Hello and welcome! Whether you just started playing Marvel Crisis Protocol, or are an experienced player looking to get into X-Men, everyone needs a place to start and today, I'll be going over some of the basic and important tools available to the affiliation since there are now 20+ models for them to play.
First, let's go over the leaders.
Storm, leading X-Men Gold, is probably the better known leader of the X-Men in Marvel Crisis Protocol. Thanks to her leadership, granting models extra movement and additional defensive tech in the form of rerolls, she's a very efficient character with a proactive leadership that you can leverage to gain an advantage on the scenario, of project threat across the board by having your characters be better positioned for attacks. This makes positioning very key in Storm led lists, as your characters need to be somewhat close to each other to leverage the extra mobility. Since the leadership scales better with larger bases (because you can get more movement), some models become more interesting because of their larger bases. It also helps models save actions by replacing a movement with the «jump» and making them more efficient. In addition to her leadership, Storm as a character is a solid affiliated 3 threat, making her the most inexpensive leader available, which provides additional flexibility in list building compared to her peers.
Next up is Scott Summers, aka Cyclops, leading with X-Men Blue. Cyclops's leadership is a more offensive focused one, where your models gain extra power whenever they deal damage with their attacks. This incentivizes playing characters with strong offensive outputs that also scale well with extra power. Because it has a range limitation (even if the range is fairly long), there is a positioning element to keep in mind here if you want to maximize its effect. Cyclops usually wants to play on a somewhat close but not too close map, where you can both engage against your opponent's models and give power to your allies without being too exposed.
The most recent addition to the X-Men leaders, Profesor X provides another leadership that gives power to a friendly model. Once per turn, whenever one of your characters uses an active or reactive superpower that costs power you can give another one of your models a power. This can give you a solid start, where the first character you activate uses a superpower and gives another model a power. This lets in turn keep the chain going by having your next character activate and generate power again. While this is probably the most straightforward leadership available to X-Men, it is nonetheless very effective. Xavier's leadership is looking for characters that have both active and reactive superpowers to make use of it as much as possible.
All 3 leaders give X-Men different playstyles and options to consider. One thing worth keeping in mind is that they tend to occupy the same function or role most of the time. Storm, Cyclops and Professor X are all ranged attackers that are more on the fragile side and can be threatened easily if overexposed, so keeping them safe is important as losing the leadership can make it significantly harder to win.
Now onto the Team Tactics Card
First Class is one of the best examples of affiliation defining Tactics Card. First Class lets all the affiliated model have their first interaction be free. The card is typically played on round 1, as it's where the power difference has the biggest impact and usually where your characters are very likely to do it. By itself, First Class lets X-Men be one of the few teams that prefers a subset of Secures colloquially named Pay to Flips (Sword Base, Mutant Madmen, Spider-Portals and Deadly Meteors) because they can interact with them and pick up extract tokens all in round 1. Even without the advantage on Pay to Flips, when there are a lot of extracts on the board, or even just to conserve power going into round 2, the card is very flexible and efficient very early in the game and gives a lot of momentum.
Under Storm's leadership, it lets you use the place from X-Men Gold and interact with an objective. Under Professor X's leadership, it lets your characters spend their power for their superpower without limiting their interactions on the scenario and leverage the leadership to its maximum.
First Class is one of the best examples of affiliation defining Tactics Card. First Class lets all the affiliated model have their first interaction be free. The card is typically played on round 1, as it's where the power difference has the biggest impact and usually where your characters are very likely to do it. By itself, First Class lets X-Men be one of the few teams that prefers a subset of Secures colloquially named Pay to Flips (Sword Base, Mutant Madmen, Spider-Portals and Deadly Meteors) because they can interact with them and pick up extract tokens all in round 1. Even without the advantage on Pay to Flips, when there are a lot of extracts on the board, or even just to conserve power going into round 2, the card is very flexible and efficient very early in the game and gives a lot of momentum.
Under Storm's leadership, it lets you use the place from X-Men Gold and interact with an objective. Under Professor X's leadership, it lets your characters spend their power for their superpower without limiting their interactions on the scenario and leverage the leadership to its maximum.
Children of the Atom is a card playable by any X-Men, that lets them remove all conditions and gain a power for each one removed. This card is interesting, as it doesn't have the same value for each character that can play it. Since lower threat characters tend to be more fragile than the expensive characters, the card scales better on high threat models since removing conditions helps them more than inexpensive characters. Taking an action to remove a condition a on 3 or 4 threat is not as impactful as doing the same on a 5 threat. As the vast majority of affiliated models are 3 or 4 threat, this card is somewhat situational or matchup dependent but can be a reliable tool to save some trouble on your expensive models or as a tech card against certain matchups.
To Me, My X-Men! is another relatively important card for the affiliation. This lets any X-Men leader (whether active or not if you play more than one of them at the same time) pay any amount of power to advance another X-Men short towards them. Since towards and away are measured with 90° angles, the movement is surprisingly permissive and flexible. An important thing to know, you do not have to be during the turn of your leader to play the card, it can be played at any time you could normally play an active card. This card has a lot of applications. It can be used to safely take an extract from the center line on the board on round 1, or to move models back on points after they've been pushed or thrown away set up Storm's leadership, bring a character in attack range and so on.
The latest addition to the universal X-Men Tactics Card, Xavier's Dream lets any number of characters spend 1 power to reduce damage from a single source by 1 for each power spent. This card can help protect a character scoring points, an important activation or even deny an opposing model the opportunity to build power. The card not being limited to affiliated models means you can play and pay for it with your out of affiliation models. This inherent flexibility, in addition to spreading the cost on different models, makes it a very strong and reliable tool in the Uncanny X-Men's arsenal.
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Overall, the 3 current X-Men leaders offer options and invite to play in complementary directions. Storm's X-Men Gold focuses on mobility, which makes her an excellent leader for scenario and proactive gameplay. Because positioning is key to leveraging her well, it's also the hardest leadership to start with but is arguably the strongest of the 3. It's worth keeping in mind that being able to give models mobility also lets the leadership be strong as an attrition plan to advance your models and augment their effective threat range.
Cyclops is, a priori, more attrition focused as it rewards making attacks and dealing damage, but tends to function more as a tempo team, leveraging the extra power from attacks to gain additional advantages on the board with spenders (attacks costing power) or by being able to use their superpowers more often. X-Men Blue is somewhat prone to snowball, meaning that once it gets going, the extra power usually lets you do more damage, which in turn builds more power and so on. This also means that if your start is on the slower side, it can take more time to get going.
Xavier's Leadership is probably the most flexible of the 3. Giving power to allied models when you use superpower helps you fund other models's kits and keep the chain going. It's the most relevant on inexpensive superpowers because it funds them early and often in the game. If you can build on the advantage it grants, you can take a pretty effective lead and try to consolidate it and win thanks to the advantages built up.
Hopefully, this article has been insightful and gives a better idea of the important things each leader of the Uncanny X-Men is looking for, as well as the uses for the key Tactics Cards of the affiliation.
As always, thank you for taking the time to read this piece and don't forget to have fun!
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