Strongest Characters/Teams and Why

[Palatinus]

I see a lot of people talk about characters being good or bad, but I was hoping for an idea of which characters are considered to be the best and why so I can get a better understanding of what to look for in a character when building a deck.  Most of my decks (all) tend to suck and I don't have a lot of people to play against to make them better.  I don't necessarily want to always play the strongest possible characters, but it would be nice to have an idea of what that would look like and to make a deck like that to compare my other decks against.

[BigBadHarve]

Are you using OP online? If you do, you can join me, Bios, Rucker and now Dr. Death for some games. The program has all the cards as well, you'd be able to experiment with deckbuilding.

As for great characters, there are many. Opinions will vary on who's the best, but when looking at a team I recommend balance. Especially if you're just learning.

You need to find just the right balance of assault, defense, tricks and counter tricks, (namely - negates). Many players like to find a common suit and make a team based around that suit. Having some characters with a high offsuit adds a healthy amount of teamworks to your team. For example - Capt. America has an 8 fighting and a 6 intellect. Meaning he can play 4 different teamworks on his own. Teamworks are a powerful assault tactic.

Take a look at the following characters for examples of commonly used 'strong' characters (this is by no means a comprehensive list, just an example of the characters that saw the most use in tournaments because of their strength):

Spawn - Good grid, off suit attacks and good team defense.

Heroes for Hire - Good grid, and lots of effective attack cards.

X-babies - cheap cost, very effective inherent abilty, good defense, some tricks and negates.

Hawkeye - Versatile character. Inexpensive, and is good in both the front lint or as a reserve.

Marauders - Even depowered, the vertigo is rough. They also have plenty of assault and two prime suits.

X-man - Cheap 8 grid character with very good specials. Defensive and offensive.

Four Freedoms Plaza Homebase - The inherent is the key to the strength of this deck. The ability to move any attack to another character for defense is very powerful. The team also has a balance of attacks and defense, plus the odd trick.


It's worth noting that your team may possibly revolve around a theme or tactic. You may favour more assault over defense, or vice versa. That's a deckbuilding preference of course.

A sample defensive deck that I saw often was:

Invisible woman, Nightcrawler, scarlet Witch and Spider woman. Solid defense and a bonus to venture through Invisible Woman. After they depowered the 'trick transport' I noticed people swapping out Nightcrawler, but Spawn fits in quite nicely to really make that team sick.

Just a few examples. Like I said, if you have OP online, the deckbuilder is really good - play with it and see what you can come up with.

-BBH

[Karmanal of Zert]

Since my specialty is DC I'll give a few hints there.

The Ray - an 8 Energy for low tournament-deck-building cost, a two-type 9 OPD and a Draw 3/discard dups OPD, and an Avoid any numerical attack which is good to have one of if you really want to keep him alive

Brainiac - an 8 and 7 on his Power grid, a 5 Strength CC code card (attack OR defense), an 8 Intellect, if succ. opp. must discard 1 placed card, and an Avoid 1 attack (see explanation I gave for the Ray)

Riddler - a two-type CC code and 3 good OPDs (play attacks face down opp. must guess defense, exchange remaining cards in hand with equal number from draw pile keep dups, and 3 Strength must be defended by a Power with a Universe)

Blue Beetle - +2 to venture per battle IA, plus a 6 Intellect attack if succ. opp. -4 to Venture

Comm. James Gordon - same IA as Blue Beetle, can use Comm. Gordon & G.C.P.D.'s 8 multi OPD

Wonder Woman - decent OPDs, an 8 and a 6 on her Power Grid, a numerical Avoid and a teammate Avoid

Neron - an 8 and a 6 on his power grid, a decent OPD that directs all of opp.'s attack on Neron to teammate of choice, an HY code which is a 6 attack if succ. opponent must discard 2 cards

Aquaman - this one may be debatable since he has two 6's and I think is over 19, but he has a 7 Fighting attack AR, an EB (play in front of Aquaman, special must be attacked before Aquaman can be, his IA lets him have dups), a 5 Energy may be played with a special card (which works great with both of the specials I just mentioned), and an OPD that makes Target discard all placed cards and not attack for remainder of battle - he can keep himself alive and land lots of off-type hits (his 6's are Strength and Intellect, take a look at his specials), so he's pretty self-sufficient and useful

[The Dude]

Zert,

You left out Green Lantern and Flash. While single skill max 7s are something of a tough sell in tournament level competiton GL is one of the best imo as he's cheap, has non-opd 8s that he can just keep tossing at you all day long and then a half a mutli 9 for even more offense. Plus Gotcha is nice non-opd as well.

