500 points of shut down

Today I want to share with you a 500 point team that may just be too much cheese to even be fair. You can play it sort of like a tent pole team and just frustrated the beejeezus out of your opponent. Will you win? Maybe. It all depends on how you play it out. Do it right and you'll stop your opponent cold while you shoot him to pieces.

The players:

Maelstrom, Starboy, Harry Leland, Leech, Dirk Anger, and Cypher.

If not already obvious, the point of this team is to shut down your opponents movement ability, hinder power use, force them to deal with lesser figures in order to free up that movement and shoot the snot out of them while they try. As you will be able to see from the pictures, the right locations on the map will cut movement in half twice and then give it a -2 to boot. That's while shutting down three move and attack powers. It comes to exactly 500 points too.

Cypher is a great back up piece to this and should stay back so everyone gets as much use of a good team ability as possible. Just think if the opponent is using mystics... so are you. Also having Dirk shut down their team abilities so you are the only one using them is priceless. And so what if some of your own powers are shut down with Leech. He's temporary at best. Use him to force your opponents hand.

The only thing that can help your opponent against this team is range, and that can run out quickly. Check out the pictures.

In this first one you can see how I have Starboy carry Leech out and get him into hindering.(click on pics for larger view) I don't have any objects but you will want to position one so Dirk walks into stealth. You should keep Maelstrom so he's just out of range of Leech's ability but within the 8 spaces for his own. That way he can still incap at 10 spaces. But then, incap doesn't require a power action so go to town. Perplex and outwit can also still be used with Leech. The most important things shut down by Leech are Close and Ranged combat experts. He also stops regeneration, support, duo attack, and telekinesis. It's okay, you won't need them near as much as your opponent will. Leech dies first.

In the second pic you can see how figure start maneuvering to get that coverage of spaces for their abilities. On this map you might think of going through the back office but that would be a mistake. Since all the abilities work through walls, they'll just move in and lock you down. You might also think that Maelstrom doesn't deal enough damage to be the near tentpole of this group. But add perplex and all that incapacitate and you have 3 or 4 damage from at least two sources and the shutdown stops the rest. Even outwit won't help the opponent because you can't outwit traits.

That twin field of cross coverage is a great place to position Maelstrom, forcing attackers to deal with them or come between them to get the big guy.

I haven't had the opportunity to play this and see what the dice say yet, but I intend to! If you play it, post how it went!