**** Ant-Man (Scott Lang) ****

bpcontra

I agree with the last 2 posts....Ant-Man is one of the darlings of my roster. Love using him even though he's not maxed

Mitchjewitz

I champed him a week ago and have used him ever sonce. Teamed up with Im40 and he is a beast.

atomzed

Blahahah wrote:

If the meta ever slows down enough for whatever reason, and even if it doesn't, Ant Man is a monster.

Yes, he is an under-rated Monster. And he is a great partner for Oml (or whoever who generates strike tiles).

Antman skills allow you to triple - tap the strike tiles.

If you have cast purple and yellow already, they tap in this order.

1) start of turn, yellow cd triggers, tapping on strike tile once.
2) you do match dmg, which tap on strike tile a second time.
3) his purple Attack tiles tap on the strike tiles the third time.

If you have Oml black strike tiles out, you can do 10k dmg every turn.

Blahahah

atomzed wrote:

Blahahah wrote:

If the meta ever slows down enough for whatever reason, and even if it doesn't, Ant Man is a monster.

Yes, he is an under-rated Monster. And he is a great partner for Oml (or whoever who generates strike tiles).

Antman skills allow you to triple - tap the strike tiles.

If you have cast purple and yellow already, they tap in this order.

1) start of turn, yellow cd triggers, tapping on strike tile once.
2) you do match dmg, which tap on strike tile a second time.
3) his purple Attack tiles tap on the strike tiles the third time.

If you have Oml black strike tiles out, you can do 10k dmg every turn.

Not to mention if no one steps on the ants then you get the beefy OML tiles plus the beefy ant tiles.

A bit sad to look back at Mr. Fantastic and realize he'd be an equally great partner for OML. Oh well

Mawtful

Blahahah wrote:

A bit sad to look back at Mr. Fantastic and realize he'd be an equally great partner for OML. Oh well

Ant-Man only contests on one colour, Yellow - and since his is an active ability, it's always an option to cast it so that OML doesn't transform. Reed contests on Black & Yellow, but it's not really comparable. I'd much rather get two casts of OML's black rather than splitting it for Imaginaut, and Reed's Yellow is his passive. If you did cast Imaginaut, you'd be gathering yellow to activate it, and without a way to spend it OML is going to transform (and then no more juicy Strike tiles).

I do like Mr. Fantastic, probably a lot more than most. I think he only needs a really minor tweak to his Yellow and Black, but that's a discussion for another time.

Ant-Man rates highly for a support style character in a metagame where supports are mostly ignored in favour of fast offense characters. I've been running him with Ghost Rider and Moon Knight for DDQ (since GR and MK are still poorly underleveled/covered). These three have some great options for synergy between them:

Ant and Hellfire countdown tiles deal damage at the start of turn, and attack tiles from Pym Particles or Black Lunacy deal damage at the end, so you can be triple tapping once everything is set up.
Small Time Crooks tiles theft helps eliminate the drawback from firing Moon Knight's Black early (creates enemy attack tiles, which you steal on the next turn).
Lots of attack tiles allow GR's green to deal bonus damage.
Full rainbow actives.

Blahahah

Mawtful wrote:

Blahahah wrote:

A bit sad to look back at Mr. Fantastic and realize he'd be an equally great partner for OML. Oh well

Ant-Man only contests on one colour, Yellow - and since his is an active ability, it's always an option to cast it so that OML doesn't transform. Reed contests on Black & Yellow, but it's not really comparable. I'd much rather get two casts of OML's black rather than splitting it for Imaginaut, and Reed's Yellow is his passive. If you did cast Imaginaut, you'd be gathering yellow to activate it, and without a way to spend it OML is going to transform (and then no more juicy Strike tiles).

I do like Mr. Fantastic, probably a lot more than most. I think he only needs a really minor tweak to his Yellow and Black, but that's a discussion for another time.

Ant-Man rates highly for a support style character in a metagame where supports are mostly ignored in favour of fast offense characters. I've been running him with Ghost Rider and Moon Knight for DDQ (since GR and MK are still poorly underleveled/covered). These three have some great options for synergy between them:

Ant and Hellfire countdown tiles deal damage at the start of turn, and attack tiles from Pym Particles or Black Lunacy deal damage at the end, so you can be triple tapping once everything is set up.
Small Time Crooks tiles theft helps eliminate the drawback from firing Moon Knight's Black early (creates enemy attack tiles, which you steal on the next turn).
Lots of attack tiles allow GR's green to deal bonus damage.
Full rainbow actives.

