and SotM had 2 with higher defense (Q10 and TKN).

Takeaway:
As a project, AotV is doing a good job making sure there is a spread of points (as 2 of the units in the 80-120 are squads, 7 being heroes) but will need to make sure that future designs hit varying point totals. Since most of the units that have been touched can only pass for melee without serious stretching, most of the first 12 being melee makes a lot of sense. Later designs should try to have decent range values, perhaps even one of the planeswalkers having up to 8 range, and a couple of squads having range of some sort (as has been discussed a bit earlier in the thread). 3A and 4D have been used a lot more than I personally like, and I suspect we'll see a lot more in the future.

All of this doesn't really factor special powers, but I'll try to get into that on a separate post.

[flameslayer93]

Part 2

Powers:

Off-turn: 12 (2 auras) (1 spirit)
Move other figures: 2
D20: 4
Special Req other than D20: 9
Flight/Teleport: 4
Ressurect: 1
Negate: 1
Special Attack: 3
Mind Control: 1
Choice Prevention: 2
Self Boost Attack: 3
Self Boost Defense: 2
Reduce Defense on Other: 4
Aura: 2
Spirit: 1
Extra Move or Bonus Move: 3
Grants Disengagement: 5
Healing: 1
Extra Attack/AoE Attack: 4
Terrain Powers: 3

Total Units: 12
Total Powers: 25
Total Power Components: 63

Back with the second part of the ticker, the special powers. Unlike base stats, special powers really can have a zany number of things in them. I tried to break all of the powers for the AotV units down into their base components so that we could see if we are on the right track for keeping the units themselves simple. I may have missed some components, but this breakdown should still a good job at showing us where we are at.



So far we have 25 powers for 12 units, giving us an average of slightly more than 2 powers per unit. That's definitely been a trend in unit design for a long time now, both in regards to custom units, but also to units who came after RotV. But since one active goal of AotV is to be simple enough for an 8 year old to pick up (as that was originally who it was marketed to), it would be a good idea to look at cutting back on 2 power cards and minimizing 3 power cards. So far, Pyria is our only 1 power card, and while Heroes in RotV general had 2 powers (only Agent Carr had 3, and they basically merged them into 1 power on later designs), most of the squads only had 1. While I'm not suggesting that we need to drop the second power on all of our squads, as those powers are what help define them in the overall game, they certainly won't help define them in the Master Set.


Total power components (basically, this power is a special attack using special attack rules, has lob rules, is only used once per game, all squad figures must use it and hits everything adjacent to them... wait, that's Grenade Special Attack) is a scary number at 63, but to be fair, most powers have several components. Grenade Special Attack has 5 components alone, just to be a power that isn't that great. It's important to remember that powers that trigger others basically add in the components of the triggered power a second time, because you are using that power a second time. So far, only Blink from the Velnesh Alphas have done this, so we should look to reduce this during future design steps and if units go back to design we could look to drop over the top powers.


Off-turn powers are powers that either take effect when it isn't your turn or are always on. Auras like Velkhor's are still technically on even during opposing turns (and this is relevant because 3+ player games exist!), so while there are a lot of off-turn powers, some can be justified. Lava Resistance, for example. Right now, the main units who come to mind as being overly busy with "off-turn powers" is Dienekes and Velkhor. Does Dienekes need both Tether of Logos and Combat Challenge in terms of the Master Set in general? Does Velkhor need both Frailty Aura and Demon's Vulnerability Spirit? I don't know yet. Regardless, we should think of these things (and while I personally don't like trashing on a Pod's units when many of the users aren't really around to help lead a potential new design for them, I certainly have to work in the best direction of the project). Regardless, later designs need to have more powers that aren't off turn since almost half of the powers in AotV take effect outside of your turn (and I didn't count Mindjack's control into this, as that requires your turn to activate in the first place).


Move other figures is in a good spot, and I'd suggest that we don't create too many more units with that component.


We are keeping pace with RotV as far as rolling the D20 go, and I suspect we could do about 3 or 4 more designs where the D20 is the preferred method of determining if the power can trigger.


