***** Yelena Belova (Black Widow) *****

ThaRoadWarrior

It's a shame this is the Sophie's Choice we are being presented, as she seems to be one of Sinister's better partners at the 5* tier right now. I've got him covered, but for those looking to choose between pulling now or not, I think they'll have interesting synergy together.

RickOShay

6 traps for 7 AP is great, especially when you consider that any average board starts with around 9 of each color.
Once Spycraft is played, you'll often have two-thirds of the enemy teams strongest color covered in traps. It will be somewhat common for them to match 2 traps at once. That's easy potential for 12,700 damage.
If that happens, you'll still have up to 4x traps to be matched or destroyed for over 6K each on the board.
I think this Spycraft ability is being underestimated so far.

Still, I also worry about the AP conversion to a dangerous 'weakest' color. As stated by others, this will often be the 3* essential characters weakest color in PvP. That will take a bit of planning ahead but it seems the damage will be worth the risk.   

EDIT: The weakest Match-Damage color overall from the enemy team, which may not be the essential characters' weakest color, it's from the team as a whole.

Once people get sick of this ability taking away their strongest color AP, and when considering her troublesome passive, Yelena just might earn you some Skips in PvP.

LavaManLee

I'm thinking 5Yelena, Sinister and Carbage become a skippable team. Not because it's not winnable but because of the time it would take to beat it.

ThaRoadWarrior

Since Sinister's traps are matchable by both teams, and also sap AP pretty hard, I really do think they'll be an obnoxious defense team. Much like that one Sinister node we saw in SCL10 that everyone hated, if these two end up as a Simulator "final boss" together I think it'll be pretty funny. But will a baby champ do anything meaningful? remains to be seen i guess. With Okoye in between, Yelena has a pretty cheap green AOE, so there is a possibility she could end up being another fast-Wakanda Forever! buddy if you don't have a good Thor.

Vhailorx

@RickOShay said:
6 traps for 7 AP is great, especially when you consider than any average board starts with around 9 of each color.
Once Spycraft is played, you'll often have two-thirds of the enemy teams strongest color covered in traps. It will be somewhat common for them to match 2 traps at once. That's easy potential for 12,700 damage.
If that happens, you'll still have up to 4x traps to be matched or destroyed for over 6K each on the board.
I think this Spycraft ability is being underestimated so far.

Still, I also worry about the AP conversion to a dangerous 'weakest' color. As stated by others, this will often be the 3* essential characters weakest color in PvP. That will take a bit of planning ahead but it seems the damage will be worth the risk.
Once people get sick of this ability taking away their strongest color AP, and when considering her troublesome passive, Yelena just might earn you some Skips in PvP.

This seems overly optimistic to me. Plenty of 5* characters and teams don't care too much about their strongest color because their other powers are more important (e.g. thorkoye, brb, kitty, iceman, dd, etc). So playing around yelena should be fairly easy (if not actually helpful whenever her arbitrage actually moves ap to a color you prefer). And her red passive will hurt when she is at 650, but at normal levels I don't think it will do enough damage to be much of a disincentive, especially in a brbitty meta. But does the AP drain matter to much with brbitty, where the key pretty is 6ap with self Accel. Her green is basically useless, not doing enough of any one thing to be worthwhile. and I don't see her traps being particularly good against BRBitty either, since those traps will just get overwritten by BRB's blue or Kitty's red almost as quickly as they can be created.

grumbLEGO

This will be the first time we have a character who’s only versions are either 1* or 5*. So that’s a thing.

KGB

In matches where you can bring 3 characters (shield sim) it seems like her Red and other skills would be helpful against Bishop / Worthy Cap teams. Especially when you accidentally trigger them a few times and they get those gobs of Blue/Red.

Should be useful against a few other high cost powers like Thor's Green and of course as mentioned all the goons in PvE.

She's a niche character for sure but with 40+ 5* we are reaching the niche stage similar to how it was with the 4* characters when that tier had 40+.

KGB

Projectus2501

@MrPlow said:
Why is her 1* version a villain and this one a hero?

Why is this a 5*? I wish they mapped more the relevance and power of marver characters to the mpq star system.

Guess we'll all keep waiting for that 1* Odin

TheXMan

If the enemy team has no ability in the weakest color, the red ability will trigger every turn once that color has 9ap.

Oops, no. It will then just reduce that color once it is highest. Other ability focuses on strongest color.

himatako

I actually like what I'm seeing so far and would love to use her in the game. Although being a 5* means it's gonna be like 5 years for me lol.

thedarkphoenix

@Kolence said:
I really like her red. I believe it will end up being better than some think initially.
Purple seems OK too. A minor criticism for me is, it needs the enemy take action. But otherwise, it should give us options to abuse the AI's greedy play.
Now green has a much bigger problem. She has no way of making enemy special tiles on her own.
A less important issue I see is in a mirror match - they could deny each other's green all the time.

