Powerscaling: Emma Frost

 

 

Wowee. Where to begin with Emma Frost?

I feel a little bad even covering her in some ways to be honest. The point of this series is to highlight characters that I feel get overlooked, and I don't think anyone is going to be overlooking Emma any point in the near future. I think she's quite possibly the best four threat in the game, up there with an unerrated Shang Chi, and if you're not seeing her all over the place in your local meta already... give it time. When people understand just how much this character can do, the question becomes why aren't you bringing the model with solid offense, great displacement and reliable defenses in your squad? There are reasons, but if you need a generalist all-rounder who happens to bring great tricks along for the ride, Emma is your girl.

And what a glow up! Emma has spent years being underwhelming and mostly a tool for enabling the Hellfire Club. Now, she stands strong on her own and she alone might be a solid argument for giving the Club a second look. Let's get into why.

Important to note that Emma is not a simple character to play. She maintains her roll as a transform character, and you will often be asking yourself if you want her to transform or not when she is attacked each turn. The two modes are both strong, but they are strong in different ways and understanding both of them is important to her play pattern - you're basically bringing two fairly complex characters for the price of one, which is a fair amount of additional mental overhead in a game. But darling, she's worth it!
 

 

In her normal mode, Emma is both a long range mental threat with a 5 die builder at range 4 which has the rare potential to move a character, and a more impressive 8 die spender which only needs to get a wild for additional damage and displacement. Those are both solid attacks you're generally happy to throw out.

Telepathic Lash is her other important power; it is only three dice for three power which feels underwhelming at first, but getting damage unresisted on crit wild or hits makes it roughly equivalent to an average 5 die attack, and unless you are unlucky you will sneak through another damage and get that displacement. This makes her very similar to Lady Mastermind, though she is shorter range, doesn't need two opponents near each other, and displaces - at the cost of having a much lower potential damage cap. 

Still, this begins to feel oppressive if Emma is getting two attacks in a turn because now you're also hitting that 'kind of' three attacks in an activation threshold and you're likely to get most characters off the point if you focus on them. Unless the dice completely abandon her she's probably moving at least one enemy character away from the action, and her ceiling is three - which is the kind of displacement value you see more commonly in characters specialised only to do that.

This is doubly true because her Power Inhibition means that it is impossible for characters to use tactics cards or reactive powers to Indomitable, Sacrifice, Shield Mind or Bodyguard; Emma in this mode is hitting whoever she wants to hit and if she gets her triggers she is getting the displacement, which feels nice into quite a few teams.

Finally, Shield Mind makes her the absolute bane of Web Warriors and similar displacement-focused teams. Whilst keeping the power for this will often mean that she isn't putting out three attacks, she can turn off the ability for Advance, Push or Place effects to work on herself or allies within range 4 if they come from superpowers or mental attacks. Important to note that effects like Impact Webbing will still work because they are physical (unless you play her in Convocation, at which point Iron Bound Books lets her do it) but even so, that makes it much easier to protect your positioning with the careful use of bodyblocking and terrain.

All of that would be enough to justify consideration to her as a four threat to me. Yes, 2 physical defense is a weakness, but she is still a 6/6 character and you can protect her with some friends like Colossus.

But you don't really need to. She's got a girl's best friend on speed dial.

When Emma transforms she goes all the way up to 5/5/4 defenses, but don't worry she also counts blanks on her mental defense so she just becomes much tankier across the board. It costs no power for her to do this, and she also becomes immune to Bleed, Incinerate, Poison and Stun, which means that a bunch of negative status effects - most importantly Incinerate in my view - fall right off.

If you're running her with a character like Cable or Exodus to boost shields you can really make her incredibly resilient against particular attacks. This also makes her a great choice to go and grab a midline objective, because after she's done so, it's quite likely the opponent will only get one hit in on her before she can transform back out of range of further retribution, and on that one hit she's going to have very solid defenses.

Her attacks are shorter range in this form - both being Range 2 - but they are still solid. Diamond Strike has wild stun and crit pierce which are both very relevant, and Shatter also has crit pierce which is nice on a 7 die area attack, though I think I only used it once where the opponent happened to put three targets around her (which felt like too much value to pass up).

The reason to stick around and not feel too bad about losing all her longer range displacing attacks, though, is Sometimes One Must Get Their Hands Dirty. Whilst she can advance people in her normal mode, it is dice reliant and there are a few ways in the game now to avoid advances. There are fewer ways to prevent throws, and with a size 3 character throw for 3 power, which you probably had because you took some damage going into Diamond Form, Emma can soak a couple of attacks in her tankier mode than walk back onto a point and throw someone off it. This was a pretty common play pattern in my games with her, and just made her feel very frustrating to play into.

It's not all better on the diamond form side of course - she can't use team tactics cards, which you have to bear in mind when playing cards like Asteroid M, Sacrifice or Indomitable. She can still be targeted by Mirage or have Patch Up played on her though, as she's not the one playing those cards in those instances, which is worth keeping in mind.

If Emma begins her turn in diamond form on only 1 or 2 power it can be worth using 'Far From my Best Look' to lose that power and transform back into normal mode to try and get some of those good attacks off, but otherwise I found that generally getting a move attack and throw, or even a move move throw, still gives her a play pattern that feels great - able to clear a point and potentially do some damage every round whilst being tough enough to hold an extract comfortably.

I've mostly played Emma under Mystique's leadership, where the ability to gain power after picking up an extract means that her power economy feels a little better. Magneto obviously amplifies that, able to make sure that when she starts in diamond form her throw is almost always available and fuelling her kit in normal mode.

But I don't think there's many places where Emma won't benefit and be able to play a role. Her own affiliation, Hellfire Club, also hugely benefits from having a leader with such a flexible array of play lines available, and the Shapeshifters (Emma, Mystique, Lady Mastermind) helpfully gives you the ability to play either Hellfire or Brotherhood with the same trio as your core trio.

There are a couple of tactics cards it is worth covering briefly, though honestly I didn't bring either and I don't feel she requires them to more than justify her place in both rosters.

Headmistress lets Emma potentially reposition the whole team (though if none of your characters have objectives that's not a great sign). Medium advance is more than you get from similar effects (like the ever-popular Avengers Assemble), offset by the two restrictions that you can't use it to run away with objectives and all the power has to come from Emma when she has very good ways to spend power. It's still a very strong effect and if you're playing X-Men, you're probably playing them at least partly for all the movement shenanigans the team can get up to so this feels like it will play nicely into the X-Men gameplan.

Popularised by Jamie of Across the Bifrost fame, Mind Transfer seems underwhelming at first glance and is quite difficult to set up to use. However, if you're facing characters who bring grunts, you can move the activated token from the grunts over to the opposing character and the grunts still can't activate as their parent character still has a token. Emma now has much more reliable ways to move opposing characters around to get them within 2 of the grunts, so I can see this being a great counterplay card with some possible niche applications into other situations. Four power is just a lot for Emma to hold back, and at least in the rosters I've played, competition for card slots is fierce. Still definitely one to keep in mind if Nick Fury and Red Skull are terrorising you!

Even 1500 words in I feel like I'm only scratching the diamond-hard surface of what Emma offers, but I'm going to have to leave it here. Her final rating comes out at a solid A, for Apple - something that your opponents are going to want to bring to try and keep this headteacher happy.

HONK!