We do have a lot of powers that have a special requirement to trigger, but these special requirements are generally fairly easy to pick up on and strategize around. Things like a unit must be destroyed by Vlad to activate Vlad's attack aura may be an issue, so we should make sure that any designs we have done don't have needless requirements in the picture of AotV. It's highly unlikely we will be passing anything that is game-breaking into the meta at large, so we need to be thinking in the short box from here.


Flying and teleporting powers are probably fine. I would suggest we have no other teleporting units just to keep the Velnesh Alphas distinct, but since all of the winged units are likely to have some variant of flying we are fine.



Resurrection powers have been a thing some RotV, and even the campaign in BtfU had a rule for resurrection a downed dungeon crawler with the potion. We do have a glyph that lets you resurrect squad units (hah! I didn't forget about glyphs and towers) so if the Pheonixes or Lilianna don't have resurrection powers that'd be great. I'm not going to say we shouldn't have them, but... we shouldn't have them from a statistical Point of View.


Only the Soulguides negate other units's powers at this time. We can get away with one other unit doing it, but since its literally only been done like three other times in the game (Morsbane, Kira, Glyph of Negation from BtfU), we really don't need to do it again.


From the OP:

Special Attackers - RotV actually had 3 Special Attacks through 16 units. Without trying to create a perfect ratio of SA’s to Units, I think we can get away with 4 or 5 Special Attacks in this set since we have 24 units.

Right now we have 3 of the 5 suggested SAs. Special Attacks are loud, fun, and explosive. We should make sure any later Special Attacks are well warranted for the design.



Tetsuo is the only unit with a mind control feature, and I suspect he'll be the only unit with one. Also, he should probably be the only unit with one.


So far, only 2 powers prevent choices: Combat Challenge forces you to attack Dienekes and Gravity Pull forces Ozuul to use Cushing Vortex Special Attack. Normally choice denial is limited anyway, but for the record I think we are *fine* on this statistic. I wouldn't suggest going any higher than 2 powers that use a choice denying mechanic, however.



3 Units can boost their own attack right now, which is a little worrying since RotV only had 2 units boost their own attack, and we haven't gotten through most of the units yet. It may be wiser just to give units who can boost their own attack a higher attack in general sometimes.


Self Boost Defense is close behind, letting 2 units do it. Nothing from a Master Set so far has let you do this yet, but that doesn't mean we can't do it ourselves as we have 24 units to make feel unique from each other. Echoing what I said before though, it may just be wiser to give them a higher defense.


4 powers can reduce the defense of others... which is a little concerning right now. 2 of those powers are tied to Velkhor however, which is less bad than saying 4 individual units can cut defense. Since "defense is bad" has been a common theme from discussions ever since Raelin 1, I do get why we've used the power component a lot. I would suggest that we either modify existing designs to remove a power with it, or design the rest of the master set without it.


2 Auras so far, Vlad and Velkhor. Vlad's Aura is an adjacency one in a similar vein to the vikings (and DW9k), while V's doesn't require adjacency in a similar vein to Raelin. We can probably make more adjacency aura powers and not hurt the master set proper.


1 Spirit power, which is a bit of a shame because of how unique they made the viking bros play in RotV. If later designs confer spirit powers, I'm not going to complain and statistically, we are in great shape for a second one.


Bonus movement powers may need to be limited in future designs. They make fast units play faster, defenders get into the action, or let you hurl yourself onto Migol's Tomb so you can kill the big bad dragon yourself.


A multitude of powers grant disengagement, but some of that is tied into powers that let you move other figures, like Gravity Pull. Strangely, we don't have Disengage in the mix anywhere. We probably should have 1 unit know how to Disengage, and maybe a second use Phantom Walk as those are common powers.


A single healing power is good, and that's probably all we need considering the glyph of healing is also in the box.


4 powers let you get extra attacks in, or at least drop an AoE effect to hit multiple figures. None of them are on squad units yet, so maybe it would be a good idea for a future squad design to hit multiple things at once in a similar vein to the Airborne Elite. For the heroes side, we can reasonably do another couple heroes with multi-attack potential. Double Attack should get used somewhere, if applicable.


