Danger Room December - Brotherhood of Mutants

Hello everyone, welcome back to another Christmas episode of The Danger Room. This time I have Birch from British Columbia, I think. - Yeah, that's correct. - Got it. - British Columbia. - Yes. So, you may recognize Birch from last year's Christmas episode. He was on the Midnight Sun's episode with Dave. And I was only doing episodes that had releases last year. He is just too much. But I told him when the brother box came out, we do it next year. So here we are. How you doing? - I'm doing great. Yeah, it's been a fun year. We can get into some of the new brotherhood stuff. And let's get into it. - Cool. First, I'm going to ask you why do you love MCP and what brought you to this game? - I think I can actually answer the question in the opposite order. Like most people, I started minis gaming in the 90s with Warhammer. Maybe most people didn't start in the 90s, but Warhammer is usually the jumping on point. And as far as MCP goes, it was sort of like the natural evolution of going from Warhammer to War Machine and then finding out that there was a lot of DNA from War Machine in MCP. And I had a local who was telling me that I should look at the game because they knew over the Marvel fan. I grew up learning to read on my dad's Marvel Comics collection. So it's sort of been part of my life literally since I could read anything. So I've always loved Marvel Comics and that passion is waxing Wayne over the years, but it's kind of always been present. And being able to put those characters, like my favorite characters on the table and have them do the things that you can imagine them doing from the comics is a ton of fun. And then finding out that the game just had like depth was great too. 'Cause I initially picked it up as a painting project and then finding out that it was like a great game and a lot of fun was a treat. So I pressed ganged all the original War Machine players back into plank and a pretty healthy local community if Insular because we're on the southern tip of Vancouver Island. And Vancouver Island does not have a high population in Victoria as a small city. And just to quickly excise any confusion, Vancouver is not on a Vancouver Island. So we do not have access to Vancouver's player group very readily. I mean what is I've been to Vancouver but I haven't been to Vancouver Island. It's just like a ferry across. I think I've I think I've looked at Vancouver Island. You could see it from the city, right? There's actually a ton of islands in between. Okay, maybe not. The street has a ton of smaller islands. So I think maybe in some places you can see Vancouver Island, but Vancouver Island is actually a relatively big island. I'm not sure in miles but it's like 450 kilometers tip to tip and it's sort of like a long thing. Island and then it's got a ton of communities on it but Victoria is the biggest but Victoria is small. I guess just for population comparison, the city of Calgary has a higher population than Vancouver Island. Okay, yeah. So it's not populist but fortunately we've got a pretty dedicated crew here and we play a lot and we've bounced a lot of ideas. Like we're pretty thorough in our collaboration. It's a very collaborative effort when we're working on a playing the game. So really thrilled with the community we have. Yeah, you guys definitely have a community that's I don't know if you're slept on. It's just not really talked about because I don't think you guys like participate in like the TTS or the online communities that much. And not that that's a bad thing. I just don't think people know who you are. No, part of that so Dave Bergen does play a lot of TTS. That's fair. That's fair. But locally, no, it's hard for us to travel for one thing. Although we did a lot more this year but mostly in Canada, we've fully calculated Edvin's into play. But like I said, we're pretty insular so we don't get a lot of exposure and our own local discord is actually pretty highly active so we don't really kind of get out into the other ones. I fight a little bit on the other ones like I argue, you know, when people are flamin' Magneto and jump in every now and then defend my boy a little bit. But my heart's not in it because I know I'm not really going to change the hearts and minds out there. Yeah, I feel that. But I guess the last thing I was going to follow up on that is you guys are like really competitive like in terms of like performance. I mean like Greg is one of LVO and you guys you guys did play swell WTC. Yeah, I don't know if I don't think you guys went this past one but the last year 2024. Dave did go this year but no the rest of us did not. We are planning on doing it again, running it back with the same team next year that is in the cards I believe. Cool. And then I did qualify for LVO this year but I did not go. It was sort of last minute I think I qualified at the last possible opportunity out of Edmonton. I played at tournament Edmonton they got me there. But I turned it down pretty much immediately. It was really short notice. So yeah, happy to qualify. Yeah, just lucky. My congratulations by the way but you got lucky. I got lucky a lot of people didn't go. And then I got lucky that like I just drew the the god scenarios every round when I needed them. So. But no seriously, congratulations. That's actually pretty cool. A lot of hard work goes into that. I know because of you know we see Greg around here. So. Well, I I've won the two LVOs that weren't 64 people so take with that what you will. I'll take what I can get. I think it's a thing. Yeah, it's a deal. Yeah. Yeah. I also didn't work on it at all. I literally just I was debating on whether I even wanted to go and I was like, uh, Gambit, Gambit spiked in one of my TTS games and I was like like the day like two days before. I was like, all right, I guess I'll go. Oh, the luck of a cage and kind of got you to we got you. Gambit walked up to a Shang Chi on the midline enrolled like eight successes and just decimated him on round one. And I was like, all right, let's go to LVO. That happened to me like three weeks ago. My gambit just was like took a pot shot at a Shang Chi and one shot it. And I was like, yep. Amazing. Yeah. Yeah. No. And then Gambit proceeded to just be lights out the entire event. So they still continues to be lights out. He's like my new favorite model. Yeah. He's a lot of fun. Yeah. And he's in my list. So we'll talk about him. Cool. All right. We'll get to the list. Uh, so if you want to start with your characters, uh, and then we'll double back to yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Do you want to talk about them as we go? Or do you want to just go through it real quick? Yeah. So usually usually I we just read them off. So the listeners know what we're working with and