Hello champions, BananaCrapshoot here again for another article. Today I wanted to talk about one of the most effective, powerful, and easiest to achieve combo plays in the game. No surprise this can be found in the Leadership aspect and it centers around Goliath and his crazy Action. We will talk about his action itself. Some nuanced rules interactions, and the big combo plays available and different variants of it.
Now who is Goliath and what does he do. Well he’s a 4 cost Leadership ally that has 4 health comes with 2 THW for 2 consequential damage and 1 ATK for 1 consequential damage. What makes him awesome though is his ability. It reads- Action: Goliath gets +4 ATK until the end of the phase. At the end of the phase, discard Goliath. (Max once per phase).
Now there’s a few little nuanced things to unpack here. First is he is discarded at the end of the phase, so the player phase, after all players have gone he is discarded before step 1 of the villain phase. This is important. Another key thing is the Max wording at the end. This is different from Limit. The Limit pertains to that Specific ability on a card or specific copy of a card, and I’ll use some examples shortly. Max pertains to all copies of that card. So Goliath’s Action can only be used once a phase, across all possible copies of Goliath. This is very important to remember going forward.
So now that we get Goliath’s action To get to 5 ATK. we can start looking at the combo cards and how to abuse this action. The obvious one to start is Inspiring Presence, it heals 1 damage from an ally and readies it. So the sequence would be use Goliath action, Attack, use inspiring presence, Attack again, inspiring presence, Attack again, then he would have taken enough consequential damage to be defeated, and dealt 15 damage. It would be 5 for 2, heal 1(now at 1) and ready, 5 for 2(now at 3) heal for 1(now at 2) and ready, 5 for 2 and defeated.
Another card we can look to add is something that adds health to Goliath so he can get more activations and ready effects before taking enough consequential to be defeated. Cards like Team Training or Honorary Avenger come to mind. So let’s say we play Goliath and play an Honorary Avenger on hom before doing our Attack-> inspiring presence chain with him. That gets us 1 more Attack in brining up his total damage to 20 damage before being defeated.
I want to compare this to another combo‘ish card in Leadership and that’s Vision. Vision is the same cost of 4, and has 1 THW and 2 ATK each for 1 consequential damage, and 3 health. His ability reads Action: Spend a energy resource -> choose THW or ATK. Until the end of the phase, Vision gets +2 to the chosen power (Limit once per round). So there’s some similarities same cost, a ability that lasts to the phase ends. But his gas Limit, so you can’t use his action more than once, but only for this copy. If he was discarded and brought Back into play via a card effect, you could trigger that Action again.
Now let’s do that same damage exercise with Vision we did with Goliath. Now to keep it as much the same as possible I will compare to Goliath with honorary avenger because then it’s the same resource investment(5). So I vision that uses his action has 4 ATK. So the chain would go Attack, inspiring presence, Attack, inspiring presence, Attack, Inspiring Presence, and Attack again. I’ll stop here because this is where we stopped with Goliath in we used inspiring presence As much as possible to heal and ready. So at this point Vision will have done 16 damage and have only 1 consequential damage showing. Since vision has 2 more
health remaining we can ready and attack 2 more times with Earth’s Mightiest Heroes or Get Ready to deal 24 damage before being defeated. Compared to Goliath’s 20. Wait, what! Hold up, I had every intention of this being all about the Goliath combo plays, but now realizing vision does more damage before
bring defeated.... I want to look at, is Vision better? Is Goliath actually overrated right now? Is vision the better combo play? Lets dig a little deeper.
So far I have looked at each of these cards assuming a basically limitless hand size for all of the readying effects. But let’s assume you played the ally the turn before but didn’t activate them so you can to draw into your combo cards and abuse them this current round. We will say both allies on the board with nothing else attached, and 5 cards in hand. An Inspiring Presence, 2x Get Ready, make the call, and a random card with an energy. resource. With Goliath you use the action, Attack for 5 (2), inspiring presence spending make the call to rk so, healing 1 and readying, so then you attack again, 10(3) and use get ready and attack again for 15 total damage and then defeated. Now let’s take the same hand and baked state, just vision. Use his action spending the energy to do so, so vision attacks for 4 (1), then discard make the call to play Inspiring presence, to heal 1 and ready, then attack again for 4 taking us to 8(1), then use get ready twice to take us to 16 total damage before being defeated. Wow so they are really similar. If you add inspired it skews more in Visions favor because you get more Activations out of him before being defeated. With inspired and a huge hand size the vision potential damage is 30 before being defeated compared to Goliath 24. That difference in consequential damage makes a huge difference it seems.
So I don’t know if one is really better than the other but after writing this I’m leaning vision better overall with a higher ceiling. Even with similar cards/resources in hand vision gets more damage out. They are close enough that the rest of the article they can be interchangeable for combo plays.
Other cards to use for our Leadership combos- Team Training to give all your allies +1 health, skycyle to ready, Inspired, get that +1 attack, rapid response, so this adds a lot of consistency to this for our leadership players, after spending all those cards on readying to deal 20+ dmg when our ally is defeated we can bring them back with 1 damage on them. This new version of Goliath can’t use his action because of Max, but the Vision could, not that you’d be able to anyway. But next round you start again with 1 damage, here is where I think Goliath is better, off of rapid response, because they both get 2 attacks with a ready effect and Goliath does 10, vision does 8 if you invest that energy resource again.
So now vision isn’t as good. Im discovering all this in real time as I’m writing this so I hope you all are as into this as I am. So it seems Initial round played Vision has higher upside but Goliath is better off the recursion cards. I thin that’s fair. But anyways back to combo cards, basically try to draw a big hand and get the pieces so you can ready your Goliath or Vision as much as possible to deal crazy damage. Really helps close a game out for Leadership players. Sorry if this seems all over the place. This was just supposed to be Goliath focused, but as I’m writing it and doing the math stuff in conjunction with this vision epiphany happened and I decided to run with it.
I think after looking over the numbers again that Vision has higher upside and more dmg out per consequential taken. But Goliath is more consistent. you need a lot more cards in hand to peak in vision As you need to ready him more times.
So in conclusion Vision and Goliath are both very good allies, who are just waiting to be wombo combo’d with. They are the best Leadership allies for closing out games. Give them both a fair shot and have fun. Thanks for stopping by and spending a few minutes with me today. I appreciate all of you. Please check out our other articles, our podcast, and your YouTube channel. Stay Scheming Champions.
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