A Goose's Top Ten Tactics Cards That You Can't Play!

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 affiliated card. There are literally three exceptions to this in Warpath (which I take if I have a character with a reactive attack), Instant Recovery (which I take if I have 2 or more characters with healing factor) and Recalibration Matrix (which I take as a final ‘whatever I guess this is fine’ option).

That’s disappointing! There are a plethora of great situational tactics cards in the game’s lifecycle which I would like to see brought back. Here is a selection!

10) Disarm

This used to be a staple in my Web Warriors list and when Malekith and Corvus were menaces I’d sometimes try and sneak in disarm and a source of shock to make sure I had at least one round where they would feel blunted compared to their norm.

It still requires some setup and there’s still very much the possibility of a spike, but there are some affiliations today where I feel like this could really shine. Defenders putting this on a Hexed damage dealer to make sure they really can’t spike and Midnight Sons with a power drain build where you’re trying to stop your opponent’s key characters being able to pop off could both make great use of this.

9) Battle Lust

A situational card that would help some of the big boys shine a little brighter. Battle Lust has some steep costs to it – you’re not able to double tap most of the time (though charge can mitigate that a bit), you still have to pay a high amount of power, and there’s always the chance that you can whiff and fail to get the push… but there are a few characters where I feel like adding the chance of some control on an attack would make them feel more viable. I’d love to pay 7 power from Ms. Marvel to have her transform, move and make a 9 die attack with 3 rerolls to try and bump someone off the point. That’d rule!

8) Seeing Red

Another card I used to take a lot. Seeing Red punishes people for trying to ignore your heavy hitters and beat up your little characters around them. This is not cheap! 3 power is a lot, and your opponent can still play around it. More importantly, it’s just very flavourful. I miss not being able to have my big guys punch out people for picking on the weaklings.

7) No Matter the Cost

We have a lot of really good spenders now, and I feel like the loss of No Matter the Cost has also hurt healing factor characters a great deal. Tactics card slots are precious, so whether or not it is worth a slot to let X-23 use her spender for free when she rarely has an issue building power anyway is kind of an open question… but I think the fact that we can’t make that choice any more is to the game’s detriment. This is another of those cards that only makes sense for very specific characters in very specific builds, but it’s an interesting option to have access to and the fact anyone can use it means it can come up in surprising locations in some games.

I also think it's sad that now that we have a Carol who would really benefit from the card whose art she is on, we can't play it! Boo!

6) Psychic Shielding Device (P.S.D)

Always a very niche card, the Psychic Shielding Device (P.S.D) was still a lot of fun to have access to in some matchups; in the modern meta I think a little protection from Ultron2 and Dracula advancing you probably wouldn’t go amiss. It also helped into the Web Warriors matchup where you could stop their pushes for a round, and the added benefit vs mystic attacks was always something to think about into Convocation. I don’t think this card would completely mitigate the strength of any of those characters or matchups, but I would appreciate being able to consider whether I want to bring it along anyway.

5) Heave Ho

The way my teambuilding is working out with Midnight Sons I often wind up with no terrain throws on the table. I was disappointed to learn that I can’t change this by bringing along Heave Ho any more! A tactics card slot for a size 2 throw that also requires some setup to bring into play was never overly strong but it was a tool that I appreciated having access to in rosters where I was often forced to let my opponent just use all the ammo on the table otherwise. I think we could bring this one back without breaking the game.

Let Rocket Raccoon throw a car again!

4) Trip Up

Similar to Disarm, these two cards used to vie for the same spot in my listbuilding construction – when I needed the ability to blunt a big character the question would be whether I wanted to mitigate their damage output for a round or steal half their activation from them… with a bunch of extra caveats. Trip Up can be a clutch card in some circumstances, but it also has the downside that you can just whiff entirely and waste a card and some power to do nothing at all. Nevertheless, I think the potential payoff is huge – and that should be a gamble that we are allowed to take again if we want to.

3) Follow Me

A very aggressive card with a very high cost, Follow Me used to be a staple in attrition squads that wanted to kill someone and not lose priority the next round. Needing to spend 6 power is still a substantial cost for a lot of characters, but I think this could also help increase the viability of some of the killers that have perhaps fallen off otherwise (I’m thinking particularly of Malekith here).

This is maybe the card I’m least confident about recommending makes a comeback from a balance perspective; it is almost certainly worth a restricted slot if it does return, but I would like to see an option to use your restricted slots on offence rather than just defence, too. Right now it feels like those restricted slots are almost entirely about blunting your opponent; I’d like to see more ability to try and turn the tables if you fall behind anyway.

2) Kick ‘Em While They’re Down

In the world of Apocalypse this is maybe asking for trouble, and (as with all the top three cards) this is another one I think would be worth a restricted slot if it came back, but good old Kick ‘Em enabled a lot of fun back in the day (for me at least) and I think it has only gotten more useful over time.

It is not unusual for my Elsa-led Midnight Sons to have 3-5 conditions on a target. I would absolutely spend a restricted slot to be able to turn that into a build-your-own-Dark Reign. I wouldn’t even be mad if they changed the cost to be equal to the threat value of the target. But I think this card is cool and offers a way to turn condition-focused teams who might otherwise struggle with dice consistency to find that … on one target, for one turn of the game. I think that’s reasonable and wouldn’t be too ridiculous. It also has some of the most fun card art in the set, IMO.

Then again, this is the pick I am definitely the most biased about, so take that with a pinch of salt.

1) Advanced R&D

Possibly the most controversial of the ten I’d seek to bring back, but I miss Advanced R&D. In a world where the Inhumans are setting up some truly absurd turn one plays and Steve1/Zemo still have access to consistent turn one charges, I think letting everyone else get in on that in a more limited format would be absolutely fine and – again – would be worth a restricted slot to enable some interesting plays.

Yes, this does also mean that there’s a lot of jank suddenly opened up – but I think there’s plenty of jank to go around in the existing game format. I think opening those possibilities up to a bunch of other teams would be fine.

I also have just... so many copies of this card. It feels bad that I can't use any of them.

So there we go! Those are my top ten picks for fun and interesting tactics cards that you can’t play any more. Fellow Marvel old-timers, what do you miss?