By Peyton Preece
This week I just got back from Nashcon where my family performed quite well. My dad took 4th with Guardians of the Galaxy, and I took 5th with Malakith led Cabal. This article will not be a tournament report of my experiences at Nashcon (Check out the upcoming episode 4 of Doomed Prophecy releasing on 2 September!) , but the event will heavily color my opinion on the current meta in marvel crisis protocol.
Going into this event I thought almost every affiliation could compete and go 3 – 2 or 4 -1 depending on draw and a little luck, however there were several affiliations that I thought stood above the rest. The factions that I thought made up the upper echelon of the game at the moment were: Cabal (specifically if led by Malekith), Avengers of either variety, Criminal Syndicate under either leadership, Storm led X-men, and S.H.I.E.L.D. After these, there are 4 other affiliations I think can dominate events however need to dodge specific matchups: Guardians of the Galaxy, Convocation, Brotherhood of Mutants, and Wakanda. The rest of the affiliations in my opinion are fighting uphill in several matchups and thus I considered off meta choices.
For Cabal, the reason I consider this affiliation extremely meta is the new life that Malekith’s leadership has breathed into the affiliation. Malekith has the best support in this affiliation in my opinion, and this leads to teams based around allowing Malekith to do as much work as possible. This style of team is very hard for a lot of affiliations to deal with, especially Guardians of the Galaxy, Convocation, and Brotherhood of Mutants who have been performing very well during quarter 2 of this year.
Avengers have been continually great since the introduction of Sam Wilson which was compounded with the rework of Steve Rogers. This has been shown over the last several months. While Steve Rogers led teams have been performing admirably in the meta post Malekith, I think Sam Wilson is the true Avengers leader currently. Sam Wilson has always dominated metas that lean towards expensive beaters like the meta we find ourselves in now.
Criminal Syndicate have been a brutal scenario faction since their introduction and Shadowlands Daredevil has introduced a new playstyle to the affiliation that is just as effective. I know that over the last few months the rapid fire Shadowlands Teams have been all the rage, and will continue to be quite effective at killing characters due to the amount of attacks with rerolls the squad puts out. However, I believe the Kingpin leadership will be the style of play better set up to win in the next few months. Kingpin lends itself to out scoring the killing affiliations too quickly for them to do their thing, while also not actually being damage focused which makes teams like Sam Wilson’s Avengers power starved and almost without a leadership.
The X-Men have not had the best history with competitive Marvel: Crisis Protocol, however they have really come into their own since the release of Rogue and X-23. X-Men are some of the best squads on pay to flip secures which have become incredibly popular and can safely grab centerline extracts which gives them a strong advantage into killier affiliations and will ride that advantage to a win ideally.
S.H.I.E.L.D. ends up playing a similar game plan to the X-Men extract game but does the extract run a bit better and is worse on the pay to flips. However, the real reason S.H.I.E.L.D. is up here in the meta affiliations is the multitude of ways they can run away from and mitigate attacks. This ability is pure gold in a meta that is very damage focused.
The next 3 affiliations are Guardians of the Galaxy, Convocation, and Brotherhood of Mutants, and a month ago I would have considered top affiliations. They now all share one weakness and that is their matchup into Malekith builds with adequate support is very challenging. Putting the needed tech pieces in to deal with Malekith in these affiliations pulls too much from the main game plan in my experience, so they either give up their normal power or just go with plan “dodge Malekith”.
The final affiliation I want to touch on is Wakanda. The king of control is still brutal and will punish a ton of opponents. I have found them to be weak into Convocation due to the majority of their survivability tools not working against the mystic attacks Convocation uses. However, with Convocation popularity likely declining due to the rise of Malekith, perhaps Wakanda rosters gain some benefit there.
After Nashcon most of these thoughts remained true. There were 0 S.H.I.E.L.D players at Nashcon but I feel this is a mistake, and S.H.I.E.L.D is with Sam led Avengers as affiliations best suited to handle this meta. Asgard and Web Warriors also made the top 8 at Nashcon, both of which surprised me quite a bit. I had not really heard any buzz about Asgard even after their new releases, but watching some of their games showed me that their control ability and ease with which they can pivot into aggressive plays will serve them well in this meta. Asgard will be an affiliation to watch in the coming months. Web Warriors seem to be a constant – never really dominating an entire meta but always showing up and performing well with their dedicated player base. Web Warriors just have challenges on specific crises which lead to them having a potentially challenging road at events.
If you are going to events in the near future be sure to have a good game plan for beating these affiliations.
Hopefully this has helped give some understanding to the current meta in Marvel: Crisis Protocol. If you have thoughts on the topic let me know either here on the site or reach out to me on the LOS discord. Follow the rest of the LOS content on youtube, patreon or discord.
Discord: https://discord.gg/a9hAPtH
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtfbXR181RLbqW5B2Huwz4w