then we can go back to yeah. You got it. All right. I'll do that. So we've got Magneto, Exodus, Juggernaut, Emma Frost, Lady Mastermind, Clea, The blob, Mystique, Gambit, and Toad and then for Tactics cards, Magnetic Refraction, Instant Recovery. Do you know who I am? Sacrifice, Indomitable, Mirage, the Books of Truth, Astrid Am, The Ponds Go First, Re-Calibration Matrix, and then for crises in light of the new setup, Mayer Fisk, Cosmic Invasion, Deadly Meteors, Intrusions, Wedding Party, Unexpected Guests, Spider-infected, Alienship, Scrolls, and Legacy Virus. One quick caveat about all of this is I'm still sorting out the new world. So there's going to be a lot of wisdom from the old version of MCP and then I'll probably have to hedge with the new stuff and make some claims that probably aren't necessarily true as we sort of work out what where everything sits now. Yeah, that's perfectly fine. Basically, everyone who's done these episodes so far is like, I don't know, I'm not sold on my crises and I'm like, yep, great. Yeah, I guess another quick caveat is that I always consider large portions of my roster pretty experimental or at least not necessarily married to them. So we can talk about what could come and go as we go, but it's certainly not a finished polished roster. Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think that's basically everyone's roster, right? I think so. I don't know. People say art is never done. It's just abandoned. So like, rosters are similar in that way, I think. They're just going to abandon it at some point if you move on to something else. They're always evolving. I mean, the game is evolving, right? So it has to evolve with it. All right. Let's talk about Mags. Mags is a very controversial model in today's game. Yeah. How do you feel about Mags? I'll start with that. So I actually feel more positively about Mags than most people, I think. This comes from a lot of games in Magneto. I have played Brotherhood pretty much exclusively. And I think that Magneto is a very hard character to learn how to play. He's very punishing when you make a mistake. And that can, I think, inform a lot of people's opinions. So it took me, I'm a slow learner, so just take that with green assault. But I think it took me about 50 games before I was comfortable deploying and positioning him to the point where I'm no longer just losing because I'm bad at moving him around. So he is difficult. And anyone signing up to play a Magneto should understand that I think they're going to need a lot of reps. I will also say that I think people frequently don't recognize what I view as his greatest strengths or at least consider them his greatest strengths. So the first one that I think people do realizes good, but I don't think they realize is how good is magnetic refraction is tactics card. That card creates a lot of value over the course of the game in saved damage for a bunch of models that are actually fairly durable for the most part. And saves mags of himself a fair amount of damage. It's sort of like the way, although much smaller, but the way apocalypse creates like extra value every round. Magneto is creating a little extra value every round through magnetic refraction a lot of the time. And then the second thing that I think people really overlook, I think the best part of his actual card is the size, agnostic, no trigger, omnidirectional push on his reverse polarity. I think this makes and breaks Magneto playing that correctly because it lets you dictate the battlefield so much. I think it's what lets him play relatively well into apocalypse. He always gets to fight apocalypse on his own terms a lot of the time in the one-on-one. There's other issues with apocalypse, but because you get to take this initial shot that informs the rest of your decision tree, where it's like, oh, I spiked the six dice or awesome, pull him in. Let's finish him. I didn't. Let's push him out. And because a small push is bigger than a size two, you know the famine hops not sufficient to get back in range if you are exactly ranged through your way. So your diminishing is action economy. And this just works like for almost all matchups. You can just deflect so much pressure for your team because Magneto really shouldn't be your primary scoring model. He shouldn't even pick up an extract until Astrid M's out of the way. Once you've spent that, that's fine. You can pick up an extract now because he can be relatively tough to crack. But on the whole, I think Magneto is in a pretty decent spot, not great, not terrible. But you have to view him as like a value gain over the course of multiple turns through his leadership, magnetic refraction, and just deflecting pressure. Not a shotgun, I'm going to murder the world. Yeah, that's been my experience with them. Sorry, did you have something else? No, no, no. I am curious how have you felt about the collision changes? Were just everything's three damage. So it's weird. The size ones are clearly an improvement, right? Because it's essentially a free three damage. You pay one, you throw a thing, you return the power to Magneto, right? Like that's you literally it costs you nothing. No action, no power. You just get to throw three damage out there and see what happens. Size two is obviously unchanged and then everything else is actively worse for damage, but you still have a decision around it because it's power for your team under his leadership. So you may still think about throwing the size three or four over the size one just to make sure that the people who need power get it. So it's a it's a decision now. What's weird is that it's now just so much more dependent on the opponent dice because you can technically put out more damage for less power now, but your opponent is going to have more dice to mitigate that damage with. Yeah. So you just fish with it really is all you're doing and you're not counting on it. But to be fair, I was kind of at a point where I wasn't counting on it that much anyway. It was just more of a I'm fueling my team effort as opposed to I'm trying to kill someone. I've long since moved away from Magneto being the primary I'm going to kill something and it's more just playing him on a round-by-round basis. And then if something in great happens, you take it. Yeah, that's been my experience with him as like if I'm relying on Magneto to kill stuff with his builder, it's like scary town. Yes, yeah, completely agree. It'll happen, but you can't it can't be your plan unless you're in dire streets and then it's like well, I'm just hoping it works, but like yeah, you don't make it your game plan. You're trying to create a situation for the most part when you're playing Magneto where you're creating an extract parody break. So you have most of the extracts. You're not as secure as concerned