Welcome to the first article in a brand spanking new 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. As I'm not an expert on each affiliation, I'm going to try and get some of my local players involved in this series, and get them to contribute to articles of affiliations that they play regularly.
This week we're starting with Weapon X, who I've just picked up recently, so I'll be the one giving insight for this article.
What are the Strengths of the Affiliation?
One of the biggest strengths of Weapon X is they have access to some of the best attrition focused characters for their respective threat levels. Logan The Wolverine and Sabretooth Apex Predator at 4 threat and X-23 and Domino at 3 threat, tie them in with Honey Badger at 2 threat and you have a core set of characters that just want to kill things.
Logan, Sabretooth and X-23 all have access to pierce (on a wild, change one of your opponents defence dice to a blank) which really helps them get damage through, and Domino's ability to turn skulls into crits, as well as not letting your opponent explode them really helps her plug damage through too. Honey Badger really helps with this attrition focused game plan, with her Anklebiter reducing enemy characters defence dice by 1 if she's within range 1 of them.
A unique feature of their affiliated characters, is most (bar Domino) have access to Healing Factor. Logan, X23 and Deadpool all heal for 2 at the end of their activation and Honey Badger and Sabretooth all heal for 1 at the end of theirs. This makes the team deceptively tanky, and can often play a huge part on winning at the attrition game, if you have access to healing that your opponent doesn't, that can be a huge advantage. It also makes tactics cards like Patch Up and X-Ceptional healing much more efficient.
Another point to note, is a good proportion of the affiliated characters have access to movement that doesn't cost an action, making them extremely mobile on the table. Both Sabretooth and Logan have attacks that place them within range 1 of the target once the attack is resolved, Sabretooth also has a pounce, and X-23 has a free medium move on her spender once the attack is resolved.
Now, the leadership. The Weapon X leadership comes as a tactics card and either X-23 or Logan can be chosen as the leader. This helps enormously with squad building as you can either choose a 3 threat or 4 threat leader which gives you a lot of flexibility with threat levels. The chosen leader starts off with 3 memory tokens, when an affiliated Weapon X character is attacked (splashes can't get the benefit of the tokens) the leader can spend a token to give them two extra defence dice. Every time a character is dazed or KO'd (your splashes can help you with this part) you generate 1 memory token but you can only have 3 at a time. This helps enormously with the tankiness we spoke about earlier, 2 extra defence dice on characters that can also heal themselves means they can take damage as well as they can dish it out.
What Are Their Weaknesses?
The biggest weakness for Weapon X at the time of writing is a big one. Their leadership card takes up a tactics card slot in both your roster and in your game. Whilst having a leadership on a card that can be applied to multiple leaders gives you great flexibility for squad building, the downside to this is that if you take the leadership, you now only have the option of taking 4 other tactics cards, and sometimes you can really feel the squeeze.
Whilst we're on the topic of leadership, unfortunately there is also another downside. As mentioned earlier, your splashes can generate tokens when they get dazed or KO'd, but they don't get the benefit of being able to spend them for additional defence dice. This means that often, your reaching more for the affiliated Weapon X characters as splashes can't really synergise with the leadership.
The final downside, which will likely be addressed as new characters are released, is Weapon X are extremely limited in their attack types at the time of writing. Only Domino offers energy attacks, whilst every other character in affiliation only has access to physical attacks. This can make it extremely tough playing an attrition game into a squad that has high physical defence, as there's no flexibility to alter your attack types outside of Domino, so you're having to look at splash characters to fill this void.
What Crisis Do They Like?
The primary game plan for Weapon X is attrition, so they like crisis that is going to help them deal damage and cluster the opponent up enough where they can get a high volume of attacks and throws off. Secures such as Gamma and Demons are perfect examples of this, they're both E shape secures so will cluster your opponent up, Gamma can deal damage from the crisis and Demons incinerates anyone standing on the objectives, both of which help your attrition game.
We can use these same principles to look at the extracts, Research Station offers a good opportunity to cluster your opponent up, and Cubes deals damage to anyone holding a Cube (which you can then heal back through healing factor).
With all of the great movement some of the affiliated characters offer, there is potential for Weapon X to be shaped around more wider secures with the right splashes in place, they certainly have the flexibility to switch to this sort of playstyle even if it's not their primary game plan. However I do feel the main strengths of Weapon X, are best catered to when playing to attrition, as this is what the core of their characters have been designed to do.
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 this, it really is appreciated.
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