With over 20 affiliations and counting, getting started in Marvel Crisis Protocol can be a daunting task. Even for a seasoned player, with so much available it can be tough to decide where to go next.
This article will aim to break down some approaches on how you can choose an affiliation as well as a brief overview of their strengths and weaknesses. The other posts in this series can be found here:
- Part 1 – A-Force, Asgard, Black Order and Brotherhood of Mutants
- Part 3 – The Defenders, Guardians of the Galaxy, Hellfire Club, Hydra and Inhumans
Before we begin let’s outline how we are going to summarize each affiliation.
- Who they are: A brief overview of the team.
- How they play on the table: What you can expect from your models once they hit the board and what their general game plan tends to be.
- Leadership: Some affiliations have multiple leaders and this can lead to multiple play styles depending on who you choose as your leader. In these cases we will give a rough score for each leader.
- Affiliation size: How many affiliated characters are there. Do you have a wide number of options available to build up your squad or will you be limited by your core characters?
- Team tactics cards: Each affiliation has a number of unique tactics cards that can in many cases define their play style. The strength and number of these cards varies between affiliation but sometimes all you need is one very strong card to be good on the tabletop.
- Ease of collecting: Do you need to buy multiple smaller boxes to buy their core characters or can you get what you need from just the starter set plus one or two boxes?
Table of Contents
Cabal
Who They Are
The Cabal in MCP seems to reflect the Cabal shown in the animated series ‘Avengers Assemble’ rather than the Cabal / Dark Illuminati from the comics. Ultimately you can think of the Cabal as a loose alliance of evil characters with the common goal of overthrowing Earth’s mightiest heroes.
How They Play on the Table
The Cabal have a very large roster with over 30 affiliated characters and three potential leaders. Generally their leaderships and cards favor an aggressive play-style and reward attacking over being defensive.
Leadership
Red Skull – The Master of Evil leadership gives your characters additional power when they damage an opponent with an attack. Power generating leaderships are always good and the majority of power generating leaderships are limited to once per turn while this leadership is not. This means that beam attacks or rapid fire attacks can generate a large amount of power as long as they keep doing damage. Unfortunately Red Skull himself hasn’t been updated since his inception and is on the weaker side of 4 threat characters. B+
Sin – The Red Mayhem leadership gives you an extra step in the cleanup phase where you get a chance to make opponents drop objectives or be pushed off nearby objectives. Unfortunately this happens after points are scored and isn’t guaranteed, for those two reasons the leadership doesn’t quite accomplish what it wants to do. D
Malekith the Accursed – The Dark Council leadership lets another character move short, remove a damage and gain an energy when you daze or KO an enemy. Malekith himself isn’t quite the terror that he was on release but is still a mobile assassin who can move around the board triggering this leadership. The extra move it provides can compound the advantage, putting your next character in position to dispose of another enemy. B+
Red Skull Master of the World – My Cabal Is Only for the Strong is another aggressive leadership available to Cabal. It lets you treat one skull as a critical when making an attack roll. This can either be paid for with power or, if you don’t have the power, with health, representing the Red Skull forcing his minions to do his bidding no matter the cost! Usually skulls can’t be affected by re-rolls of any kind, so this type of dice manipulation is very valuable. It is limited to once per turn and doesn’t affect grunts so there are some limitations but overall a strong leadership. A-
Affiliation Size
The Cabal are one of the largest affiliations in the game with over 30 affiliated models. Within their numbers are characters that cover multiple threat levels and archetypes so you should be able to choose whichever models fit your play-style although they are more suited to fighting than just scoring. There are a few affiliations that have a lot of crossover with Cabal such as Hydra and Criminal Syndicate so there is a lot of list building opportunity to build a roster that crosses two affiliations. A
Team Tactics Cards
Dark Reign perfectly compliments an aggressive Cabal game plan, giving all your Cabal characters full re-rolls against a single target for a round. When you really want Hulk dead, use Dark Reign at the top of the round and he will (most likely) go down. Their other cards are all tied to specific characters which makes them more situational. Cosmic Invigoration lets you remove an activated token from a character which can be a very powerful play but is tied to the original Red Skull. The Black Bifrost lets Malekith create portals on the table which any character can go through. Dig In makes it so that for one round Crossbones can’t be moved and gets a bump in his defenses. C+
Ease of Collecting
Earth’s Mightiest core set comes with multiple Cabal characters to get you started. After that there are a few directions you can go; Malekith the Accursed CP93 gives another option for a leader, and you really can’t go wrong with a dark elf with beautiful hair riding a flying tiger. The rest of the roster will depend on how you want to play and if you want to dual affiliate with another faction. Mystique and Magneto are both in the Cabal, Kingpin, Hood and Klaw are also Criminal Syndicate and most of the Hydra roster are Cabal as well. B+
For a more in depth overview take a look at our Cabal Spotlight.