Terrain requirements or terraforming come up 3 times in the designs so far. While RotV didn't do a lot of this, SotM and BtfU had zero issue with terrain becoming a factor in gameplay. Right now, I have no issue with them, however it is pretty funny to see Lava Resistance in here. But hey, Othkurrik works on swamp so why not?


Takeaway:
Perhaps the biggest takeaway is that we should be looking to make more 1 power cards, and probably using some of the more common powers to help cut down on the number of power components we are using. While in the greater meta all of what we have done so far is probably for the better, we need to start creating units with better regards to AotV and simply accepting that a unit from AotV may be overshadowed by a lot of expansion things simply because those expansion units have cooler powers like Queglix Gun Special Attack. We can balance that a bit simply by giving the units we design better stats or making them better bargains than units with really cool powers, instead of making a lot of conditional powers or powers that are so situational that they are hard to fit into an army anyway. We haven't done much of anything with Order Markers, counters/once per game powers, or boosting other units stats, so I suspect it would be wise to include a few of those unit types in later.


That being said, we have done a great job creating a lot of fun powers and even some powers that imply other, non AotV stuff, exists. I'll make another power about what directions the statistic and power tickers are suggesting, at least in regards to later and current designs.

[NecroBlade]

Tackling these monsters one at a time...

Originally Posted by flameslayer93

Hopping back in here, I did a little ticker of where the units are currently at to see what variety is needed and if we should be changing anything based on those numbers...

Based on this, I think the squads are in good points diversity shape, though future designs can certainly go for the 70-80 point range and 130+ range without feeling like they are stepping on others's toes within the master set.

Thanks for this. As suspected, 3A and 4D are leading. Agreed on the rough diversity: squads falling in between, maybe one more expensive, and maybe one even cheaper are all good places to be.

Originally Posted by flameslayer93

The heroes are less well spread, but there are a lot more heroes to design. I would encourage 1-2 filler heroes, some 40-80 point heroes, and maybe an expensive hero or two to fill the void that Velkhor left (145 now, but probably going down to ~110). I would recommend that nothing goes past Ozuul's impressive 190 points, but a unit at Drake 2.0 levels would certainly be within reason.


For life on heroes, the most common numbers in RotV were 5 and 4 (and comically, the life number on heroes matched the number of heroes with that life for all 3 life scores ). Right now most of the heroes have 5 or 6 life. It would be cool to see some low life units again, even if they have deathwalker syndrome.

Agreed that having to design more heroes means the current relative lack of spread isn't as concerning. We need to be careful not to overdo it on anything in particular, but as long as the heroes are different enough from the others occupying the same point-space we're fine.

Ozuul is literally the biggest figure in the set, so it makes sense for him to be the "ceiling". I don't think there are really any other units that could have a design to challenge that anyway. Definitely want to see 2 or more lower-level (if not quite "filler" heroes). That would go a long way toward diversity on several fronts.

Originally Posted by flameslayer93

For troop counts, we don't have lot of control over that. I mostly included the stat so that I could keep track of the ticks .

Move counts, 5 is the most common number. Interestingly, both of the 4 move units designed so far have some sort of movement bonus built in (Headlong Charge and Shift). This is probably in-line with RotV, since one of the two 4 move units had a movement boost (however unreliable). I wouldn't be entirely shocked if either of the shadow squads ended up having a static move of 4. We probably should try to include more 6 movement units in AotV.

Yep, hands pretty much tied on that. I think we have two more squads of 3 and one of 4 (using all the shadow-zombie sculpts); a 2-, a 4-, and five 3-figure squads is pretty solid anyway.

5 was always the most common Move anyway. Throwing in a 6 or two would be fine, and the 4s having boosts is understandable. A 4 without a boost (as you say, the shadow squad) would be fine, too (I was thinking maybe the phoenixes could be 4f, but is flying technically a boost? ).

Originally Posted by flameslayer93

Basically, everything is melee so far. Ozuul can proxy short range by sucking units in, but he's still technically melee. Pyria is ranged, but she encourages getting into melee too. So, we really only have 1 unit who plays like a ranged unit rather than a part timer. We haven't gotten to most of the mage planeswalkers yet, but I would suggest 1 or 2 are dedicated ranged units. We can't really sell melee units as ranged, so lets make the apparently ranged units, really ranged.

