Across the Bifrost Team Championships 2026

 

After 6 months of prep along with my team the Thunderbolts, we gathered in Shepherd's Bush along with 115 other competitors to take part in Across the Bifrost's Team Champions!

This was my very first time being part of a team in any miniature wargaming context, and jumping right in with a seven round tournament that I believe was the largest MCP event ever to have been organised was an incredible way to start! We had some of the best players in the world, who had travelled from all over the place, to play Crisis Protocol at the very highest levels. Also, we were there!

As before I'm not going to try and give an exhaustive play by play of all seven rounds of the tournament. Partly because I think it could be overwhelming, but mostly because I am writing this the morning after the event and already some of the details of those games are fuzzy. Instead, I'm going to break this report down into three sections. First my thoughts on how the tournament structure and team gaming worked, then my thoughts on the state of the game in general as this was my first big event since the dramatic changes a few months ago, and lastly what I learned about my roster in particular.

The Tournament

I cannot thank Norbert and Jamie of Across the Bifrost enough for organising all this. Pulling 60 tables together would have been difficult under any circumstances, but the recent changes to the way throws in MCP work mean that the assumptions we used to take about what made a good table all got thrown up in the air at the last minute.

Despite this, one of the things that really stood out to me as we played was not just that the tables were all good and functional (and I had the potential to play Magneto so I always wanted to play on a table which worked for him so I was looking at them with that eye) but also that the creativity and thematics of the tables were incredible. We had the crashed plane from Lost that had a huge number of easter eggs  with tiny crabs painted up as marvel characters. We had a Sanctum Sanctorum bursting with tentacular monstrosities. We had a board made of huge MCP dice and sound effects.

The creativity of the MCP community in putting together these tables always blows me away. More than any other game I have played, MCP offers the chance to have some hugely impressive and beautiful boards and the tournament community have fully embraced it.

The pairing structure was also quite impressive. I won't explain the whole thing step by step but the essential outcome was that the team captains were each able to control a number of the matchups in a way similar to the refreshed crisis selection format, both opponents and which tables were played on. It felt very tactical, and I had a good laugh after we started revealing my team captain Jay's roster first because he was playing unaffiliated with just a huge selection of the characters people widely regard as the best in the game, which kind of throws the idea of finding a hard counter right out the window. I doubt many people were teching for 'IDK literally everything strong my teammates aren't using, good luck!'

I would also like to throw out huge thanks to Jay and Fireborn for handling the pairing process and just telling me where I needed to go and who I needed to fight. That took a lot of the stress out of it for me but I'm sure it felt like a lot more for them! In advance of the tournament we'd created a matrix of our players and the affiliations that we were playing into with a 1-10 rating for how confident we felt into them, and that let them try and pick our matchups appropriately. More on how that went later, though I will say it was very funny to me that we all talked a big game about our plans into Apocalypse and the many strategies we had dreamed up to counter him, and then proceded to lose every game into Apocalypse we played.

Everyone has a plan until they get Biomorphic Arsenal'd in the face I guess. 

The comraderie in the Thunderbolts was incredible. I didn't know any of my teammates before we started playing, we met up thanks to the Across the Bifrost discord and were united by a general attitude that we didn't want to play super high level sweaty MCP, we just wanted to go and have some fun. Excepting the fact that any room filled with over a hundred gamers is going to be somewhat sweaty, I think we absolutely succeeded at that goal. Some of our team were just starting their MCP journey, others had played from the very start of the game, and I had a great time just having somewhere to vent my MCP thoughts during the day for six months. 

I know. I have a blog, I'm in most of the public discords and I still needed somewhere else to go on about it. What can I say? I like to honk. 

In terms of actually playing the game, what stood out to me most was how radically it changes the calculus on what works. You do not need to be prepared for all comers (and I think trying to be in a team format is actually a big mistake). When you can control the matchup to some degree you are much more free to build rosters that don't worry about certain things too much. For instance, I didn't play into Shang Chi at all, across all seven games. Nor did I face Inhumans, which I identified as one of the few teams that could consistently outscore what I was trying to do. But more on that later.

 The Game

There were.some huge changes to the way MCP is played at the end of 2025. I'm not going to lie, I wasn't a fan of most of them on paper and I was happy to say so. I disliked the priority roll going to a two part system which made deployment and turn one less predictable, I thought that would make the game feel much more random. I disliked the throw changes, I thought it was very silly that dropping a building on someone hurts as much as dropping a waste paper basket on them. I disliked the crisis selection changes, I thought that offered too much control to your opponent.

I did like all the character updates though. And I have a ton of respect for the MCP designers, who have created one of the most consistently fun games I have ever played. So, rather than throwing my hands up and quitting Crisis Protocol forever, I obviously stuck with it and at this point I have to admit I was wrong. They were right. Who knew that professional game designers can design games better than some random goose on the internet? Shocker!

The priority roll and crisis selection changes are massive and they do make it much harder to consistently play on crises that you really want to play on and dominate them because you can predict in advance how turn one will play out thanks to deployment. I was right about that. What I missed was how much better that feels to actually play than the old method. I am not (and do not try to be) a hypercompetitive gamer, and the fact that this brings things down a level and adds some more randomness into the game meant that there wasn't a single matchup across the seven games I played where I felt like it was a foregone conclusion before we started.

Which is not to say that the game isn't still highly competitive. The gulf between the top tables and the bottom was still pretty clear, and good players were consistently pulling very good results, but it means that those results are down to moment to moment decisions within the game rather than crisis selection and deployment. That's a good thing and I am now officially a fan of this.

