UK Marvel Crisis Protocol Grand Tournament 2025

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 also featured a warmup side-event before we got into the GT proper, which I appreciated because it meant that I got to get used to measuring things in physical space and test out my list before we got down to it.

My plan was to run primarily Elsa in Midnight Sons as she and the Monsters were the team that caught my eye and got me back into the game. The roster was as follows:

Characters

Immortal Hulk
Loki, God of Mischief + Mind Gem
Werewolf by Night
Blade
Elsa Bloodstone
Frankenstein’s Monster
N’Kantu the Living Mummy
Man-Thing
Black Panther, Chosen of Bast
Wong

Tactics Cards

Brace for Impact
Sacrifice
Siege of Darkness
Bats the Ghost Hound
One Below All
Giant’s Blood
Instant Recovery
Hideous Monster
Recalibration Matrix
Warpath

Crises
Deadline to Destruction
Guardians Save Shi’ar Empress in Style
Wedding Party Targeted in Terrible Attack

Unexpected Guests Crash Royal Wedding
Terrigen Canisters Fuel Doomsday Device
Scientific Samples Found in Discovered Universe

The idea was to double down on the power tax as much as possible. Elsa’s leadership lets the whole team put out root, and Loki’s bubble adds an extra +1 power cost. He takes a lot of effort to get off the board between his trickster, count blank defence, and Giant’s Blood card – two out of three of which also let him reposition his bubble mid-round. Then if they do daze him, he does the same thing but also stops enemy crits exploding making it even more difficult to KO him.

Originally I was running him with the Space gem as a midline grab piece, but I realised early on that you don’t want to put an extract on Loki until you are at the point where you want your opponent to daze him. He’s so annoying that most players will start to focus him down when they feel the pinch of the aura and the Root, so if you can stop that being worth too many additional points that’s better. The mind gem also means that he can walk people off points, bodyguards out of range, and just generally keep messing up your opponent’s plan. It’s great. Love it.

I did still want to have Blade and Immortal Hulk in the roster though – both because if I wound up with priority on a 5 wide extract, Elsa has no way to take advantage of that the way I am building her but Immortal Hulk under Blade can just run up and grab the centre extract, or two on Cubes. Also because I figured a lot of people would expect Immortal Hulk, which proved to be correct. If the opportunity had arisen, I might have played Immortal Hulk at 19 or 20 threat with iHulk, Elsa, Loki and a 3 or 4 – but spoilers, it didn’t.

Game 1

Round one was into a pretty new player who wanted to test Dracula in Midnight Sons. It was Deadline/Cubes at 16 and I had priority, so I decided to go Blade/Immortal Hulk/Man-Thing/Wong. The thinking here was that Wong could heal up Immortal Hulk, Man-Thing could use Instant Recovery to be a spongy tank on a deadline point, and Blade … could enable Immortal Hulk mostly, maybe get some attacks in if needed.

My opponent chose to run leaderless which surprised me a bit. I believe the squad was Dracula, Werewolf, Moon-Knight and Man-Thing and he valued Siege of Darkness over Dracula’s leadership.

Immortal Hulk did exactly what I expected. Round 1 he ran up and took the central cube then the far left. Round 2 Wong healed him of the damage and he used One Below All to get over to the opposing Moon Knight who was on the far right of the table and daze him. Round three he KO’d Moon Knight, then took a couple of attacks and a pounce from Werewolf by Night but it wasn’t enough to get through his 12 remaining health, as I still had brace.

On the other side of the table, Man-Thing and Blade were able to hold the left point and Wong held the back. The game finished round 3, 18-7.

Game 2

Second game was into Steve-led Avengers at 18 on Deadline/Inhuman Weaponry. My squad was Elsa/Loki/Werewolf/Frank.

This was a wildly close game. My opponent ran Cap/Cable/Shang-Chi/Karnak/Wong and the Loki bubble plus the root really blunted Cap and Cable from being able to do very much. He was also playing Grievous Wounds as he’d expected me to put Immortal Hulk on the table.

