Welcome to another article in the Quick Reference Guide series. In this series we're going to take a look at each affiliation in the game and give a brief overview of how they play on the table, where we cover three main topics, strengths, weaknesses and crisis selections. This series is aimed at newer players who might not be familiar with all of the affiliations in the game, and serve as a quick reference guide to glance over before a game. In this next article, we're going to look at Criminal Syndicate, and we're going to continue the trend of asking some of my local players to help me out with the article, and this time, it's Will Spencer!
What are the Strengths of the Affiliation?
Versatility! At the time of writing, Criminal Syndicate have access to 3 leaders - Kingpin, Shadowlands Daredevil and M.O.D.O.K, Scientist Supreme. This allows a lot of flexibility when determining how you want to play the game.
Kingpin's "Illicit Network" leadership is heavily control and crisis focused and allows all healthy characters to count as 2 for the purpose of contesting secures, characters may also spend 2 power during their activation to pass a secure token to an ally within range 3. This leadership allows the criminals to score very highly on secures in turns 1 and 2, as most other teams will struggle to displace or daze characters so early in the game. Generally, the best characters for this leadership are those with large health pools, damage reduction and tough to shift characters that can afford to stand on secures and weather enemy attacks - some good mentions here are Rhino, Juggernaut and Lizard.
Shadowland Daredevils "Shadow War" leadership focuses on attrition play, it allows allied characters to reroll 1 attack dice when attacking an enemy that is contesting/holding an objective token. In addition, the rolled dice may be a skull. This leadership really boosts the offensive output of your team and you can afford to be outscored early game in favour of taking out key characters, then levelling the score late game when your enemy has had their team reduced. Characters that benefit most here are those with rapid fire weapons, as they get the re-roll on both attacks such as Winter Soldier and The Hood. Characters with rerolls built in are also very powerful with this leadership such as Baron Zemo and X-23 as they get their own innate re-roll in addition to the leadership.
M.O.D.O.K, Scientist Supreme's "Advanced Idea Mechanics" leadership is somewhat a hybrid of the 2 play styles. Once per turn when rolling attack or defence dice, allied characters that are contesting or holding an objective may change a dice to a hit or a block if they have a wild in the roll. This ability is difficult to quantify, as it relies completely on rolling a wild, however the fact that it works on both attack and defence rolls can boost your teams effectiveness in both yours and the enemy turn. Characters that work best here are rapid fire characters, as you can force the trigger if it was missed originally, or characters with rerolls to help get those wilds.
Another big strength of the affiliation is Criminals also have access to some great tactic cards - "Cruelty" allows a once per game bonus mystic attack which can help finishing off a target in the event your double attack has failed to daze or KO them. "All According to Plan" allows you to steal priority from your opponent which is great for a pivotal turn in the game and "Shadow Organisation" can give characters Range 2 Stealth for a turn, which can be really punishing to gunline shooting based teams like S.H.I.E.L.D and Guardians of the Galaxy.
On the final note, Criminals also have some really powerful affiliated characters - Black Cat, Rhino and Ulik being some of the most popular.
What Are Their Weaknesses?
It can be sometimes hard to create balanced teams for Criminal Syndicate. Kingpin teams that are totally focused on control can leave themselves open to being blasted off the table by an attrition team. Equally Daredevils attrition team can struggle to keep up on points against crisis based teams, if key characters aren't taken out early enough the game is in danger of ending before you can catch up. M.O.D.O.K's leadership is difficult to really "leverage", it's almost entirely dice reliant and also requires you to be contesting or holding an objective. Perhaps too many conditions needed for a fairly average reward?
Rules overlap can also be a problem for the Criminals, they have lots of characters that perform a similar role of being tough to kill with moderate damage. It can make roster and team selection difficult in certain situations.
What Crisis Do They Like?
In terms of crisis, this really depends on your leader choice. Kingpin loves high scoring secures such as (the appropriately named) "Super-Powered Scoundrels Form Sinister Syndicate". This not only allows for high scoring, but makes your characters tougher to kill from the cover. D Map secures such as Riots Spark are also great for Kingpin, as they force your opponent to spread out more, generally making it even easier to outnumber them on secures. An honourable mention here is Deadly Legacy Virus, Kingpin can assemble the virus easier than most teams due to his leadership allowing passing of extracts, if you combo this with Black Cat and you can quickly get that virus going!
Daredevil on the other hand prefers low scoring, "fighty" crisis such as Demons Downtown, Gamma Wave and Instrusions. These secures limit the points your opponent can score and maximise fighting on the midboard, allowing you to do what you do best! There are no stand-out extracts for this team, low scoring is probably the best option here such as Montesi Formula, however Senators should also be considered - once again it forces a big fight on the midboard.
I'd like to say a huge thank you to Will for his contribution to the article, I'm not sure I'll ever have an easier time of writing an article as he practically wrote everything above word for word. My copy and paste and punctuation skills have taken a hammering though!
I hope you enjoyed this article, and I hope it's given you enough understanding of the affiliation to give you some confidence in either playing with, or against them. As ever, thank you for taking the time to read, keep on rolling those dice.
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