Marvel Crisis Protocol: Building Your Team – New Players’ Guide, Part 2
Marvel Crisis Protocol brings the beloved characters of the Marvel Universe to the tabletop in a fun, strategic game. Here’s how to get started!
With stores opening back up and playgroups getting together again for the first time in over a year, all of our favorite games are bound to have a lot of new players! If Marvel Crisis Protocol is one of the games you have your eye on, this article can help you get started!
Welcome to part 2 of my guide for new players to Marvel Crisis Protocol! This set of articles assumes that you have no experience in playing or collecting M:CP. We will have more articles soon delving deeper into more specific topics, but for now, I want to provide a good roadmap for someone getting into the game for the first time. See part 1 here!
In the first article, I covered how to get started with the core set, building your models, and playing your first games. This time we’ll look at some good character packs to pick up and talk about building a good roster to get started with games beyond the core set.
is there anyone who ISN’T an avenger?
Choosing an Affiliation
If you are not familiar with what an affiliation is in M:CP or what each affiliation does, check out my previous article first!
If you have started out with the core box, you have access to the two first affiliations, Avengers and Cabal. These are both very strong affiliations with a surprisingly large pool of characters to draw from. Both of them also have received their second leaders with Sin and Sam. With all these options and the ability to add in non-affiliated models as long as the majority of your squad is from the leader’s affiliation, you can build a lot of great rosters without needing to expand beyond these two.
That said, there are a lot of affiliations to pick from with more coming all the time. One of the things I love about this game is that the factions really are pretty well-balanced. Every affiliation is seeing play, even at the competitive levels with the TTS leagues. A lot of new players are getting into the game for a specific model or set of models that they know and love from either the comics or the MCU. Picking based on the “rule of cool” really isn’t something that needs to be avoided in M:CP.
If you were waiting for X-Men before picking up the game, you’re not alone!
If you don’t have a specific affiliation in mind and just want more options, I would suggest starting with either an affiliation with a lot of characters or one with a lot of cross-affiliation members. You can find the full list of affiliations on AMG’s website (updated with every new release!).
If you’re looking for large affiliations (other than the core set, which as mentioned are both large teams), Defenders and A-Force are both great options. As an added benefit, they both share members with the Avengers, which makes them easy to slowly branch into after bulking out an Avengers roster. For teams that share a lot of members with other teams, I like either Asgard or Wakanda. As an added benefit both of these affiliations are considered quite strong.
Building a Collection
There are a ton of character packs to pick from already, and more get released almost every month. Crisis Protocol models are in line with other games on cost, but if you are being introduced to tabletop mini-games with this one, there can be some serious sticker shock! So how can you choose what to buy next when you want to make sure that your money will go as far as possible? This question gets asked quite often on the MCP Facebook page.
While there are a lot of ways to look at this, I am going to try to give you my top 5 best picks for early MCP purchases. Each one is chosen for a different reason to help highlight some of the paths you might take, but any of them would be fine early buys. In no particular order:
Best Overall Value
Vision and Winter Soldier – Vision is a powerhouse for 4 threat with a great beam attack, a throw, and good defensive abilities. Winter Soldier is one that people are down on, but I find him useful with out-of-activation long-range bleed attacks. He also lets you open up affiliations easier with his ability to count as any affiliation. The tactics card “Field Dressing” is a highly desirable card that is in most rosters. Overall a great pack
Best Cabal Upgrade
MODOK – M.O.D.O.K. probably is the best Cabal affiliated model in the game, and often considered the best (or close to it) 5 threat model available so far. He was an early addition to the game but has stood up well over time. Also includes Recalibration Matrix which is a decently powerful tactics card. He sees play in many cabal lists and plenty of unaffiliated lists as well.
