Peace Was Never an Option

I’ve greatly enjoyed my return to Marvel Crisis Protocol – I feel like the game is in a great spot, and the proliferation of wildly different ways you can play most affiliations in the game and still hope to have success is great to see. That said, there is one aspect of the game that I find a little disheartening, and that’s the current extremely restricted list of tactics cards. I have stacks and stacks of cards from earlier in the game’s lifecycle which are now no longer legal for standard play, and I think this creates some strange list building pressure where the lack of good generally applicable cards means that you are evaluating characters much more highly if they can also bring an strong tactics card with them. It also means that in practice, the 10 tactics card slots are not always utilised well. Often I find myself taking the two restricted cards the roster has access to, a strong affiliated card, and then two character-specific cards or a character card and another affili...

  Powerscaling: Captain America, First Avenger Steve Rogers has three incarnations (to date) in Marvel Crisis Protocol, with Sam Wilson meaning that there are three different ways you can have Captain America lead your squad of Avengers! That’s a lot of Steve and a lot of Captain America, and I have to be honest, the thought of painting up yet another Captain America in the year 2025 was… exhausting. But of all the models in the second core set for the game, Violent Steve – or especially his leadership – was the one that stood out to me the most. I’ve now played a lot of games with Steve3, and whilst I’ve lost about as many as I’ve won, Captain America, First Avenger (Third Steve) remains, I think, the most interesting of all the different ways you can field the man who can, famously, do this all day. Whilst the man himself remains fairly generic, his leadership has proven to be a tool that just feels more useful the more I learn to use it So I’d like to talk about him! Which...

  Powerscaling: Elsa Bloodstone In this installation of Powerscaling, we’re going to be looking at one of the characters who was a huge draw in bringing me back to the game: Elsa Bloodstone. When I first read Elsa’s card my eyes lit up. The leadership just stood out as such an incredibly interesting choice. Root is a powerful condition and I have historically considered taking characters like Minister Sinister purely because they can throw out Root and combo it with the original Loki to create a horrific bubble where characters have to spend two power before they can play any non-innate superpowers at all. That kind of tax can really hurt characters who rely on their cheap reactive powers to reduce damage. If a 1 point increase is a handful of sand in the gears of a team’s power engine, 2 points is a pocket full of gravel. Not every team cares, but for the ones that do it can make the game a painful uphill battle. Elsa remains my personal favourite way to play Midnight So...

  Powerscaling: Squirrel Girl Welcome to the first in a series I’ll do… as and when I feel like I have something interesting to honk about, looking at characters in Marvel Crisis Protocol that I find personally interesting. Where better to start than everyone’s favourite and least controversial character in the Marvel Universe, the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl! I was a little concerned when I heard that Squirrel Girl was coming to Marvel Crisis Protocol. How could you possibly represent a character who has defeated both Thanos and Doctor Doom effortlessly within the comics, without making her seem underwhelming on the table? I’m happy to say that Doreen absolutely lives up to the hype in MCP, and delivers a character that ticks every box I look for in a character I love playing: thematic, interesting, and with an excellent sculpt to boot. At first glance, Squirrel Girl might seem a little underwhelming for a 4 threat. She’s only got a medium move (albeit, wallcrawler means that s...

I went to (what I learned was the first!) UK GT. Since it was nice and easy to get to and I learned about it the same week I decided to check out Marvel again it felt like fate, and I was very excited to put some physical miniatures down on a table again – something that is increasingly rare these days! To try and get some practice in I joined the ongoing TTS league and in the runup to the tournament my results were: Very narrow loss to Avengers. Match cancelled due to scheduling issues with my opponent. Match cancelled due to scheduling issues with my opponent. Match cancelled due to scheduling issues with my opponent. Then work threw me a crisis so I just dropped to get that done so I could comfortably take Friday off because… then we were into the tournament! So… not exactly perfect for practice, but I did manage to get a few casual games in here and there so I at least knew my mechanics if not how they were going to perform in a more competitive environment. Friday ...