Overall, I still like her. Sounds like fun new mechanics to try out and make work with what we already had. Especially interested in the new weak color impact on team composition.

P. S.
As far as MCU tie-ins go, at least she's definitely not a Wasp and seems stronger than CM...

I agree, I thin she's going to end up much more useful than people think

jp1

How about some characters that aren’t already in the game? There are many choices.

wymtime

@thedarkphoenix said:

@Kolence said:
I really like her red. I believe it will end up being better than some think initially.
Purple seems OK too. A minor criticism for me is, it needs the enemy take action. But otherwise, it should give us options to abuse the AI's greedy play.
Now green has a much bigger problem. She has no way of making enemy special tiles on her own.
A less important issue I see is in a mirror match - they could deny each other's green all the time.

Overall, I still like her. Sounds like fun new mechanics to try out and make work with what we already had. Especially interested in the new weak color impact on team composition.

P. S.
As far as MCU tie-ins go, at least she's definitely not a Wasp and seems stronger than CM...

I agree, I thin she's going to end up much more useful than people think

Unfortunately I think you are mistaken. I will give you some examples of other 5* that are good not great and rarely see the light of day.

Peter Parker cheep red, great green has a quality partner in Vulture to feed him.

Hela steals enemy tiles and replaces them with strike, great green damage, and can spam attack tiles and buff all special tiles

Doom huge nuke in black, true healing and steals AP.

Havok hits like a truck does huge damage he might be new I have him at level 474 and he does not have a natural meta partner.

All of these 5* are good but get left on the shelf since they are not meta. They don’t have a Meta Partner or their color overlap does not measure up.

Yelena will be like this. With a Meta or Thor Okoye, BRB Kitty. She had no natural partner nor does she do anything to swap out of those meta characters.

Are her powers interesting yes. She looks solid not great. She is a 3rd wheel but not much else.

OzarkBoatswain

3/5/5 just because red's last two levels don't do much.

I like that she is good against certain teams but also weak against other teams. This is how characters should be designed in my opinion.

The red passive is good against Worthy Cap + 5* Hawkeye and other teams that try to steamroll on a few colors. Also good against characters with expensive powers like 5* Black Widow, 5* black suit Spider-Man.

Purple is good against teams that get free turns like 5* Carnage and 4* Rocket. It's bad against special tile spammers.

Green is good against characters who put down just a few special tiles, but is underpowered against other teams.

Purple and green are weak against "rainbow" teams -- teams that have good actives in every color. All of her powers are weak against teams that don't rely on AP.

Bad

I dont know what is the harder work here, to guess the clues or to designing so hard clues.
About Yelena I think she is interesting. She is more AP messer than sinister and her pasive at 5 screws all big powers on game.
Right now there are really few teams having rainbow coverage, all new characters lose that option to power pasives.
Another use for her, like sinister is pve and goons.

TPF Alexis

@fight4thedream said:

@TPF Alexis said:
I can see the "convert strongest colour to weakest colour" thing backfiring a lot. Do you really want to be turning black into yellow for a Thorkoye team? Feeding purple to Daredevil or blue to Iceman? There are also a bunch of places where it will be good, of course, but there are some pretty common characters/teams who will love that swap.

I am confused. Why would black be converted to yellow when Spycraft is used against a Thor/Okoye team? Both Thor's and Okoye's weakest color is purple so it would be converted into purple, no?

Edit: @optimus2861 exactly my thoughts.

Nurr. Not sure why I was thinking only about the options among their strong colours. Depends on the third as well. There are plenty of characters with a good power in whatever colour, tho, so potential danger regardless against rainbow teams.

Kolence

I see a few comments mention the team's strongest and weakest colors. Her purple and green read to me like only caring about the target's colors. The only team part I see is the aoe damage part. If there are enemy specials around, this gives her more utility in managing enemy AP pools, potentially, as there could be 3 different combinations of strong and weak colors on the enemy team. As well as allowing more traps on more than one color from the start of the fight.

ThaRoadWarrior

“Enemy” generally encompasses the team, usually it says “target” if it means target. I’d be surprised if it was based on who was in front

Kolence

Hmm, you may be right. Looking at a few chars now, only Northstar specifically mentioned tearget's color, while other's say enemy color (Valkyrie) or your strongest, their strongest etc.
I blame Northstar and the current pve for making me think like it would work the same way...

Vhailorx

@Kolence said:
Hmm, you may be right. Looking at a few chars now, only Northstar specifically mentioned tearget's color, while other's say enemy color (Valkyrie) or your strongest, their strongest etc.
I blame Northstar and the current pve for making me think like it would work the same way...

Rogue's green also says "Target's strongest color" and you can change its effect by rotating the enemy target