Because it's Midnite!

Having been very much out of the loop on Marvel Crisis Protocol for a couple of years, I was delighted to discover that there were several releases for the Midnight Sons released – Elsa Bloodstone in particular spoke to me because … I mean heck, just look at her. Who doesn’t love a redhead who dual-wields rifles?

Returning to the game after a couple of years away there’s an interesting mix between things that have changed and things that have stayed the same. There’s certainly a lot more choice now, and yet the fundamental questions the game is asking have remained consistent. I’ve so far played three games, testing what used to work and seeing what people are bringing now, and rather than trying to internalise everything all at once I think I am going to focus on the minis that caught my attention and brought me back to the game.

So lets talk about Elsa and Blade.

(Brief aside, but I love the new card format. The cooler blues are way easier on my eyes than the garish yellows of times past, and the horizontal format is way better than the vertical one. Though it does mean that the team has a mix of all three styles which is going to make my ADHD twitch)

Elsa is very similar to Blade in a lot of ways, but much like how the game has changed subtly, she runs in a slightly different fashion to the OG leader.

Defensively she’s very similar. The main difference is that Blade heals and gains power for being near characters with Bleed and can shake his own conditions, making him a little more defensive compared to Elsa’s ability to punish people who put conditions on her. She fights at range and sets up with conditions, where Blade prefers to be up close and can put out more damage on average.

Run and Gun keeps Elsa mobile and contributing to the fight, where Blade is much more reliant on his leadership or having someone else help chauffeur him into the fray.

Both leadership abilities need the character to spend power, but that’s where the similarities end. Blade’s leadership opens up a lot of positioning and extract play, allowing each character to spend one power to place 1 during their activation. That immediately opens up a safe extract grab activation 1 for characters like Immortal Hulk, and through the course of the game it lets them dance around their opponents, playing with ranges and really rewarding tight positioning play.

From what I have seen in various discussions, this is still considered the more powerful of the two leaderships and it definitely rewards high level play. One lesson from the three games I have played thus far, however, is that I am extremely rusty in terms of positioning and I need to relearn that aspect of the game. Luckily, with a whole bunch of crisis changes, I’m not the only one there. It feels like a leadership that will get better as I grow into it.

But of the two leaderships, Legion of Monsters is the one I’m far more excited about.

Where Blade’s personal kit is designed for more violence, his leadership leans into positional play. Elsa has more personal mobility and impact at range, but her leadership leans into attritional play in a way that isn’t just trying to fix dice math, and I find that fascinating.

Boom! Throws out splash damage and punishes teams clumping up for bubbles (though it can hurt your own characters too, so you need to be careful).

Horrify is the option that caught my eye most – root is an extremely powerful condition, I learned that in my Mister Sinister testing back in the day, and there are some characters it just shuts down completely. The ability to threaten it for one power and an action from anyone on the team seems completely wild to me.

Silver Bullets is also interesting. The ability to shut down Odin’s Blessing is obviously a huge counter to Asgard specifically, but there’s also a lot of characters with damage reduction as their main defensive tech.

Combined with Elsa’s degeneration trigger on Bloodgem Blast the team can really make damage stick in a way that no one else can. Apocalypse, for instance, relies on healing himself after he takes damage. One wild from Elsa and he’s suddenly a lot more easy to deal with, and if he has a Colossus bodyguarding him, well, now Colossus’ power economy is wrecked by root and the bullets are cutting through that organic steel skin when he does manage to jump in front of the boss.

I will admit that the lack of dice fixing in the team does worry me a little bit; you need to actually put the damage out first in order to have it stick, and there’s not a huge amount of consistent damage on tap. I’ll be interested to see how that works out as I dig deeper.

There is, however, one last card I want to talk about right now.

The bestest dog, Bats.

Siege of Darkness is still a fantastic card, but talking about a lack of dice fixing – Bats solves that problem, at least when it comes to making sure you push through a particular trigger. Elsa’s Bloodstone Blast will probably get the degeneration trigger if you spend 4 power on it and throw 9 dice at them. Or you can spend 1 power on it, 2 on the card, and be guaranteed.

I also understand that ‘wait, Midnight Sons are actually really good?’ is not necessarily the hottest take out there right now, but I’m excited to dig in and see if all these moving parts work in the way I expect them to.

The UK Grand Tournament is coming to my city at the end of May, and that just feels like fate. I’m sure I won’t even have begun to scratch the surface of what this team can do by then, but I’ll go in with the heart of a lion and the wings of a bat. Who knows, maybe that’ll be enough?

Because it’s midnite!!!