about the secures because once you've broken extract parody, you can then just work on holding enough secures or denying them enough secure points that they have to come fight into you. And then that's Magneto's optimal situation because fighting in a Magneto is a nightmare is he doesn't have to move. He's getting great value out of his actions. His actions can be deflecting like he can just be like no leave. Yeah. And try again, or oops, I got you. And fighting past Magneto makes a lot of other characters more durable by proxy almost. Where it's like you can't just run past Magneto and go beat up toad. It's not going to work because Magneto is dangerous enough that you can't just ignore him. So if you can force the enemy team to fight through Magneto, you're in great shape. If Magneto has to go to them, less great shape. Right. Yeah, it sounds similar to how I play A4s. Just like really try to just break extract parody and then make them deal with the bodyguard bunker. Yeah. Yeah. That's essentially what you're doing. Where Magneto is basically the bodyguard, it's not so much a bunker as even if you get past Magneto, you're still working through Magnetic Refraction on the character that you want. Right. It's like toad holding the extract, but he's in within three of Magneto. And now he's got cover and potentially if he's within two sacrifices online and we'll get to it. But I think people are sleeping on Mirage. No, that card rules. Yeah, that card owns. Yeah. I was talking about that card. Yeah, where it's pretty nuts. People go as you inflict it on somebody, people go, it does what? Yeah. It just keeps going. So I would be one of those people. I have to re-read it if someone played it into me. All right. Well, yeah, Mag. Yeah, I don't know how much more I can say about him. I mean, yeah, I'm the same way. I don't use him as like this Corvus Gleeve or whatever where they're just like, I'm going to execute something at the start of the round. No, I think like you said, people get frustrated with that. And like, I think people try to play shehalk similarly. So it's just like also like, my point is that's not how you play her either. So I think that's why people get mixed up expectations with Magneto. Yeah, that rings really true for me. I guess the last thing I'd say is that one of the things you should be doing is a Magneto player during deployment is thinking about where you want the fight to happen. And when you want to play Astrid Am, and Astrid Am is very tempting to try to drop round one all the time. And sometimes you do. Like, it is a very strong round one play. But if you can go even or better on scoring without playing Astrid Am, saving it is also very good because saving it lets you pivot something often Magneto later at a key point. And it acts as a secondary in DOM for when people just place Magneto severely, which is one of his greatest weaknesses. If you've held Astrid Am, it just doesn't matter. You just don't do it. So holding Astrid Am can be very good if you're going even. If you're going even in the Magneto or around one or better, you're pretty happy. Like that's like a winning position a lot of the time. Provided you play out rounds two and three correctly. Yeah, okay, I totally see that. Yeah, I don't know how much more I have to add about Mac. I don't know. I like my biggest frustration is just like, I just feel like I'm praying my opponent with start dodge rolls. Like most of the time, I don't know if you feel that way. I used to. Now I usually view the throws as team for my fuel or fuel for my team. And if I get damaged, that subowness is normally how I view it. Or the one the size one throw is just free. Like that. I literally don't care what happens with that because I paid nothing. It's just like check this. See what happens. Cool. Got there. Okay, fair enough. Yeah. Yeah, I don't I wouldn't say I'm the best Magneto player either. I like sometimes I he frustrates me because I'm I do find myself in positions where I like need to nuke something. Or like I engineer the board state to nuke something and I like builder and get stuck a lot. Let's go lock something. It's all it's made pretty strong in me. It does happen. Okay. You'll know I'm so sick of it. The books of truth are in my roster. Okay. And we'll get to that because I've actually got a little more play than just playing books of truth. But that's a leader. All right. Yeah. All right. We'll talk about that. I actually have never played that card. So maybe that's why missing piece. I'm not sold on it yet. But testing testing so far in this new world has actually been pretty good. So when we get there because it's tied to a different character, we'll talk about it. All right. Yeah. I mean, just glancing at it. It would be it would be way more exciting if I could like reroll my skulls and then do Magneto's reroll at range two. But yeah, it would be. But it's got more play than just Magneto. So there's fair enough. There's some stuff going on there. But again, we'll get there. All right. We can move on to jugs then. I currently basically will never play Magneto without juggernaut. And that's really all I have to say. I don't know if you feel the same. And I'm willing to be convinced I'm wrong. I will not argue that point to. So we'll talk about it because there are points. I think Exodus is better. Okay. But if someone were to come to me and be like, my roster is I play Magneto jugs as much as humanly possible, that's not wrong. Like that. If somebody were to ask me, what two models should I buy first to play Brotherhood? I'd say juggernaut and towed. These are the two models you absolutely want, especially learning the affiliation. I think that juggernaut is still absurd. I think he's always been absurd. I don't think this has changed. I think that for whatever reason more fives came out and people sort of moved on from juggernaut, I don't think the guy has lost a step. I think he's crazy good. And I think he actually got better in the new world because he was not reliant on throw damage whatsoever. And he's no longer a liability to his team. I think if people are using do you know who I am for damage? I think that's almost always a mistake. And it's a displacement tool. You use it to put baby in the corner. That's what do you know who I am is therefore is I'm tired of dealing with apocalypse. You can go hang out over there for a while. And you can put someone with it. Great. Oh yeah, you can get him at the end of it. You're like, all right, you can take the free damage too. Yeah, yeah. But mostly it's like I just don't want to deal with black bolt or whatever, right? Please leave. It's a, she's not in the roster right now. There's ever a chance he comes back. But sometimes you hit him with a firewall with pyro first and then just be like, and now go