Thursday, April 23, 2020

May the Power Protect You: Jen Scotts (Timeforce Pink)


Jen Scotts is my favorite pink ranger. Hands down. MMPR pinks do more damage and HF pink is its own can of worms, but I like my frontman characters, and Jen just knocks it out of the park in that role. She speeds up energy generation and is a must-use in any soft-centric ranger team. Is she a better soft frontman than Marv? Honestly? I don't know. Nor do I particularly care. Marv has a different style and I think tier lists for characters in this game are an absolute trap. He doesn't do what Jen does and that is exactly how it should be.

Jen's ability is the definition of flash. You get to swap villain cards and decide what to comes out first. The benefits to this ability are obvious! No, her ability does not cancel out FAST and do not make the mistake my group made in the first few playthroughs of Jen! But not being able to cancel out FAST does not negate Jen's ability, at all. I usually found myself grabbing cards with GUARD and slapping them down at the front, so that way we could take them out faster, or to even cancel out another GUARD card. And while a hard approach to this ability means that you're picking what you're going to nuke first, a soft approach means you're picking the card you're going to start building your engine upon. Jen works pretty well for both approaches.

Overclock is one of the few cards I saw that made me jump up and down with excitement that I actually understood upon first looking at it. Grab a three shield card and discard that sucker and revel in the amount of energy you just gained! Right? Right?



Um, back that up a second.

No. This can be a trap. Whatever you discard eventually will need to go back into your deck, probably using the Recovery action. If you're going to do a full reset cost is obviously no object, but if you can't afford to get a full rest? You might hose yourself. Gaining one energy is already a lot, so I usually find myself playing conservatively with Overclock. Obviously, anyone can do whatever they like, but unless you have a really good reason to dump a three shield card? I really don't see a point.

Well, unless you have Warp Vector. Warp Vector's ability to grab a card, any card, from your discard pile and put it back on top of your deck makes it the ideal compliment to Overclock. It allows Jen to not dust as many card as she does with Overclock, and is a good hard and soft move, overall. The only issue with using Warp Vector with Overclock is how intensive it is on the momentum of your game.  You might kill an enemy card for your trouble? Maybe? The actual combo needs to be spaced out, as a clean-up for when all the heavy lifting has been done and you still have a few dead spaces left.

Covering Fire is the leading soft move for a Front Man. You essentially turn someone else's maneuver into a GUARD-proof attack, for an energy. Hopefully you've been overclocking, so you should have plenty of energy to deal with that, right? Yeah, that's an issue. So make sure you're watching those energy banks. Maybe the maneuver your buddy is playing is an energy gainer, and you come out with no additional energy, but maybe that maneuver costs energy as well. This could turn into a major play, depending upon the cost of said maneuver.

V5 Blaster is one of those cards that I just go gaga over... until I have to actually use it. A three energy attack and they're adding more dice based off of what the heck you've left in the energy pool? Man, you have to set this move up right. Fortunately, it doesn't take very much to make this attack be on par with the Power Bow, power-wise. Just be careful using Overlock and other high energy-generating cards. Make sure that building up to this one super-move actually does more than if you had been doing smaller, but still moderately powerful, moves. That's going to take some intense build-up to be worth it. But, on the other hand, if you manage to get a good three or four extra dice for this one move, you've helped yourself for the next few moves, now haven't you?

Jen's zord is one of the flashiest things in this whole game. Port someone over, for one attack! That's so freaking good! There's only one thing I really want to caution when using the zord, however: do not hose another combat to help yours. If someone has moved over and is helping another battle they may need the very card that you're trying to pull for your own battle. Me being the person I am, I would get really excited that I could use the zord, without stopping to make sure that I should have in the first place. The zord's ability is really powerful, but can set off a ripple effect acrost the board, creating unintended consequences.

Jen's kit is really powerful and deep. She can generate more energy than anyone we have to date. Jen more than holds her own, but put her with a team and her abilities open up the field for everyone else. She's kinda like dropping a a stone into a still pond: the ripples will go on, and on, and on. Her frontmanning abilities are a bit more subtle than folks like Jason, Tommy, and Marvin, but she opens up worlds of play that they can't.

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