The throw changes...

Thematically I still think this is a miss. If you get The Hulk dropped on you that should hurt more than having Rocket Racoon dropped on you, I'm sorry! It should!

But, I will grudgingly admit that in terms of gameplay it is overall better for the game for it to work as it now does. Brace for Impact no longer feels necessary - my roster didn't have it and nor did most of the rosters I faced - and that would've been unthinkable before. Terrain in the games I played was no longer just ammunition, it was also used much more tactically, with people using it to body block throws and pushes where before they might have been nervous about standing right up against a size three or four piece of terrain. I played a lot of Exodus and one game of Magneto over the course of the weekend and both those characters made great use of the size one and two terrain to increase their damage output, but it no longer felt overwhelming.

Magneto was even able to use terrain to ensure that when the opponent started throwing him away (which I was sure they'd do), he was thrown from one section of the board where he'd used all the size one terrain to another section where he got more back. That felt pretty incredible. Which I guess brings me to the final section...

Goostique

My roster was as follows:

Characters (10)
* Magneto (6)
Exodus (5)
Juggernaut (5)
* Emma Frost (4)
Lady Mastermind (4)
Rhino (4)
* Mystique (3)
Pyro (3)
The Blob (3)
Toad (2)

Team Tactics (10)
My Hellfire Club
Asteroid M
Do You Know Who I Am?
Magnetic Refraction
Mirage
Pyrotechnics
This is a Robbery
The Pawns Go First
Indomitable (R)
Patch Up (R)

Secure Crisis
Wedding Party Targeted in Terrible Attack! (R, 20)
Intrusions Open Across City As Seals Collapse (C, 19)
Lockdown! Security Systems Stymie Breakout (S, 18)
Cosmic Invasion! Black Order Descends on Earth (D, 16)
Deadly Meteors Mutate Civilians (I, 17)

Extract Crisis
Jailbreak Leads to Mass Mutant Escape! (T, 20)
Skrulls Infiltrate World Leadership (J, 20)
Mutant Extremists Target U.S. Senators! (L, 19)
Inhumans Deploy Advanced Weaponry (O, 18)
Terrigen Canisters Fuel Doomsday Device (F, 17)

Long term Goose fans may remember that some time ago I played into Joemanji's incredible Mystique, and after struggling to make Elsa work for several months, when they announced the changes to Emma Frost I knew I wanted to try and make something similar work with a slightly different core.

I went in with the thought that on crises which brought us close together and scored slowly I would play Magneto, and for everything else I would run Mystique along with Emma Frost and Lady Mastermind.

Those three characters all have abilities which mean that on their activations you can't use reactive team tactics cards or superpowers. If I'm going 5 wide (which I think I managed every time I played them) that means that you only have two activations in which you can use those powers at all.

In a standard tournament of MCP this would only be a minor thing; a lot of teams don't worry too much about bodyguards, defense boosts or other such tools. In a team tournament, though, it meant that my captain could try and match me into teams where this was highly relevant, and for the most part we did.

On top of that, I really came to appreciate what Emma Frost and Lady Mastermind bring to the table themselves. Mystique is a bit of a known quantity, but those two characters were incredible. So was Exodus, who got to live his dream of being a mini Magneto in all the games I played him.

I will go into more detail on each of those characters in upcoming posts, they all deserve it, but three times across the weekend I played a 20 threat team of: Mystique, Lady Mastermind, Emma Frost, Rhino, Exodus. The basic strategy was to have Exodus draw focus and threat as a tough damage dealer who demanded a response, whilst the rest of my team ran around scoring points.

That worked and I wound up going 5-2. The two games I lost were one into Apocalypse and one of the best players I have ever gone up against - that whole team was running like a well-oiled machine and I think that was the only round where the Thunderbolts didn't manage to put at least one win on the board, and the game where I played Magneto - which was incredibly fun and down to the wire. It all came down to the last activation of the last round of the game and I lost by a single point.

All of my opponents were great fun to play against. I think a few were a little shocked or confused by what these new characters could actually do - Emma in particular stood out as a character who has changed so radically from what she used to be that very often people were dismayed to discover that, no, switching into diamond form doesn't cost power, and, yes, in diamond form she has a 5/5/4 defensive statline and counts blanks on her mystic defense. And, yes, she has 6/6 health. Honestly, I think she may be in the running for best four threat in the game now, and I look forward to talking about that later.

The Thunderbolts overall finished up 23rd out of 24 teams, but I have to say it felt like we still came away the winners. We all learned a lot more about our respective rosters, we had a good time, we threw some dice alongside new friends and we lived up to our team motto.

We weren't super.

We weren't heroes.

And we never gave up.

Who can say if there'll be a Thunderbolts sequel in future? I hope so.

Of course massive congratulations to the Hussars of the Galaxy who took the win. It sure looked like the top half of the board was very fierce from our view down the bottom and I'm glad the trip was worth it! 

Finally, I'd like to give a shout-out to the people who let me know that they have read this blog and enjoy it. It honestly felt incredible to meet people who knew about it and let me know they appreciate my thoughts. MCP has one of the best communities of any wargame I've played, and it is great to feel like I'm even a tiny part of that. So, thank you, and I hope you enjoyed this writeup too. Hopefully there will be many more Marvel tournaments over the coming year and I'll discuss what I took away from them, too!

And as always:

HONK!