HelmAverse Supers - Reinforcements Arrive

[Tornado]

Nice tweaks. Wider Engagement is really cool.

[Matt Helm]

Thanks, Tornado, Wider Engagement makes Plastic Man a much more serious threat of a figure as it plays well with his other powers.

While we sort out our update cards, we take a small break to present a card we had done but not posted. This design started on the HelmAverse International thread where A3n and Lil'Helm collaborated on the ultimate finished design.

[Sherman Davies]

I like that Booster more than the last version. Nice work!

As for Wasp, why is the mini's flight stand painted black in the photo, and why is the flight stand red in her hit zone?

[Tornado]

Skeets! Cool Booster. Love the points mechanic.

[chas]

Glad to see your name on your cards. I can't get Sherman Davies to do that on his! I have to mark them myself, as I use cards from many different designers all at once.

[A3n]

Originally Posted by Sherman Davies

As for Wasp, why is the mini's flight stand painted black in the photo, and why is the flight stand red in her hit zone?

That's actually her leg.

[japes]

Originally Posted by chas

Glad to see your name on your cards. I can't get Sherman Davies to do that on his! I have to mark them myself, as I use cards from many different designers all at once.

Yeah it's a nice touch. I used to also add a print date on the back so I could check back to see if any updates were made.

[Matt Helm]

The lead designer's name on the card is something that A3n has always done for our HelmAverse cards. It's one of many phenomenal artistic choices he has made over the years. A version # or latest date somewhere is an interesting idea as well. I guess writing it on the back is pretty clever.

Conducted a little minor solo playtesting today:

- "Wasp" needed a slight edit on the SA to only reduce defender's dice for each attack that actually showed at least one skull. I made the change in the updated Wasp post.
- "Captain Atom" seems ready to go. Hopefully Lil'Helm and I will have him posted real soon. He has been through concept designs, playlists, edits, reboots, etc. for years. We are glad that he appears finally ready to go.
- "Re..." is also ready to go. His latest minor edit worked out great in my opinion. Lil'Helm is more of a fan of the character than I am so he gets the last stamp of approval before release.
- "Ge..." has jumped the line. Being a pretty straight forward design means that testing is more about solidifying his point cost. So far I like where we have him but I don't make release decisions until at least one other Helm family member gets a good test drive with the design. Hopefully this will be soon.

[Sherman Davies]

Originally Posted by A3n

That's actually her leg.

Part of it is her thigh, but the bottom part of it is the black peg that plugs into her flight stand. I know because I used to use that mini for my own Wasp before I replaced it with a 616-accurate mini.

[Matt Helm]

These next two card were a very long time coming. By "long time", I mean years. Captain Atom and Major Force both went through numerous designs, playtests, recycles, re-designs, re-playtests, re-recycles... on and on and on, again. At one point it became a joke that both figures were just stand in proxies while we tested designs for other figures that were ordered in the mail, drying from being repainted or rebased, or buried in our collection and not yet pulled out. These guys were the stunt figures just as much for other designs as they were for their own.

One of the issues that we dealt with was that we wanted the two of them to have an obvious similarity and a dicotomy. We didn't want a Spider-Man/Venom thing as we also wanted each character to stand independently from the other.

Another issue is the seemingly limitless power the characters have and how we should represent that aspect. I'm looking at you Dr. Manhattan as the annoying thought worm in my head. In reality though, neither one has that iconic of a history that their power set is easy to represent. I think of Captain Atom as Charlton's Superman but also recognize he is more famously a DC character at this point.

Ultimately, it came down to one adsorbing energy for his own benefit and the other expelling energy to do damage. Mechanically pulling that off took many different design tries. The difference now is that after Ant-Man, Punisher, and a soon to be released mega-villain, we broke the HelmAverse barrier for marker usage. Add in Mirror Masters destructible objects, Captain Cold's glyphs, and Loki's extra figure piece and the HelmAverse is definitely beyond not using traditional marker powers. Therefore, Captain Atom could finally be done in a way that I wanted (although Major Force can still be done without extra markers).




Of course Lil'Helm rocked the art again.

[Tornado]

Good stuff. I like how Captain's powers has one that works off increments of 2 markers and the other off three. Then you get something at 2,3 and 4. nice

[Matt Helm]

Thanks T-Nado, for checking out the Captain (and the only Major Force Heroscape card on currently available on the site). And you are correct that his markers power him up offensively, then defensively, then again offensively. We're glad it didn't come across as complicated because it really isn't. It took YEARS to get him to a place that makes us happy.

Speaking of years, we bought the Walmart Optimus Prime plastic $5 toy several years ago with a "just in case" mindset. Eventually, I painted the wheels grey, the tires black and addd a "dirty" wash and then a clear coat to the whole figure. The end result made him look much less like a throw away toy and more like a Heroscape figure. A 3-D printed peanut base was added and the design somehow flowed much more easily than I thought. Lil'Helm and I play tested him and were both very happy with how he "transformed" into a playable figure (despite Helm Jr. and my nephew with 3D printer cringing at the idea of adding him to the HelmAverse).

Well, we already have TMNT and Mortal Kombat so why not represent another icon from pop culture (he has had Marvel comics, IDW comics, and now Image comics but we went generic Transformers logo Heroscape general style).