Flash of course speaks for himself as one of the two best reserves in the game and he's powered in what are probably the two most popular skills so he can team with just about any tournament deck. But if you were going to try a max 6 the frontline he has a plethora of excellent specials at his disposal.

BTW am I the only one that thinks that by and large JLA is actually a really good set that just got overshadowed by the ridiculously overpowered Monumental coming out two months later? Play them against characters from their own timeframe and most of them can hold their own with any hero in the game of that era and almost all of them have two or three really good cards (out of five total) with some heroes like Aquaman and Flash having 5 good cards out of 5.

[Palatinus]

This has really been a lot of good information.  I just have not had the experience of playing a variety of people and decks to really learn the ins and outs of strategy in building a good deck.  As soon as I have time in the next couple of nights I am going to build a couple of decks.  I think I will be using the JLA set as the main resource for one and Monumental for the other.  The sets I have the fewest cards from are Classic, X-Men, Image, and JLA, but I think I have all the JLA heroes and most of their specials even if only a single copy.  I have a ton of Monumental including a completely unopened starter box.  At this point I think I have every hero and enough copies of the specials though.  I really like the heroes from the X-Men set though, so I may look for someone from there as well.  My wife has a deck with all four characters from X-Men and I don't think I have won a single game against it.  That could also be because I suck at deck building though.

[BigBadHarve]

This has really been a lot of good information.  I just have not had the experience of playing a variety of people and decks to really learn the ins and outs of strategy in building a good deck.  As soon as I have time in the next couple of nights I am going to build a couple of decks.  I think I will be using the JLA set as the main resource for one and Monumental for the other.  The sets I have the fewest cards from are Classic, X-Men, Image, and JLA, but I think I have all the JLA heroes and most of their specials even if only a single copy.  I have a ton of Monumental including a completely unopened starter box.  At this point I think I have every hero and enough copies of the specials though.  I really like the heroes from the X-Men set though, so I may look for someone from there as well.  My wife has a deck with all four characters from X-Men and I don't think I have won a single game against it.  That could also be because I suck at deck building though.

Yes, actually having the good cards helps too!

Have you tried installing the OP Online program? It's got everything loaded up, and making decks is easy. Rucker, Bios and I have had several matches together, and Dr. Death recently joined the cadre.

-BBH

[Palatinus]

I don't have the program set up - yet.  I very much want to but I haven't had time to do anything yet.  I have a couple of people I want to get on this forum that I will get to play too.

[Karmanal of Zert]

You are absolutely right, The Dude! I actually thought about putting Green Lantern on the list, I didn't because I also left out Metropolis S.C.U. If you build a DC-only Energy deck, you are shooting yourself in the foot by not having at least one of these guys on your Front Line in my opinion! Green Lantern is great for those Any-Power 8's and of course the two-type 9 OPD, I really like Metropolis S.C.U. for their 6 Fighting attack (may be used against Reserve) which as a relatively high off-type can really annoy your opponent in apt quantities and of course their 11 Energy attack OPD. I also like The Flash's cards but since I've never managed to put him in a deck I kind of forgot about him!    Totally agreed on your point about JLA as a stand-alone set. No where near as inferior and uncreative as the perfectly acronym-ed B/S set.

@Palatinus
As someone who also owns not a single Image OverPower card, I highly recommend you read through the set's checklist! Quite a few interesting ideas to be unearthed there, as weird as it may be for me to direct you to your own site. http://www.beenhereandthere.com/overpower/image.txt

[drdeath25]

I don't necessarily consider the Flash to be hands down one of the best two reserve characters in the game. He costs 19. You can get the same special from reserve from Velocity who only costs 16, and maintains the 6e icon. The only bad side is trading flash's 6f to velocity's 5f, and not having the draw OPD for flash, if you choose to play that with him. More than worth it in my opinion to go with Velocity over flash, with most of the decks I build, to get the 3 more points for your front line.

I normally chose Spider-Woman if i am going to use a 19 in reserve. With the marvels, Silver Sable would of had the same 9-or-less from reserve, she would of been awesome.

But you are right about Hawkeye being devastating from reserve, especially if you are playing with his mavels card. (But even without the Marvels card he is still already the best reserve character in my opinion, at a nice 17 points he offsets your common 21-point front line heroes, which is nice)

[BigBadHarve]

I don't necessarily consider the Flash to be hands down one of the best two reserve characters in the game. He costs 19. You can get the same special from reserve from Velocity who only costs 16, and maintains the 6e icon. The only bad side is trading flash's 6f to velocity's 5f, and not having the draw OPD for flash, if you choose to play that with him. More than worth it in my opinion to go with Velocity over flash, with most of the decks I build, to get the 3 more points for your front line.