The initial turn was cagey with me refusing the left flank and happy to hold equal points, intending to have Werewolf engage Karnak who was sitting on the Avengers back point whilst Elsa put Root on the enemies before they could close on my back point. The interesting thing here is that because of Cable’s shields, she didn’t do a lot (maybe any?) damage doing that, which was fine by me because it meant the power tax was more effective.

Werewolf was able to daze Karnak thanks to Siege, which also got him the wild to jump onto the back point. What I was not expecting was for Karnak to wake up and spike 7 damage into him in return, then follow it up with a total of 12 damage across a builder and a spender at the top of turn 4 which KO’d werewolf through instant recovery! Jack has some serious flaws I guess!

Frank was even less impressive and I think managed to make one attack all game before going down to Shang-Chi and Cable. Loki’s main job was to walk around the points taxing people and walking them away which he did pretty well, but with only 4 characters he did have to pick up an extract at some point and Cable was able to incinerate him which he was not a huge fan of.

It all came down to turn 5 where Loki needed to hold a point with Cap and Wong on it. The final two activations were Loki, who walked onto the point, declared he was, in fact, a God, and used his spender to daze Cap with a 6 die mystic counting blanks. I was feeling optimistic, and of course my hubris was my downfall because Wong then managed to do 2 damage with his 4 die strike. Loki didn’t have enough power left to count blanks or trickster, so the game ended 16-15 thanks to the efforts of the true Sorcerer Supreme.

Game 3

The final game of Friday was into Brotherhood, Guardians/Senators at 17, and I was nervous going in. Back in the day I remember Mystique Brotherhood being very good at Senators, and my game plan is to try and play 4 wide which did felt risky just from the sheer number of points on the table.

I ran Elsa/Loki/Werewolf/Bast Panther at least partly because I wanted to see what Bast Panther could actually do. He was theoretically there to handle flip secures for me, and if everyone else is going to be stuck in the middle dealing with Senators that felt like a good guy to have running around dealing with the secure.

I realised pretty early on that Loki would need to kill Mystique, though. Her ability to negate reactive powers and cards meant that if he didn’t, she was going to kill him, and he is a big part of the gameplan. This was also where one of the other leadership options really shone; Elsa’s BOOM! Allows a character to spend a power to do 1 damage to all characters within 2 of it. Werewolf doesn’t mind when he’s uninjured, he has healing factor, and with the number of bunched up enemies thanks to the Senators this really helped the team put out a lot of damage very quickly into the generally low health pool mutants.

Loki’s frost beam was also very handy – counting blanks pushed through the damage on Sabretooth, and suddenly the long mover is now a short mover and holding an extract can only move once so couldn’t escape the scrum.

This was a very bloody game and again very close, going all the way to round 6 with a lot of the Senators winding up left on the table due to the number of characters dazing and dying round to round. The shocker was Bast Panther, who after he dazed was able to take out Sabretooth, Pyro and Mystique between his pounce, spender and builder. He did then immediately get KO’d top of the next round, but he got the opening to keep me in the game, and he’d secured the left hand points for me before he got into the fray.

It again came down to the final dice rolls; Sabretooth just able to KO Loki before walking onto a point and flipping it to go 19-17.

 

My main thought heading into the actual GT was that I simply do not have enough characters to deal with a lot of extracts being on the board. Excepting the first game, which was the style I didn’t really want to focus on anyway, playing 4 wide with only Werewolf as my damage dealer meant that I was often having to work really hard to maintain parity on extracts let alone get ahead into 5 or 6 wide teams.

On that basis, I switched out my extracts to Alien Ship, Montesi Formula and Legacy Virus, thinking that only having 3 on the board would take some of that pressure off.

Wowee, was that not a great choice.

Game 1

Game one was playing into a fellow Midnight Sons player! It was Deadline/Skrulls at 16, and he went Blade/Immortal Hulk/Red Skull2 into my Elsa/Loki/Werewolf/Wong. My plan was to try and kill Red Skull as quickly as possible, with Loki just walking Immortal Hulk away until we could focus fire on him.

In theory, I like Elsa using Bloodgem Blast after dazing Immortal Hulk. Seems real good.

