Well, hello there idiot. Welcome back to An Idiots Guide to MCP. In Chapter 1, we analysed the different types of crisis and how they can affect the game. Now we understand what they are, we can look at building a roster.
The Fundamentals
Let's start by looking at what we need to include in a roster. I'd recommend using a roster builder for this, Crit Wild! is an amazing tool for mobile users and can be found on most app stores. Alternatively, if you prefer something on a desktop, Cerebro has a roster builder built in to the website.
So let's start by having a look at what we need to include in our roster. I'm going to take a snippet from the official rulebook here, as I think it's broken down really nicely for players to understand.
A roster consists of three categories:
10 Characters
10 Team Tactics Cards
6 Crisis Cards (3 Secures and 3 Extracts)
A roster may contain any character but it can't contain multiples of a character with the same character name and alter ego.
Players also then select ten different team tactics cards for their roster. Just like characters, you can't include any multiples of the same card.
Finally, you must select 3 different secure crisis and 3 different extract crisis.
Characters
So we know what we need to include in our roster, now lets take a bit of deep dive into each of the categories mentioned above and how we go about deciding what we need to include. The first thing we'll touch on is characters.
The first thing we need to do, is decide what affiliation we'd like to play. You do have the option of "dual affiliating" ie. including multiple affiliations in your list, but for simplicity we're going to just build a "mono affiliated" roster and just include a single affiliation.
I've been really enjoying Spider Foes lately, so we're going to use my own roster as an example here, they're also a really good example of how to build a roster, as at the time of writing, they only have one leader.
Speaking of leader, that's the first thing we're going to add to our roster. And for Spider Foes, that's Green Goblin. You might be asking, how do I know if a character is a leader? And this is where I point you to the leadership on a characters card. I have included Green Goblins as an example.
So any character that has this strange looking superpower that says (Affiliaiton: X) is a leader.
Now to slightly complicate matters, some affiliations have a leadership ability that is on a tactics card rather than their character card. Like the Weapon X leadership below:
This will take up a tactics card slot in your roster, but just make sure you're including the character it applies to.
Ok, so we have our leader. Now what? It's important to note that when playing a game of MCP, more than of half of the team you select must be affiliated to your chosen faction, therefore we now need to include some affiliated characters in our roster. You can check the affiliation document to see what these are for your chosen affiliation.
Now, there are no hard and fast rules as to how many affiliated characters we need to include, we just need to bear in mind that there are multiple threat levels in the game, and we need more than half of the squad to be affiliated at each threat level, and also give us enough flexibility to be able to adapt to the crisis that is put out in front of us. In my example, we already have Green Goblin, and I have also included Doctor Octopus, Venom, Rhino, Lizard and Mysterio, which gives us 6 affiliated characters in total.
Green Goblin, Rhino and Venom are all 4 threats, whilst Lizard, Mysterio and Doctor Octopus are all 3 threats, so that gives us a nice base to work from.
So, what we now need to do, is to add some non affiliated characters in there to try and fill in some gaps. Sometimes you might find that you have a wide variety of affiliated characters to choose from, so you're either not taking any "splash" (non affiliated) characters, or your affiliated characters offer you enough flexibility that there's no cracks to fill in, and you might just want to double down and pick some splashes that further enhance what you're trying to achieve with your roster.
Coming back to our example here, at the time of writing there's a distinct lack of high threat characters in the Spider Foes affiliation, so we're going to add Hulk at 6 threat to give us a high threat option. On a similar note, there is no 2 threat affiliated either, so Bullseye comes in to the roster to further give us some flexibility.
We now have 8 characters in our roster, leaving us with two spots to fill. Another important aspect of roster building is determining what your building your roster to do. I like playing an extract based playstyle with my Spider Foes, so I'm going to look at a character that can strengthen this game plan. I have a distinct lack of safe central extract grabs currently (a character that can run to the middle of the board from deployment, pick up an extract and then move away), and this is important for a team that is primarily extract focused. Beta Ray Bill is a great option for this, he'll need a tactics card in order to do this, but we'll cover that later in the article.
