I'm gonna jump in this thread.
About a year ago, there was a thread asking to build a team that could take on multiple villain encounters subsequently in an endurance type test. To be able to do that, your team needs to be pretty solid to start with, so I feel like this can be beneficial to this converstation. Here was my breakdown of how I built my ideal team for this challenge (I tweaked it quite a bit from my original post):
Teambuilding for Endurance:
To begin building the perfect team to take on multiple villain encounters, we need a cornerstone, someone who can take punishment, deal punishment out, and has the tools to keep themselvs and possibly others sustained through multiple rough patches. For the cornerstone of my team, no one really fits the bill as completely as Scholar. His elemental forms provide DR and heavy team tanking through redirection, massive self healing with utility team heals, the tools to prevent damage through Offensive Trans, and the ability to deal mass damage once set up through Energy forms. His out of turn plays will help during occasional board wipes. Scholar makes a perfect cornerstone to build an endurance team around.
1. Scholar
Now that we have identified the perfect cornerstone for a survivability team, lets start plugging holes. If there is one essentail component that Scholar is missing, its the lack of Ongoing destruction and general Villain deck Shenanigans. There are tons of great options here, from Nightmist to Argent to Visionary to Wraith, the list goes on. Parse, though, seems like a great fit. Her ability to screw with the villain deck and dictate what the villain plays is frankly unrivaled even by the previous queen of utility Dark Visionary. Parse brings the manipulation of Dark Visionary while being able to deal more damage than her on average, and also can be the saving grace to Scholars major other weakness, DR, with her nack for Irreducible damage. They compliment each others weaknesses incredibly well and they form the "core" of this teams strategy.
1. Scholar
2. Parse
Now that the core of our team is built, we can start adding the bells and whistles that will make our core better and more efficient. We have two heros are are pretty such specializing in what they do. Scholar as the main Tank with benefits and Parse as our Utility queen, if ANY of them can't perform their job, for whatever reason, everything can fall apart. We need a pivot, someone who can possibly fill any major need if the heart of the cards are not in our favor. The Naturalist instalty jumps out to me as the perfect pivot for an endurance team. He can flip the switch to the DPS/Tank/Utility role on a whim and has his own fantastic ways of healing, redirecting, and even taking the Environment out of the equasion when it all becomes too much withstand.
1. Scholar
2. Parse
3. Naturalist
We are coming down to the wire, and with only 2 spots left, the competition gets tough. The team lacks a definitive "Sweeper", the guy that comes it and cleans up the board through sheer speed and power. When the name of the game is Endurance, most of our heavy hitting heros are pretty frail and counter to our goals. Also, the team up to this point is very ONGOING heavy. But if we can ignore equipment destruction it leaves more room for Parse to be even more selective with her deck manipulation shenanigans. Tempest has the makings of of a great endurance style damage dealer. He not only has some of the best teamhealing, but his access to AoE and strong one-shots and enviro destruction makes him attractive. Haka is another prospect, where his bulky HP, healing, Ground Pound, and particularly Savage Mana could be very strong together and make a lot of sense. But there is another option that might not be very obvious. The Sentinels. They require very little setup, Medico can spot heal Parse or Scholar, they can team wide heal, have access to their own DR, can belt out a considerable amount of damage per turn (AoE and single target), and Writhes signature card can be used and abused. They can revive themselvs in case something goes horribly wrong as well, and when the name of the game is endurance, well, Battle Rez's have always been invaluable. Their healing can combo well with Scholar's Energy setups, and if you are smart about manipulating the HP of your team (an often overlooked utility), Sentinels provides a huge amount of sustain once everyone starts to hover around the same HP values.
1. Scholar
2. Parse
3. Naturalist
4. Sentinels
With one more spot to fill, we could look just about anywhere. Since our team is very ongoing heavy, we will want to stay away from heavy equipment users for two reasons 1) they will get hit very hard since they have no others to help them limit whats destroyed and 2) any equipemnt removal from villains can become a dead card which lets Parse have a greater focus in how she manipulates villain decks. So that leaves out characters like Wraith, Bunker, or Expat types who really rely on keeping their equipment in play. We also want to stay away from characters who run opposite of our theme of endurance, so heroes like AbZero, Fanatic, Nightmist, and Setback who all hover around the high risk/high reward playstyle. We could still use someone else who deals some solid consistent damage though. Ra would be a fine choice for that, but I'm not sure he brings enough to the table for the type of team we are building. But someone like Tempest really seems like a major choice here. He brings hard hitting one-shots for damage, boasts enviro and ongoing destruction, has team wide healing (which synergizes with Scholar's Energy forms), and brings team wide damage reduction with Shielding Winds which has a ton of value in a 5 hero team. Tempest does have a piece of equipment or two, but the good news is that they are not of vital importance to stay in play, and both he and Scholar bring trash searching utility to get those cards back into your hand. Seems like a perfect fit.
1. Scholar
2. Parse
3. Naturalist
4. Sentinels
5. Tempest