In practice, it didn’t quite work out that way. Three wide with priority at the start meant he kept it even after dazing and KO’ing characters. Loki was able to send Hulk away, but the bump and One Below All meant he could get where he needed to be anyway. I did kill Red Skull fairly easily, with Werewolf, but his grunts still managed to daze Elsa before they went down, so Hulk just killed Werwolf and then her before we could get any fire into him at all.

Game ended with Loki on a point on his own and the entire rest of my team KO’d. 16-11, turns out that power taxing Immortal Hulk requires a lot more than a root and a bubble because he’s just going to throw 7 dice attacks into you until he has the power to do whatever he wants anyway. Maybe the new Clea Judgement tech would help – but I couldn’t have brought that here regardless.

Game 2

Game two was into Apocalypse, and I was excited to see if my list was as good into it at a tournament as it was in my casual games leading up to it.

This was Guardians/Skrulls at 17 and I ran Elsa/Loki/Werewolf/N’Kantu. I also realised immediately that N’Kantu should’ve been Bast Panther again, I was just on autopilot. N’Kantu’s push isn’t as helpful on a flip secure, Apocalypse brings energy damage that can overwhelm him, he was going to have a bad time.

He did have a bad time.

My opponent ran a pretty standard Apocalypse list of Apocalypse/Toad/Magik/Beast/Blob. I failed to flip my back two points. Everyone got pushed picking up the Skrulls at the beginning. Things got messy very quickly!

There was a comical point where Werewolf had Bleed/Root/Poison/Slow/Incinerate on him all at the same time which was great – but Apocalypse was on the other side of the table so he just sort of stood there being miserable amidst a team that slowly whittled him down rather than exploding right away.

But losing those points early really hurt, and I couldn’t pull it back. The game ended 20-9 and I laughed a lot. Fair to say that my genius anti-Apocalypse tech did not really work out.

Truth is though that I made a lot of matchup errors here, right from picking N’Kantu at the start. What I needed to do was use Elsa’s bloodstone blast as soon as possible to remove Apocalypse’s healing and then focus him down. Instead I panicked at the loss of early points and tried to go into his extract holders, then failed to kill them anyway. I think that if I’d kept a cooler head this could easily have gone the other way.

I still really like playing into Apocalypse. He’s a very cool team to watch do their thing, in my opinion, and whilst I am told he’s crazy strong – I think that’s only true if you are able to consistently make the best choices moment to moment in a game where your opponent is also able to throw problems at you. That’s how strong things should be; it’s not a squad that you can autopilot to victory.

Game 3

My third game was into Weapon X! I was super excited to see them on the table since I think I’ve played them maybe once before? And then the squads were revealed and I was immediately intimidated.

We were playing Intrusions/Alien Ship and I ran Elsa/Loki/Werewolf/N’Kantu – who WAS the right choice here because there was definitely going to be a lot of murder one way or another and he could maximise his push, use his mystic attacks, fun times all around.

My opponent ran X-23/Maverick/Weapon X/Domino/Zemo/Nebula.

The moment deployment was done I realised we were all going to die.

I had priority but I did not want to walk into a gunline backed by people with knives duct taped to their hands so I passed twice and just accepted that if we were going to get anywhere it was going to be through control more than murder. Elsa’s leadership was definitely helpful in terms of spreading out the damage more than rooting; I wanted Zemo’s bubble offline as quickly as possible because it was giving such a massive advantage round on round, and the automatic one point let us finish him off because he was in 2 of a teammate. That was cool! The Loki bubble and root also meant that a lot of characters were blunted from their effectiveness.

But I’m not going to lie to you, dear reader, my instinct of ‘oh no they are just going to murder me’ proved to be 100% correct. N’Kantu was the first to daze and the first to KO as I wasn’t able to protect him (a weird thing to think to need to do, most of the time) so he never got his tokens, then Werewolf went down under weight of Wish-brand Wolverines, and there’s only so much you can do when you’re trying to play 2 characters into 4 or 5, just from a board coverage perspective.

It was still a fantastic game but I think, with the benefit of hindsight, I should have completely abandoned the Loki Plan and either gone Elsa/Immortal Hulk/N’Kantu/Wong to have more damage output and throws or Elsa/Frank/N’Kantu/Man-Thing/Bast Panther to have more parity on the points.

