[MCP] Competitive Innovations in the Marvel Universe – Highlights from the WTC

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.

The World Team Championship was one of the largest tournaments in the Marvel: Crisis Protocol calendar year. Over 200 people across 42 teams from across the globe came together in Copenhagen to see which country has the strongest Marvel: Crisis Protocol players!

Before we break down into some analysis it’s worth going over the format of the event. Across each 5-man team there could be no duplication of characters, though Team Tactics Cards and crisis could be doubled up. This created an interesting meta as each team member had to make some sacrifices to their roster for the good of the team as a whole.

One other point to note was that during the pairing process, within each pairing, the player who did not choose the match up chose the table. In order to make this matter asymmetrical tables were placed so that you could ensure your Asgard player had a lot to throw or your Web Warriors player had a lot to hide behind!

Results

For those who want to look at all the lists in detail they can be found on longshanks here.

Italy Maestro 1st Place

The Italians went undefeated over 6 rounds making them the 2024 WTC Champion.They included some unorthodox lists within their team including options for more than one X-Men and Avengers team. Between their lists they had a good balance of attrition and control which likely made pairing into them difficult.

Team Breakdown:

Guardians of the Galaxy

This Guardians list included Thanos with the reality and space gems who can make the most out of the “Winging It” tokens given out by Star Lord. Interestingly he also included original Ghost Rider as a splash rather than the affiliated Cosmic Ghost rider. Psylock was another uncommon splash for the Guardians, bringing some otherwise missing mystic damage to the team. The crisis and characters taken favor a central fight rather than a points scoring game.

X-Men

The Storm led X-Men list included the usual X-Men tricks in order to get an early points lead using First Class and Storm’s leadership to safely take extracts. The inclusion of Doctor Voodoo helps against Web Warriors or other control mirrors. Voodoo himself being a way to steal from enemy characters who are already holding which the X-Men don’t have in their affiliated roster. Ultron Metal Tyrant added some much needed punch to the list. Being somewhat of a turret himself Ultron gets a lot out of the ‘Hop’ from Storm’s leadership to position himself around the board without wasting a move action.

X-Men / Avengers

The second X-Men list within the team was also the first of two Avengers teams in Italy Maestro. On the X-Men side the list focused on Professor X, passing power around characters to enable early plays that wouldn’t usually be possible. An example might be using Magik‘s Limbo step to pass a power to Wolverine to do an early The Best at What I do charge. On the Avengers side he could use Sam Wilson’s All New, All Different Avengers Leadership to help curb the damage from attrition teams. There are some interesting splash characters taken here. Thor, Prince of Asgard gets a lot out of Professor X’s leadership enabling an early For Asgard! charge. And Crimson Dynamo helping in central fights where adding the shock condition to the enemy with his beam and re-rolling their dice with disruption field are invaluable.

Web Warriors / Hellfire Club

This dual Hellfire and Webs list is heavily scenario focused with high scoring crisis and multiple options to steal extracts with Rhino and Black Cat. An attrition team facing into this could end up with a tough time if they pull Riots Spark Over Extremis 3.0 as the Hellfire Club can get a huge amount of healing each turn between the Extremis consoles and the leadership. Despite the Hellfire club pivot, many of the characters here are staple splashes in Web Warriors lists such as Baron Zemo and Black Panther who get a lot from being able to re-roll skulls under Miles.

Inhumans / Avengers

The second Avengers list in their team was a dual Inhumans and Avengers roster. This list can put a huge amount of early pressure on, either under Steve Rogers‘ leadership reducing the cost of early superpowers or Black Bolt‘s Inhumans leadership passing power around to achieve the same. Thor, Hero of Midgard can be an absolute menace once he gets his power generation going and between these leaders he can be powered up in multiple ways. Similarly either Medusa or the Howling Commandos can set up Thor by placing him further up the board. This gave the list a clear game plan that could be achieved under multiple characters / leaderships and therefore could be played no matter the threat level chosen.

England 51% Affiliated 2nd Place

The top placing England team may well have been one of the favorites going into the tournament but were knocked off the top spot by the Italians in round 3.

Team Breakdown:

X-Men – A similar Storm Led X-Men team to the Italians with Crimson Dynamo splashed to help in E-shape fights and Doctor Voodoo to help in the control mirror.

Cabal / Black Order – A take on the now infamous Thanos Cabal list which, between Death’s Decree from Thanos, Red Skull, Master of the World‘s leadership and Master Swordsman from Baron Zemo enables some extremely punishing attacks. Under this setup Baron Zemo can attack with 7 dice, re-rolling everything and where a skull in the initial roll can be turned into a critical hit.

Avengers – A Steve Rogers Avengers list making the most of the discount from the A Day unlike any other leadership to create an extremely tough to crack, ball of heroes. Steve himself can bodyguard for allies while Cable boosts Steve’s shields even further. Hulk and Shang Chi provide a huge amount of control between their throws and pushes and to top it off Sam Wilson can airlift any allies that get moved out of position.

