Hello! My name is Anders and this is going to be the first in a series of articles chronicling my preparation for my first large MCP-event, going off on the 22nd and 23rd of October, 2022. It’s called Malmö Wargaming Weekend and it takes place in Malmö in Sweden (there will be a link below if you wish to attend). It is the largest MCP event to date in Sweden, even if it might seem small in comparison to British and American events.
The event itself is going to be 24 players, divided into two days. There will be a cut after day 1, so we will have a final top 8 bracket as well as lower brackets for the remaining 16 players during day 2. All brackets will have prize support. The goal with this is to give players something to aim for even if they lose a game or two during day 1.
The event will require fully painted lists (gulp!) and will be played with the latest ruleset released by AMG. I expect there to be some very good players attending, so I aim to bring the most competitive list that I can that still suits my playstyle.
Affiliation Selection
First thing is first. I have to decide what affiliation to bring. Affiliation selection is important because I need to bring an entirely painted force. Since I’m notoriously bad at getting started or staying focused enough to paint, I need a lot of time to get my force ready. That means the decision on what to bring needs to be done quite a bit ahead of time.
To me, the answer is obvious. My first affiliation, and the one I have the most experience with, is The Brotherhood of Mutants. I’ve always been a sucker for the mutants of Marvel, and Magneto is one of the most interesting villains of the setting.
The Brotherhood brings a strong game that can pivot in many different directions. They excel at attrition, but can also play a potent control game. Magneto’s leadership provides his entire squad with power, and he is one of the premiere attrition pieces of the game. Mystique’s leadership provides a rebate on interacting with extract objectives, as well as the ability to score a non-pay2flip-secure with a token instead of a character. Being able to build essentially two very different styles of lists and stay with the same affiliation seems like a good plan.
Character picks, first draft
This first draft will focus on the affiliated characters I aim to bring. There is a lot that can happen between now and October, and there is a fair chance of the meta shifting with new models and rulings coming out. I will however need a strong core of models affiliated with the Brotherhood, and those feel unlikely to change. My picks can be seen in the image below.
The app is called “Crit! Wild” by the way, and it’s available on both iOS and Android for free. It’s very good. Go download it! It’s made by a local near me ;).
In any game where I aim to play an attrition style, I believe my force will start out with Magneto, Juggernaut and Mystique, using Magneto’s leadership. That comes to 14 threat and is probably one of the strongest 3 wide squads you can field at that threat level. All of these characters come with a very powerful Team Tactic card each (more on this later) and you can reliably threaten a bit further than the midline with this setup on turn 1.
Rounding out these characters is Toad, Quicksilver and Rogue. These three characters all fill different roles that help fill out both threat levels and are stronger on specific crisis. Rogue is another premier attrition piece and both Quicksilver and Toad have a very strong scenario presence (they are good at scoring you points outside of dazing and KOing your opponents models).
This concludes the roster selection of characters for now, and I have four slots left to fill with unaffiliated (or even more affiliated!) characters that I feel fits my gameplan. It has given me a roadmap of which characters I have to paint first. Here they are, ready on my painting station.
Team Tactics card picks, first draft
Below you can see what cards I have picked that most likely will end up in my list.
As I mentioned above, Magneto, Mystique and Juggernaut each came with a powerful Team Tactics card of their own. Magnetic Refraction works by giving cover to all members within 3 of Magneto. If you combine that with the already high defenses and damage reducing abilities of characters like Magneto, Juggernaut and Rogue, you have a team that is very resistant to incoming damage. Do You Know Who I Am? and Deception are both very powerful displacement tools that serve to reduce the number of actions your characters need to take to move, especially Magneto. Asteroid M similarly serves the same purpose. Juggernaut can activate and move to the midline, and then Magneto can use Asteroid M to move up for free and get his very powerful attacks and throws off. I also added Can I Borrow That?, Quicksilver’s card. This card is really strong when facing high impact extract assets such as the Alien Core. Do note it doesn’t work on civilians. Finally we are looking at the two restricted cards we are allowed, and in my opinion these pick themselves. Field Dressing is a very potent card allowing you to save an activation you otherwise would have Edit: Field Dressing was banned since this article was submitted, sorry for the confusion all. Patch Up can reset the damage done to one of your high impact models. In this case I choose Patch Up over Medpack because Brotherhood usually has a lot of power to spare, it can heal for more total, and it can be played out of activation. I tend to pick the cards associated with the characters I choose the majority of the time and Asteroid M makes the cut in 99% of games. This means that I sometimes only go with one restricted card, which says a lot about the power level associated with the cards available to Brotherhood. The remaining three slots are open for when I add more characters, and to fill out any gaps in my list.
This concludes the first part of this series. As we continue I’ll go into more advanced tactics, meta discussion, painting progress and even some battle reports! Stay tuned at Line of Sight for the other parts. If you want to find me, I’m called kollar#5868 on Discord, and I’m in the LoS-channel. Feel free to poke me if you want to chat about anything.
Until next time!
Links:
Malmö Wargaming Weekend: https://www.malmofigurspel.se/mww/
Crit! Wild on iOS: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/crit-wild/id1601261111
Crit! Wild on Android: https://andriodapk.com/androidapp/1601261111/crit-wild
How are you bringing Field Dressing when it was rotated out?
Ah shoot, this was submitted before that change happened. I’ll edit it out. Thanks!