Welcome back to SG Protocol.
Today we continue our roster building series with an example roster build using the leadership approach.
As a reminder the leadership approach functions like this: you look at the different leaderships in the game and if there’s one that’s a build around ability you create your roster focused on it.
For our example here we take one of my favourite leaderships in the game. Baron Wolfgang von Struckers:
It is a bit wordy but it basically does two things each once per turn: it lets you move a condition your attacking model has to the target, if it doesn’t already have it and if you’ve done at least one point of damage with the attack. On top of that if during their activation an enemy character was handed a condition to an enemy model, your model removes 1 damage from itself. In terms of leadership types it is mostly an anti attrition leadership. Giving the conditions to your opponent is nice but the bigger impact is loosing them yourself and healing your models through handing out conditions.
It also lends itself to more of a “scenario” rather than “attrition” play style. Meaning we want to score VPs fast.
So with that we can start to add characters to our roster (this won’t be a competitively optimised roster).
I’ll be using Jarvis Protocol for the build today. The Apps creator, Darkhaine, reached out to me and added a bunch of quality of life features making it a joy to use.
We obviously need Baron Strucker so he is locked in.
From there we can see which affiliated characters we want to bring in.
I decided to go with Spider-Woman, Arnim Zola, Baron Zemo and Viper as my affiliated characters.
What all of these characters bring to the table is a bunch of different conditions on their attacks. Viper, Spider-Woman and Zemo also give us great speed in all being Long movers.
From here we can start to look at characters that benefit a lot from the leadership. So we want characters that hand out conditions and, if possible are also rather tough.
We should also take our spread of different threat levels into account. We already have four affiliated 3 threats and one 4 threat. I think the core of models we will play in most games are gonna be Strucker, Spider-Woman and Baron Zemo for a combined 10 threat. For math reasons we should include a 2 threat, a 5 threat or (at least) one of each.
Our options at 2 threat are limited because there aren’t that many in the game. One with obvious synergy would be Bullseye. He has Bleed on both his attacks which is a status condition. It’s even automatic on his spender attack. We could also go with Honey Badger or Nebula here. Both bring good damage output but can’t contest or interact with objectives making them the poorer choice for our scenario focused team. So we go with Bullseye.
For 5 threats there are two big candidates to consider:
Scarlet Witch, who has tonnes of conditions on her attack and also prevents the shaking of conditions in range 3 of her. Her big problem is action economy. You want to be attacking twice with her as often as you possible but her small base medium move make it rather hard to get into position. She also wouldn’t really fit the “tough” description we are looking for. Counting Failures (Skulls) during defending make her more survivable than you would expect though.
The other 5 threat that stands out to me for a Strucker Roster is Ghost Rider. The spirit of vengeance hands out Hex on his builder, is fast and has a decent healthpool to make use of the leadership heal. He also comes with a tactics card that lets you basically bring him back from the dead in exchange for another model you have on the table. And we may be happy to exchange our Bullseye or Viper for s fresh Ghost Rider depending on game state.
So while I love Wanda I give the edge to Johnny Blaze here.
That leaves us with three character slots on our roster. I want at least two of them to be 4 threats and the third could be either a 3, 4, or even higher.
Let’s start with the 4s:
First up Omega Red:
Omega Red can hand out poison just by being close to enemy characters and can heal himself from his attack. He also brings some control. Omega Reds biggest weakness is his Short movement but with our affiliated Long movers that shouldn’t be a problem. In our Scenario game plan he is a secure character. He spends his first activation going to a secure and then be annoying to get off it again.
We will also bring Beta Ray Bill. Bill is fast, tough and has conditions on all three of his attacks. He is a premier scenario player, too because he gives us access to an eyes on the prize “safe grab” (meaning he can get an extract from the center line of the board and retreat back to safety). We’ll cover these things in more detail in a future article called “according for the meta”. Bill is also a great user of the Hydra tactics card Sleeper Agent. We’ll talk more about that further down when we come to tactics cards selection.
As said above our final spot is a bit more open to discussion. Personally I don’t like any of the 6+ threats here for this list but you can always make a case for Hulk in any roster.
So we could go with either a 3 or a 4.
My pick for an unaffiliated 3 threat under Strucker would be Baron Mordo (giving us the full Baron tripple). He is fast, relatively tough in the right match ups and comes with a great ability to spread around conditions like Hex.
Pyro is also someone who, at face value has a lot of good synergy with Wolfgang von, but in a similar vain to Wanda he is probably more of an attrition style character rather than scenario so I’m not too sold here.
For another 4 Crimson Dynamo stands out to me. His base attack being a beam with a wild Shock makes it rather likey for him to give out at least one condition per turn and he is already immensely tanky and the leadership heal would double down on that. For this roster I think he wins out over good old Carl Amadeus and Mr St. John.
Honourable mention for Venom who plays a similar role to Omega Red but has automatic bleed on his attack; can’t automatically spread conditions by standing somewhere though. I’d be very happy to swap the two however and think its really a matter of personal preference.
