Hello and welcome to another column! Today, I'll be covering the different X-Men lists players brought at the 2025 edition of the World Team Championship. I'll be going over character choices, notable inclusions for affiliated models, popular splashes, team tactics cards and scenarios.
Leaders and Leaderships
Let's delve into the affiliation spread. This year, out of the 32 teams, only 8 are bringing X-Men in one form or another, totalling 9 different X-Men lists as opposed to 22 inclusions out of 42 teams in 2024. Coming in force this year is Charles Xavier, leading 5 out of lists, making him the most popular this time around. Alongside him are 3 lists led by Storm and X-Men Gold and a single list led by Cyclops for X-Men Blue.
Another big change from last year is the presence of dual-affiliated lists, which went from a small minority to the majority of lists. 6/9 X-Men lists are dual-affiliated in one form or another with 4 lists bringing Xavier and Apocalypse, one list bringing Storm and Cable for an X-Men/X-Force duo and lastly one player rocking Storm and Star-Lord for an unusual mix of X-Men and Guardians of the Galaxy. This leaves us with 3 single affiliated lists, one for each leader in Storm, Cyclops and Xavier.
Affiliated Models
Magik (6) sits at the top of the food chain of affiliated models this year. This is likely due to an important combination of factors. Being the most inexpensive affiliated model to trigger Xavier's Leadership on round 1 gives her a premier role under his leadership, as is being an important piece under Apocalypse as well, in addition to her buffs in the latest character update all help cement her place amongst the X-Men.
Beast (6) ties Magik as the most included X-Men model unsurprisingly. Beast has been a staple model of X-Men for as long as the affiliation has existed, with his above average resilience, control and efficiency, he's a character that gets the job done in most lists. Being another model popular under Apocalypse facilitates his inclusion here as well.
Xavier (5) is the first leader appearing on this list and the most popular choice in the current metagame. He's been the most successful leader for X-Men so far in 2025 and has had some success on the competitive scene both as a single leader and taken alongside Apocalypse. His ability to share power makes him a fairly consistent leader to use, with a long list of affiliated models and excellent team tactics cards.
The next group of models falls into the notable category of being affiliated both with X-Men and with Servants of Apocalypse, to facilitate list construction and providing solid bases for both halves of the list. Iceman (5), Gambit (5), Psylocke (4) and Colossus (4) are all models that fit into that category. Their roles as either damage dealers that can scale with either leaderships (like Psylocke and Gambit) or as control pieces (in the case of Iceman and Colossus) help round up the core list of models under Xavier and Apocalypse, covering most of the bases for the list.
Next up is X-23 (4) which plays a similar role as some of the models taken with Apocalypse as she is taken for being both an X-Men model and an X-Force one, but still occupies an important role in more classic lists. Her mobility and offensive output has made her a very strong X-Men model for the current crisis set and while she doesn't fit the type of models Xavier usually looks for, she is still taken in every Storm and Cyclops list of the event.
Storm (3), Rogue (3) and Domino (3) share a similar niche to X-23 of being models taken by the minority of players not fielding Xavier. Storm being the second most taken leader, Rogue, being a popular piece for Xavier (sans dual affiliation) and Domino being a former staple of X-Men lists, is still popular under Storm and Cyclops for her offensive output and resilience.
The next group of models lands somewhere between being taken as tech pieces, concessions of the team format or niche character selection. Logan (2), Cable (2), Nightcrawler (1), Shadowcat (1), Cyclops (1), Honey Badger (1) all fit this mold. We notice enormously different inclusion rates compared to 2024, with Logan, Nightcrawler and Shadowcat all moving from the top of taken models to barely seeing any inclusion at all. I think we can put it down to essentially 3 factors. The first one being the scenario changes, where new maps are narrower than they used to be, meaning X-Men can't leverage their mobility to keep their more fragile characters safe. The second one is that a lot of what constituted really important models and splashes pieces for X-Men are now taken by affiliations that have had better tournament results this year (most importantly Apocalypse but others as well like Inhumans and Midnight Sons) and lastly just overall not having great event results this year means that teams are not as hard pressed as they've been before to include an X-Men list in their team.
Lastly, unto affiliated models that were left out this year Angel, Bishop, Emma Frost, Jean Grey, Phoenix and Wolverine. Most of these models have a lot of traits in common from which we can infer why they were excluded. Most of them are fairly static, meaning that they usually have to take a lot of move actions and not be as impactful on the board, while also not being very consistent in their performance on the board. Most of them are also of either average durability or more fragile than a lot of their available counterparts, both in and out of affiliations.
Unaffiliated models
For this section, I'll divide the models into 2 groups; the models taken for the Apocalypse dual and the rest, as most of the splashed models appear only once or twice by virtue of there being few X-Men players at the event.
Toad (6), Apocalypse (4) and Blob (3) all fit the first category. Apocalypse being the leader of it's own affiliation and Blob has additional synergies with Xavier that differentiates him from other 3 threats available to Apocalypse. Toad fits the role of being an excellent scenario-oriented 2 threat which gives him a role beyond being affiliated with Apocalypse.
As for the rest of the models, because most of them are only included once and some of them twice, I'll list them here but, because the number of teams is so small, it's hard to have any meaningful takeaways from their inclusions.
