2014’s movie-based sets delivered two of our favorite pieces, including:

Black Widow [Captain America: The Winter Soldier 003]

Why she sneaks onto the list:

Duh, she’s Black Widow, one of my favorite Marvel femmes. (The current comic starring her is excellent.) This version is the one Heroclixin’ likes best because

• She’s got the trifecta of 1) Stealth, 2) move+attack options and 3) ability to ignore hindering terrain that a Black Widow figure should always have. She’s actually the FIRST to get this.
• The Espionage trait is pure F.U.N.: She takes from the enemy’s Themed Team Probability Control pool instead of her team’s and she doesn’t get an action token for using TTPC.

But there’s red in her ledger:

At 114, she’s heavy for her shortish dial and really, really short range. She almost HAS to be run with SHIELD to get that 3 up to anything decent.

Her next mission:

She’s a fixture on one of Heroclixin’s very favorite theme teams, Secret Avengers as originally written by Ed Brubaker. And she’s a natural with her other “Espionage” trait-mates: Agent 13, Nick Fury, and Captain America 001, all from the Winter Soldier set.

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Drax The Destroyer [Guardians of the Galaxy Movie 013]

Heroclixin’ readers know we’re big fans of Guardians of the Galaxy here. Yet only this one makes the Top Ten of 2014.

Why? Why THIS Drax? Well, we need only to look back at Heroclixin’s F.U.N. Focus on the Guardians from late summer:

“… he’s got serious pros: Charge+Flurry+Precision Strike as an early combo. Later, a SP packages Close Combat Expert+Combat Reflexes. And then there are his stop clicks — yes, CLICKS — with Regeneration (free if he has any action tokens). Granted, these clicks aren’t guaranteed stop clicks: they only work on a 5-6 roll. But he’s got three of them and he gets to roll for each one. We like those odds. HEROCLIXIN’S TAKE: Our first choice as for the Drax role in ANY Guardians team.”

He has the best mix of capability and affordable point cost of all the Drax versions in the game. And he’s F.U.N.: The Battle Fury, Toughness and lack of Willpower hold him back from being just grossly good for the points [Friendly] but he’s still a fearsome, hard to KO melee specialist [Useful] that’s a staple member of the GotG [Nerdcore].

Next seen on:

Guardians teams, of course. He won’t make all of them, but he’ll be on many of them.

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Next installment: A legion of corpsmen. Or is a corps of legionnaires?