Adepticon 2025 has come and gone, and with it an Atomic Mass Games presentation on what’s to come for Marvel Crisis Protocol. There are plenty of new characters, new rules and new starter boxes to talk about, so let’s get rolling!
Store Tournament Kits
New organized play kits are coming that will support both leagues and single-day events. They’ll each come with enough prizes for all of the participants of the event, with a few special prizes for players who finish in the top four or first. AMG is planning for three kits per “Organized Play season”, but they did not specify how long a season is.
Andrew/Wake: This is a great move by AMG, especially with the GT kits going to fewer events- I was able to attend a number of GT’s last year at local shops across the mid-Atlantic, but this year they seem to really be sending those to primarily conventions. These were mentioned in the seminar as being specifically trying to create a local “mini-GT” experience, and I think that’s great for community support. I also as a TO really appreciate the emphasis on primarily rewarding participation rather than placement- most events have prizes for the winners anyway, store credit or product or what have you, so having the swag go to everybody is a fantastic move that encourages people to just show up and have fun.
Scott/ Brushwizard: This sounds like such a good idea to me. I really like that it focuses on participation and allows everyone attending to get their hands on most of the goodies, with something special for the top dogs as well. I was given one of the plastic Cyclops character cards at Adepticon, via a friend who gets promos sent to them, and it’s a very nice card. It has a glossy sheen to it, but it’s not hard to read and the card feels great. I feel like this is a much better option than foil too, I rarely use any of my foil cards because I have a hard time reading them.
Em/ McWhat: I love this for them. We’ve seen this in past OP kits, and mirrors what they did at Adepticon, where if you participated in a few events you could score whatever swag you wanted. Events should be much more about spreading the love to all the participants, not just 2-3 top players.
Affiliation and Starter Packs
We’re still getting affiliation repacks, a good trend that keeps the SKUs down and makes it easier for new players to come into the game.The real news here is the release of two now starter packs. Each will get you ten characters that can all work together (while the Spider-Foes starter is all SF-affiliated, the X-Men starter can be run under multiple X-Men and Brotherhood affiliations out of the box). They have all the dice and tokens and things like that you’ll need to play, with the exception of terrain. Leaving terrain out let them get the price under 100 USD, so definite pros and cons there. The X-Men starter will always be available, but the Spider-Foes box is temporary, and it sounds like the second “slot” in the two available starter sets will come and go on a rotating basis with new affiliations.
Matt: I love this so much. There have always been a bunch of ways to get into MCP, some more confusing than others, so to be able to tell someone to pick up a single box that’s cheaper than the core set and just has characters they want in it? Perfection. I hope the second box rotates rather frequently, because while there are plenty of Spider-Foes sickos like me out there, I’m sure there are even more people who would love a Spider-Verse or Guardians of the Galaxy starter.
Alfred Pharius: These packs will be great for getting new players into the game. Like a lot of people, when I started I wanted to get into X-Men but soon realised that most of those characters were packaged in boxes with other non-X-Men characters. This way all the core characters for some of these harder to collect affiliations will be in one place.
Quinn: The value here is absolutely incredible. Ten characters, which is really 12 individual pieces for each with the Sandman grunts and Magneto constructs, with tools and tokens for 90 USD is the best value in MCP by a whole lot. At that price, these aren’t just great for new players but for anyone looking for several of the included models.
Scott/ Brushwizard: Wow, these new starter packs are an amazing value. Especially when you consider how much each two character pack costs. While we were sitting there, one of my friends was immediately sold on a Spider-Foes roster because of it, and another is now eyeballing X-Men. I do feel bad for some folks who might only need a couple of the characters in the pack, since they are now locked into a giant multi kit pack. It does make me glad I grabbed up the entire line last year, and kept up on releases since.
Em/ McWhat: Some old gaming friends recently got interested in MCP, so this is great timing and an easy sale. It is unfortunate if you missed out on earlier packs and just need 1 or 2 models from a set. Hopefully there will still be opportunities to get the regular expansion boxes as well.