Doctor Voodoo, Shang-Chi and Beta Ray Bill all see the most inclusions at 2 instances, which can easily be attributed to them being top of their respective classes as far as unaffiliated models go. Nebula, Okoye, King Black Bolt, Ghost-Spider, Gwenom, Red Skull 2, Hulk, Baron Strucker, The Mighty Thor, Rocket Racoon, Groot, Star-Lord and Immortal Hulk all make a cameo appearance in the remaining X-Men lists.
Team Tactics Cards
When looking at the Team Tactics cards, we see a much clearer consensus and trends amongst the players than the character choices.
First Class (9), To Me, My X-Men (9) and Xavier's Dream (9) all make every single lists and understandably so. As we'll see when we'll go over the scenarios, but X-Men has historically tended to play a lot of Pay to Flips for their secures and this year is no different. First Class helps aleviate the pressure of having to interact with both secures and extracts on round one in addition to being a key component of playing Professor X's leadership. To Me, My X-Men, somewhat similarly, can give any number of X-Men character a short advance outside of their activation, which is a very strong effect for a very inexpensive cost of 1 power per model advanced. Lastly, Xavier's Dream, which has been nothing short of incredible since it's introduction. The ability to prevent damage from any source as a very inexpensive cost and working on splash characters makes it a staple in all 10 team tactics cards taken, and arguably in all 5 taken during squad selection.
Joining the affiliated cards is Brace for Impact (9), also taken in every lists. Brace continues to be the most taken card at every event and in most lists, for it's inherent flexibility, efficience, and ability to mitigate one of the strongest source of non-action damage in the game.
Sacrifice (7) makes up the second most taken restricted card in lists. It can help protect important activations and VPs by redirecting attacks into another model and provides an important layer of defensive tech for some of the more fragile models in X-Men.
Journey Through Limbo (6) appears to be taken alongside Magik in every lists she appears in. The ability to displace a model of any size while also incinerating them provides a strong displacement effect that both X-Men and Servants of Apocalypse don't have a lot of access to, while also being stapled to one of the most taken affiliated models explains why the card is so popular here.
Recalibration Matrix (6) and Survival (5) come next as some of the most taken non-restricted generic card. While X-Men has a lot of very strong affiliated Team Tactics Cards, the predominance of dual-affiliated lists invites the players to consider more cards that can be played in either of their affiliations and not limit their choices as much.
Next up, we have Children of the Atom (5), which makes a strong showing in a meta where conditions seems to be rampant, in part due to the popularity of Apocalypse and his Horseman of Pestilence.
Much like the characters before them, the remainder of the Team Tactics Cards mostly fall into very few camps; additional or different tech like Instant Recovery (3), Warpath (2) Fall Back (1) or Patch Up (1), character specific cards like Chi Mastery (1), Cerebro (1), One Below All (1), Cosmic Obliteration (1) amongst other things and cards from other affiliations like Immortal Servants (4), The First One (4), Preserve the Dream (1), Cat and Mouse (1), Pretty Sneaky Sis (1) and Galaxy's Greatest (1).
Crisis
Similarly to last year's selection, there seem to be a well established preference amongst the scenarios taken at this year's WTC. Mutant Madmen (8), and Shi'ar Empress (7) make the vast majority of lists, keeping with X-Men's preferences about Pay to Flips with M'kraan (4) and Deadly Meteors (3) completing the list of most taken scenarios. As for the remainder, Mayor Fisk (2), Wedding Party (1), Intrusion (1) and Riots (1) all make the rest of the scenarios, the majority skewing towards the more brawly side of the game.
Amongst the extracts, we can see similar trends, with Inhuman Weapons (7), Hammers (4) and Scientific Samples (4) being the most taken secures. It's worth noting that, all of them are assets, which shows that a lot of players are taking the popularity and strength of Inhumans and Terrigenesis into account when choosing their extracts. In the subsequent group, we can see similar preferences to the secures, focusing mostly on slower scenarios with Legacy Virus (3), Montesi Formula (2) and Alien Ship (2) all sharing the asset quality of the more popular extracts. The next group of scenarios goes into the opposite direction with relatively fast scoring scenario choices with Senators (2), Terrigen Cannisters (2) and Skrulls (1). As we can see from the overall crisis selection, X-Men leans more into a midrange plan than the heavily influenced scenario game plan it had in the past.
Overall, my impression is that X-Men is not a very popular pick for this year's event due to a multiplicity of reasons; the first one being the emergence and dominance of Servants of Apocalypse as an affiliation. It's no secret that it's been having excellent results since the last crisis changes as well as the latest round of character changes, combined with the fact that it is relatively self contained and does not infringe on a lot of other affiliation's models makes it a pretty easy choice as far as team building goes. Secondly, and the one that pains me the most to say is that X-Men, in the current state of the game, has had it's arguably worst year and track record since it's release. Combined with the fact that it shares a lot of models with affiliations that perform better, and that the splashes usually used by X-Men can be taken by different teams means there's much less of an argument to make concessions. Dual affiliation definitely seems to be the new norm for now, both in term of singles and team events. Hopefully, things'll be looking better for the Children of the Atom come 2026.
Thanks for taking the time to read this piece and as always, don't forget to have fun!
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