Getting Started With Marvel Crisis Protocol: Uncanny X-Men

At Goonhammer we’ve devoted a lot of words to talking about how to compete and take your game to the next level. In “Getting Started,” we look at how to get started with an army – the basics you need to know, how to start collecting models that will leave you with a serviceable army, and what the best deals are.

Special thanks to head58 for writing the original Uncanny X-Men affiliation spotlight.

The X-Men arrived in Marvel: Crisis Protocol on the game’s first anniversary, and in the years since they’ve become one of the game’s best supported factions. With 22 affiliated models, you’re spoiled for choice when building an X-Men roster, but where to begin? Who is a must-buy, and who’s here for completionists? Exactly how many affiliations can you play if you buy all of the mutants? Let’s find out!

Who Are the X-Men?

Born into a world that hates and fears them, the X-Men are a heroic team of mutants, individuals who were born with superhuman abilities. It’s this distinction, being born different instead of made different by super-science or magic or other twists of fate, that’s driven sixty years of storytelling featuring hundreds of characters.

The X-Men debuted in September 1963, in a fast-paced adventure pitting Professor X and the original five X-Men (Cyclops, Beast, Angel, Iceman, Jean Grey) against Magneto. Unpopular enough to sustain their own comic but not enough to cancel outright, the title ran as a series of reprints from 1970-1975 before being revitalized by Len Wein and Dave Cockrum in Giant-Size X-Men #1. Chris Claremont took over writing duties right afterward, beginning a run that would last 16 years.

Under Claremont, there was a renewed emphasis on long-form, soap opera-esque storytelling. Subplots would continue for years, and relationships between characters would evolve over time, forming the basis for team dynamics that continue to this day. Uncanny X-Men would become the best-selling comic book for most of the Eighties, and the X-Men as a franchise would remain popular through to the present day. They even got a movie trilogy in the 2000s, back when it was notable for a comic book IP to do really well at the box office.

In recent years, the X-Men comics have gone through cycles of setting up wildly creative status quos and then paring down back to basics. The most notable modern example would be Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely and their other collaborators setting up an explosion of the mutant population, integrating them into every aspect of the Marvel Universe’s culture, only for that to be followed by House of M and the depowering and/or death of 99% of the mutant population. The comics are currently in a boom period, started by Jonathan Hickman, Pepe Larraz, R.B. Silvia, and others, where the mutant population of the Marvel Universe have established the island nation of Krakoa as a haven and nation-state for themselves. It’s not going great.

Essential Reading and Viewing

All of the following comics are available on Marvel Unlimited, a great service for the Marvel Comics fan who doesn’t mind reading comics on a tablet or a web browser.

Uncanny X-Men (1963) #1 – A bit of a novelty at this point, it’s still fun to go back and see how much of the series’ DNA was there from the beginning. Magneto is on one from his very first panel, chewing scenery and deciding the best thing to do with his day is to steal an entire military base from the US Army. The X-Men have great chemistry with each other, although their treatment of Jean hasn’t really aged well.

Uncanny X-Men (1963) #125 – 137 Chris Claremont and John Byrne bring us The Dark Phoenix Saga. Jean Grey is possessed by an ancient cosmic power, but that’s the least of her problems as she encounters the Hellfire Club and the alien Shi’ar.

Uncanny X-Men (1963) #141 – 142 Chris Claremont and John Byrne continue their run with Days of Future Past. The iconic dystopian future X-Men story,  Kitty Pryde from the future tries desperately to save the X-Men and all of mutantkind from imprisonment and annihilation at the hands of the robotic Sentinels.

Uncanny X-Men (1963) #186 (1963) Chris Claremont and Barry Windsor-Smith’s Lifedeath is a deep dive into the psyche of a recently depowered Storm and her relationship with Forge, the man who was inadvertently responsible for her loss. One of my favorite single issues of an X-Men, or any, comic book.

New X-Men (2001) #114 Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely brought an electric new era to a franchise that had begun to stagnate by the time the 2000’s rolled around. They introduced a bunch of memorable new characters and took old ones to unexpected places before wrapping up their run in a way that left the franchise with endless potential.