Web Warriors – A list that aims to score the game out quickly going wide with multiple strong 3 threat Web Warriors and the potential to go super wide with 2, 2-threats thrown in as well.

Asgard – The new meta terror of Asgard using the extremely strong 15 threat core of Loki, Prince of Lies, Thor, Hero of Midgard and Beta Ray Bill. There were a couple of interesting splash characters in the list. Vision whose immunity to collision damage in his energy defence mode helps in the Asgard mirror. And Weapon X who is a pure damage machine, ignoring extracts completely to focus on more dice.

Belgium Patch Up Boys 3rd Place

The Belgians took third place losing having lost in the final round to Italy.

Team Breakdown:

X-Men – Another Storm led X-Men team with a Voodoo splash which seems to be the best way to get success in the list at this point.

Cabal / Hydra – Another take on the Cabal list with Thanos. The differences here were the option to use Red Skull, Master of Hydra as an additional leadership option. Looking at the matches played it appears that Hydra was the preferred pivot in this case.

Asgard / Guardians – As Beta Ray Bill and Angela are affiliated to both Asgard and the Guardians of the Galaxy it is straightforward to take the Asgard core 15 with Guardians and fill the rest of the roster with Guardians. Then depending on whether you need to smash people up close or shoot them from afar you have options.

Web Warriors – A list with 2 2-threat characters in Wong and Black Widow to enable them to go extra wide as well as Crimson Dynamo to help central crisis.

Spider-Foes – A list led by Doc Ock, Sinister Scientist which can pivot to either an attrition or control game plan. Namor gives the option for a safe central extract steal and he has chosen to take some lesser-seen Foes such as Venom and Mysterio.

Event Statistics

The highest win rate of any affiliation was A-Force with 71% however this was a relatively small sample size from a couple of dedicated A-Force players.

The Servants of the Apocalypse made quite a splash in one of their first major tournaments with a 66% win rate over 33 games. It’s hard to say how much of this was due to unfamiliarity with the match up or the strength of Apocalypse himself but the win rate is impressive nonetheless.

Similarly the Midnight Sons had a good showing with a 63% win rate across 32 games. Blade’s bump in the night leadership can be used either to help play the scenario enabling early extract plays or to gain an attrition advantage pushing characters into range for additional attacks.

With over 100 games played it is worth going into a little more detail regarding the Cabal. Their latest list with Thanos enables an early kidnap of an enemy character and his Death’s Decree along with Red Skull Master of the World’s leadership and Baron Zemo’s master swordsman superpower can one shot the majority of characters in the game. During the event they had an impressive 62% win rate overall however this is without the mirror taken into account. In the pairing process a common strategy was to have this strong list cancel itself out by pairing into the same from the opponent. Removing the mirror match bumps the win rate up slightly to 65.4% which is possibly enough that it needs looking at from a balance perspective.

If we look at Asgard we can see some interesting results. A recent balance update restricted Brothers in Arms and Research Station attacked in order to curb the strength of the Asgard core. They had some of the highest number of games played at the event with 172 games in total achieving a 53% win rate. When removing the mirror matches the win rate only marginally increased to 54%. All things considered a 53% win rate is around where we would want for balance so it appears that the balance change seems to have worked based on this initial data.

The X-Men had a good showing at the event with a respectable 57% win rate over 127 games. Within the choices of leader Storm was the clear winner with a 61% win rate when she was leader compared to 47% for Cyclops and 43% for Professor X. Being a threat cheaper as well as giving additional movement and defensive shenanigans helps Storm a lot compared to the other leaders.

The Web Warriors are usually a strong roster for team events but ended on a below average 48% win rate over 154 games. Although Web Warriors are strong they had poor showings into some popular affiliations losing most of their games into Asgard, Cabal and X-Men. Additionally as they are a ‘known’ threat many teams took tech pieces specifically to counter Web Warriors such as Doctor Voodoo, Shang Chi and Agent Venom.

The Avengers are a team that can take on all comers due to their flexibility. However sometimes being the Jack of all trades master of none isn’t ideal in a team format where lists can be heavily skewed leaving the Avengers with a 47% win rate over 114 games.

The last affiliation I want to mention as it also had 100 games played was the Guardians of the Galaxy. With exactly 100 games played they only managed a 38% win rate. If I had to make an assumption on this it may be because some of their most popular splash characters such as Thanos or the Hulk were taken by their Teammates Cabal or Avengers lists respectively. The Winging It leadership favors taking a big threat to make the most of those free re-rolls and if your big threats are elsewhere it can hurt the Guardians game plan.

Interestingly over the course of over 1200 games there was an exactly equal 50% win rate for those with and without priority. In the words of Thanos ‘Perfectly Balanced, as all things should be…’

Round Up

As someone who attended, I will say that I had an incredible time overall. Our team ‘England Excalibur’ came exactly in the middle 21st out of 42 teams so I can’t complain. We met some incredible people from all over the world and the level of sportsmanship at the event was very high. If you get a chance to come to WTC 2025 I highly recommend the trip.

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