Another spot where we don't have a whole lot of choice. Obviously there are several more heroes that will fill Ranged roles, but squads are a bit limited. There was mention of maybe the HSG's getting short range, but that doesn't do anything for me thematically. Reach was also brought up as a possibility for the Scions, though that might look weird next to Ozuul without it. That leaves the phoenixes, which I could see having 1-2A and short range and taking a cheaper filler-squad spot. (As a note for later: maybe we do another Archmage-linked Illusion design here? Something offense-oriented.)

Originally Posted by flameslayer93

For attack scores, there's lots of 3's. And honestly, I think it's too many 3's given the troops we have done and then we have to consider caps's question/suggestion to lower the attack and raise defense of the Velnesh Alphas. Our saving grace right now is that some of our units can boost their attack scores (or use a special attack with a higher attack score). But since there were quite a few 2A's in RotV (and 3 of the units in SotM even had 2 or less Attack despite many of the units getting scaled up in terms of raw power), I think we can do a little bit of scaling units down. The Alabastar Sentinels would probably be good unit to have their attack go down to 2 to make them similar to the Izumis since they are situationally tough or fast. If we did that, we could give Headlong Charge a +1 Attack bonus to actually let them deal damage.

Alabasters being more Izumi-like could work. Would be fine with their defense bonus; fun to set them up a charge for where they need to go, then leave OMs off them to create roadblocks. (Side note: are they creatures cursed to turn to stone [as the name Flesh to Stone would imply] or statues that can be animated [as the name Animata and their fellow animata the Ebon Armor would imply]?)

Originally Posted by flameslayer93

Defense... it's all 2, 3, or 4. And a lot of 4. I know there's a lot of hate for making high defense units, so we only went with part-time high defense units so far. We could reasonably give something a higher defense, but I'm not 100% sure if we should hack away at the Alabastar Sentinels or the Honored Soulguides's current designs since right now (other than Dienekes or Ozuul), they are the only two units who could feasibly be higher. The 2 heroes can slide by because they already have extra life to make up for a lower defense score. An upside to hacking up Soulguides is that the Soulguides have been in editing limbo and may end up getting redirected to design if we deem to too complex to proceed with. Alternately, the Alabaster Sentinels haven't even seen a proof of concept game to my knowledge. Another large factor is that outside of the Eldrazi Scions, we don't have a super strong argument for any other naturally high defense unit in this set. When compared to RotV... they've had 3 (NGS, Zettians, DW9K) and SotM had 2 with higher defense (Q10 and TKN).

I don't think there's so much hate toward high defense as thematically so far everything has worked out the other way. My 5D suggestions are:

• Ozuul (with or without a drop to 5A) which would make him an absolute wrecking ball and probably worth his 190 or more (as opposed to a slight decrease as-is, IMO)
• HSG's since they prefer to use an OM to set up at some point before using Last Will so they don't have to summon in the start zone

The Scions or maybe even one of the shadow-zombie squads could also get higher Defense, and there are still several heroes that could take on a high-D/low-L role to fill in some gaps.

Originally Posted by flameslayer93

Takeaway:
As a project, AotV is doing a good job making sure there is a spread of points (as 2 of the units in the 80-120 are squads, 7 being heroes) but will need to make sure that future designs hit varying point totals. Since most of the units that have been touched can only pass for melee without serious stretching, most of the first 12 being melee makes a lot of sense. Later designs should try to have decent range values, perhaps even one of the planeswalkers having up to 8 range, and a couple of squads having range of some sort (as has been discussed a bit earlier in the thread). 3A and 4D have been used a lot more than I personally like, and I suspect we'll see a lot more in the future.

All of this doesn't really factor special powers, but I'll try to get into that on a separate post.

I think we're in a good place so far, too. We shouldn't try to force anything, but little tweaks are possible and there are plenty of units to go that can and will add more variety.

[flameslayer93]

I think we're in a good place so far, too. We shouldn't try to force anything, but little tweaks are possible and there are plenty of units to go that can and will add more variety.

This post echoes miles and miles of truth. Part 3 is around the corner, where I make suggestions to change existing units but mostly make suggestions about where future units should be aiming based on both parts 1 & 2 together, but at this time I haven't had the caffeine intake to work on it.

