Roster building can be a tricky part of Marvel Crisis Protocol. Your roster includes not only your ten characters but ten tactics cards, and six Crises on top of that. Your characters and team tactics cards can all be a part of one or more affiliations, and there are pros and cons to mixing and matching between them.
Earlier this year we saw Mike De Luca win the world championship with a list that could be affiliated in multiple ways so it’s the perfect time to dig in and see why you might want to do this in your own games.
So what are the different dual affiliation options?
Mono Affiliation, Dual Leader
Some affiliations have multiple leaders that can affect different game plans. Generally you’ll have a primary leader that you’ll use most of the time and a secondary leader for specific situations.Â
The Avengers under the original Captain America, Steve Rogers often have a primary plan leveraging his A Day Unlike Any Other leadership to maximum effect. This leadership reduces the cost of the first superpower you use each turn by 1. This is most effective on characters with powerful 2 cost superpowers, enabling turn 1 plays unavailable under other leaderships.
This will work well most games but some Crises or opponents might negate this somewhat. Captain America Sam Wilson’s All New All Different leadership allows you to remove damage, special conditions and move your characters short when one of your other characters is dazed or KO’d.
If you are playing a Crisis such as Mayor Fisk Vows to Find Missing Witnesses which not only damages but also applies the stun condition to your characters, this leadership can be invaluable. Alternatively, if you are playing against an opponent you know will be dazing your characters or applying debilitating conditions such as The Servants of Apocalypse, Sam’s leadership might be the way to go.
Another important factor is the character the leadership is attached to. Sam is only a 3 threat character and with his long move, flight, and charge, he is much more mobile than Steve. On terrain-heavy or spread maps he might be a more valuable piece on the table. Conversely, Steve excels as a bodyguard keeping some of your other valuable pieces from taking big hits. In a matchup that will come down to trading big hits the ability to decide which of your characters will take those hits might end up deciding the outcome.
Sticking to one affiliation also helps when choosing team tactics cards. With only room for ten in total, once you add another affiliation you have less room to include their cards. Affiliation specific cards tend to be more impactful than their unaffiliated counterparts. You don’t want a situation where when you are trying to make a squad with your second choice affiliation you realize you don’t have enough usable cards for the game in hand.
In short, your opponent’s list, the Crisis, the threat level, your leader and the table all factor into which leadership you take but the flexibility of having multiple options available is where the real strength of mono affiliation, dual leader play lies.
Dual AffiliationÂ
Some rosters utilize two affiliations and will usually bring them to help fix specific game plans. The prime example of dual affiliating is with a leadership like Kingpin’s Illicit Network. This leadership lets all of his healthy characters contesting an objective token count as two. A Kingpin list will take full advantage of this with crisis such as Superpowered Scoundrels form Sinister Syndicate, which has a potential 5 points on the table for his criminals to stand on.
As strong as this leadership is, there is a huge downside. On Crises that are controlled by paying to interact rather than standing there, half of his leadership does nothing. Therefore, it is common to take a secondary leader to help in these cases.Â
There are other leaders within the Criminal Syndicate roster such as Shadowland Daredevil, but his leadership works best with characters who put out a lot of attacks while Kingpin’s leadership want big chunky potato characters to sit on points.
So that leaves you with several good options to dual affiliate with Kingpin. A popular choice are the Spider-Foes, who have several members who belong to both affiliations.
On a pay to flip scenario where half of Kingpin’s leadership is invalided, you can take advantage of the Green Goblin or Doc Ock Sinister Scientist’s leaderships, both of which can be strong under the right circumstances.
With this particular dual, you know that if you get priority you will almost always take your own secures under Kingpin. The advantage here is that the Spider-Foes have a card Sinister Traps which works best when you don’t have priority. This card lets you place a trap on an objective token in the first power phase and can help prevent an opponent with priority from taking more extracts than you in the first turn.
Characters like Rhino are affiliated to both the foes and the criminals and are very strong under both affiliations. Under Kingpin he is a mobile tank who can stand on points and score. In the foes he can make the most of some of their cards such as Surprise, Webhead to give him an additional bit of movement and out of activation damage.
