After months long silence about new rules AMG has chosen rapid fire all of a sudden. Just two days after Iceman we get another From Panel to Play this time the reveal of Professor X’s card:
Hmm… Absolutely not what I expected. Being only 4 threat is a very big surprise for starters.
His builder is pretty incredible handing out the devastating root special condition on a wild. He and Shadowking are the only two characters in the game that condition as an attack trigger.
Mental Suggestion is almost 1:1 copy of Cassandra Novas 1 power mini spender (but Charles has to deal damage to trigger the advance) and quite strong in theory. In practice the Prof isn’t someone you want in the middle of a scrum.
Finally for attacks Astral Duel is a spender that’s completely matchup depend. It’s thematically unfitting very good against Magneto and against some teams and models but will be pretty useless in many other cases.
And now the big thing we’ve been waiting for: his leadership.
It’s… different? It is kind of a variation on classic Core 1 Steve Rogers in a way? It can definitely jumpstart some of your characters if you have other characters that can use active or reactive superpowers in round 1. Importantly unlike Xavier’s prime student Cyclops Prof X’s leadership doesn’t have a range restriction. Characters with multiple power per turn are probably going to be popular with Charles.
Xavier sports full on Shuri rerolls (so straight better than iTony as he can help with defense rolls where IIM can’t). Importantly that also means he can’t use the rerolls himself.
Defensively he tries his best Enchantress impression in taxing enemy attacks with 2 power unless they want to go into his 6 mystic defense dice. It’s weird that Mysterio being the lowest threat still has by far and beyond the best version of this ability since he can use his mystic defense on dodge rolls as well. Xavier can’t and with only 6/5 health and 2 physical defense throws are his absolute nightmare.