X-Factor (2005) #1 Peter David and Ryan Sook revisit the old X-Factor team in the wake of “The Decimation”, an event that left only 198 mutants alive and powered. Jaime Madrox and friends have restarted X-Factor as a detective agency in the wake of this tragedy, and their stories are more grounded and character focused.

X-Men Legacy (2012) #1 Si Spurrier and Tan Eng Huat bring us a series focused on David “Legion” Haller, the son of Professor X. This team turned Legion and Blindfold from characters I vaguely knew existed to two of my hands-down favorites. I cannot recommend this series enough, but to talk too much about it would spoil it, so just trust me and check it out.

All-New X-Men (2012) #1 Brian Michael Bendis and Stuart Immonen bring the original 5 X-Men to the present-day Marvel Universe, where they have to reckon with decades of decisions their older selves have made. None of them are very happy with where their lives have taken them, and tensions boil over as they’re all made to literally confront themselves.

X-Men The Animated Series / X-Men ‘97 A cartoon from the mid-90’s that originally aired on Fox and is now in the middle of a revival on Disney+. The animation isn’t great, at least in the early seasons, but the show is extremely fun and has a lot of surprisingly faithful adaptations of classic X-Men stories.

X-Men Evolution A cartoon from the early 2000s set in an alternate universe where most of the X-Men and their foes are teenagers instead of adults. If you’ve seen any gifs of Goth Rogue, this is where they come from. It’s a pretty light show, but a good time.

X-2 My favorite of the original 20th Century Fox X-Men trilogy. It’s got one of the coolest Nightcrawler scenes ever, some fun interaction between the younger mutants like Rogue, Iceman and Pyro, and a good adaptation of Wolverine’s origins.

Days of Future Past My favorite of the later-era 20th Century Fox X-Men movies, this is the one that has the extremely sick Quicksilver scene in the kitchen. Other than that, it’s fun to see all the callbacks to the older films and Fassbender and McAvoy are fantastic as Magneto and Professor X.

Logan More of a modern western than a traditional superhero movie, Logan serves as a downbeat ending to the Fox X-Men franchise. Wolverine and Professor Xavier pair up for one last ride through the near future, where things have been going very poorly for mutants for a very long time.

How Do They Play?

The X-Men generally like to play an objective-focused game, using tactics cards like To Me, My X-Men and First Class to interact with distant objective tokens in round one, getting a small lead over their opponent and then keeping it however they can. With the change in Cyclops’s leadership to one that gives power whenever an opponent is damaged, there is more room to explore an attrition strategy where players try to prevent scoring by taking out the other team, but it’s not the main design focus of the affiliation. 

The X-Men are a faction that will grow with you as you learn the game. The better you get at learning their specific movement tricks and learning how to prioritize who you activate and why, the more success you’ll have with them. They do have a bit of a steep initial learning curve, but once you’re over that there’s a ton of room for you to show off your skill in piloting the affiliation. 

Affiliation Strengths

• Great objective game
• Deep roster
• High skill ceiling

Affiliation Weaknesses

• Mediocre to bad attrition game
• Fragile characters
• Takes a lot of practice to learn

Leaderships

The X-Men currently have three leaderships available to them, and I’ll give brief summaries of them here:

Storm 

Storm’s leadership gives characters the ability to do a limited teleport. Lovingly known as the “storm hop,” this ability is key to the X-Men’s ability to run around the battlefield and claim objectives. 

Cyclops

Cyclops’s leadership allows characters to hand out a power to another allied character when they make an attack that deals damage to an enemy. This is nice for really loading up a character you’d like to activate late in a turn, when you want them to be able to freely use superpowers and spender attacks. 

Professor X

Professor X also has a leadership based around handing out power, but his triggers when using an active or reactive superpower. This is another good way to pass around power both because it’s unconditional, you just use a superpower and it triggers, and because it also triggers on your opponent’s turns. 

First Purchases

My slam-dunk recommendation for starting with the Uncanny X-Men affiliation is their Affiliation pack. This pack contains Cyclops, Storm, Wolverine, and Beast, giving you two leaders to build around and two roster staples that you’ll use all the time. It also has a great selection of team tactics cards, giving you access to To Me, My X-Men, First Class, and X-Ceptional Healing, cards you’ll be using in most of your games. This is a super solid core to build around, and at least one thing from the affiliation pack will feature in literally every game you play with the X-Men, be it a character or a tactics card.