So with that we have these for our 10 characters:
Characters (10)
- Baron Strucker (3)
Baron Zemo (3)
Arnim Zola (3)
Spider-Woman (4)
Viper (3)
Omega Red (4)
Bullseye (2) - Crimson Dynamo (4)
Beta Ray Bill (4)
Ghost Rider (5)
Next up we select three secure and three extract crisis cards. Let’s start with secures:
Being a scenario team we want many VPs on the table. We are also rather fast and decently survivable. So I like D shapes which is why we take Riots sparks over Extremis 3 as our first secure.
We like to be able to score two VP from one secure and our leadership helps us reduce the negatives of the crisis so we also bring Mayor Fisk vows to find missing witnesses.
And lastly we can go pretty wide (meaning taken more cheaper characters) have Long movers an stealth characters so I think Superpowered Scoundrels could work out good for us too.
For extracts we probably want to make use of our fast characters in Zemo, Spider-Woman and Viper as well as the potential safe grab we have with Beta Ray Bill. So we like crisises with a lot of VPs on the board as well.
Our mobility means we aren’t as punished by being placed as other teams might be with all of Spider-Woman, Zemo and Viper having a superpower to move without spending an (entire) action on it. So I like Spider Infected for us.
With a way to heal and good ways to spent power on basically every character in our roster Struggle for the cube seems a fine choice.
And for our final extract I think we could go with either of Skrulls or Paranoia. I prefer Paranoia here to stay farther away from the enemy. We also have good ways to get the extra VP from it by going wide and moving an extract holder closer to a friendly model as our last activation.
So our crisis cards are:
Secure Crisis
Mayor Fisk Vows To Find Missing Witnesses (H, 16)
Riots Spark Over Extremis 3.0 (D, 17)
Super-Powered Scoundrels Form Sinister Syndicate (F, 20)
Extract Crisis
Paranoia Pummels Populace! (K, 16)
Spider-Infected Invade Manhattan (F, 17)
Struggle For The Cube Continues (F, 17)
Finally we need 10 team tactics cards.
I like to start by looking at the cards of the affiliation first, character specific cards after that , restricted cards next (you could argue that you should start with those) and general cards last. Some general cards like Eyes on the Prize or X-Ceptional Healing are treated as character specific cards for this.
So I came up with these ten cards:
Team Tactics (10)
Scientific Method
It’s an Arnim Zola card that works well with Baron Strucker. It won’t see the table too often as Zola will honestly often be our fourth choice for a 3 threat but it’s fun when we do play him.
Deal With the Devil
We mentioned it’s effect above when we talked about Ghost Rider. It’s a must take with him and in this roster we have some targets we would be happy to switch out to keep GR on the table.
Double Agent
Jess’ card is great simply for dictating who your opponent activates first. Jess is a very good character in her own right so risking a second activation of her is a big threat too.
Eyes on the Prize
The card that lets Beta Ray Bill (who gains 2 Power per Power Phase) move once grab an extract and move again back to a safer place. Will be in every squad we build that has Bill in it.
Kick ‘em While They‘re Down
This goes somewhat against our scenario game plan as it’s a pure attrition card. With the amount of conditions we can put out this still can help getting an important daze or KO to protect some precious VP.
Mission Objective
We want many extracts on the table and keep them with our characters so Mission objective is a big help. A card that will very often make our 5.
Sleeper Agent
A Hydra card that isn’t officially Hydra (but might as well be). It’s effect is pretty powerful on the right model. Beta Ray Bill is that model in our roster. Bill can throw terrain and characters up to size 4 and as long as he hasn’t attacked someone before that lived through the attack Bills target can’t do anything about the throw.
Brace for Impact (R)
The single most used tactics card in the game. Sometimes unnecessarily included but here our average physical defense is nothing to write home about. Throws also bypass basically all of our defensive superpowers as they don’t care about Stealth, Martial Artist, Coiled Serpent from Viper or the strategic genius rerolls of the two Barons.
Indomitable (R)
Pretty much the same reason as for Brace. You could make the argument for Patch Up or Sacrifice but we definitely want two defensive cards for your restricted slots here.
Recalibration Matrix
A card to negate a dice spike of your opponent that can also be used offensively if the situation would call for it.
So we have a full roster. To recall it ended up being:
Characters (10)
- Baron Strucker (3)
Baron Zemo (3)
Arnim Zola (3)
Spider-Woman (4)
Viper (3)
Omega Red (4)
Bullseye (2) - Crimson Dynamo (4)
Beta Ray Bill (4)
Ghost Rider (5)
Team Tactics (10)
Scientific Method
Deal With the Devil
Double Agent
Eyes on the Prize
Kick ‘em While They‘re Down
Mission Objective
Sleeper Agent
Brace for Impact (R)
Indomitable (R)
Recalibration Matrix
Secure Crisis
Mayor Fisk Vows To Find Missing Witnesses (H, 16)
Riots Spark Over Extremis 3.0 (D, 17)
Super-Powered Scoundrels Form Sinister Syndicate (F, 20)
Extract Crisis
Paranoia Pummels Populace! (K, 16)
Spider-Infected Invade Manhattan (F, 17)
Struggle For The Cube Continues (F, 17)
That’s all for today (I imagine it was a lot already 😅).
See you next time and cheers from Germany 🍻