I normally chose Spider-Woman if i am going to use a 19 in reserve. With the marvels, Silver Sable would of had the same 9-or-less from reserve, she would of been awesome.

But you are right about Hawkeye being devastating from reserve, especially if you are playing with his mavels card. (But even without the Marvels card he is still already the best reserve character in my opinion, at a nice 17 points he offsets your common 21-point front line heroes, which is nice)

Well, the practical problem with that is Velocity's 'Speedthrough' card is nigh impossible to find. If you're playing OP online, it's not an issue- but playing with real cards means limited accessibility.

-BBH

[The Dude]

Yea, I'm with Harve on that one. I have two copies of speedthru, which is nice; but for Flash I have all the Reap the Whirlwinds I could ever want.

And yea with his Marvels card Hawkeye is outstanding, but without it I find him clearly inferior to Flash and Spiderwoman. Yea the cost and the 7 is nice, but what he actually does in reserve (a single 6E and the 2/8 special) isn't all that tremendous.

[BigBadHarve]

Yea, I'm with Harve on that one. I have two copies of speedthru, which is nice; but for Flash I have all the Reap the Whirlwinds I could ever want.

And yea with his Marvels card Hawkeye is outstanding, but without it I find him clearly inferior to Flash and Spiderwoman. Yea the cost and the 7 is nice, but what he actually does in reserve (a single 6E and the 2/8 special) isn't all that tremendous.

Notice how all of these great reserve characters are also quite brilliant in the front line. So much so, that it almost seems a shame that they have been permanently relegated to the reserve!

-BBH

[gameplan.exe]

First of all - I love this site!  I'm so happy I found it.  My brothers and I started playing Overpower about 18 months ago after my wife got me an original booster box for Christmas - she regrets that now! 
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Anyway, what especially caught my eye just now... BBH, where is this OP Online program?  I would absolutely love to use that!  Plus, my wife is talking about moving in the future and I wouldn't be able to play w/my brothers anymore.  With OP Online, that would solve it.  Dude, that's literally a dream come true!  I was, no joke, wishing I knew how to program something like that!
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Thanks for the info!
Post Merge: July 08, 2011, 03:54:43 PM
Oh, and by the way, a few things I always look at when building a deck...
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The average Venture value of the attack specials in my deck.  I specify "Venture value" because if Angel's NeuroToxins is successful, it essentially counts as a 10 when summing the Venture Total.  Same goes for people who have a "2/8" attack like Gambit's Kinetic Detonation.  While it's easier to defend than a normal 8, if it does hit, it's still an 8. So anyway, I generally shoot for an average Attack of 6.7 or better.  I figure that means an average of 3 hits will kill some one.
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Also, I have an aversion to Character-specific avoids.  In general, I won't put more than 1 personal avoid in a deck, per frontline hero.  My Battlesites tend to be 80% defense or more.
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Here's an example of a pretty strong deck I recently built...
Gambit (BJ, HN, HN, EJ), Quicksilver (BV, AS, AG, AU), Rogue (AC, BD, AS, AG, AR), Jean Grey (in reserve, AS, BH).  My Battlesite was Avalon (see the Fatal Attractions theme here?) with Bishop's AC, AY, Cable's AD, Colossus' AG, AR, and Prof'x AQ, AH.
I put in 20 powercards, 6 Teamwork cards, and 3 Ally cards to get me to a 51 card deck.

[BigBadHarve]

First of all - I love this site!  I'm so happy I found it.  My brothers and I started playing Overpower about 18 months ago after my wife got me an original booster box for Christmas - she regrets that now! 
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Anyway, what especially caught my eye just now... BBH, where is this OP Online program?  I would absolutely love to use that!  Plus, my wife is talking about moving in the future and I wouldn't be able to play w/my brothers anymore.  With OP Online, that would solve it.  Dude, that's literally a dream come true!  I was, no joke, wishing I knew how to program something like that!
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Thanks for the info!

Yeah, it's great that OP isn't entirely dead.

Jack (another user on the forum) has a website dedicated to OverPower. He has the OP online available for download. Go to - www.overpower.ca - and you can get the program.

Depending on your OS you may have trouble getting it loaded. I had some issues with it at first, but eventually solved it.

-BBH

[gameplan.exe]

Thanks a ton for this, BBH!  I've actually been to that site before, I just never even notice that on the bottom, there!  I'm at work now, but you know what I'll be doing as soon as I get home (maybe even on my lunch)!