sit in the corner with your route and slow. And you're just not in the game anymore. And because the card doesn't require it to be juggernaut's activation, you can just hold it for like times after people have moved up to the secure. Like juggernaut's already gone and they run up to the secure and you're like, nah, get out of here. Yeah. And he also just like requires almost no maintenance. Like he doesn't need help from Magneto. He generates exactly the power he needs like every round. And every now and then he just one shot stannos. You know, like it is like, uh-huh. The dice come up and he threatens the midline really well. He's safe grabs really well. I know people sometimes get turned off with the idea of like a five threat safe grab or whatever they'd rather do something with like a three threat or whatever. But um, in juggernaut's case, you're often generating extra value by smashing through a size three or whatever on the way and distributing power across the team. So it's not purely like a loss to have your five threat back up. And he's always fast enough that he still can affect the board next round, probably in exactly the same way he always was, which is move slide punch or move punch slide or whatever. Um, yeah. I think juggernaut's insane. I would not ever fault anyone for being like juggernaut makes every roster, every squad. Yeah. I'm in agreement with you. Yeah. I so juggernaut came out in 2022. I remember because that was the first LVO year. He wasn't quite available yet. Uh, but juggernaut feels like a five threat that was designed in 2024 who just came out like two years earlier. I was just like, he was like playing like, he was like a new model, like new age model playing in like the old game. And that's why he felt so freaking insane back then. Now I think there's a bunch of stuff that he can compete with. Like we've had Red Skull, he's had name or Jane, like all these things Dracula, like all the stuff has come out since then. But he still hangs with them is like, wow, exactly. Yeah. He feels like as good as them still. Yeah. Even just the fact that I wouldn't consider splashing a five, even though there's so many great fives out there, he's just that good. One of the one of the things we say locally is people are always like, ah, can I get far enough away from juggernaut? And the answer is always no. Yeah. There's no such thing as escaping juggernaut. He will catch you. If any brother and players are sad about fighting webs, this guy is your answer. Like, webs hate this guy so much. Oh yeah, because I was like, web warriors when he came out and I was literally losing my mind. Yeah, they can't displace him. They can't outrun him and his dice go over the top of their re-rolls half the time. And the slide does a free damage that none of them avoid. Like he just, he kills him. Like he hunts webs and kills them. Yeah, I was losing my mind at that time. But since we were talking about five threats and we've already talked about how great juggernaut is, I think we should probably make a case for Exodus here. So I'll preface. I am pretty low on Exodus. So I'm also willing to be convinced I'm wrong. Yeah. So when he came out, when we saw his card, I was disappointed. Not going to lie. Maybe we can take a quick side trip into the box itself because ultimately the box has made me a little sad only in so far as we didn't get anything in brotherhood that significantly altered how brotherhood operates the way webs did this year. And I don't want to be grass as greener too much, but like webs got game-changing stuff. And brotherhood got stuff that's like the same but different. Yeah, it's a thing. So the case for Exodus is I have so far found him to be tanky or the juggernaut. This guy does not die. If you play incident recovery, he will live forever. He also has a lot more dynamic turns than juggernaut. And he can fight more people one-on-one than juggernaut. He's also extremely good on deadly meteors because his teleport hops between meteors like you can go meteor to meteor. And you will always have the power for the teleport provided people are actually contesting meteors even if you're on your back meteor because you get two per round and then his gainer is range four. So you go to three for the teleport and then you'll still have an action left for the gainer to get the power to flip the middle if you need it or you can just start brawling on the middle. He also kind of got the magnetotreatment in that when you're playing him under magneto, size ones are freebies. You just throw a size one now and return the power to Exodus and you lost nothing. He's also extremely nice in that he takes magnetic refraction very well. Being 444 he doesn't have a weak defense stat so there's nothing to prey on which actually has made him pretty good into Apocalypse. You can fight Apocalypse with Exodus and feel pretty good about it and if Apocalypse ever goes after other characters the telekinetic shield can actually blunt the builder to the point where Apocalypse isn't always just killing something every round. So he actually has been pretty clutch for me against Apocalypse in a way juggernaut isn't always. I quite like him in that matchup. He also randomly has some rogue qualities in the powertrain on his builder and the amount he heals every round makes chip damage completely irrelevant. He reliably heals the three every round. And sinking, one rounding him isn't easy either because one of those attacks he's going to be 444 but then the next one he's going to be 666 defensively, often in magnetic refraction. And the choice on when you use the telekinetic shield can often dictate how much damage you're taking. If the person attacking you is low on power you telekinetic shield the builder to prevent them from getting anything they need to finish you. But if they're already flush you wait out for the big attack. So you have to think about who's attacking you and what they're doing with it and what they need in order to play the game afterwards. He also does have displacement that he accesses. It's not super reliable but it's pretty good. He also hits the entire range of defenses when you count his throw because he has two mystic attacks and energy attack on his spender and then he throws. So he kind of just does everything and his teleport is more valuable than it looks even though it's three cost and range two. So I'm actually finding that he's really valuable on the scenarios where you are going to just brawl. Like you're just going to fight in a way the juggernaut's not necessarily because juggernaut wants to like skate around punching people at like extreme ranges and Exodus just wants to stand centrally and fight everything that comes near him. And he'll win against like way more threat than he's worth. I've had him fight things three