Do I Need A Core Set?

Technically, no. You can skip the Core set and instead buy the Affiliation pack, a few more X-Men character packs of your choice, the Crisis Card 2023 pack, a couple sets of dice and the Movement and Range Tool pack and have the things you need to play. This is the way to go if you’re absolutely sure you only want to play X-Men and X-Men adjacent characters during your Crisis Protocol journey. I think you’d be missing out on some great value if you go this route, though.

If you buy a core set, not only do you get all of the accessories you need to actually play the game, but you’ll also have a bunch of good terrain to use during your game as well as 10 characters that range in usefulness from tournament staples to… nice to look at when they’re painted up. For the purposes of this article, I’m going to assume you’re beginning to play the game with the Earth’s Mightiest Core Set and the Uncanny X-Men Affiliation Pack.

Here’s a list you can take to the local game store when you’re just starting to learn things:

Core Set and Affiliation Pack Example Roster

This list keeps it simple, adding pretty much all of the “good guys” in the core set to the Affiliation Pack to complete a 10-character roster. Try using Beast, Storm, Black Widow, and Spectacular Spider-Man to claim objectives while the rest of the team fights it out. Pick either Storm’s or Cyclops’s leadership according to what you want to practice doing in any given game. If you want to work on positioning and more of an objective-focused kind of game, go with Storm, whose ability to move characters around with her leadership is key to that strategy. If you want to work on making decisions about who to fight, how to do it, and when, go with Cyclops, who gives you benefits every time you do damage to one of your opponent’s characters. 

Branching Out

These lists are more thematic than they are competitive, each focusing on a specific piece of media or era of the X-Men and recreating it as much as possible with the characters available in the game. The last two lists are “dual affiliation”, which means you can play them either as Uncanny X-Men affiliated teams or as either Brotherhood of Evil Mutants or X-Force affiliated teams, depending on the list. 

I tried to limit the amount of purchasing you need to do per list, and none of these lists contain non-mutant characters that aren’t in the core set. For a more robust, competitive team-building discussion please check out the Start Competing: X-Men article when it comes out. 

X-Men ‘97

This list is all characters who featured prominently in X-Men: The Animated Series and X-Men ‘97. Nightcrawler rounds out the roster because he was in a couple of episodes and he comes in the same box as Bishop.

To build this list you’ll need to grab 4 boxes: Jean Grey and Cassandra Nova, Rogue and Gambit, Bishop and Nightcrawler, and Professor X and Shadow King. Try using Storm’s leadership with Nightcrawler to grab objectives, or set up a brawling team under Cyclops with Wolverine, Rogue and Bishop. 

X-Men '97

The Original Team

This list contains only characters who appeared in the original X-Men comic book run from 1963 – 1970. They all teamed up with the X-Men aside from Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, who joined the Avengers after turning away from the Brotherhood instead of joining the X-Men. 

To build this list you’ll need to grab 4 boxes: Jean Grey and Cassandra Nova, Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, Iceman and Shadowcat, and Professor X and Shadow King. Try running it under Professor X’s leadership and using Quicksilver, Iceman, Beast, and Spider-Man to control objectives and outscore your opponent. 

The Originals

The Movies (2000s series)

These are characters that featured in the original trilogy of Sony X-Men movies that ran from 2000-2006. Sadly, we don’t have the cool leather costumes from these movies, but we can always pretend. 

This list takes 5 boxes to build, because there’s only one box where we’re using two characters out of it. This is not really a heavy hitting list, with characters like Shadowcat and Iceman being rather pillow-fisted, so practice movement and enemy displacement to control the board and win your games. If you’re okay with buying non-X-Men affiliated boxes try out Pyro or Juggernaut in this list, they both had fun moments in this movie trilogy. 

