Goose's What If...? Top 5 MCP Changes To Honk For

 

In general I try not to discuss changes I would like to see in miniatures gaming; I feel like if you are a player who spends your time with the game thinking about how you would prefer things to work, you lose sight of how the game is actually played. However, with the news that 70 or so characters in Marvel Crisis Protocol are going to be updated, I'm going to indulge that impulse a bit and discuss the character changes that I personally would love to see.

Disclaimer: I suspect that the majority of the changes that are coming are going to be minimal; health updates and cleaning  up wording primarily. I don't necessarily think all the changes I will discuss below are likely to happen. I'm also not a game designer and maybe they would all be terrible! But these are the changes that would make me very happy to see.

Also the main thing I want to see is an official card pack. Please, please AMG don't make me print 70+ cards myself. I will actually die. Thank you.

1) Sin

Sinthea Schmidt is a character I've had a lot of fun with in the past. I even wrote a whole article about her back in the day. But she is a little clumsy to use and I think there actually is a good chance she gets cleaned up.

Aside from needing her health adjusted, Sinthea could really use her leadership being updated so that it works on all extract tokens as well as all objective tokens. I would also like to see the order switched; I think it's fine to let her leadership drop extracts before pushing enemies away. It's still a random leadership and nowhere near as reliable as the ones which tend to dominate the game.

I'd also like to see Partners in Crime updated so that it works with Brock Rumlow rather than Crossbones, just so we can run either version with her. If I can cheekily sneak in a second character update here (and I can, it's my post) I'd like to see OG Crossbones given a free bodyguard power for Sinthea Schmidt. I think if all of these changes were made, Sin and Crossbones might reach the lofty heights of 'viable'.

2) Elsa Bloodstone

Oh, my beloved Elsa. I tried hard to make this leadership work but it just does not feel strong enough in the current meta, especially when Blade's leadership is sitting right there in the same affiliation.

In the dark Sentinels power tax future we see coming, I do not feel like Legion of Monsters keeps up. The root + Loki combo was the most powerful part of the Elsa gameplan, and they do it better with more in-affiliation support and a leadership which also lowers the power your opponent gains as you fight them. 

I would propose a two-part fix. Just remove the power cost, and make Boom! 'each other enemy character' instead of hitting your own team. 

We don't have friendly fire on area attacks any more, so I think this last part might actually happen! If Elsa's leadership no longer drains your own resources where Blade's does as well, even if that seems like more of a pipe dream, I think that would make her a compelling secondary leader into some teams though she's rarely likely to be your primary choice.

Here's hoping that AMG are thinking along similar lines and they don't just let Elsa sit on the shelf.

3) Malekith the Accursed

Malekith is ... fine. He's not totally unplayable or anything. But he got hit extremely hard by  nerfs (deserved as they were) to the point where he just feels a little bit boring now. He's a 7 threat character whose builder is just a 7 die attack with no spice and that's boring! In a world where everyone's health is going up I feel like he's at risk of bouncing off a variety of 4 and even 3 threat characters and at that point he just feels sad.

I would like to see Blade of Midnight gain either a wild pierce or some sort of status effect. Incinerate, Hex or (with an appropriately difficult trigger) Judgement could all make him feel that bit more exciting.

I'd also like to see Ferocity's throw go back up to Size 4. Let me throw Hulks again and I think I feel much better about using Malekith. 

I'm not sure we see any of this though; Malekith had his time in the sun and I think most people are happy to see him return to the shadows, I just can't help but want to see such a ridiculously cool miniature shine.

4) Klaw

Speaking of the coolest models in the line ... I've never actually put Klaw on the table and I've never had anyone play him against me either, which is a crying shame because that sculpt is sweet as heck!

The trouble is that he just doesn't seem to have very much of a niche. Soundwave Barrier is the coolest thing on his card but it is expensive. His beam is a good attack but it isn't Whisper and if he is using it he is probably having trouble funding his beam and his healing, which is the only way to keep him around any length of time. Black Market Entrepreneur helps move him around but... all three of the other leaderships in Criminal Syndicate are so much more rewarding to build a plan around.

The health changes may be enough to make him viable if he has more chance to stick around and heal repeatedly, but I would like to see Black Market Entrepreneur rewritten to be something really exciting. The name of the ability makes it sound like he should be getting more power, giving his squad new attack options, or being rewarded for stealing extracts. There's a lot of ways it could go and I think that's the real lever to pull to make Klaw into a compelling option in comparison. I wouldn't be mad if Criminal Syndicate had Kingpin as their secure-focused leadership and Klaw as their extract-focused one, in whatever form that winds up taking.

5) Angela

Back in the day, Angela offered something truly unique in having a large base and a long move. I still think she's decent, and her living ribbons gives her something useful in niche matchups, but the throw changes have reduced her damage output substantially and she doesn't quite measure up even though she has such a large amount of text on her card.

I would like to see the starting text of Living Ribbons removed; enemy characters being unable to move through her base rarely comes up and is mostly just annoying when it does. Instead, I'd like her to be able to spend up to 3 power to reroll defense dice and keep the restriction on enemies rerolling and modifying attack dice into her.

This would give her something to do with the excess power she tends to generate, unless the opponent just refuses to attack her - which seems fine to me.

Whilst I'm dreaming, I think it'd be cool if Heven's Wrath worked off target threat rather than size, and had Cleave on just a crit and a wild. I feel like that'd help make her that much more of an assassin. Maybe both would be too much for a five threat, but I'm not sure. I think there's still a lot of characters that would compete in the five threat slot even with these changes (The Mighty Thor and Loki, Prince of Lies come immediately to mind).

Those are my top five wishes! It was honestly difficult to cut it down to just five and I'm sure every player feels this way. I'm really excited to see what June brings; between last year's core rules changes and such a large update it feels like we're heading into Crisis Protocol Second Edition, and the game has never felt better.

Even if I'm terrified of the Sentinels.

HONK!