New Characters
A whole ton of new characters were shown off at the show. We’ll leave card analysis to their respective articles (check out our Phoenix analysis here), but this is quite the exciting line-up, bringing in a bunch of long-asked-for Spider-Verse characters and filling some gaps in the Avengers and Brotherhood lineups. Further out, we’ve got a pack that’s two versions of Kang the Conquerer and two Iron Man side characters, a nice branching out of the Guardians/Asgard affiliations, and, of course, more mutants. Finally, the Sentinel affiliation is finally seeing some new releases.
Matt: I’m super excited for the Blue Marvel & Spectrum pack. The Ultimates run by Al Ewing and Kenneth Rocafort is criminally underread and one of my favorite comics of the last decade.They should both be absolute powerhouses on the table, too. I hope the Bastion/Nimrod/Omega Sentinel box is enough to make Sentinels actually playable as an affiliation, mine are currently shelf queens unless I’m trying to have a fun game I know I’ll lose. As an aside, I don’t get the Kang pack at all. Maybe there were movie plans that changed that would make it make sense?
Alfred Pharius: It’s great to see some of the previously teased models in their full painted glory. All we knew about from the spiderverse pack was Spider-Man 2099 to get not one, but 2 spider packs this year was quite the surprise. I’m a huge fan of the new Miles sculpt as they’ve made him so dynamic. The sculpting at AMG has come a long way since having to glue separate elbow pads to Baron Zemo. Biggest winner for me are the new Sentinels. The Nimrod sculpt looks so chunky I love it! As sentinels are currently the smallest affiliation (ignoring things like Dormammu) they are the most in need of new models.
Jubilee is the final main cast member of the X-Men cartoons yet to be included in the game. With her added we will finally be able to recreate full X-Men 97 scenarios at game nights.
As a side note Dani Moonstar was a New Mutants leader in the comics so maybe two underloved affiliations will be getting some love soon.
Andrew/Wake: New. Guardians. Of. The. Galaxy! Obviously, there’s a lot of wonderful stuff here, but GotG are my first MCP love and where my heart immediately went in these previews! I would have preferred Nova as the affiliation’s second leader, given that he’s actually led an iteration of the Guardians before, but that ship has sailed, so now I’m pivoting to Adam Warlock and hoping for an “Infinity Watch” leadership for the team. Guardians are fine in their current state, but their leadership has gotten a little stale- rerolls are nice to have, but outclassed by a lot of the really cool stuff that other affiliations are doing these days. It would be really fun to have another, more interesting, way to play the affiliation.
Beyond that, I’m really excited about the new mutant characters- most specifically Moonstar as a possible second leader for the New Mutants, but it was also confirmed that wave would be bringing X-Factor Investigations into the game as a new affiliation. XFI was led by Jamie Madrox (Multiple Man), so he seems the likely leader, although Havok led X-Factor in the 90’s, so who knows? The X-Teams getting access to grunts (if those are indeed grunts, as they appear) is going to be wild…!
Quinn: Wow, there’s a ton to unpack here. Guardians and Webs are getting a whole lot, and it’s exciting that Sentinels may finally get their time to shine. While there will undoubtedly be model-specific discussion all over the fandom, I’d like to give massive props to the AMG sculpt team. Several of these new models are among the best in the game, and I’m personally super excited to paint up Nimrod and Iron Monger. Oh, and we’ve got a potential new Spider-Foe in Prowler! He was confirmed to be the Aaron Davis version, which means he’s almost a lock to join Spider-Man’s gallery of rogues in MCP.
Scott/ Brushwizard: First of all… Multiple Man! I’ve been joking around about him ever since Grunts were first released. I’m still holding out that he’ll be a 2 Grunts character like Sandman, but I’ll take it. Another fun surprise was Valkyrie and the Warriors Three. On Thursday at Adepticon, while playing with my friend Greg, we were brainstorming who else he could add to his Asgardians. I mentioned the Warriors Three and he got all excited and said “What if they released another Valkyrie, on her Pegasus charging down to impale someone!”, well Greg, you got your wish!
Other than that, I’m very excited for Jubilee, Ronin, Adam Warlock, new Web Warriors and of course, Phoenix. I’m hoping that Nimrod and Bastion bolster Sentinels well, currently my big robot bros sit unused on a shelf. Not to mention, next year’s Crisis Pack being based on Mutants and Sentinels? It’s going to be an exciting time for X-Men fans!