So one more slot remaining. Looking at my roster so far, I'm quite happy with what we have but there's a glaring hole I think that needs to be addressed. I just don't feel like I've got enough to deal with a really high threat centre piece character like Malekith. Hulk is great at higher threat levels where I can slot a 6 threat character in, but I have a lot of 4 threat characters in my list so I need a bit of a cheaper option for lower threat games. I'm going to include Pyro here, we're going to need the help of another tactics card but that's the price I'm willing to pay.
Tactics Cards
We've picked our 10 characters, now we need to pick our 10 tactics cards. It's important to note you can only select 5 of these for a game, so they're not all going to be available to you at the same time. There's a really logical way I've found of selecting tactics cards, and it's using following the steps below:
Select 2 restricted cards
Select any affiliated tactics cards
Select character specific cards
Select generic cards
So firstly we're going to select our restricted cards, you can only ever include two of these in your roster at one time, so have a think about your overall game plan and what your roster is trying to achieve and pick the two that are the most suitable. You can find out what these are here. For our example here, we're going to try and snuff up all the extracts and then try and hold on to them, so Brace for Impact and Patch up are the two most applicable to this roster.
Now lets move onto affiliated tactics cards, and this is going to entirely depend on how good your affiliated cards are, as some just wont be relevant to your roster. For us here though, Sinister Traps is a fantastic Spider Foes card and plays right into our plan.
So that leaves us with still 8 tactics cards slots to fill, so we now need to look at character specific tactics cards. What I mean by this, is cards that require specific characters to play them.
There's 3 excellent cards here that are all associated with characters that we have included in our roster. Well Laid Plans with Goblin and Doc Ock, This is A Robbery with Rhino and The Grand Illusion with Mysterio. Both Well Laid Plans and This Is A Robbery involve making your opponent drop extracts. I mentioned before how the main plan is to grab extracts and score the game out, and these two cards are a big factor in being able to do so. The Grand Illusion is also an excellent card choice here, we need to be able to survive whilst holding the extracts in order to the score game out, and The Grand Illusion can definitely help us do that by weakening opponents attack dice.
That then leaves us with 4 slots to fill with generic tactics cards, and it's this category that tends to leave the most flexibility.
As mentioned earlier in the article we're bringing along Eyes on the Prize for Beta Ray Bill and Kick Em While They're Down for Pyro. X-Ceptional Healing makes the cut as it makes Lizard particularly difficult to take off the table, and Fall Back again helps with the defensive aspect of the game by stopping a potential double attack.
There's a wide range of generic tactics cards in the game, if your unfamiliar with what's available, I'd recommend having a look at mcpdb.com which collates all of the available cards in the game. Most list builders also have these imported to their respective apps. It's important to find cards that synergise with your roster to maximise the flexibility of your tactics cards.
Crisis Cards
We have our characters and we have our tactics cards selected, and now we're on the home straight. All that's left to do is pick our crisis. Throughout this article, your game plan has always been the common theme when making decisions on what to include in the roster, and the crisis cards are no different. For a breakdown of the crisis, please refer back to Chapter 1, as the information there is going to massively help you make a decision here.
It's worth taking into consideration the threat level of the crisis in your roster, as there's a high probability you could potentially be playing games at that number. If your roster consists of a lot of high threat characters and you don't typically want to be playing with a low model count in games, then maybe leave the 15/16 threat crisis at home.
In terms of the shape and pace of the crisis, if your roster is built around attrition, you're primarily going to want slow scoring and narrow scenarios to cluster your opponents models up and slow the game down to allow you to kill off enough models to tilt the game in your favour.
For crisis focused teams like the Spider Foes in this example, we're going to want the exact opposite of this, we're going to want wider scenarios to help us spread out, making models more difficult to focus down, and high scoring so they can score the game out before models die.
The latter is what we've gone with here, and both the secures and the extracts are all wide, high scoring scenarios to allow us to play the extract scenario game the rest of the roster is built around. With extracts in mind in particular, I've chosen extracts with a high number of objectives on the table to try and leverage the extract steals in the roster.
Congratulations, you've just built a new roster. Now go and take it to a table somewhere and try it out. It's worth noting, you'll likely make many tweaks to your roster before you get to a point where you're happy and comfortable with it, that's normal. The important thing is you play games with it, figure out what does and doesn't work, and make changes to try new things. MCP is an ever evolving game, so it's important that you're roster does too.
As always, thank you for reading, and please check out our sponsor www.protechgames.co.uk for all your MCP needs.
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