on one and he'll win especially thanks to the spender because it auto-incentrates. And then when you have other characters that are a little squish here but you've managed to get them inside of magnetic refraction and then you telekinetic shield them suddenly characters that are normally pretty vulnerable become nearly immortal. Like you telekinetic shield a gambit under magnetic refraction that guys go and know where. Yeah. Like five dice wilds count double cover like he's taking nothing. So the fact that he's helping his team a little more than juggernaut ever does is quite nice especially when you're running some of the squishier threes. Um, Steak takes it well too and she's in like martial arts range and you're just like nah she's five days now and blanks count she's not dying either. Um good for clear too but we'll get there. Hmm how much said yeah. Yeah Exodus. So like everything on his card is good like it's fine like nothing is a horrible. I think the big problem is probably that he just came out at a weird time. Like I think if you were playing this guy in like demons he probably would be awesome. I'm demons you'd be great. Um, like I said deadly meteors he's great. He's actually great on wedding party because he can just shift with the party and keep fighting. Right. And you have leadership power so it should be okay. All right it should be okay anyway because of the gainer like even if you lose one from the wedding party you just gainer somebody. Uh sure. It should be okay. Um, it depends on how much damage you're taking though. Sometimes you gotta uh you gotta get that builder in. Um, a lot of times you can just sit on him for a late activation and hope people hit him. He takes extracts very well. Like you should be picking up an extract with him because beating an extract out of him is nightmare fuel. Uh he will just hold on to it with forever. Um, similar to jugs in that respect but like different enough that there's teams that are gonna struggle. Um, like I said chip damage doesn't stick and in a way he benefits from the throw change like you're never one rounding him in conjunction with throws anymore because throws are essentially chip damage to him. Um, and as long as you've held to the activation he's just gonna top himself up and as long as you're holding incident recovery you're probably not getting him in one activation anyway. Yeah that's actually a good point. I find that people play Exodus misplay him. They'll activate him as like this beater and go early and don't like he's like extremely vulnerable because his healing's down now. Yeah no you want to hold him until he's got damage on him. Yeah. Um, or you want to like top him up for some power to save other people. You're just you're looking at his power economy versus his health economy, just hermining when to activate him. Um, not to try to kill people because I've found that with no dice fixing six dice just doesn't cut it. Like that's not what he's there to do. He's there to top himself up, hold on to the extract, defend the secure and because of the healing, even though you're not doing tons of damage there's very few people that will win. Like he'll just end up winning by virtue of weight of health. His card reads 14 total health. It's closer to 20. Yeah that's that's and like I think people play doctor strange in like an incorrect way sometimes like some players do they'll like activate these healing characters too soon and then the opponent has too many activations to just days them before they could go again and that's really the biggest problem. Yeah. He's pretty good on unexpected guests to where the um the guest is within teleport range. Um, uh, depending on how you've managed your power, it works kind of well on um, oh, start to clear teleport range. Sorry I should have said that. You shift him up with Clea and then all of a sudden he just picks one up and has two actions left and when he can walk to the midline from picking up a guest or a spider infected, he is suddenly actually pretty dangerous on round one. Yeah, no that's cool. Um, yeah I don't really know much else to add about I mean I guess we talked about the gainer a bit like you use it sometimes. You do yeah um it's often like I just want one power and then if you hit the wild you're you're like exceptionally happy. Mm-hmm. Um, but I would not it's five days looking for a wild is not what I would call sufficiently reliable to make it your game plan. Um, but if you get the displacement you're pretty happy especially because that displacement often means you're bringing them into builder range and now you're going to get to play the game Exodus wants to play which is fighter range too. This is the thing that I think people missed when they were making a lot of the cable comparisons. Once he's on the table he doesn't play like cable at all. There's there's you can see all the DNA of cable in him like the he basically reads like another cable but the play pattern is not the same at all. They're not trying to achieve the same thing with secures and extracts as one another and they once you start playing in Exodus you'll see that like that's not the game plan. He wants to fight as many people as humanly possible as close as possible. Yeah maybe I just meant to jog my my my my brain but like cable is like really easy to feel like you're getting value out of him because he just like he just does the thing every game you're like I just if I'm an x-force I cat in mouse but I always body slide and I just shoot the thing on the midline and like his does are like pretty good to where you feel good about that most games. It's like very easy to do. Exodus is like sounding like he's got more of a set up round one so that he can be successful the rest of the game and like the turns where he's effective are like later in the game than where cable is that peak effectiveness I guess and I agree with that the the thing with Exodus I think that's really important to recognize is his activation timing is really important and the decision tree on what he needs to achieve is really important because he's only got so much power to go around and you need to have decided what that powers for because he has a lot of ways to spend it for a lot of different things. Like is his personal presence required is he just throwing out telekineted shields this round and it's like a round by round decision and it has to be flexible you have to be extremely flexible in your thinking with him in terms of timing of activation and what he needs to achieve every round and I think that's just going to grow and I think that's actually more important in today's world with the new prio stuff because your flexible round ones are more important not that joke is inflexible joke is extremely flexible and there's a sort of why I would never