03/22/2010 News: Special Thanks to MobileHorror.com for reformatting this message. It seems Wizkids has revamped the entire tournament scene, eliminating the "restricted / unrestricted" format in favor of a new Golden Age and Modern Age format. These aren't just cosmetic changes -- these are very real and very big.

HeroClix tournament formats update – welcome to the Modern Age!

HeroClix’s latest and greatest set, DC Heroclix: The Brave and the Bold will be hitting the streets in April and the amazing Blackest Night starter a few weeks later in May. With these releases, HeroClix tournament players around the world will be asking themselves one question – “How does this change the restricted tournament environment?” OK, maybe there will be some other questions, but since the release of Hammer of Thor, we’ve been silent on the issue of retirement. With a new set on the way and the 2010 HeroClix World Championship scheduled for GenCon in August, it’s time for the silence to be broken.

The restricted/unrestricted environment is, as of the release of the DC HeroClix Blackest Night Starter Game, history. Gone. Fini. To bring our game more in-line with its comic book roots, we introduce the Golden Age and Modern Age formats. At first glance, these may appear to simply be new labels for the same thing, but in fact, they are two very different play environments. What’s more, they leave the door open for future possibilities…

FIGURES IN EACH AGE

HeroClix events run in the Modern Age format will work similarly to how the restricted environment worked before; all figures and sets from a particular point in time to the present are in the Modern Age, while all other sets are categorized as Golden Age. With the release of the Blackest Night starter, the Legion of Super-Heroes starter – and all sets that precede it – are considered “Golden Age”. That leaves all sets from Avengers through Blackest Night as Modern Age. Going forward, we will continue to re-categorize sets once per year, usually announcing what the change will be in the Spring-time and tying the change to a particular release, usually in the summer months. In general, we will remove one year’s worth of sets at a time, leaving the Modern Age as very roughly the “past two years” worth of sets, similar to our old restricted environment. (Because of our 10 month hiatus, for a while this “two year rule” will be very approximate indeed to give each set a full chance to be explored in a tournament setting.)

If you do not know your sets by heart, the characters and special objects in Modern Age will all have set icons from one of the following:

Marvel HeroClix: Avengers, Monsters and Mutations, Secret Invasion (which includes the Fantastic Four starter), and Hammer of Thor.

DC HeroClix: Justice League, Crisis (which includes the Anti-Monitor Action Pack), Batman Alpha, Arkham Asylum, The Brave and the Bold, and the Blackest Night starter.

HeroClix Classics: All of the HeroClix Classic figures are a part of the Modern Age format. Any figure from a Golden Age set that has been reprinted in a HeroClix Classics set is considered Modern Age as well, and can be used in place of the Classics figure. A reprint is a figure that is identical to an older figure in every aspect except for set symbol and collector’s number.

Colossals (if the build total in your Modern Age game is high enough): Galactus Eater of Worlds, Fin Fan Foom, Starro, Anti-Monitor, and Sinestro Corps Anti-Monitor. Though only one Fin Fang Foom debuted after Avengers, all versions remain legal. As the two versions of Galactus have slightly different powers, only the more recent Coming of Galactus event version remains legal.

Maps: All official HeroClix maps with the modern color-coding remain legal in Modern Age, regardless of what set they were released with.

Continued on next page...