The #8 WINNER is:

SHAPE CHANGE

In the past, SC was a great line of defense against attack. But if the character was the only possible target and won the roll, the attacker still sometimes had the option to attempt a different action, such as a break away attempt or a simple move action.

No more. The 2011 wording now requires you to choose a different target for your attack. If you don’t have another legal target, you just wasted an action; take your token.

This is a simple yet fantastic upgrade for Shape Change.

The #8 LOSER is:

also SHAPE CHANGE

Battle Fury now ignores Shape Change. They’re so angry they don’t care who you look like! Fortunately, BF is rare enough that you won’t face it terribly often. But it’s still enough to make Shape Change a mild loser in this Top Ten.

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The #7 WINNER:

COLOSSALS

It was annoying that Colossals, aside from being able to shoot out of adjacency while based, were
completely outclassed by the mere Giants at being, well, big. Now that’s changed. They break away automatically and share Giants’ ability to ignore smaller characters for movement, whereas before they had no break away or movement bonuses. Along with their already-implemented ability to act with 2 action tokens, Colossals just got better and better.

And it’s all because of GROOT.

No, seriously.

Groot, being the first character to have a Special Power making him a Colossal piece, had to have made the designers realize that being Colossal did practically nothing for him in and of itself other than make him a colossal, immobile bull’s-eye for shooters beyond his paltry 4 range. Remember, virtually every other Colossal character until him had come with a half-ton of special rules and immunities to half the PAC, masking the inherent lameness of Colossal Size.

So thank Groot.

(One more thing: Multi-Attack also got a big upgrade/simplification in that it now allows any two actions instead of just any-two-power-actions-that-lead-to-an-attack-ONLY. But because there are only a handful of characters with the ability and all of them are Colossals, this is just one more way that these biggest of the big get a win in 2011.)

The #7 LOSER?

INCAPACITATE

It also got the “no damage” treatment that Energy Explosion received, making it crit-miss-proof. So why is it a loser?

• it lost the critical hit potential (which was always a bit of a double-edge sword, given that Incap was a way to damage Mystics without hitting them directly. So this isn’t really a huge downgrade) and;
• It’s now 100% less effective against Battle Fury, just like Shape Change. Also, the new aspects of Leadership can potentially render a successful Incap completely useless.

The combo of both these drawbacks puts Incap a slot lower on the list of the lame than SC. (At least Stunning Blow still works.)