Greetings HeroClix Masterminds!

Welcome to the first Design Insight article for Marvel HeroClix: Wheels of Vengeance! Our first Ghost Rider themed set is packed full of Spirits of Vengeance, as well as Marvel’s creepiest monsters, and enough vehicles to get your whole team rolling. Get ready, because today we’re getting under the hood into this set’s designs!

Ghost Rider’s Hellcycle might be the most recognizable vehicle in comics, so we knew fans would expect a badass execution and were excited to deliver. As important as the design of the individual figure might be, helping vehicles permeate the entire set – and putting one into every booster – moved the entire HeroClix team from contemplating a design challenge to embracing a design opportunity. We’ve done light subthemes in the past with the old extended base figures like in Avengers Defenders War, but we wanted to give more to players here. If you’ve been tracking the previews, you’ve seen characters riding motorcycles, horses, and even a shark! Vehicles have been part of HeroClix for more than half of its lifespan, and in Wheels of Vengeance we’ve taken some of the coolest aspects of what’s come before to introduce two new takes on vehicles for your characters to ride.

The first new Vehicle mechanic comes via the Pilot trait. When you play a Vehicle character with a Pilot trait, you’ll designate a separate character on your Sideline to be that character’s Pilot. The Pilot lends its powers to the Vehicle character, then if the Vehicle is KO’d the Pilot character hops off to continue the fight.

When we set out to design Pilot, we wanted to retain the customizability of the original Vehicles, but also take into consideration the positive reaction fans have had to “pop-off” style characters like BW#100 Black Widow. Each Pilot trait will key off different names or keywords. While this Ghost Rider is keyed to Ghost Riders and Midnight Sons, but some other Vehicles will have Pilot traits that reference Wolverine, Blade, Assassins, or even Howard the Duck. The Pilot trait gives players a new way to lean into the inherent mix-and-match nature of HeroClix; which figures are you excited to give a motorcycle to?

As excited as we are for the Pilot trait, it doesn’t quite get up to our goal of a vehicle for every character. So, we turn to the second style of Vehicle in Wheels of Vengeance, equipment!

Ghost Rider’s ride is making its HeroClix debut in Wheels of Vengeance! Every Ghost Rider has had their own distinct Hellcycle, so the Hellcycle equipment has multiple ways to play it. With multiple ways to customize your Hellcycle, and the Hellcycle being non-unique, you can get wheels under your entire team and burn some rubber across the map.

Lastly, the vehicle theme of Wheels of Vengeance is rounded out with characters that soup up any Vehicles you run. Some will have attractive attack and damage power combos meant to work well with the Pilot trait, and others like Robbie and Frenchie will explicitly boost characters with the Vehicle keyword. With “Wheels” being front and center of the set’s name, we made sure that there were multiple fun and rewarding paths to engaging with Vehicles.

Of course, “Vengeance” is also part of this set’s name, so join us next time as we take a closer look at the Ghost Riders themselves, and all the hellfire and magic that comes with that. We’ll see you then!