Powerscaling: Lady Mastermind

Regan Wyngarde isn't exactly a character that I had a lot of interest in prior to seeing her release in Marvel Crisis Protocol. I hadn't heard of her, and even her sculpt wasn't... my favourite, though I do appreciate the arrogance in the pose, the leaping leopard is a bit of a tough sell.

But! After putting her on the table, Lady Mastermind became a fixture in my roster with a play pattern that reminded me of one of my absolute favourites in the original Loki, which was not something I expected at all from reading her card. Let's dive in to why that is!

The most complicated thing here is undoubtedly Your Reality is Whatever I Want it to Be. There's a ton of text here, but I'll sum it up: If you have power equal to a character's mental defense and Regan is within range 5 of them, she can spend that much power and make an attack with a type, range and power equal to their builder or spender, targeting another enemy character near them.

It doesn't get any triggers or special rules, which can be both good and bad, but what this ultimately means is that if Regan is within range 5 of her targets, she can reliably make three attacks in a round. She doesn't offer any displacement, but this combos really nicely with her Brain Fog superpower, which was the theme of my core, and means that she is often making three attacks in a round which your opponent can't use any reactive superpowers or team tactics cards to mitigate. This makes her perfect for picking off characters who might otherwise have been saved by bodyguard-style effects, or softening up targets that rely on paying to reduce damage.

Her primary attack - Deadly Illusions - is also range 5 and whilst it can only do 1 damage at a time if the opponent has no special conditions, if you pair her up with a condition-dealing character (like Pyro, Omega Red or Abomination) it is quite usual for her to be able to do 3 damage with her Mind Over Matter trigger, 1 damage with a second Deadly Illusions, and then push through another damage or two with the aforementioned Your Reality attack. That's pretty respectable damage output, and even if she's not getting that, the ability to put out Bleed (for another point of chip damage, deceptively), poison, shock or incinerate on wilds lets her soften targets up for others on your team or mitigate the hit back.

None of this sounds very Loki-like so far, though, does it? So why did I wind up thinking of her like that the more I played her?

Mostly it's because everything Regan does is extremely annoying and your opponent has to be thinking around her. Whilst she can attack all the way out to range 5, where she actually wants to be is within range 3 of a fight where she can farm power from Try a Little Harder Next Time, and ideally make sure that she is positioned so that if they want to come and fight her they have to get off the point. Even better if she's not holding an objective, so the investment in fighting her feels even worse.

Her Mental Lock means that in practice she often winds up being a 4 defense character because nobody feels good spending 2 power to deny 1 defense die (and if they do, they'll be annoyed about it) and the last piece to the puzzle is her Mirage tactics card.

Again, this is a lot of text but the summary is:

If the opponent rolls skulls and Regan is within range 3 of the target, she can reduce the damage (unless they count blanks), refund some of the power she spent on the card, and then advance the target short.

This can put a character that has been displaced back onto a point, it can also take them out of range for any subsequent attacks, and if someone comes to try and deal with her, she can use it to get herself out of a tight situation.

I think this is almost a compulsory card if you're running her; it isn't reliable one hundred per cent of the time (your opponent might not roll skulls when you really want them) but I haven't played her yet and failed to find an opportunity for it to mess up what the enemy activation is trying to do - which is where that Loki-esque nature comes in.

Between the card, the fact that they want to try and position their characters so they can't hit each other, the conditions she herself can put out and the ability to translate conditions into damage there is a large mental tax to playing against Lady Mastermind which makes the easiest way to deal with her to try and kill her - and if you're playing her with that in mind, doing so requires an investment of resources that is getting your opponent nothing back except the removal of this nuisance character.

All that said, she obviously has some weaknesses of her own. The biggest is the fact that she's not actually that difficult to remove herself - even if your opponent won't invest in reducing her defenses, 4 with no rerolls and no other defensive tech with only 6/5 health is not going to stick around long to any sustained pressure.

She also isn't terribly mobile or displacement. I generally don't take her on Wedding Party or Mayor Fisk because whilst those crises seem like they'd give her a target rich environment, in practice I prefer teams where absolutely everyone has ways to stick around on the points and push your opponent off them; the VP being so tightly concentrated in two positions on the board make a character who can't directly contribute to them easily a much tougher sell.

But outside of those two situations, where it is a bit less punishing for her to hang back from the main fight and still contribute, I've found her to be a surprisingly effective puzzle for your opponent to unpick.

Overall, I think we have to rate her S, for Skulls? Don't mind if I do.