Karl "Hair 10" Markovich is a former Wizkids HeroClix Rules Arbitrator. He comes to us a freelance writer and HeroClix guru.

I spent about 45 minutes talking with Justin Ziran at GenCon. We talked about a pretty wide range of topics and I wanted to jot some of what we discussed down before I forgot it! I was asked not to share a couple of items from our discussion but the rest of it was wide open…

Overall figure quality

This is something that Justin has worked long and hard on and he feels that they are making good progress on. We talked about paints and sculpts themselves.

I’d agree that the painting is getting much better with each set. I kind of disagreed with him on some of the sculpts, particularly the “waiting on the bus” poses of many of the commons and uncommons. He’s aware of this and they are continuing to work on it.

He stated that they (WizKids) are limited some by cost, but they will continue to work to make sculpts better.

“Oreo-style” bases
We talked a bit about the “oreo bases” that are coming in the Superman set. He hopes the community reacts well to them as they spent no small amount of time and cost to address the dial issues. While some simply wanted to go back to the “H” style bases he saw that as addressing a symptom rather than the problem itself. He was also worried about how it looks to a new player to have to use the ring to turn the dials.

Disclaimer: I’ve had one of the prototype oreo bases for many months now. Justin sent it to me to show the players at my venue and get feedback on it. They are a huge improvement over the old dials and it was universally well received by the players in my group. And as an added “bonus”, the prototype allows you to take the dial sticker out of an “H” base dial, put the sticker into an oreo base, and put the oreo base onto the figure. This means I can “fix” all my Avengers figures! (Of course, this assumes the final production bases match the prototype I have).

Related Article: New Oreo Dial Preview