Best Avengers Upgrade
Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver – There are a few great packs for the Avengers specifically, but I felt that the twins managed to pull ahead of the pack at least marginally. Scarlet Witch is an impressive damage dealer with an array of special conditions to hand out, and quicksilver is a great 3 threat model for grabbing objectives (especially using his tactics card to steal an objective right out of an enemy’s grip!). They are both Avengers which lets them slot in easily to build out the core set roster in some areas that the original team is a little weak in. Scarlet’s low defense is helped by having her near Cap as well.
Best Reusability
Angela and Enchantress – these two Asgardians are both in multiple affiliations, but really what affiliation they are members of hardly matters. I have seen both models in a lot of lists of many different affiliations. Angela is a good fast beater, and enchantress has a really mean combination of moving enemy models and then using a beam attack on a newly formed line of foes. In my mind, these are two of the best in the game at their threat level and regardless of the affiliation to choose you could make use of them.
Best Slow-Grow Option
Black Panther and Killmonger – If you want to slowly build up from your core set and have more options over time, this pack is excellent. You get two strong 4 threat characters with their own specialties (panther is sturdy and great at repositioning, Killmonger is great at focusing down an enemy and getting points for it), and they are members of the two-base game affiliations. Black Panther is then the leader of Wakanda, so with the purchase of Shuri and Okoye or even Vision and Winter Soldier, you could start using Wakanda next.
Honorable Mentions
Shuri/Okoye, Thor/Valkerie, Corvus Glaive/Proxima Midnight – all three of these packs are good, and could easily have a case for top 5. in my mind they are slightly below the others, but could be moved up in the order based on what your goals are for your team and what style you like best.
Playing More Games
Once you start to build a roster, it’s time to move beyond core set games and start using a full roster of 10 models and 8 tactics cards. This is the default way to play M:CP whether it’s for a casual game night or a tournament. At home against my wife and/or daughter we usually still pick our teams on the fly and randomize scenarios which is definitely fun but not commonly done in a store.
When choosing your 10 models for a roster it is important to think through how you will break up your team for each point value. In the core set all of the scenarios use 17 threat. Once you start playing with bigger collections you will find Crisis Cards with anywhere from 14 to 20 threat values. You will likely have a primary affiliation, and you’ll want to make sure you can build a list that maintains its affiliation bonuses for every possible point value.
If you want, you can also have a roster that could go into two or more affiliations based on your choices. This gives a lot of flexibility, but it uses up roster slots with a second leader and likely more tactics cards that couldn’t be used in all games. To make a dual-affiliation roster I usually want my second leader to be good enough to sometimes use in the main affiliation (like using Black Panther as an Avenger if I don’t use him as the leader). If you’re still starting out I would recommend sticking to one affiliation with options to increase or decrease your threat level easily.
Tactics cards are somewhat harder to choose simply because there are so many of them. I wrote an article a while back on choosing tactics cards but a lot of new stuff has come out since then. I may be putting out a V2.0 of that article soon.
For now, I would recommend starting with the following:
- Add in your affiliation’s tactics card(s). Many of these are very strong and in some cases (Wakanda, I’m looking at you) is more of a reason to be affiliated than the leadership bonus.
- Add in tactics that are specific to characters you have in your roster if they add something unique/cool/powerful to your character. These can only be used by their specific character and even if they aren’t the best they are usually very flavorful and fun (though don’t get me wrong some are very strong too)
- Make sure you’re taking 2 cards from the Restricted List. These cards are restricted for a reason, and you can assume they are going to be among the strongest cards available.
- You now have likely 3-6 cards chosen from the previous steps. This leaves you with a few flex slots for your own favorite cards. This will depend on what your team is trying to do well, but I like to prioritize cards that break the rules somehow: extra movement, extra attacks, moving power or objective tokens between characters, etc over the many cards that add or subtract 2 dice from attacks.
- If you’re struggling to figure out you final list and have a slot left available, take Trip-Up. This is my own pet card, I take it in almost any roster and it does great things for me.
Do you agree with my purchase rankings? What affiliations did you start off with? Hit me up in the comments!
