Crisis Protocol: The Tactics of Choosing Tactics
One of the interesting mechanics in building your Crisis Protocol team is selecting your Team Tactics cards. With so many possible selections, how do you pare down to 8 cards for your roster?
With 23 characters available in the current pool, choosing 10 of them to build a roster isn’t too difficult. Generally choosing which affiliation you want will narrow down your choices pretty quickly. However, the second piece of building your roster is choosing your tactics cards. This is (in my opinion) much more challenging. You only get 8 cards, out of a current pool of 41 cards! Many of these cards offer very valuable effects used once per game. How do I choose just 8 from such a varied and powerful set of abilities?
I am going to go over my own method of choosing my tactics cards by separating the cards into several different categories to help narrow down selections for building a roster. This is only one way of choosing cards, and will vary greatly based on what you are trying to accomplish and your own unique play style. This is not a tier list, rather a breakdown by how widely applicable these different powers are. I can’t stress this enough. Crisis Protocol is still in its early stages and is not a highly tuned competitive game where everyone is taking the hot “meta” roster. This is a great time in a game’s lifecycle to try out all sorts of new things and not get bogged down in making the “perfect” competitive list.
That said, each category is listed in roughly the order that I prefer the cards in that category. This is as close to “rating” the cards as I am getting in this article. I understand this is entirely subjective and will likely get a lot of disagreement in the comments. Feel free to argue my ordering/classification. This is meant as a starting point, especially for newer players to sort through the pile of options in front of them.
Tactics vary greatly in function and power. Some are almost always useful, others are only useable in a very narrow situation. Others are just bad when compared to similar investments of tactics cards and/or power (looking at you, ‘Heave Ho’). I am not going to go into an in-depth discussion about these cards, and will not just be copying text for you to see. If you want to read the full text of any of these cards, click here.
Enough preamble, let’s jump in.
Affiliation cards
These cards can only be used when your roster has selected the matching affiliation. A team can only have a single affiliation. Important to note, unlike leadership powers, most affiliation tactics will only affect actual members of the affiliation found on the affiliation cards. When used, these cards usually give a nice benefit to any of your affiliated characters who spend a power, and are usually very strong abilities, sometimes faction-defining.
- Wakanda Forever (Wakanda)
- Odin’s Blessing (Asgard)
- Avengers Assemble (Avengers)
- Dark Reign (Cabal)
- Second Wind (Avengers)
Character-specific cards
These cards are usually not tied to an affiliation (though they can be), and can only be used by the character named on the card. This means the character has to be in your roster to make use of it, and that character HAS to be the one to spend the cost to play the card. These are almost all very thematic for the related character and are pretty high on the power curve. Some of them are almost always taken with the associated character (I’ve never seen venom in a list without lethal protector)
- Usurp the Throne (Killmonger)
- Cosmic Invigoration (Red Skull)
- Lethal Protector (Venom)
- Gamma Launch (Hulk)
- The Age of Ultron (Ultron)
- Psychic Fortress (MODOK)
- Anger Management (Hulk)
- Vibranium Shielding (Shuri OR Black Panther)
- A.I.M. Lackeys (MODOK)
Multiple character specific cards
Like the list above, these cars can only be used by specific characters. They are harder to use, though, because they require 2 specific characters working together. Many of these are very thematic but maybe not as strong and certainly not as easy to use as many of the other tactics cards. They are certainly cool when you get them to work!
- Till The End of The Line
- Sibling Rivalry
- Ricochet Blast
- Uneasy Allies
- Thunderwave
Unrestricted + always good cards
These are your “bread and butter” tactics cards. You will almost never regret taking up one of your slots with these cards. They are the type of cards that can be used by any character and are flexible enough or used in a common enough situation that you will activate them in almost any game that you bring them. These are very commonly used cards and oyu will likely encounter a handful of these in every enemy roster. Note, this does not mean these are always the best choice or that they are the most powerful (though that argument could probably be made). They are simply the most flexible and most likely to give value consistently.
- Field Dressing
- Brace For Impact
- Recalibration Matrix
- Patch Up
- Mission Objective
- Battle Lust
- Advanced R&D
Unrestricted + flexible cards
These cards are similar to those above. They can be used in a pretty wide variety of situations and can be used by any character. The difference is that this list of cards has requirements that may not be as easy to fulfill. Either they require more precise positioning to use, or are counters to specific things that you might not need in every game. They offer good flexibility, but are not going to be used in every game.
- Psychic Shielding Device (P.S.D.)
- Trip Up
- Drop Off
- Seeing Red
- Sacrifice
- Sucker
- Inspiring Monologue
- One-Two Punch
Looking forward to the day where this is actually a tactics card!
Unrestricted + situational cards
These cards are harder to slot into your list, but that doesn’t mean they are bad cards. These are likely going to be useful if you have a very specific situation you are trying to engineer or a specific character that you are trying to push further with one of these cards. Unless you have a plan for how you’re going to use these cards, you will likely find that you have the card unspent at the end of many of your games. This being said, some of these cards are still quite good. Doomed Prophecy in particular is an amazing card, but is only useful in very specific situations in the late game.
- Doomed Prophecy
- Smash
- Follow Me
- Disarm
- Escort To Safety
- Tactical Analysis
- Heave Ho
Thoughts
When choosing my tactics cards, I like to make sure that I am going to get value out of my picks. If I build a roster where I don’t end up having 5 cards that I can actually bring (because of character or affiliation restrictions), I am playing with a self-imposed handicap. Likewise, if I end the game with unspent tactics It means I have left “money on the table”. Maximizing your use of these cards is a major piece in roster-building!
When building my roster, I usually start by choosing the affiliation I am likely going to be playing. I almost always take that affiliation’s tactic card. I then pull at least 3 of the “unrestricted + always good” list. Then I look at my roster and take tactics that match some of the characters I am planning on playing. I don’t always bring their paired card, but most of the time if I am playing Venom, Killmonger, Ultron or Bucky + Captain America I will add their card. Then I round it out with a few selections from the bottom two lists if I still have room. P.S.D and Doomed Prophecy have been making a lot of my lists lately.
When choosing my actual team, I know that I should have 5 playable cards. If there isn’t a specific situation I am worried about I will likely bring my affiliation card, my 3 “always good” cards, and one character specific card. The character card is usually what I will drop if I need one of the situational cards (like P.S.D if they might be bringing MODOK or trip up if they have a Hulk or Venom).
As the card pool grows, these choices will get tougher. Using some sort of method like the one outlined above can help choose which of these new releases will make it into regular rotation and which ones will be reserved for games where you’re just trying something new.
What are your favorite tactics cards? which ones am I not giving enough credit to here? what methods have you all developed in choosing your roster of 8 cards?