On the other hand, literally every game I played Loki was the highlight and I’ll talk more about that in a bit.

Game 4

The final game of day 1 was into Inhumans. I’d seen some chatter (and watched a horrifying example) of what Inhumans are capable of, so I wasn’t feeling super confident going into this after three fairly one-sided (if fun!) defeats, but I was determined to see if I could pull it back. Aside from anything else, my thinking on Inhumans was that they pass power around to get to very precise break points – throwing out Root and the bubble may actually be at its most effective into a team like that.

We played Cosmic Invasion/Alien Ship at 17 and I ran Elsa/Loki/Werewolf/Man-Thing, thinking that Man-Thing’s ability to reposition himself or others if they get pushed could be useful. It absolutely was. Man-Thing’s teleport ability was extremely useful the entire game.

My opponent ran Black Bolt/Karnak/Lockjaw/Voodoo/Toad and after seeing what Karnak could do in my game yesterday I identified Bolt and Karnak as the two main damage dealers. Lockjaw was filling a similar role as my Man-Thing but with the added bonus of getting to power up the rest of his team turn 1, and Voodoo is a character I have a lot of experience with and against – I’m actually more used to dealing with pre-nerf Voodoo so modern Voodoo feels like a breath of fresh air. You get to count for secures whilst possessed now? He can’t even just throw you off? Luxury!

I was more or less right about the power tax. I was also able to mitigate the round 1 Great Refuge somewhat by walking Loki up to walk Karnak back. Werewolf is actually fairly resilient into energy damage – 4 die with Instant Recovery backing him up meant that I was hopeful he wouldn’t die to Black Bolt too quickly, which he didn’t. It took Voodoo some effort to get up the power to possess him, too, and after that he was happy to jump to the back point and murder Lockjaw for some dog-on-dog violence.

I used Elsa’s spender and Run and Gun a lot to zone out Karnak and burn him down as much as I could, whilst Loki continued his main tactic of walking around moving people off points, being an annoying bubble and moving back to points.

The Inhumans still do a lot of murder though, and it also came down to the final die roll of the last turn. I’d had to flip Black Bolt to get his extract at some point, which meant he could then Whisper onto both Loki and Elsa. Elsa was holding an extract on a point, Loki wasn’t…

So Elsa shoved Loki in front of her attack with Sacrifice and the day was saved. That guy’s a dick anyway, he deserved it.

Final score was 17-15 and I secured my second win of the tournament.

 

Now, the thing I have maybe been downplaying through all of these reports is how much brainpower Loki takes to play. Not only am I constantly having to think about my opponent’s power economy as much (or more, frankly!) as my own, I’m also having to make sure the bubble is being counter, my opponent is aware that if they move he can Giant’s Blood away and cause more problems, where he’s going to go when he does that to maximise the bubble, whether he wants to Trickster or I Am a God in response to attacks… Loki has a massively outsized impact on the game and takes up a huge amount of space in both players’ minds.

After 7 games straight of him I simply did not want to play another 3 games of it, especially as – for all everyone was for the mast part agreeing he was a huge pain to play around and the most annoying and impactful model on the table – that wasn’t actually translating into wins for most of my games.

Luckily (?) for me, I had a bout of insomnia Saturday night, which is not an uncommon occurrence, and I wound up building an entirely new roster from scratch with the mission objective: I want to make Gwenom work in Web Warriors, because I really like my Gwenom miniature. I also want to play Ms. Marvel and Squirrel Girl, because those, too, are some of my favourite characters – put that all together and you’re trying to run a Web Warriors build that can fight.

Let’s see how that works out for me.