tell anyone they should pick up Exodus over jugs especially beginning brotherhood he is a he's something you take as an alternative when juggernaut is not the optimal choice juggernaut is still the five threat to your four brotherhood but Exodus does pivot nicely and does things sufficiently different that there are times he's important yeah that makes sense okay anything else about these characters we can keep going um nothing is jumping out we could get a nuance but like I think it's important to get to some of the other characters because some of this stuff is where um we started talking about meat the meat of the list all right who you want to talk about next well I know you want to talk about Emma uh I mean is she that important though no no she's not yeah so we could say we could say that I'm a for later I mean I mean I mean uh you know who we talk about lady mastermind is that a good pick she's in the box as Exodus okay yeah yeah yeah let's talk about lady mastermind uh when the box came out I was like this characters either broken or bad and uh I was wrong she's somewhere in the middle um and the weird thing about lady mastermind that makes her hard to talk about is I still don't know where she gets played but every time I play her I'm happy I did I don't know if that makes any sense but I'm like I don't know why she was so great but she lived longer than she should have she did more than she felt like she should have and she disrupted my opponents game plan way more than she should have and then you start finding that her your reality is whatever I wanted to be a tag has more play until like some of the top dogs than you thought it's very weird also mirage is a crazy card um so I initially thought that she was gonna be this turret right range five all the stuffs range five I no longer player that like that I player like up there she is in the fight um because people never want to pay to reduce her defenses so she's actually 444 again often in cover and then you have mirage in your back pocket for when people's roles go weird and her spenders actually really good it doesn't read great but when you spender you get to set up for the your reality attack much better if you're fighting over a point and you rearrange a bunch of people on the point and you're like so for example I did one where I spendered into crimson dynamo there and a couple of the guys and I spendered and I wandered them around into like the perfect beam for crimson dynamo and then he just blasted his buddies down the beam oh I see what you're saying yeah yeah yeah you dynamo made the beam attack into his own team yeah yeah with your reality yeah yeah yeah it's also it almost never actually costs four because someone's gonna roll a skull or two like another personal role like the defense roles so she's getting a lot of power back on skulls a lot of the time because she forces a lot of roles when she's up front and even people attacking her are gonna be giving her power because of the skulls so she's actually really power self-sufficient so a lot of times the play pattern is you use deadly illusions to try to get and incinerate out there and then you use someone else to punch the incinerated guy and then you've got an action left over a lot of the time um the interesting thing about your reality is that there are a bunch of characters in the game that people play frequently or maybe they don't play frequently but like are become huge liabilities to to their own team so let's talk about a corner case that I fought last night nobody's doing this but like I was playing a criminals into get player last night who was running Modok 1 turns out the guys mystic defense is only three and he's got a range for six dice attack I can borrow so he just starts absolutely lighting his team up the other ones that are that are played that are actually really interesting is a apocalypse becomes terrifying for his team yeah they can't stand near him because paying for it to make a apocalypse slap somebody is a great deal yeah yeah and he just starts one-shotting people like he's just like blab blab your dead your dead so he he's a liability and she's so far back from apocalypse if she wants to be that like he's got to work to get out her I mean I he doesn't have to work that hard but like it's an effort to go past Magneto to go fight lady mastermind he's in the rear right like obviously you're never deadly illusioning's apocalypse but his friends are fine targets like there's nothing wrong with incinerating any of the other guys that are coming in or hitting them with the five-day mystic um wait do you get you get to pick the type when you barley no no no no no it's the sorry I meant the um the deadly illusions attack is five-day mystic sure yeah yeah yeah yeah but I'm it's actually a question I have I don't know no you can't it's it's literally the printed line like the stat line and then every all the text underneath is blank like you don't get me right so it'll I think on apocate printed as physical right so it's correct yeah so it's a physical attack yeah yeah yeah no changing that you just get a seven-dice physical attack whack-a-friend actionless which is huge um and um a lot of times it's a lot of damage um especially if you if you've previously incinerated them again with lady mastermind right like um the wild you can't count on it but if you get it you're happy you're often using that attack to build a little power anyway um so it's cool about this I'm sorry I didn't rip you what's cool about this like you're playing a more upfront with using this spender more yeah which is something I have not heard anybody do with this character it but what's cool is they remove friendly fire damage I was so happy because I don't even have a lot and there were times where I'm like I can't do it or game it'll die and then uh now that's not true I can do it yeah no that's super cool so yeah this is like I guess AMG's pushing you in the way to that you should have been playing her the whole time yeah yeah plus like throws being less deadly is just nice for her to you right so um I mean she she's pure profit all on the changes like there's nothing about her they got worse she just got better um another great character to victimize with uh your reality is uh Red Skull 2 because his printed mystic is two um so you can like just start slapping people for six dyesers for two power great deal um and the other thing to remember about her is there's nothing you can do about this because she's got mystics uh kind of what's called for her but like the shapeshifter stuff shifter yeah like people are like track sacrifice it's not a great shape for her yeah yeah um there's like you don't get to do anything like you're stuck you just eat it um so people will try to sacrifice I killed him Maximus the other