Hello!
So I recently went 4-0 at Infinity Series – Soul with Hellfire Club and Dr Norbert has asked me to write a blog post detailing my experience and thoughts on Hellfire’s current position in the meta.
I started playing Hellfire as a political statement, because I feel that one of the reasons they haven’t been nerfed yet is that not enough people are playing at or winning large tournaments with them.
Cosmic Ghost Rider got nerfed pretty quickly, because he was a menace everywhere from big tournaments to local game nights. I fear that Hellfire may have slipped under the radar because they aren’t as popular, or fun & thematic to play. Anyway, here’s my experience with them from the event.
Preparation
This event was the Sunday after the UK Nations Teams Tournament. So my bags were packed with my rosters on Friday morning. My Hellfire Club was added to the Restricted list on Friday evening. I had a number of people come up to me and ask how I felt about it. Myself and the other couple of Hellfire players there simply shrugged. It’s not THAT big of a hit, it’s just 1 less card. Red Flag #1 for how powerful we feel this roster is.
Owning all the models required for Hellfire Club is pricey. You take the crème de la crème of MCP characters. None of which share an affiliation box. So I had to borrow a couple models from friends.
Side note – this leads to one drawback of playing Hellfire. The social stigma. It’s very common to receive shade from your fellow MCP players when you rock up to a tournament with Hellfire. I’ve been boo’d in the past when going up to accept prizes I’d won while playing Hellfire. All playfully of course – but it’s certainly a factor for the faint of heart such as myself lol.
This meant that I didn’t have all 10 of the Team Tactics Cards in my roster. I rocked up with 7…and My Hellfire Club becoming Restricted meant I only had 6. I was fine with this; which is Red Flag #2.
I’m an X-Men player through and through. My games tally with my mutant brothers and sisters is easily over 1000. Leading up to the Nations team event, I practised with X-Men as much as I could to the tune of ~50 games in the fortnight leading up to it. However, the amount of Hellfire games I played in preparation for Sunday = 0. Which leads to Red Flag #3…
MCP is a game with lots of depth. You can spend years learning the intricacies of each match up, each crisis, synergies between your team, your leadership, your opponents team etc. Dice variance is the thing that keeps the game fresh, unpredictable and far away from chess-like set plays that would ruin a newer player’s enjoyment. Hellfire are the experts of mitigating that. When I am running Hellfire, I feel like I am playing a different game to what I do with X-Men.
X-Men have their turn 1 plays locked down more than most teams. But I still have to react to how my attacks are rolling…how my opponents’ attacks are rolling…and ‘oh crap, Storm has dazed again’. That is what MCP is. But with Hellfire, everything is a lot more certain and predictable. The healing they gain on the regular – and the power generation being near guaranteed means we are not playing what I would consider to be ‘true’ MCP. We’re playing a much safer, easier to game expression of MCP.
Side note – Pat Dunford is in my local meta. One of the most fun things about playing vs Pat is he genuinely cheers on your characters when their dice go crazy into his. This is obviously because he’s a nice guy who loves the game and the wild variance the dice brings. But I can’t help but think a small part of it is because it brings an interesting challenge to the game for him. As someone who knows every stat card, every move and every synergy at play at once, the dice variance gives Pat a reason to keep coming back and enjoy playing against the schmucks like us. It’s unpredictable and fun! Hellfire I feel, mitigate this more than is acceptable.
Hellfire are also not fighting against themselves during roster building. Everyone knows that taking all the best models in the game with less limitations is strong, that’s a no brainer. It also means they don’t have to compromise anywhere. When I’m playing X-Men, I’m splashing a lot of the tools they’re missing. Black Cat’s steal, Spectacular Spider-Man’s displacement…but in order to make that work, I have to take the likes of Beast, X-23, sometimes Honey Badger…even if the crisis isn’t great for them, just to make it work. That’s what most teams have to do – and it’s what makes actually playing an affiliation feel like a fun and meaningful choice.
Anyway, enough ranting – onto the games.
Round 1
vs Mutantman on Paranoia & Deadly Meteors at 17 threat.