The New Roster – Violent Spiders

Amazing Spider-Man
Gwenom
Agent Venom
Venom
Captain Marvel
Squirrel Girl
Miles Morales
Ms. Marvel
Ghost-Spider
Black Widow

Brace for Impact
Sacrifice
Masked Menace
All Webbed Up
Spider-Tracker
Clone Saga
Lethal Protector
Fan Club
A Better Tomorrow
Inexplicable Demise

Infinity Formula Goes Missing
Deadly Meteors Mutate Citizens
Deadline to Destruction

Scientific Samples Found in Discovered Universe
Spider-Infected Invade Manhattan
Skrulls Infiltrate World Leadership

There are a few choices here which might be raising some eyebrows. Captain Marvel (original flavour) brings a size 4 character and terrain throw which I think you need if you are going to try and run a fighty squad. Arguably, Beta Ray Bill does it better, but Captain Marvel takes more advantage of the Miles Morales rerolls, and is more punishing to whiff against if someone tries to burn her down and fails. Most people choose to try and ignore her.

Which is where Masked Menace comes in. One or two of those camera tokens on the board means that it is not difficult for Captain Marvel to score a couple of extra points of power from her gainer round 2, and if she has picked up an extract she is now on 5 power. If she does just one gainer but picked up an extract, she is probably on 3, which is enough to move and throw. 5 power means she goes into the next round on 6, and can Binary Form, shoot two 6 die reroll any attacks, throw, and end on 3 power ready to binary form again in round 4 – all without anyone hitting her to power her up.

Masked Menace also helps both Gwenom and Venom out as they need power for their clapbacks and in an ideal world they want to be clapping back with their spender to heal, Venom especially. Or, if they don’t attack them either, both Gwenom and Venom are happy to use their superpowers, fuel All Webbed Up turn 3, there’s a lot of possibilities.

It didn’t actually come up in the game because Gwenom’s mobility is her major advantage and Venom’s mobility is his major weakness, but there’s a cute interaction with Sacrifice/Lethal Protector and Venom. If someone attacks Venom and Gwenom is nearby, both get the opportunity to hit them back, so a character can take between 10 and 14 die of physical attacks on their own turn if the Symbiote Duo have the power to spend.

What surprised me when I actually played Gwenom, though, was how little this aspect of her kit was necessary to make her feel like a completely viable 4 threat character. Going Maximum Gwenom to heal and then Symbiote Spider Technique means that on an all webbed up turn she can throw a 9 die physical then a 7 die reroll any physical, probably building enough power to then throw size 3 terrain or characters which is absolutely brutal. Or she can move, attack, move, then throw size 3 characters or terrain.

Her throw is also medium, the same as Venom’s, so if the target is slowed they have to use two actions (or spend for a superpower if they have one) to walk back to where they started. There is a playstyle here which is still distinctly Web Warriors in the sense that almost every character you put on the table has the ability to displace, but also with a huge amount of damage potential that Webs generally lacks. The trade-off is that you don’t have Lifesaver, you don’t have as many weblines, and power generation is more dependent on dice – but so long as you aren’t running headlong into an energy attack gunline, your models are disturbingly resilient for a Web Warriors roster.

Finally: Black Widow should’ve been Okoye, but I could not find my Okoye miniature no matter how hard I looked. Okoye lets you do the Gwenom-attacks-because-I-bodyguarded trick on two spots of the board almost every game so she’s definitely a straight upgrade. But, whatever, she became Black Widow. I figured it wouldn’t make a huge difference.

Let’s see how that works out for me!

Game 5

Exhausted from lack of sleep, running mostly on Lucozade, my first game of the day was…

Delayed.

I waited at the table for 20 minutes after the time was called and my opponent did not appear. I understand that there was some sort of issue with Longshanks that messed everything up, and when I spoke with the organisers one of them dropped out and we began the round late.

Still, it’s not the organisers fault that Longshanks got confused. Overall the event seemed to run smoothly barring those glitches, and whilst I was feeling the time pressure a bit, my opponent was gracious and we managed to get the game started pretty quickly.

I was paired up into the same Apocalypse player I had played the previous day, but with a very different roster… which we then drew Guardians/Skrulls again, albeit at 17 rather than 16. Well, I thought, this should at least prove to be a good test of this roster versus my Midnight Sons. Apocalypse brought exactly the same team, and I ran Miles/Gwenom/Venom/Captain Marvel/Black Widow.

Originally I was going to run all three symbiotes but then I remembered Apocalypse’s energy attack and thought better of it.

