Feature article no.2 – Chris Young

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Today we’ve got another feature article, this time from Chris Young! Chris is an experienced Asgardian player, and today he is going to break down a little bit about

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For Asgard!

Today I thought I would give you all a brief overview of the Norse Warrior Gods of Asgard. This article is just going to be a quick review of the affiliation; their leadership ability, characters and tactics cards. In the future I’ll be writing some more in-depth articles about some of the Asgardian characters, and I’ll be doing some event reports once I’ve had chance to go to a few

Leadership

The only current leader for Asgard is Thor, Prince of Asgard and he has the Prince of Asgard leadership. This is a great leadership in a number of ways as the majority of Asgardians tend to be on the expensive side, so the healing and the ability to remove status effects without shaking can be game changing. I’m not sure it’s neccesarily the best leadership in the game, but it is easy to use initially and has room to learn which is a great place to be.

An important note to always keep in mind is what your opponent can throw out status effect wise. It might be a good idea to not use the leadership on a character until after your opponent goes with their Scarlet Witch or Hawkeye, so that you can get rid of some of the nastier conditions they throw out. Being able to remove Stagger with this leadership is great, and it can really help to maximise action efficiency

Team Overview

I’ll be going more in depth into individual characters in future articles, but the main selling point of Asgardians is that they are always able to do something, due to the Asgardian Superpower. This Superpower is Innate and all of the Asgardians have it – It means that in the power phase they gain an additional power. As all of the Asgardians all have pretty strong builders, this means you’ll always have the power to use superpowers and tactic cards – And the Asgardians have access to lots of good ones.

You will rarely get an activation where an Asgardian isn’t charging forward or throwing things around, and this can lead to more power gain which really gets the snowball rolling.

One of the most fun aspects of playing this affiliation is that on the face of things they are a very charge in and hit things affiliation – and they hit hard. Once you get some experience with them you can start to play around with all the crazy combinations and abilities they have, and this can actually make them a very tactical team. Enchantress is a great example of this with so many different options each turn for her to use her power in different ways for different goals

As I mentioned in my It’s not dice, its you article, sometimes as fun as it may be flying around hitting stuff, because you have the natural ability to generate two power a turn you can have the option of double moving and using throws/pushes/advancees without relying on dice. This can be the best option at times as it can let you throw people off of objectives, and as your not attacking them it doesn’t give your opponent as much power to retaliate

Team Make up

Currently the affiliated characters are Thor and Angela who are five threat, Loki, Enchantress and Hela who are all four and Valkyrie who is three. At times this can make team building pretty rigid if your not including Task master or Winter soldier to count as affiliated three threats thanks to Rogue agent

This is because at lower points to stay 51% affiliated you might only have space for two affiliated characters and one unaffiliated. At higher points you’ll probably be looking to have three affiliated characters and two unaffiliated. This generally means the cheapest three character core is going to be Thor, Valkyrie and either of the four threat options, which gives you a twelve point core. At lower threat values like 14, you can have two affiliated characters such as Thor and Angela and then just one unaffiliated four threat, but as going wide is becoming more prominent this might not be the best route.

Team Tactics

The current Asgardian tactics cards I staple to all of my rosters are Odin’s Blessing and Rainbow Bridge, both of which are great. Sibling rivalry is also fantastic if your taking Loki, but if not it won’t be much use for you. I would also give special mention to Advanced R&D, as this allows Enchantress to use Amora’s kiss round one to steal an important extract like the Skrull or Power core. If you want to play more aggressively you can use it to give Thor the power to use For Asgard! turn one letting him charge in and cause chaos!

More isn’t always better

Although I will definitely go over this more in depth in the future, as mentioned above one of the advantages of Asgard is their ability to start with and generate more power than most other teams. This means that if you pick a Crisis card like Infinity Formula or Struggle for the Cube, although it gives you more power it also gives your opponent more power, closing the gap and making the advantage of your power gain less impactful. It will also let your opponent use more spender attacks, which can be very bad when you already have fewer models than your opponent. This is important to bear in mind, and it’s the reason why more isn’t always better

Drinking Partners

Initial good choices for non-affiliated characters with the Asgardians are characters like Rocket, as he is the cheapest character to fit in that can hand back and still contribute – Nobody wants to pay the price for Asgardian to just have have sitting on a back pointsitting. Lizard is a great three threat option, and he helps with roster building – and he loves the leadership as it helps him be an even better tank. Okoye is another two threat character that can make roster building even easier, and taking those hits for your big hitters is worth every penny

Things to watch out for

Although you can remove status effects with the leadership this is only once per round, so if your opponent has ways of dishing out multiple conditions you can really start to get into trouble as having to shake can really hurt the Asgardian action economy

Outside of the obvious worst Conditions to have – Like Hex and Incinerate, I think Stun and Poison can be the really bad for the Asgardians – Their leadership and all the things that make Asgardians great comes from starting with more power and having great ways to generate and spend it, so having that cut down can really hurt

Hopefully this has given you a bit of food for thought about our favourite Norse Warrior Gods, and I’ll be providing a more detailed breakdown in the future. I’ll be diving into specific Character cards, Tactics cards and strategies in the future, so if you want more of my opinions on the Asgardians, keep your eyes peeled!

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It’s really refreshing to see someone talking about the Asgardians, as they’ve been left behind a little with the current super wide builds we are seeing dominate lower threat values. I think Asgard still has a place in the meta, and it’s always scary to face up against the literal Gods of Asgard, so I’m looking forward to what Chris has to talk about in the future!

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