Mutantman introduced himself as a fellow mutant lover, so I was very excited for this match. He had a fully affiliated X-Force list and was here to shoot guns and stab people.
This game I learned that X-Force actually have quite a good game into Hellfire. You need good attrition to punch through Hellfire’s tanky characters – and good mobility to chase them down once they’ve thrown you away and double moved the other way. X-Force have both!
Mutantman played this game brilliantly. Exactly as they should have. Deadpool and Honey Badger harassed Emma with physical attacks while Psylocke and Domino beat up Ultron, Metal Tyrant while also denying him power. It was very well executed…and Deadly Meteors is one of X-Force’s best Secures.
However, the power gained each turn from My Hellfire Club meant that Ultron still had enough power gain for his full kit to be online, despite the expert power management he was subjected to.
This was a lot more nerve wracking than Hellfire are used to, the attrition almost got too much. Alas, the attrition has to reach new heights when going into this team, so it wasn’t quite enough.
Round 2
vs Uriel93 on Struggle For The Cube & Infinity Formula at 17 threat.
Uriel93 and I played the day before in the Nations team event and he whooped me with some god like Crimson Dynamo beams, so I was out for some revenge! He was playing Sam spam Avengers, something I’ve only ever played 2 or 3 times.
So I was going up against a very good player, who had travelled here from Italy no less, who beat me the day before and was playing a team I wasn’t confident about going into. I figured this was going to be tough.
Uriel93 also brought a ton of great tech pieces. Captain America Sam, Black Cat, Beast, Helios Laser. All scary things into Hellfire.
Unfortunately, because of Hellfire…it ended up being a little rudimentary. My team essentially grabbed a bunch of Cubes with priority, stood on the Infinity Formula and waited for the opposing team to solve the puzzle. Only reacting when someone activates, fails to punch through my defences and so they get thrown off the point while I escape.
Rhino was a big problem here. He stood at the back collecting power and not suffering from the Extract because of the leadership. Which meant in Round 3 he could Stampede, Robbery, Gore, throw a Size 4 and Gore again. Safe to say that the increased cost to This Is A Robbery was needed, but pretty ineffectual when it comes to Hellfire Club.
Round 3
vs Changeling on Research Station & or Infinity Formula at 15 threat.
Changeling is one of my favourite people to play against. They’re also one of the most improved MCP players of the past few months. They’re running Defenders…the new cool kids in town…and have found a ton of success with them, they’re an exceptional player.
I win the priority roll and suddenly feel a lot better. I have spread out crises which avoid the big fight in the middle that Defenders love. So long as (and I say this out loud) “I don’t get Researcher…I think I’m going to be okay”. Lo and behold, we get Researcher, so Changeling naturally selects 15 threat. It’s every crisis team’s worst nightmare – and here we are.
I took Emma, Bill, Lizard & Crimson Dynamo. Changeling took Daredevil, Wong, Namor & Shang Chi. I’m terrified. My plan is to completely ignore the Researcher and pretend it isn’t there. I’ll just go all out on the Infinity Formulas.
What this then resulted in was yet another game where my best bet is to not interact with my opponent at all. I can just stand back, on the Infinity Formulas and wait until someone activates. Then move, throw them off the point, move back. All in all, it was a pretty boring way to play and all the disengaging means Changeling is having a less than ideal time, because his models aren’t able to do their thing.
It results in Changeling spending a lot of time thinking about their turns and what can be done, to then be met with Hellfire spending about 5 seconds of thought to consider which of their 3-4 displacement characters is going to react, doing it without needing to roll any dice, and then passing the turn. This continues for a few rounds until I score out.
The few attacks that hit Hellfire weren’t big enough (most of the time they were only getting hit once, because of the displacement the attackers had to now make up for – and then Crimson Dynamo was in the middle taking the edge off of every decent dice roll Changeling had), so Hellfire slowly healed everything.
Round 4
Vs Aldo Alamos Oliva on Struggle for the Cube & Deadly Meteors at 17 threat.
Aldo captained the Italian team that came over for the Nations team event. He brought X-Force with Baron Zemo, which as I’ve already learned today…is a concerning matchup for Hellfire.