There were two big factors to how this game went. The first was that Gwenom survived turn 1 on 1 health which meant that she was fully loaded with power at the top of turn 2. The second was that I was able to bait out Brace before Captain Marvel used her size 4 throw into Apocalypse.

The game was still tough with a lot of back and forth, but the damage output from the team was high enough – mostly thanks to throws – to kill Apocalypse himself and put huge pressure on the rest of the team. Probably the lynchpin moment of the game was Apocalypse using The First One to KO Toad, recovering a point of damage because he was injured and Stagger fell off, reactivate and… fail to kill Miles with 14 dice of mystic attacks.

I think it is fair to say that my opponent’s attack dice were performing badly and my defensive dice across this game were performing above average but the truth is that my defence dice performed extremely well for me across all three games, and part of that has to come down to the general strength of Miles’ leadership. Gwenom have 4/2/3 reroll 2 then reroll 1 on everything but mystic (where she ‘just’ rerolls 1) means that her effective energy defence is probably around a 3, whilst trying to get her to go down with physical attacks is a real challenge.

People are reluctant to attack Venom in general because they risk him eating them back and healing back the damage they just did, Captain Marvel usually has him around as a bodyguard for physical and mystic, doesn’t care about energy, and again – people don’t want to power her up and just try to ignore her.

The best target on the board is often Miles or Black Widow. Miles I am very happy to play cagey with because his job is to steal an extract late game or just sit on a point with stealth. Black Widow should have been played like that, but what I actually used her as was a distraction to run in and demand to be dealt with or score me points.

In the end, I was able to just squeak out a win 19-17 on turn 6, which was a promising start!

Game 6

Game six was into Guardians of the Galaxy, which was… the one thing I really didn’t want to happen.

I could have pivoted to a more standard Webs play – that’s why Ghost-Spider is in the list after all, but we were playing Guardians/Samples at 17 again and I wanted to see just how bad 2 energy defence actually is into a team kitted out with energy attacks.

The answer? Quite bad!

I took the same team as in game 5, my opponent took Star Lord/Angela/Rocket/Groot/Beta Ray Bill

I definitely made a lot of other mistakes this game. I threw away Black Widow again to try and buy time; she got one-shot by Rocket after he was done one-shotting Gwenom. I did a poor job with deployment and wound up with Captain Marvel matched up against Bill when I should’ve worked harder to put her in against Star-Lord and Rocket (the latter of whom simply walked away from her to take out Gwenom turn 1).

I can’t even claim my defence dice were poor. The rerolls or counts blanks meant my characters were consistently scoring 2 blocks. However, Guardians consistent dice meant that they far outstripped any ability for 2 dice to keep up. Maybe recalibration matrix could’ve stopped the first spike, but it would also undo my own consistency and the team just didn’t have the ability to stand up to the ranged firepower.

The game was over turn 3, 17-11 to Guardians.

I’ve thought about this game a fair amount since and I think there’s a few ways to try and deal with it.

Certainly, one game is not enough to say that the pattern is undeniable – but it also makes intuitive sense and seems broadly supported by the community. Take a lot of low energy defence characters into Guardians and you’re going to have a bad time.

My opponent was also saying that he has a pretty good win rate against more classic webs. I’m wondering if the play here is to switch Agent Venom in the roster, and Gwenom in the squad, for Daredevil.

He isn’t a character I thought about previously because – honestly – I don’t think of him as a Web Warrior at all, but if I had him and the Okoye the roster is supposed to have, she can probably make sure he gets into the gunline before he dies, and he can then throw out some nice Devil’s Deliverance attacks, potentially buy time for Venom to get up and support… I think there’s some potential there, and whilst I like Agent Venom from a theme perspective, I don’t think there’s a good slot for him when I’m already trying to run the other two Web Warrior symbiotes.

Much to think about.

I would also like to say that the table for this game in particular was excellent. It was a Limbo themed table and came with a whole sheet of information about Magik’s realm, her comics, panels and lore to enjoy. I thought that absolutely rocked and I really enjoyed reading up about where we were going to be fighting before Star-Lord brutally executed my teenagers.