Convocation
Who They Are
The Convocation are a loose group of the premier sorcerers of the Marvel Universe. They are one of the few affiliations that only exist in Marvel Crisis Protocol though there are some nods to the sorcerers of Marvel knowing one another with interconnected Sanctum Sanctorums in the Marvel Universe.
How They Play on the Table
Being all about mystic attacks can make Convocation quite skewed on the table. They can bypass some of the most common defensive abilities in the game such as Vibranium Shield and Martial Artist. However this can be a double-edged sword as occasionally you’ll face characters with extremely high mystic defenses such as Ultron with his Metal Mind and you will struggle to hurt them. Many of the Convocation characters themselves don’t have a high physical defense and so they can be reliant on turns when their Iron-Bound Books of Shuma-Gorath are up (more on that below). They have several unique cards, a small pool of characters, and two leaderships that are attached to a card rather than a character. For these reasons they can be quite a complicated affiliation to play and I generally wouldn’t recommend them for a new player.
Leadership
The Bar With No Doors is a unique leadership as it is attached to a card rather than a specific character. The card is included in the 10 for your roster but does not take up the 5 for your squad. You attach it to one of your Convocation characters at the start of the game and it has one of two effects. The Moons of Munnopor lets you re-roll a mystic attack dice against a character that has not activated and lets you re-roll a defense dice if your character has not activated. The Circle of the Cosmos lets you place your character within 1 of its position if it was damaged. You can pay a power in the power phase to switch between these effects giving the affiliation a lot of flexibility. Early on you can steal extracts under the Circle of the Cosmos and ‘bump’ yourself away whenever an enemy attacks to keep your extract holder safe from follow up attacks. Then in a later turn when you need to be more aggressive you can switch to Moons of Munnopor for some attacking re-rolls. B+
Affiliation Size
Only eight affiliated characters, and two of them are Dr. Steven Vincent Strange so they can’t be taken together. The affiliation is one of the smaller ones, and on top of that many Convocation characters have very similar stat lines and roles. C
Team Tactics Cards
Uniquely in MCP the Convocation have as many affiliated Cards as they do characters. I won’t go through all of them here but some stand outs are the Iron-Bound Books of Shuma-Gorath which let your characters use their mystic defense instead of their physical defense for a round. This card can be used again when one of your characters is KO’d so a popular tactic is to splash Elektra or Ultron, Metal Tyrant who both have grunts that can die easily and refresh the card. Other stand out cards are Plane of Pohldahk which can give you full mystic attack re-rolls vs one character. And Orb of Agamotto which lets your characters teleport within 3. A
Ease of collecting
There is no Start Collecting box for Convocation, nor are there any Convocation characters in the core set which means you will need to buy other boxes to get the collection going. On the plus side, all the Convocation cards and half of your affiliated characters are split across only two boxes: Baron Mordo and the Ancient One CP64 and Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme and Clea CP67. Three more boxes, and you will have the entire affiliation at your disposal with a couple of splash characters to spare. C+
For a more in depth overview take a look at our Convocation Spotlight.
Criminal Syndicate
Who They Are
Where the Cabal are the baddies that threaten the entire world, the Criminal Syndicate are more likely to just threaten the city (and being Marvel Comics, this usually means New York City). The generic bank robbers and street level baddies all get lumped together into the Criminal Syndicate affiliation.
How They Play on the Table
The Criminal Syndicate are one of the larger affiliations in the game with over 20 affiliated characters. Generally Criminal Syndicate lists have a primary game plan of using the Kingpin’s leadership to sit big, hard-to-shift characters on all the secures on the map and win on points. As Kingpin’s leadership does nothing for the secures that aren’t based on sitting in a place, they often have a secondary game plan either by dual affiliating or with another one of their leaders like Shadowland Daredevil or M.O.D.O.K. Scientist Supreme.