I decide early that the only way I’m going to win this is to go super aggressive on scoring and try to end this by Round 3, because Cables gun catches fire to too many of Emma’s zoo animal menagerie of a team. This is where I’d like to give a shout out to pay-to-flips.
Pay-to-flips, love them or hate them, create an interesting problem for the power economy on most characters. Hellfire of course, mitigate most of this, but not all. Aldo’s X-Force here will be feeling the full brunt of the Pay-to-flip power cost – which was then made worse by him failing every single flip in Round 1, giving Hellfire a 6-2 lead. But wait, it gets worse…
I send Lizard deep to steal one of Aldo’s home Cubes. This prompts Cable and Psylocke to go into him for an early daze. The attacks don’t quite make it through and Lizard survives the Round with 2 health remaining. We both come to the realisation that this is a complete disaster for X-Force. Not only will Lizard not daze to the Cube damage at the top of Round 2, but he can now throw Psylocke back to her deployment line and double move to safety, healing factor and then pop the leadership to heal 1 more. You can see where this is going…Lizard then spends the rest of the game in complete safety, healing and gaining power, ready for a late game double move and throw to get Hellfire to 16 points. This level of predictability after some disappointing dice rolls isn’t unique to Hellfire, but it certainly is more common – which I think is a shame.
Aldo’s best hope here is to daze my characters in single activations, or else he risks them throwing and double moving to safety while holding an extract. But it’s Hellfire…so i’m running Beta Ray Bill, Lizard and Miles Morales…some of the tankiest characters out there.
I felt like this game highlighted the Hellfire gameplan of “I’m going to do what I want…you need to do everything you can to stop me”. Aldo needed to focus on getting as many attacks in as possible while hoping they spike, whereas I had to just sit and wait for the dice results and then react in the same way I do every game. Throw, move, move. Move, throw, move. Any dice rolled are a bonus. Overall, not the most engaging experience for either player.
In Conclusion
Hellfire performed as expected. I didn’t have to sweat much – despite my opponents all being very skilled, having great teams with lots of anti-Hellfire tech and synergy with the selected crises. They essentially made little to no mistakes. Which feels like a shame.
Even at the scariest, sweatiest moments for Hellfire today (ie, someone gets spiked and goes down), I still felt pretty safe in the knowledge that I had 2+ characters waiting in the wings with all the power they need to do everything that makes them the best at what they do. The real stinger is that they very often achieved this level of power by not interacting with my opponent or rolling dice.
I think that if I were to play the same matchups vs the same crises with my usual Storm X-Men team, I would go 1-3 for the day. Maybe 2-2 if I’m lucky.
Now I don’t want to lean too heavily on the ‘everyone-is-affiliated’ approach for Hellfire. I think that could be really fun. We see it with Dormammu. An amazing leadership, everyone is affiliated, but you pay the tax of having an extremely high threat model who isn’t too influential on the board. You have to compromise on your leader to use the benefit of everyone being affiliated. I think it works there. Who knows, maybe there will be more leaderships like this in the future too (looking at you Dracula! Bringing a team of superhero vampire thralls sounds awesome). I just think that the current Hellfire leadership leans a little too far towards ‘efficiency’. Extra power PLUS Extra healing PLUS all the best characters PLUS a 4 threat, pretty great leader = a little too much ‘good’.
One final thing I’ve noticed about Hellfire in the game right now. The players that have played against them once or twice realise how powerful they are. But a lot of players haven’t encountered them at all. KurtisO won the TTS league Season 14 with Hellfire, I won the Second Chance League Season 14 EU with Hellfire (which I had no right to, given the players I went up against), which shows they are a top tier team. So why aren’t more people playing them? For me, I believe this is because MCP is a game where we all want to play as our favourite and most recognisable superhero teams from the comics & films. Not to mention it’s a lot of different models from a lot of different boxes. I would hate for this to become a have vs have-not kind of game.
I love Emma Frost in the comics. I love Hellfire Club!
However I can’t help but think perhaps a little tweak to the leadership is needed to stop Emma, an elitist member of a high society private members club from rocking up to games with her menagerie of animal themed monstrosities and leaving both players with a sour taste in their mouth. Because Hellfire.