day with Skull 2 I incinerated Maximus first and then Skull 2 just slapped the crap out of him and killed him and so he's he's a big liability to his own team especially because he is only range 3 which means he's probably in with his team a lot of the or he's like he's he's got to come forward but because he's range 3 on a medium base he can reach a lot of them um yeah it's pretty pretty great sometimes his grunts are just there and you're just like actually your grunts please um yep sounds fine yeah part of the battle beating him was just getting rid of his stupid grunts yeah and if you can just put two power to say your grunts aren't on the table it's pretty good deal right so you just kind of like get out of here please um yeah so she's been fun there she makes black bolt a liability to his team um true yeah because he's only correct me for wrong three minutes to defense right but it's still six dice range four and he's often standing near his friends to bodyguard but now he can't bodyguard on her turn so whoever he's standing near is just getting clapped so I have found she's never bad but I still don't know it's almost like your opponents roster is dictating when you take her as opposed to crises which is really weird to me like if you see skull two you're kind of like woo she's gonna profit and then if they don't take skull two she's probably still gonna be fine like she's gonna do stuff she's gonna do work she has displacement she has conditions she has ways around tech like there's no re-calling against her no bodyguarding like build doesn't like her much yeah there's just like you're not gonna be sad although we stuck with her card we should jump ahead and the TTCs and talk about Mirage it is the weirdest most opportunistic card in that it's like the worst recall and the worst warpath and the worst fallback and the worst rogue powardrain but it does it all at the same time okay let's read this card because I don't know I had to reread and read it aloud and then and then I'll all all right our so good it is so Mirage says when an enemy character attacks an allied character within three of your lady mastermind during the mod step lady master I can pay two for each skull in the attack role lady mastermind can change one result in the attack to a blank for each dice change this way the enemy character loses a power then after the attack is resolved if one or more dice were changed the defender can move short so essentially it's like lady mastermind or her friend gets attacked and she's like in range three of her or friend or whatever and then the attack role you check if there's skulls forever skull you can mod other dice to blanks and then they lose power for each one dice modded and then if you modded any dice you can move your guy short all right correct yes so in practice this is opportunistic in that you have to see skull results right like it's not like recall and you're like I hate this role let's just try it again right like you have to there has there's a conditional you have to hurdle which is the skulls are in the role so you have to be opportunistic with it it's not as much of a plan but when you see the opportunity you take it because it's actually really back breaking because you negate the power they had on them that they thought they could count on that's now gone yeah so maybe they made a builder attack which you made bad because you reverse pierced everything correct so they didn't make power on the attack and then they lost power because of the maraja ability and you walked away from them yeah either way yeah so I've moved I've had this happen with I think it was strange attacking magneto and there was like two skulls in the role and I was like let's undo that thanks because it's during the defender modifies a attacker step you play it so a lot of them oh no it wasn't strange because he can always re-roll at the end well strange would be tack roll yeah no he doesn't like it uh this would be is this you're the defender in this case yeah strange would strange would strange would agamoto first and then if you had any would play the card that is what happened yeah and then um and it was his last attack and he was trying to get rid of magneto but I took all his damage away and then walked up to him and that was the end of strange activation and magneto was next so they did not go well for strange um two other quick examples I was playing us ultra on two and he shot lady mastermind to try to build the power for his throw and I just reversed it or he had the power for his throw and I just drained all the power for the throw and now he can't get his grunts back um and I also did it to a lizard who was gonna throw me off a point but he buildered first and I was like no let's take all of that way moved buildered I drain him now no throw uh and I get to reposition if I want to and because it's the defendant character and I'm not lady mastermind you just get like the optimal position afterwards do I want to be aggressive do I want to back out it's on your directional right so you don't have to think about it that much so it's like they get an absolutely back breaking power drain and you get optimal position and no damage or low damage but the downside is you don't always get a say in when you do it right yeah so you're just like it just exists and you're just like waiting for to make sense yes and then the great thing is you usually find that moment like it it just is going to exist over the course of the game and you just have to be watching for it and then when you take it it can just it can break the game over the over the knee of the card or you're just like it's sounding to me like I in the sky or Avengers assemble even and like those cards are insane so like yeah yeah it's it's it's again it's different than that you can't plan for it like those cards but the when it happens because your opponent doesn't know either right like they can't be like okay okay I can plan around eye this turn with the mirage it's like I don't know when this is happening and then when it does it's really bad yeah you're example with lizard was like maybe he should have thrown first but maybe he didn't have the power and it's like he maybe he gambled and like got punished for it so yeah it's definitely like it's just like exist and can mess with people's heads is like so yeah that's cool yeah and it's like like I said one of those things where he would go keep going wait there's more like you flip the results and they're already like oh man now I'm not getting a power I need I was like that's worse than that you lose like two hours and like what I'm like yeah and then I'm gonna move this guy and they're like wait what like it just it just keeps going I gotta I gotta play this now this is right right right up my alley yeah it's pretty fun