Overall, this feels like a solid set of announcements. Still no Fantastic Four or Dr. Doom. I have a feeling when they are finally announced it’ll blow the roof off of the place.
Em/ McWhat: Reset the clock on someone mentioning FF / Dr. Doom. For real though, a solid set of characters including some fan favorites. I’m always here for more Defenders options. And even though I don’t play them (skill issue), more Web Warriors are always welcome. And what amazing sculpts on all of them. Silk is the real standout there IMO but really they are all lovely!
Release Timeline
Schedule for the new releases shown off in this stream. The Tolerance is Extinction card pack didn’t get a dedicated slide, but it was mentioned as a “Mutants vs Sentinels” themed crisis pack to go along with the releases that quarter. I’m unsure if leaving Q4 2025 off the slide was intentional or not, it wasn’t mentioned during the show and the Blue Marvel/Spectrum pack is missing from the slide so I’m assuming it’s an error.
Alfred Pharius: It’s nice to see a timeline on releases though without specific dates it makes it harder to plan for big events toward the end of the year.
Em/ McWhat: I saw it pointed out elsewhere there was a big gap in Q4 2025 in this release timeline, which immediately led to speculation of a big announcement. That’d be great if true, but we’ve seen a similar slowdown leading into the holidays. At most we might see some kind of special diorama pack, along with the affiliation packs mentioned in the restock schedule. Happy to be wrong though!
Restock Timeline
AMG released a schedule for when they plan to have reprints of older, hard to find characters come back in stock at retail. We’ve been getting a lot of comments on articles lately about how we keep making characters that nobody can buy right now sound awesome, so hopefully this schedule will help some of y’all out with planning future expansions to your rosters.
Matt: I’m really happy to see a commitment to keeping things in stock. It’s always a bummer when you want a character and can’t get it. I should probably grab the Namor and Shang-Chi boxes while I can, Q3 2026 is a long way away.
Alfred Pharius: For those people who have some but not all of the models in the newly announced starter boxes it is nice that they will still be able to plug holes in their collection with the smaller boxes. My one concern is the distinct lack of Rhino in the list above who is a character (at least this side of the pond) who has been out of stock for a long time.
Andrew/Wake: The most important thing that I heard with this in the seminar, besides the obvious increased availability of these characters, is that this release schedule will also coincide with a balance pass on these groups of characters at this time. This is a huge deal for the game and a big shift from the previous “big batch of changes unless there’s a catastrophe” model AMG has been employing for the game. The first of these balance updates is supposed to release in May 2025, and presumably affects some of the Q2/Q3 releases (we’ve seen Gambit’s new card on the AMG prizewall, for example). Whether anybody else is on the list or who from these models will be affected is unknown to the general community, but it’s good to see AMG taking the opportunity to look at under/overperformers on a rolling schedule. Too many changes to a game too fast is always a concern- you don’t want to make it hard for players to know what the current ‘legal’ state of the game is- but the AMG team are veterans of the CID debacle at Privateer Press, so I have to assume they’ll carry that valuable experience forward and do this right. Done correctly, this is wonderful for some of these characters who haven’t been seeing the table regularly, and AMG has certainly earned the benefit of the doubt!
Scott/ Brushwizard: This is really nice to see. So many times I’ve heard “where is Colossus and Magik” or “Rhino is out of stock everywhere” seeing their plans for restocks over the next year is a very welcome sight. And it helps sell the game when you can tell folks that are just starting, that their favorite character is not gone forever.
I can’t wait for the balance pass in May either. After seeing that Gambit update, it makes me excited to see what else is in store. So much so that I may have printed off a proxy card, since I couldn’t get it from the prize wall. Exciting times!
Em/ McWhat: It’s a good problem to have when you can’t keep up with demand. But it is still a problem. Glad to see them announcing clear plans for making desirable models available again. Interesting that there are few ‘villain’ (Cabal or Hydra) affiliation/starter boxes coming. I’ve often wondered if the more heroic affiliations like GotG and Avengers sell more, and this might support that.
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