Strategic Initiatives: Extract Plays #8

    

Welcome back to yet another edition of Strategic Initiative! With the recent reveal of the new crisis that we will be playing with for the next year, I wanted to go over some of the relevant round 1 options available to the Uncanny X-Men on some of the next extracts from the Tolerance is Extinction set of crisis. I'll be covering mostly lines available to X-Men Gold with some being more generically applicable.

First of all, let's cover our bases.

Storm's leadership lets you take one of your characters, within R2 of another and place themselves within R1 of the other character as long as they're not holding an objective token at the cost of 1 power. This is a key tool to a lot of round 1 options available to X-Men as it gives enough additional mobility to a model to let them reach certain extracts or secures they otherwise wouldn't be able to reach. Combined with some Tactics Cards like First Class and To Me, My X-Men it opens up a lot of possibilities.

    

Now that we've covered our bases, let's dig into the first scenario: Sentinel Schematics Sabotaged!

Sentinel Schematics belongs to one of the new types of extracts (Source) where the extract tokens picked up by each character during a round, will reset and return to their origin points. This makes some strategies significatively worse when it comes to picking up opposing extracts on round 1. Being cognizant of that, it's important to weigh in your options when it comes to spending resources to grab these extracts.

In this example, we've deployed Storm right besides Shadowcat, so that our leader can play To Me, My X-Men. Choosing Magik to move short, towards Storm, by leveraging the 90° angle and move Magik in front of Shadowcat to set up the X-Men jump. Then, Shadowcat can pay a power to place within R1 of Magik, walk, interact with the source extract without paying power thanks to First Class, and walk back to safety on a home secure. This lets us pick up an extract on first activation, and build a scoring advantage presuming we can grab our two home source extracts as well.

Up next, we're going to cover another of the new source extract shapes with Surprise Assault! Mutants Homes Destroyed

Since Surprise Assault uses similar distances to the home Skrulls, the same guiding principles apply. To make sure everyone's one the same page, we'll go over them.

First, let's go over the home points. The first thing to note, is that some model can inherently safe grab the points closest to your deployment line. The base movement required being either a 50mm based medium mover or a 35mm based long mover (so characters like Beast or Shadowcat can do it in affiliation but some splash characters can do it as well). Another noteworthy interactions is that Magik can do it as well thanks to her Limbo Step superpower, presuming First Class has been played.

Now that we've covered our bases, let's move on to the opposing points. There's a few ways to move grab them but we'll only be covering the most simple and effective options.

Using the Storm's leadership, we can have either a 35mm based long mover or a 50mm based medium mover that have inherently 2 or more power, or access to First Class. Models like Shadowcat or Beast being good examples in affiliation.

Next up, provided we keep the same set up of having, at least, an affiliated 35mm based long move or a 50mm medium mover, you can use the 90° angle to move forward with To Me, My X-Men, line up with the opposing extract, move, pick it up and move back to safety, effectively breaking parity unless your opponent comes and takes one of yours (which almost always exposes one of their models for opportunistic attacks).

This covers some of the basic options available to the Uncanny X-Men on the new extracts in the Tolerance is Extinction rotation. As always, I encourage anyone to try these out for themselves, figure things out and experiment!

Thanks for taking the time to read this piece and don't forget to have fun!