Yeah I was actually using Ant Man to help counterbalance 5* Bruce. His one ability puts out like 3500 in strike tiles but sets out some for the enemy too. Ant man just eats them up right after and then it's like it never happened. Plus they don't contest on any colors, which is baller.

Orion

New respect for Ant-Man after this gauntlet. He's a niche character, but it's a pretty useful niche. I have him champed, so I bumped up his blue to 5 and let him loose. The best fight was him against level 431 Fist/Blade/Cage. Damn, that's right up his wheelhouse. Drop a blue and watch the fun. Convert a Protect/Attack/Strike tile every turn while they futilely make more. I almost felt sorry for them.

His purple and red work great with OML strike tiles out too. He's been a huge help so far.

Dunamis101

My favorite Antman team right now.

https://youtu.be/nw-grVo-RrI

Rick_OShay

Yes! Mockingbird is great with Ant-Man, in hopes that her passive will earn you a 'free' power of his. This can provide an excellent shortcut to using his Grow ability - which is hard to execute in normal matches. 
Max Punisher is a good teammate, but I've been bringing in Moon Knight for the Black-Green using character. If Mockingbird happens to trigger his green ability, an enemy is probably going down. His black is good too of course (especially if this happens to down an enemy). MK also brings a nice passive into play. 

Dormammu

Ant-Man and Carol is insane if you can get his yellow countdowns to resolve. This can be tricky against active opponents, but against goons it's a breeze. I like to get Cloak & Dagger involved as they'll speed up the two key components of that duo - black and yellow.

I've also heard that Ant-Man and Drax is a thing.

Rick_OShay

As some have posted, some good teams are:

Carol & many others, especially C&D

Mockingbird & Moon Knight / Vulture / Pun Max

St4r-Lord & any green-black user including Iron Fist. SL red punch for 6 AP when AM's CD's are out. Once Ant-Mans's strikes are out, IF blue finally has a good use. Plus you have SL reducing IF's already cheap 2 powers. 

Blade & anyone simply due to rainbow color coverage. I actually bring Coulson along here. Tons of AP gen when AM's CD's resolve. Also, his purple charge/swap helps get AM's blue AP up for the big grow punch, after stealing many enemy special tiles first.

AlexR

Antman's recent rebalance really helped and improved him, imo.

Before, I ranked him pretty low because while he could do a couple of things, there were many problems. The main thing he had going for him was tick damage (many small hits that can be boosted by strike tiles) and support for cd teams. You could definitely make some good strike tile-based teams with that! - as mentioned above, C4rol enjoys both cds and a partner that does tick damage and he was always quite effective with her.
Getting him to actually use Growth for damage was so expensive that it was quite unusual to get there, seeing as he had no self-acceleration.

Which put him into the awkward spot that someone who mainly does tick damage does not really benefit from being boosted all that much. When pick-2 4* PvP is dominated by boosted half-covered 5* with ~50k+ health, having someone whose main contribution is tick damage is just not really viable. As someone who liked using boosted 4* rather than Polaris meta, I... pretty much never used Antman when boosted, either.

Stealing/destroying tiles for 9 AP always has the issue that the threatening tiles that you'd love to steal are usually passively generated. And worst case, generated at turn 1 (hi Grocket). Making a 9 AP active ability just too slow to deal with them. And that's not even taking Queen of Meta Polaris in consideration who is used in the vast majority of tile-based teams and just completely hardcounters stealing tiles.

--

Now to the rebalance! That helped him SO MUCH. The biggest thing is that Scott has MUCH BETTER access to Growth as a nuke now. That directly means he also benefits solidly from being boosted now! His abilities also get a little cheaper depending on swarm tiles, which he definitely also needed. His purple is also better at surviving now-- a locked swarm tile does much better than a vulnerable trap tile. All that, while not losing the cd/tick synergy he has with C4rol etc.

And while he can generate some swarm tiles himself, using him with W4sp now helps him out a ton, since she can generate swarm tiles very easily and partially passively.

I went from not even using him when boosted to doing most of the recent boss with boosted Scott+Wasp. He's a lot better now, imo.