The 2000s movies

The Movies (2010s series)

These are characters that featured in the series of movies starting with X-Men: First Class and ran from 2011 – 2019. It’s impossible to build a team that evokes this movie series without Magneto and Mystique, so I leaned into it and this list features a Brotherhood of Evil Mutants dual affiliation, allowing you to use either X-Men or Brotherhood leaderships as you see fit. 

You’ll need 4 boxes to build out this list: the Brotherhood affiliation pack, Psylocke and Emma Frost, Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, and Professor X and Shadow King. With this list you should definitely try out the Brotherhood leaderships. Magneto is a powerhouse of a kind you don’t really get in X-Men lists, and pulling off a good Deception play with Mystique is very satisfying. 

The 2010's Movies

Krakoa Era (2020s comics)

The modern era of X-Men comics is defined in part by mutantkind becoming functionally immortal, giving storytellers access to any character they’d like to use. To represent this, I tried to pick newer characters and models that don’t see heavy representation in the other lists presented here. This ended up pointing towards an X-Force dual affiliation, as Colossus, Wolverine, Psylocke, Cable, Domino, X-23 and Honey Badger all have both affiliations. That’s 70% of the team!

You’ll need to purchase 4 boxes for this list: Colossus and Magik, Emma Frost and Psylocke, Cable and Domino, and X-23 and Honey Badger. With this list, whether you’re playing under Cyclops or under Cable, attrition is the name of the game. Pretty much every character on this team can put in heavy damage on enemy characters, and Colossus and Honey Badger can control who your opponent hits back, giving your team more activations to bring the pain.

The Krakoan Team

Starting Other Affiliations

As you collect the X-Men, you’ll find that you naturally have access to a range of other affiliations. Some of these affiliations are unlocked by a tactics card that comes with a character, while others are leaderships on specific models.

Brotherhood of Evil Mutants

With the rich history of characters changing allegiances throughout their history, it comes as no surprise that there’s a ton of overlap between the Uncanny X-Men and their rivals, the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Colossus, Emma Frost, Gambit and Rogue are all Brotherhood affiliated and Rogue in particular sees a lot of play on the team.

If you decide to move into playing Brotherhood, I’d start by picking up their Affiliation pack, and then grabbing either Juggernaut or the Blob and Pyro box.

X-Force

X-Force currently has one leader, Cable, and most of the X-Force affiliated characters are also X-Men affiliated, so you may have already picked them up. X-Force is one of the premier attrition teams in the game, with Cable handing out a bunch of rerolls and most of the team being very efficient attackers. 

Non-X-Men characters I would buy to start your X-Force journey would be Deadpool, Bullseye, and maybe Crimson Dynamo to give your team a defensive tank to hold down the center of the board.

Hellfire Club

Purchasing the Emma Frost/Psylocke box gives you access to the Hellfire Club affiliation.You can play just about any other character with her and they will all count as Hellfire Club affiliated, so you can go nuts with the core box characters or any other model you just think looks cool. The Hellfire Club is currently a very competitive faction, so they could be a good second team if you want to try tournament play but aren’t super comfortable with the X-Men yet. 

If you decide to try them out, consider picking up a heavy hitter like Hulk or Beta Ray Bill and slotting them in alongside Ultron from the new Core Set.

Weapon X

Weapon X is a difficult faction to recommend to beginners, because it’s locked behind a player purchasing the Rival Panels – Weapon X Program. This is a box that retails for 100 US Dollars and comes with two (very good, admittedly) characters that are alternate versions of Wolverine and Sabertooth, and a large, borderline useless terrain piece in the Weapon X bunker. You can get both an affiliation box and another character pack for that $100, so buying into Weapon X is a big ask.

If you do buy into the faction, you get what plays like a pared down version of X-Force with some really interesting and unique tactics cards that set them apart. Logan, The Wolverine and Sabertooth, Apex Predator are both fantastic characters that will see play in a lot of X-Force, Brotherhood, and maybe even X-Men lists you make. I do recommend trying them out, but only as a third or fourth faction and maybe after you’ve proxied the cards/models once or twice.

Now that you have some good ideas of what to buy, why don’t you read about how to paint them? — check out our How to Paint Everything: Marvel Crisis Protocol in 60 Minutes feature to learn how to get your heroes into battle quickly.

Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com.