Short and sweet this morning as I’m still working on the SoCal Open recap, but we just got a bombshell dropped on us ~30 minutes ago as of writing this:
In an AMG transmission this morning they revealed a massive core rules change on top of the random crisis selection. Now the player who LOSES the priority roll-off chooses threat value. And as the above quote goes into, these changes are intended to (in conjunction with fully random crises) decrease the importance of Crisis selection. Which generally I think is a good thing.
New players often are very bad at selecting crises to put in their roster, much less select by matchup. Which, of course they should be – Crises and their interactions with affiliations and their abilities and tendencies is a deep and nuanced thing. And a lot of those players know they don’t know the answers and feel intimidated by the choice making them take longer and feel worse in picking. This threat selection change takes things a step further by breaking the ability to force extract abuse upon your opponent. Face off against Black Order and they pick extracts putting down Panic? Just don’t play at 19 and you’ll massively screw up their plan. The flip side is this advantages the slow control teams who focus on secure play. They care less about not having secure selection (except for CS) as their plan is to displace and eke out an advantage with last activation. Theres going to be some real feel bad when someone gives extracts to the player who loses the roll-off and they drop SWORD at 14. But I guess in the grand scheme of things perhaps Secure abuse is better for the game than extract abuse.
I will admit though I wonder if this goes too far. As with the above SWORD example I forsee a potential future where this change massively inflates the value of wide control teams like Web Warriors, Wakanda, Criminal Syndicate (though less good without more good low threat options), et al who want to go last. And while control is fun for a lot of players (myself included), there is a risk that dedicated brawling could take a big hit. That said I’ve been a huge fan of pretty much every change AMG has announced so far, so even if I’m a little trepidatious about this change I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s time to get into the dojo and see what works with these system changes!
That will wrap us up for this First Impressions article here on acrossthebifrost.com, make sure to check out the Roster Doctor on Facebook, Youtube and Anchor.Fm!
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