TseungTsu here, I was settling in for a binge of Horizon Forbidden West and AMG drops a bomb on us!
So let’s break down the characters we see here for some SHIELD affiliation First Impressions.
Nick Fury
Mark wrote a great article up on him when he was first spoiled. I think they key things to remember here as we look at this picture is he’s 4 threat, and his leaderships is:
So we have two things here we can build and play into. Getting a VP when you’re dazed/ko’d doesn’t seam like something we want to build around. At least not now. So let’s focus on using the short advance whenever you’re damaged by an enemy attack.
She-Hulk
A giant angry beater who makes great use of the free short move. With her size base she covers a lot of ground, and wants to be up-close for brawling. We combine this with Gamma Transfusion and it means after being damaged by an attack she can spend 1 power and take two short advances toward the enemy character if need be. This is going to make it virtually impossible to end outside of her range if you’ve dealt damage to her and she generates that additional power to make it extra easy for her to use it.
I think she’s going to be a great 2 piece core with Fury and the SHIELD agents look like they’ll help mitigate those two being a low activation pair.
A pile of 3’s, Ironman, Winter Soldier, Hawkeye, Taskmaster, Black Widow Agent of Shield, and Warmachine.
Affiliated 3’s just open up so much list building potential. 2 of these plus Fury is a solid 10 threat core. Going to 3 of them plus Fury is 13 threat which allows us to still threated 7 wide affiliated at 20 threat.
Both Pat and I think Ironman is already a top tier 3. 4 Physical defense, damage reduction, great tactics cards and on his injured side a really nasty beam! With the beam a short move is phenomenal, we see this abused already with Avengers Assemble. Helios Laser Bombardment is also great combined with Warmachine and Hawkeye who each can end up flush with power, and have issues spending it all.
Warmachine loves a move to setup beams. Pairing him plus Ironman as your 2 affiliated choices set up a very tanky core we’ve seen in Sam spam quite a bit.
Taskmaster I love from a fluff stand point. He was a shield AGENT before going “rogue” and commonly works with them even after his heel turn. (Thanks Greg from Recalibration Matrix)
Widow, Taskmaster, Bucky, and Hawkeye are all specialists. I wouldn’t expect rosters to have all of them, but I love being able to pick and chose what I want. We can go Ironman, Bucky, Hawkeye to be sure ranged based. Taskmaster, Widow, She-Hulk if we want to get up close and brawl with people. Ironman, Warmachine, Taskmaster and She-Hulk if we want to just present meat shields. I think there are a ton of ways to build this affiliation out, and we haven’t even seen the tactics cards yet!
Dual Affiliation
Before we close out I want to mention that this core looks super easy to dual affiliate. We have a leader in She-Hulk, and we share so much with Avengers. Sam loves to play with so many of the models already included here and it seams like an obvious fit to me. A-Force is easily gotten to by including Captain Marvel (Who’s incredible if you haven’t played her post revision) and we can threaten a lot of dynamic play styles at team selection!
Well I hope you all are as excited about this new affiliation as we are. Let us know on discord what you think about them! In addition Pat and I launched a youtube channel recently and would really appreciate any subscribes you feel gracious enough to give us. Until next time everyone cheers, and happy gaming.
