Ministravaganza – Crisis Card Inbound!

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During the Ministravaganza, one of the more subtle releases that was easily overlooked by the second wave of X-Men and the Juggernaut, was the new Crisis Card that it looks like we are getting with Baron Mordo and the Ancient one.

With the new changes that were announced to Crisis Card selection, making sure you have Crisis cards you want to play are more important than ever. You can’t just take two you want, knowing you have the luxury of never actually having to play the third. You also can’t just take a third Crisis like Wakandan Herbs or SWORD base to try and throw off your opponent – As now you might actually have to play them.

Whether you play competitively or casually, and whether you think the change is good or not, it’s always refreshing to have changes like these that can seriously effect how you play and how you build teams. So, today I’m going to look at the new Crisis Card, and how it might fit into peoples rosters with the new changes.

So the new Crisis we have is Intrusions open across city as seals collapse – Which for the sake of brevity I’ll just refer too as Intrusions. AMG slowed down with the Crisis releases, the last one we had being Deadly Legacy Virus Cured? Which we got with Mr Sinister. As we already have Secures where the interacting character rolls dice equal to their Physical or Energy Defenses, there was a lot of speculation that with the Mystic release we would get the first Crisis where you roll dice equal to your Mystic defence.

Although this wasn’t the case, I think it’s fair to say what we have got is very impactful. I’d go as far as to say that this is possibly the craziest mission we have seen so far. On the surface, Intrusions is a nineteen threat secure that uses Deployment map C, and has three ‘Dark Portals’.

What’s really bonkers is when you look at the way the Interact with this mission works. From what I can tell, in order to score these points you just need to be securing them in the Clean Up Phase – Similar to how you score Infinity Formula. Unlike Infinity Formula though, Intrusions has the option to choose to Interact with the Dark Portals if you want to try and get some interesting results.

When a character interacts with a Dark Portal, the first thing that happens is they drop all objective tokens they are holding, if any. As far as I know, this is the first way we have seen for a character to choose to drop it’s objective tokens. This alone creates a lot of new possibilities, as you’ll be able to recover multiple Extracts, bring them back to your home portal and Drop them all for one character to pick up. The first place that this comes to mind to be used in with Hammers, as using long move characters to go and gather Hammers for your slower beat stick characters could be really brutal. This could also make some really crazy Deadly Legacy Virus plays, as it will be much easier to get them all near to one character to pick them up. There have been times where one of my characters has two of the tokens and another has the last, and the fact that this will almost let me pass them between is bonkers.

This is only just the first part of the Interact though. Once the character has dropped all of it’s objectives, you roll one dice. If the result is a Crit, Wild, Hit or Block, then you can remove the character and place them within one of one of the other Dark Portals. If the result isn’t one of those above (So a Failure or a Blank) Then your opponent instead gets to place your character within one of another Portal. Either way, after travelling through a Portal a character suffers one damage once it has been placed this way. So although you can use the Portals to drop Extracts, you’ll have to go for a trip through a Dark Portal and take some damage when doing so.

Some of the movement that this enables is pretty insane. Having a huge beat stick like Corvus Glaive or the new and updated Hulk just teleport to be on the completely opposite side of the board will be pretty bonkers, and being able to send reinforcements through if needed will be really handy. If you roll a Blank or a Skull though, then that could be seriously bad news, as your character might be placed completely out of the way, or into a trap as lots of other angry characters are waiting on the other end.

As this is a Secure with only three points, and each point is only worth one Victory point a turn, this is quite a low scoring Crisis. Paired with a low scoring extract, and you could be in for quite a long game. I think Black Order and Brotherhood are going to quite like this mission, as they can try and use the Portals to hunt down their opponents and keep their expensive high cost characters in the game. I don’t think that a lot of rosters will be wanting to run this though, as the randomness of the places and the potential movement it can give to your opponent could be a real pain.

I don’t think that I’ll be running this one with my Web Warriors, as I quite like being able to push my targets away without worrying about them popping through a Portal next to me. Nineteen threat is one of my favourite threat values, but like I said I only think it’s BO or Brotherhood that will really want these missions – Although their low model count could mean they don’t want to drop the objectives they are holding.

If you look at it in reverse, I also think that Sam Spam Avengers might like this mission. They have plenty of models that they can throw through the portals, and plenty more that can pick up any objectives that they drop. It’s definitely going to be interesting to see how often this Crisis makes the cut moving forward! As I said though, I don’t think it will make many rosters – You can’t really risk accidentally playing this into Black Order and having Thanos and friends being able to bounce all over the place!

As always please leave a thumbs up if you enjoyed reading, or a thumbs down if you didn’t! Please feel free to comment with any thoughts you have on the new Crisis! Board in Brum still currently have a bunch of great sales on, including the leaders for the Uncanny X-Men, which you can find here!

If you’re looking to expand your roster with some new Heroes for Hire, or take the dive into Marvel Crisis Protocol – Check out Board in Brums Marvel section here, for all the MCP goodness you need! Thanks again for reading!