After the recent mutant wave hit Marvel Crisis Protocol, there has been much debate among the community around one character in particular - Iceman. Opinions seem to vary among many, some feel that he's significantly under the curve for where a 3 threat should be, yet others feel there's plenty in his toolbox to warrant a place in many rosters. In this article I'm going to assess Iceman's card, his role on the table top and my general feelings around where he sits on the imaginary "curve".
Character Card
Let's start by taking a look at Iceman's character card. With 4/3/3 defences and 5 health, this is about average for what we've seen from 3 threats recently, though his medium move on a medium base gives him more movement than those on a smaller base.
Looking at his attacks, he has no builder, but instead has a Beam 3 gainer in Freezing Blast, it is only 4 dice, but hands out slow on a wild. The lack of a builder means he may often be short of power if he cant line up enough targets for his beam but reversely in situations where he can get 3 or 4 people lined up for the attack, he'll have more than enough to know what to do with.
Chill is Iceman's spender, a 3 power spend for a 7 dice attack with a wild stagger is a fair trade, though your probably pinning a lot of hope on rolling the wild here or there's just going to be better ways to spend that power.
Looking at his superpowers, Freeze and Fade is essentially a hit and run that we have seen on many characters before, though this superpower enables Iceman to count as size 5 for the move action. In the absence of any flight superpower, this essentially lets him move across most terrain in the game, without having to take a short move action to climb.
Ice Slide is basically the same reposition superpower that we see on Sam Wilson, for 2 power, during Iceman's activation when he begins a move action, he picks up a character within 2 and when he finishes the move action he can place that character within 2 of itself. The slight negative of this is that it only works on characters that are size 2 or less, but out of activation movement is really powerful in this game and can be used in a number of different ways. On a medium move and a medium base, that's also a really good distance. It should also be noted, that this can be used in conjunction with his charge, 4 power for a charge and reposition of an allied character is really good value.
Cold Snap is a new unique superpower that we've not seen in the game before. This basically links in with Iceman's slow triggers on his gainer. When an enemy character ends a move action or attack action within 2 of him, it gains slow. If the character already had slow it suffers a damage instead. Now, a few points to note here, it must be a move action or an attack action, so you cant trigger this by throwing, pushing or advancing them into Iceman, it must be a move action. You also cant trigger this by Iceman walking up to them, it must be the enemy characters move. This feels like a bit of a shame, since there would have been a lot of use cases for this superpower if the things mentioned were able to trigger the ability. Instead, it feels extremely annoying for characters that can only attack from range 2, since there's good ways to position Iceman in order for them to trigger this. It also feels really useful in brawlier scenarios where characters are clustered up in a smaller area of the board, as again, there's more options to position Iceman to make Cold Snap effective. Though a lack of any sort of defensive tech might mean he'll often just melt (see what I did there) in this scenario. Outside of these two examples though, the effectiveness of this superpower is probably going to be limited as it's fairly easy to play around.
Tactics Cards
Unfortunately Iceman only brings 1 Tactics Card to the game, and it's a team up card with Emma Frost. Emma must play the card during Iceman's activation and any superpowers that he uses, the power for these can be spent from either himself or Emma. They can also be used any number of times that activation. Additionally attacks made by Iceman add 1 dice to the attack rolls. This card does feel extremely useable if Emma is a character you already use regularly. Adding 1 dice to a beam attack feels useful whilst also increasing the chances of hitting the slow trigger. Being able to Ice Slide multiple characters also seems like a really good use for the card. Emma does have a lot of things she would rather do with her power though than fuel Iceman for a turn, and there's other tactics cards for her like Headmistress that just feel like they could be a better use for the tactics card slot.
Conclusion
Iceman has a number of things that he does well, his movement is excellent, the ability to move characters out of activation is one of the highlights of his card and his triggers have the potential to be crippling for your opponent, even if they are dice dependant. Yet there are some things that still feel leave a lot to be desired. He doesn't have any defensive tech outside of his standard defence dice, and his power generation and Cold Snap are extremely scenario dependant.
But if we take a step back and view him objectively, he synergises well with the leaders of his affiliation in X-Men, the beam offers plenty of chances to trigger Cyclops' leadership, and his medium base offers another large platform to hop using Storms leadership, and his slows and staggers help with her objective control game plan. Being a 3 threat, he also fits in well with her generally wider plan.
In summary, Iceman is not an every game character, but in the scenarios where his kit works, he feels useful on the table where he's affiliated, and that's a perfectly viable place for a 3 threat to be.
As always, thank you for reading, and please check out our sponsor www.protechgames.com for all your MCP needs.