Again, only take suggestions and statistics at face value and not necessarily as the direction that pod must go or that I won't support the design decisions anyway.

[flameslayer93]

Part 3

Based on the last couple posts, it would be a good idea to look at what changes could be implemented to current units, but more importantly what upcoming designs should be aiming for to keep this Master Set as diverse as possible.

Dienekes:
Dienekes is in a good spot right now, but if it seems like any changes need to be made, we can consider dropping Combat Challenge. In the overall metagame it is a valuable way to keep him relevant, but in terms of the MS, it likely won't be what players remember him by. This is not a change I recommend lightly, nor a change I feel is needed for now.

Honored Soulguides:
This unit has been in Editing Limbo for a long time now, and for good reason. Last Will is very complex power and has a very broad spectrum of units it can affect. At first glance, Stealth Flying is no slouch either, but that's a common power that should be taught to new players as well. Their primary power is very unique, which is a really good thing for a Master Set unit. 2 possible changes have been proposed: 4 Range and 5 Defense. It would probably be best to only implement one of these changes, but in the event Last Will is a no go it may be wise to implement both.

Ukushisa Pride:
Some have suggested making them 5 Defense and dropping the defense bonus for Combined Heat. This is a solid change. Everything else on their Army Card is golden.

Velkhor:
Velkhor's Aura is only so-so, but that's what playtesting is for. On this unit, it seems as though he is a touch overdesigned. Despite praising the use of a Spirit power in Part 2, I dont think the Aura + Spirit + Flying combo is working out well. And, I really hate this suggestion because Velkhor is so far along, but I feel less bad because it sounds like he is going to be redesigned a bit anyway. Dropping Demon's Vulnerability Spirit is probably the best for Velkhor and the Master Set at this point. Hopefully a Spirit power can be used elsewhere.

Katryn Vade:
I do worry Katryn Vade has been overdesigned a bit here, but she should be distinct enough anyway. The best power to drop may end up being Oathsworn Guardian (and then replacing it with Double Attack). I'm not 100% sure if that's the best route here though. [Aspect] is quite unique and suggests we should have at least one or two more offensive powers that large and huge are immune to.

Durnipia:
Still in design, there was a suggestion to make her have a short range. I could support this idea, and I doubt it would greatly change how she would be played. Range 4 feels the best here, if not Range 1.

Alabaster Sentinels:
Still in Design, it might be a good idea to drop Flesh to Stone and drop their attack to 2. In exchange, give Headlong Charge a +1 attack bonus, and 6 defense. This would make these relatively cheap defenders still play distinctively different from the Izumi Samurai, and be another 1 power army card in the MS.

Arlinn Kord, Goldnight Outcast:
1-2 Defense and low cost

Arlinn Kord, Moon-Blessed:
Disengage

Avacyn, On Bloodied wings:
3 Life 5-6 Defense, Flying

Blighted Reavers:
4 Move

Eldrazi Scions:
7 Defense or Short Range + 6 Defense if the Pheonixes don't get it.

Flamewing Pheonixes:
D20 power that can ignore wounds or Ressurect power (if Liliana is not a Necromancer who raises the Shadow Zombie Squads). Short Range if the Scions don't get it.

Illusionary Projections:
Phantom Walk and 6 Range

Jace Beleren, Mindmage:
6 Range

Lilianna Vess:
1-2 Defense, probably will get range 6.

Merfolk Roilmage:
7 Range, probably water powers

Nissa Revane, Animist:
8 Range, possible Archmage, Arcane Riposte may not be a bad idea here

Restless Zombies + Ghoul Vanguard:
4 Move

I've left most power suggestions out since I'd rather the pods focus on how they want to proceed there. Common Powers were included, since they haven't had too much representation in the MS yet, and are already simple, not requiring special requirements to activate.

3 Units from here should have higher defense, and if either Lily or human Arlinn can get base 1 defense, that would really help create more definition in the Master Set.

4 of the heroes should be getting range, and at least 2 squads should squeak in range somewhere.

This spread still allows ample room to work with for points variance, special abilities, and unique feeling units within the master set, even if these units have a similar feel to other units from other master sets or expansions.