There are also characters such as Lizard, who is only affiliated to the Spider-Foes side but makes an excellent addition to a Kingpin roster as one of the tankiest 3 threat characters in the game. Similarly, Bullseye is only affiliated to the Kingpin side, but being a 2 threat brings some flexibility to a Spider-Foes roster that they don’t usually have.
Kingpin’s criminals tend to be one of the most popular dual affiliations to take because they can skew Crisis selection in their favor being so strong when taking their own secures. This means for each of your Crises you can plan out what you would take with your own secures under Kingpin and what you would take if forced into your off affiliation.
Besides the Spider-Foes some other popular options to dual with Kingpin are:
- Hydra – Abomination is in both and Red Skull 2 is a menace.
- Cabal – A lot of crossover with the criminals and can put up a strong fight under Red Skull, Master of the World’s leadership.
- Asgard – Have multiple characters who work great in the Kingpin side, like Beta Ray Bill.
- Brotherhood of Mutants – Have no crossover in characters but include great pieces for Kingpin such as Toad, Juggernaut and the newly-updated Colossus.
Besides character selection, the team tactics cards you take are important to consider when dual affiliating. Some affiliations such as SHIELD can do well dual affiliating with Web Warriors.
The difficulty with this particular dual is not the characters but their cards, as SHIELD has so many affiliated team tactics cards and you’ll need room for the Invaders leadership card on top of that! Similarly on the Webs side they too have some great cards so you end up with a roster that becomes very tight on which cards to take. What you don’t want is a situation where your Webs side is the best option for your opponent and Crisis in front of you but you don’t have 5 cards you can take under Web Warriors, as you have too many SHIELD cards in your roster of 10.
In short all the same considerations you have when using dual leaders in one affiliation are needed but you need to take extra care when choosing team tactics cards.
Three or More Affiliations
In rare cases you might have a roster that can play more than two affiliations. The roster that Mike De Luca won the world championship with was an example of this:
Characters
Captain America (Steve Rogers)
Captain America (Sam Wilson)
Thor, Prince of Asgard (Thor Odinson)
The Mighty Thor (Jane Foster)
She-Hulk (Jennifer Walters)
Beta Ray Bill (Bill)
Shang-Chi (Zheng Shang-Chi)
Doctor Voodoo (Jericho Drumm)
Black Cat (Felicia Hardy)
Okoye
Team Tactics
Brace for Impact
Fall Back
Recalibration Matrix
Avengers Assemble
Battle Plan
Chi Mastery
Odin’s Blessing
Rainbow Bridge
Stalwart Determination
Special Delivery
Crises
Super-Powered Scoundrels Form Sinister Syndicate!
Riots Spark Over Extremis 3.0
Deadly Meteors Mutate Citizens
Deadly Legacy Virus Cured?
Skrulls Infiltrate World Leadership
Inhumans Deploy Advanced Weaponry
When your roster can play this many affiliations it might be because your third (or 4th) affiliation is needed for a very specific matchup. In Mike’s case his roster could be Avengers, A-Force and Asgard. He has said on podcasts that the A-Force side specifically was to help with the Apocalypse match, as She-Hulk and Jane Foster are both great at bullying Apocalypse himself, but in reality he ended up playing A-Force over the other options anyway.
He managed to fit all three in as there is a lot of character crossover with those affiliations and he took a minimum number of cards from each option: One Avengers card (Avengers Assemble), two A-Force Cards (Special Delivery and Stalwart Determination), and two Asgard Cards (Odin’s Blessing and Rainbow Bridge). These are arguably the best cards of each of those affiliations but doing this sacrifices some other strong cards options.
Final Thoughts
Using a dual affiliated roster isn’t for everyone and can require some pre game planning to make the most of it. The main considerations to make are:
- Can you skew your list to your crisis selection like a Kingpin Dual can?
- Does your main affiliation have specific strengths or weaknesses that can be fixed by dual affiliating?
- Do you have room in your ten available tactics cards?
- Does your leader have matchups they are particularly bad in. e.g. Red Skull Master of Hydra is not very good into Apocalypse as Apocalypse can always attack his worst defense whereas Baron Strucker can be great in that particular match.
Hopefully you’ve found this guide useful. I haven’t been able to cover every dual affiliation possible and with more characters coming I’m sure that more options will become available in future it’s an exciting time to be playing MCP!
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