Manapul Plaza

Oh, it's been too long since I posted a new Heroclix map!

Batman, Superman, and Green Lantern have done very well in Heroclix.  Each has had own set, mini set, or some such.  As a result, there are many versions of them to play, plenty of allies to put on teams with them, and enough of their villains to give them a fair challenge.  

But Flash? Poor Flash.

Sure, there are plenty of versions of Flash (both Barry and that kid who used to be his sidekick who no longer exists and whose name escapes me).  But his foes?  Frankly... they suck.

By that, I mean, their Heroclix figures suck.  The Rogues themselves---well, I've never been their biggest fan.  Still, whatever their failings, they are one of the most famous Rogues Galleries in comic books.  And the Flash (both in comic books and Heroclix) deserves foes who can give him a run for his money.

Take the Weather Wizard.  He was the first of the Central City Rogues to be 'clixed', and was in the very first set of DC Heroclix some eleven years ago.  But as a result, his dials are so underpowered as to make him completely unusable.  Heck, at one point on one of his dials his Attack Value is 5 and his Defense Value is 11, which is about what you would expect from, say, a clix of Aunt May in the hospital on a respirator (and even then she'd probably have Willpower).  And yet, unlike many, many characters, the Weather Wizard has never been remade.

In such cases, Flash fans like me have had to resort to re-dialing the figure using a more modern, appropriate dial from some other figure.  For the Weather Wizard, I made the obvious choice: I gave him a "Storm" dial from Marvel Heroclix.  Here's the custom character card I made to go with it:

Mirror Master's not as bad as Weather Wizard, but he's still bad enough to warrant a re-dialing.  I actually made two different versions of Mirror Master, one based on the Dr Manhattan/Silk Specter duo from the Watchmen set and another on the Mysterio (whose illusory/fake copies of himself are very similar to Mirror Master mirror duplicates).

Sadly, some original Rogues, like the Trickster and the Pied Piper, don't even have their own clix figures at all!  It's criminal, and I'm hoping that Wizkids, the makers of Heroclix, will find some slots in upcoming sets to correct such injustices.  

When they do, I've taken the liberty to create some Flash-oriented maps to play them on.  I have posted here before my Flash Museum map and my Central City Police Forensics Lab.  But I've missing the most characteristic venue for Flash battles: a large empty plaza of the kind that seems to be the principle constituent element of Central City urban design.  In fact, I've long suspected that LeCorbusier was actually a Central City escapee, come to our world through of the myriad extradimensional portals that pop up in Flash stories all the time.  Because no person from a normal world could possibly have his viewpoint on urban design.

Now to make an accurate Central City -style plaza,  you'd have to double the size of normal Heroclix map and put on it, well, nothing at all, because Central Plazas are always utterly featureless except for vast expanses of unpeopled sidewalk.

That, however, would make for a boring Heroclix game.  So I created a plaza map (below) with a few features like pools and a statue (of the Flash, of course), and some street commerce.  I call it "Manapul Plaza":

The yellow and red is in case you forget who the map is for, by the time Wizkids makes some decent Rogue clix for Flash to fight.