Some information in this article may be out of date as characters, tactics cards or leaderships have changed. All articles with out-of-date information are identified with the Legacy tag.
Welcome to this introductory article focusing on Crisis selection with the Uncanny X-Men in Crisis Protocol. This piece will be focusing on Storm's leadership, X-Men Gold as it's the most popular and used of the X-Men leaderships by a significant margin. As an important part of what defines affiliation identity in MCP, leaderships, tactics cards and affiliated characters are usually the biggest factors in determining what type of crisis you'd want to play. Before we delve into crisis selection properly, let's take a look at what X-Men Gold does.
With the added mobility granted by what's colloquially known as the X-Men Jump or Hop, leveraging that extra movement is an important part of successfully running a Storm led team. The Cover granted by the leadership also leads to a choice of more spread out map shapes for secures like B and D. It forces your opponent to move their models more often to attack you, will both limit the number of attacks they can make and force them to do them when you have Cover which reduces the impact of these attacks.
The X-Men jump informs significantly the crisis selection for X-Men as it gives them an inherent safe extract grab. A safe extract grab is something that lets a model move and pick up an Extract token placed in the middle of the board in 1 or less action. It's important because it lets them move back to safety afterwards out of range of most things an opponent can do to threaten that character. Their tactics card To Me, My X-Men also gives them an opportunity for a safe extract grab if needed. X-Men tend to favor Extracts that have relatively central objectives because they can safely grab more than almost any if not any other affiliations in MCP which lets them get ahead on victory points very early on. This means they also tend to favor high scoring extracts (which have more tokens) to leverage those safe grabs even further.
After the leadership, the next important piece in helping identifying advantageous crisis is the tactics card First Class.
First Class lets your affiliated characters' first interaction be free of charge which can be helpful on two main axes.
The first one is enabling a character to have a better and more efficient activation on round 2, which is especially true for X-Men characters that have 2 costed superpowers or attacks (like Cyclops's Hit and Run, Beast's throw, Rogue's Mutant Absorbtion, Colossus's Bodyguard, X-23's Claw Rush attack and so on) while still being able to interact and play the scenario on round 1 to score points.
The second axis on which First Class helps is letting your affiliated characters interact twice, which can be relevant on certain Extracts like «Struggle for the Cube» or «Fear Grips World» (more commonly known as Hammers) where characters can hold multiple of them. This leads X-Men to typically choose «Pay to Flips», which are a kind of Secure that requires interaction to take control of in order to score them. This lets them get a usually important advantage early in a game as most characters and affiliations are not able to pay power to interact with both Secures and Extracts on round 1. Here are the pay to flip scenarios available (as of the writing of this article) to use.
The first one is enabling a character to have a better and more efficient activation on round 2, which is especially true for X-Men characters that have 2 costed superpowers or attacks (like Cyclops's Hit and Run, Beast's throw, Rogue's Mutant Absorbtion, Colossus's Bodyguard, X-23's Claw Rush attack and so on) while still being able to interact and play the scenario on round 1 to score points.
The second axis on which First Class helps is letting your affiliated characters interact twice, which can be relevant on certain Extracts like «Struggle for the Cube» or «Fear Grips World» (more commonly known as Hammers) where characters can hold multiple of them. This leads X-Men to typically choose «Pay to Flips», which are a kind of Secure that requires interaction to take control of in order to score them. This lets them get a usually important advantage early in a game as most characters and affiliations are not able to pay power to interact with both Secures and Extracts on round 1. Here are the pay to flip scenarios available (as of the writing of this article) to use.
Mutant Madman and Spider-Portals are the two most popular one since they combine both the «pay to flip» aspect and shapes X-Men tend to like playing on. As for the last Secure it comes down to personal preference, so I would advise to try them out and figure out which one you feel more comfortable playing, be it a third pay to flip, a secure with a favorable shape like Infinity Formula, Cosmic Invasion or Extremis.
As for extracts, since X-Men Gold usually wants to play a fast scoring game the scenarios most commonly played with them tend to be the ones who bring more tokens to the board for your models to pick up. I'll divide them into two distinct categories that will inform how we approach the games.
The first one is uneven extracts, the two with the most tokens being Spider-Infected and Struggle for the Cube. The important thing with those two, is to know that you want to be able to grab 3 of them, independently of which player has priority to be able to leverage them effectively because when you don't have priority, and you're not able to pick 3, it puts you at a significant disadvantage on the scenario.
The second axis concerns even scenarios, so in this case we have Paranoia Pummels Populace, Fear Grips World (colloquially known as Hammers) and Skrulls Infiltrate World Leadership. These 3 crisis all have 4 tokens each lets the Uncanny X-Men take advantage of their mobility and tools to grab the extracts and position themselves safely compared to the opposing team since most affiliations have fewer tools to play those scenarios without having to overexpose some of their characters.
In the end, X-Men Gold tends to be a very scenario centric way of playing MCP and their favored crisis choice reflects that. They are significantly better than most affiliations at being able to grab an early lead on VPs and consolidate their advantage through positioning, mobility and diverse toolkit.
I hope this breakdown will be helpful in figuring out which crisis to bring with X-Men Gold and how the tools available to them can help the affiliation succeed. As always, thanks a lot for taking the time to read this piece and don't forget to have fun!
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