[Crisis Protocol] Competitive Innovations in the Danger Room: Interview with BarBarJonks

Welcome to Competitive Innovations, our weekly feature for a number of game lines across the tabletop wargame space. Each week our army list and tactics experts canvass the top tournaments for their game of specialty, looking at the week’s top match-ups and how they played out on the tabletop to let you know what’s hot, what’s not, and what might be coming next as the competitive meta evolves year-round.

Greetings True Believers! Today we will look at a roster that was the talk of Sin City during the Las Vegas Open: a Cabal-affiliated list led by, wait for it, Sin, and not her father. And went 5-1 for the event. I appreciate this list’s creator and pilot, BarBarJonks, for agreeing to my interview and walking me through this roster.  You can find it below if you want to see the entire list of characters, Team Tactics Cards, and Crises selected. 

BarBarJonks Sin Cabal Roster

The Leadership

To say Sin is much maligned in Crisis Protocol as both a character and a leader would, I think, be an understatement.  I’ve included her card for reference.  At first glance, her stat line is very unremarkable except for a slightly higher than average Mystic Defense of 4, and really low Stamina pool on her healthy side, which is also 4.  She does have 6 Stamina on her injured side, but for comparison, Rocket Raccoon has 3 Stamina.  Her power economy also seems a little inefficient with only a gainer as a method to build power outside of taking damage, and a Reactive Superpower that only works with the original version of Crossbones, who has also been a much-maligned model for most of his existence.  BarBarJonks is not new to miniature wargaming and has played competitive MCP since 2023, so I knew there had to be a reason Sin was chosen as the leader.

“Sin offered me two things that [Red Skull, Master of the World] did not, and that was a unique playstyle that I had to navigate and learn without the ability to look up any ideas, and it allowed me to play scenario instead of attrition,” BarBarJonks said. “Also, the ability to play Pay to Flip Crisis sets gave me a unique advantage in the current meta.”

As a teacher, I cannot put into words how much I appreciate the fact that leadership was chosen so that a player could learn it without being able to really look up ideas to crib from.  I also really like the curveball of a scenario-focused Cabal list when, I think rightly, so much of the competitive meta leans into more attrition-style roster construction.  So what is Sin’s leadership, and how does it work?  For timing purposes, it happens after VPs are scored in the Cleanup Phase, so it happens before Dazed characters flip their stat card, Priority is sorted, etc.  However, for Red Mayhem, you first get to roll a dice for each objective token that is being contested by an allied character.  BarBarJonks reminded me that this doesn’t mean only a Secure objective.  If you roll a Crit, Hit, or Wild result, each enemy character contesting the objective gets pushed away Short.  For the second part of her leadership, you also get to roll a die for each enemy character holding an Asset token that is within Range 2 of one of your Allied characters.  If it’s a Crit, Hit, or Wild, they drop the Asset token.  

“Sin’s leadership is a coin flip at all times, so I learned how to maximize how many coin flips I could force in each turn,” BarBarJonks said. “This entire list is sort of unintuitive the first few games, and the leadership has some real feels bads in it, but you have to accept that you won’t get every 50/50 coin flip, and learn you need only about 1/3 of them to be successful.”

The Rest of the Roster

I could not wrap my head around the rest of the roster at first glance, either.  Mostly because I rarely see these models on the table.  BarBarJonks stated that the core of every squad was Sin, Quicksilver, and Toad, which only totals 8 Threat and gives a ton of flexibility to build out based on the scenario.  

“Every single other model counted for affiliation purposes,” BarBarJonks said.  “Ulik, Wrecking Crew, Taskmaster, and Viper just fit the leadership and gameplan generically well and help make threat values. M.O.D.O.K is great on Infinity and E-shaped maps. Crossbones is used on Infinity, too, and in my testing is one of the models I had more success with than I anticipated.  Ultron was the last slot of the team, and he needed to answer two questions: ‘What do I do into Midnight Sons?’ and ‘What do I do into Shang Chi?’”

BarBarJonks also added that the only Crisis type his list really wanted to avoid were Extracts that brought Civilians instead of Assets because it would nullify Sin’s leadership and Quicksilver’s steal ability.  Additionally, BarBarJonks said that there was a lot of “what does [Sin] do, how does that work, can I look at that card?” when he would bring his roster to the table.

Overall Experience at LVO and Future of this Roster

Like any good competitive player, there seems to always be an element of always trying to improve your roster, and this one is no different.

“I had a great time at LVO in general. Omnus and Tyson do a great job. There are plenty of new models I want to try,” BarBarJonks said. “(Vincent) Curkov gave me the idea of running Enchantress in that Ultron slot, which seems good. I want to try [Red Skull, Master of the World] under Sin because of the place and attack suite. I really appreciate how so many people have found this roster to be fun.”

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