Game 7

The final game of the tournament was into Daredevil Defenders, and it is what got me thinking about the above roster swap! I hadn’t seen Daredevil on the table since his rework, and he has gone from basically a punchline to an actually really solid character! That was nice to see.

We were playing Infinity Formula/Montesi at 18, which was exactly what I wanted because 18 lets me put down all the characters I wanted to play that day. My squad was Miles/Gwenom/Venom/Squirrel Girl/Ms. Marvel and let me tell you I was so happy just to get to run them all together I didn’t really mind what happened in the game from that point on.

My opponent ran Daredevil/Hulk/Namor/Luke Cage and things got off to a fairly worrying start. Namor did a safe grab as he had priority, Hulk managed to daze both Squirrel Girl and Ms. Marvel due to massive dice spikes and throwing people around. However, turn 2 we were able to mitigate Hulk’s impact a bit with Sacrifice onto Venom, Gwenom dazed Daredevil with a 7 die hit then a 5 die reroll all hit, Ms. Marvel put some damage into Luke Cage and Miles was able to jump out from behind his point, kick Namor back off the point, and run back to start pulling back points and set me up for a turn 3 where my team was already bursting with power.

Infinity Formula really helps this team a lot.

See, in the previous round, Squirrel Girl had already played my favourite card:

Is this a competitive card? Probably not. Is this a good card? Well. I think it has its uses into Hulks and similar monsters in Web Warriors specifically. Because whilst my opponent sweated over the possibility of getting multiple horrible conditions or even just losing Hulk immediately… all I really wanted was the slow. Which is lucky, because that’s all I got. My opponent even thought it was funny because Hulk already moves short so it does literally nothing.

(Sidebar, but I’d really like to see Slow do more so that it isn’t a condition people just ignore if they already move short. Perhaps if your movement is already short you could no longer be moved by friendly effects? Cribbing from Malifaux a little there)

Except it does mean Web Warriors get +2 dice to attack him. So when he tried to finish off Ms. Marvel, Venom was able to jump in the way with Lethal Protector and take the hit, then eat him back for the full 5 damage he had already accumulated.

Hulk threw out another attack and threw Venom but didn’t succeed in doing much more. Gwenom finished off Daredevil with her boosted builder and spender, again healing what little damage she had taken, Ms. Marvel and Squirrel Girl finished off Cage, Miles dazed Namor and stole his extract…

The game turned around extremely fast because the team was very good at turning power into damage, and the opponent’s attacks couldn’t connect cleanly enough through the very consistent Web Warriors defence dice. It finished up 20-5 to Team Pink.

So overall on my return to MCP I won 4/10 games across the weekend, 3/7 of them in the actual UK GT, and finished up 23^rd out of 28 players overall (or 5^th in my little pod of 10 in the second day).

That is a lot better than I expected to do, so I’m very happy with my performance! I’m also happy that my opponents generally seemed to have a good time, even when being frustrated by Loki, perhaps the most annoying character to play against in the entire game. Everyone was great, there were cool prizes, and I look forward to going to more in future.

I’d particularly like to shout out the event organisers – Jamie and Norbert from the incredible second life of the Across the Bifrost podcast. They kept the show on the road despite some undoubtedly stressful technical issues and were great to chat with through the weekend. I know next year they are hoping that the UK GT expands, and I know that I’ll be there again for sure!

To me it feels like Marvel is in an extremely exciting place right now. There are, as there always will be, things that are above the curve and things that struggle to find a place – but there is also always the opportunity to surprise people, come at the game from a different angle, and throw a curveball with something off-meta.

I started playing Crisis Protocol because I needed a new game and it was to hand. I kept playing it because I loved that feeling of finding weird things that make people go ‘oh wow I didn’t expect that’. I put it down because it felt like the community honestly wasn’t having much fun with it any more during the Malekith/Cosmic Ghost Rider era.

I’m happy to say that the fun is definitely back in the game. It might not be a new edition – in fact, I had a conversation with Will Schick where he said that one of the design goals is that there will never be a new edition – but the game feels extremely different to how it did when I stopped playing, and I would say for the better.

Now I just need to decide what I want to play because too much of it looks fun. Which is a great problem to have.

HONK!