Leadership
Kingpin – The Illicit Network leadership has remained one of the strongest leaderships in the game since Kingpin’s release and often Criminal Syndicate lists will be built around it. The first part of the leadership allows healthy characters to count as 2 when determining who is securing an objective. With several large and hard-to-shift characters in the roster, such as Rhino, Ulik, and Kingpin himself, it can be hard to stop them from winning all the points on the table early on. The second part of the leadership allows characters to throw extracts to one another. This lets them stack them on hard to kill characters before running them away with all the points. A+
Shadowland Daredevil – The Shadow War leadership lets your characters re-roll attack dice if the opponent is holding or securing an objective. It is also a relatively rare form of re-roll in the game in that it allows you to re-roll skulls and isn’t limited to once per turn or action. Due to this, the leadership works particularly well with beam and rapid fire attacks using characters like Hood, and Crossbones, and Merciless Merc potentially getting 4 or more re-rolls each a turn. B+
Klaw – The Black Market Entrepreneur leadership lets Klaw advance short when an allied character is Dazed or KO’d. As it only affects Klaw and requires your own characters to suffer, this might be one of the worst leaderships in the game. D-
M.O.D.O.K. Scientist Supreme – The Advanced Idea Mechanics leadership is a more balanced dice manipulation option than Shadowland Daredevil’s. It requires your characters to either be holding or securing an objective and if so, once per turn, if they roll a wild they can change another dice to a success. Free dice manipulation is always helpful but requiring your characters roll wilds and be holding/securing objectives means you have limited control on when it happens. B-
Affiliation Size
Criminal Syndicate are one of the widest affiliations currently in the game with over 20 affiliated characters. They also have a lot of crossover with Spider-Foes and Cabal so a dual affiliation is a strong possibility. There are enough affiliated characters to meet several potential playstyles, broadly fitting into the categories of potatoes sitting in a place or guns pew pewing people. A-
Team Tactics Cards
A broad selection of cards but many are rarely seen. Their most play-style defining card is All According to Plan which at the cost of 10 power across your Criminal syndicate affiliated characters lets you steal priority from the opponent. This can be a game winning play letting you activate a key character first in the round who might otherwise be killed off. Shadow Organization gives your characters a form of stealth protecting your characters from attacks outside range 2 for a round. Then they have several low quality offensive cards the best of which, Cruelty gives you a free 5 dice mystic follow up attack if you damage an opponent. C+
Ease of Collecting
Although a broad affiliation, there is no dedicated affiliation box for Criminal Syndicate, and they only have one affiliated character in the Earth’s Mightiest core box. However, you can get a good start with some of the leaders. Kingpin comes in CP29 and is a core part of the affiliation; Shadowland Daredevil comes with Elektra in CP79 giving you your second leader and a secondary playstyle. The latest addition of the Sandman, Shocker, Electro and Vulture box CP156, although usually thought of as Spider-Foes, contains characters who are all also Criminal Syndicate affiliated so it would be a good next purchase. B-
For a more in depth overview take a look at our Criminal Syndicate Spotlight.
Dark Dimension
Who They Are
The Lord of the Mindless Ones, ruler of the Dark Dimension, the Dread Dormammu a mystical being of unfathomable power. He seeks to conquer all dimensions including earth and has come close numerous times. It often takes the combined might of Earth’s most power sorcerers to prevent Dormammu from achieving his goals and conquering the Earth.
How They Play on the Table
The Dark Dimension is one of two affiliations in the game that technically only have one affiliated character. When you include Dormammu in your squad it automatically becomes Dark Dimension affiliated no matter who else you include. This represents the fact that any character in the game can become a thrall to Dormammu’s dark influence. The ability to take any character in the game makes it difficult pin down exactly how the Dark Dimension play, but Dormammu himself being one of the most expensive characters in the game at 8 threat means you need to plan your team around supporting him.
Leadership
The Dark Dimension leadership gives your characters additional power in the power phase. This can be a huge boon for characters early on with abilities like Charge or Pounce able to be used on round one. A deal with an extra dimensional God-like being comes at a price as if they have over 6 power they will take a damage in the power phase. Yes that does mean your characters can be dazed in the power phase and not do anything for that turn, you have been warned! C
Affiliation Size
Technically the affiliation size is only 1 making it the smallest affiliation in the game but in practical terms it is infinite as no-one is safe from the temptation of the Dark Lord. D/A
Team Tactics Cards
Only two cards for the Dark Dimension. Dark Empowerment allows you to share power around your team based on the amount of damage you do. As usual for Dormammu this comes at the cost of health. The other card Dark Restoration lets Dormammu pay 6 to bring one of your KO’d (3 threat or less) characters back from the dead. The threat of this card can make it so that people don’t want to attack your X-23 or Baron Zemo as killing them just brings them back healthier. Honorary mention goes to the unaffiliated card Smash which lets you destroy a terrain piece smaller than your character to gain attack dice. Dormammu being one of the few size 5 characters in the game mean that Smash can be a huge value to him. C+
Ease of collecting
Both the cards and the single character you need are in one box. A+
That’s part two finished once again if you missed part one you can find it here. Stay tuned for part three for the next set of affiliations.