and almost everybody in brotherhood benefits in some way like Magneto obviously loves it Exodus loves it um lady mastermind herself loves it like I've walked up to people going like and now I'm gonna spend are you like I just walk into their team knowing I'm gonna get my activation and be able to retreat afterwards um yeah it's been a ton of fun but like I said a little unpredictable so I and people kind of hate that in mcp in general right like they they want a very predictable wrote game plans um but some of the cards are pretty good when you just play opportunistically inflexible right and Mirage is one of those well I think that's how mg wants the game to be and that's like their ultimate goal in designing things so when things exist in that space I think game g's done a good job like the opposite of like this failing is like modern day in humans you know right yeah yeah yeah we're like targiannis this has existed forever but now all of a sudden it's just a menace yeah well that and combined with like they're just so everything's so scripted right like you just do the thing and oftentimes the opponent can't compete with the thing yeah um so yeah yeah it was a pretty bad feeling to walk into a game just being like because I know I don't have prior going into this game or when I do have prior depends on the situation you're just like I'm automatically in a deficit yeah yeah that's like the opposite of what amg is looking for like mirage definitely something where it's like you can't plan on it but it you bring it because at some point it will make sense yeah it's up to you as a player to figure out when that is and that's good game design yeah and it's so fun to play like when you do it it's just like uh this feels so great maybe the dough who means speaking a little too much in my recommendation here but like I definitely every time I play it I'm like uh this is fantastic oh no this yeah this card's gas like uh yeah it's I need to play I need to play some more lady mastermind she's uh yeah quick quick uh talk about the box really quickly I think this is the best card in the box yeah I think I was that way when the box was spoiled completely I was like maybe fault line is there but yeah I don't probably not yeah uh we'll talk about the pawns go first eventually but it's probably not staying on the list yeah pawns is weird I don't know all right that's uh that's lady mastermind I don't know if there's anything else with her uh but yeah I think I've definitely learned a lot here with just her like I I haven't actually played her I've just watched Phil player yeah I think she's a ton of fun uh I'm playing her aggressively uh I don't yeah I have no advice on why she doesn't die but for whatever reason she just continues to exist round after round on the midline and I'm like why is she not dying people are attacking her she's just not dying she doesn't have great stats I don't know what it is maybe so but she's living is she living in refraction most of that time oh yeah yeah yeah she's living in refraction and um and uh people don't want to pay the two to reduce by one like yeah yeah so she's four four four a lot of the time yeah she just she's sticky well at that I mean by that logic she's death four with cover I mean she's not that far off with six else she's not that far off from Exodus right well yeah at that point yeah she she I agree it's just funny because like she doesn't read that well if you know what I mean she feels like she feels like because everything on her card matters she feels more than the sum of her parts you know some cards there's like one rule that just doesn't mean anything it's like relatively irrelevant like mega-dosepender for example um there's nothing on lady mastermind card that doesn't matter right and I think that is where I maybe failed and maybe the community's failing is I think I wrote the spender off and that is maybe the missing piece because like you said you get to move people which lets you line up your free attack much much better and it got buff because you don't friendly fire anymore and it's just more attacks more dice being rolled which triggers her like I make power on skulls now do you want to take a quick detour into displacement really quickly uh I'll be as brief as I can but one of the things about brotherhood to try to salvage people feeling sad about brotherhood I had this big soul searching moment where I went o3 and tournament felt terrible and I went back to the bot into the drawing board and I was like okay what does brotherhood actually do well and I took stock of all the characters and I realized brotherhood's displacement is absurd there is so much displacement in brotherhood and a lot of it is extremely good if you view brotherhood through the lens of displacement and stop viewing it as like an attrition affiliation specifically or in missice case specifically like I run the bases and try to score points the displacement matters so much it is honestly probably the biggest strength of brotherhood where you're just like you don't get to leave anything where you wanted it that's a good point yeah especially like Emma's like Emma's displacement machine now yeah we'll just keep we'll keep the shapeshifter train going yeah so um I've played a bunch of Emma in the new world now and I think she's now brotherhood's best for threat um I think rogue and apex both took a hit with the throw changes um rogue less than apex but apex is uh not even a consideration for me anymore and I am a huge apex stand I love that dude I played a lot of him um but I think that Emma is now the best for threat in brotherhood if you're not sure what for threat to grab grab Emma um I played a lot with them sorry to interrupt you I did watch Zach just like decimate somebody with apex I think apex actually still is some juice it could it could be the fact that maybe Emma is just that good now yeah space for both of them that no I think there even might be I was just really down on the on the throw damage because it was so much a part of his kit the getting four on the pounce and the throwing size three is for four um but I could be wrong I've not tested him in the new through rules maybe everything's fine I haven't tried him I've always loved Emma as a character and I played a lot of old Emma and that was because of Thanos Capole um yeah she was actually really good into Thanos Capole she was extremely good at 15 uh was it 15 back then no yeah was 15 because we still had research or gamma in the day 15th rat I thought I could fight them well like a fair fight with magneto Emma juggernaut because yeah because you can put shield line on immediately thenos can't troll you correct you pull in you play a fair game like you're both now playing a fair game of mcp and if I kill red skull I win that game exactly yes and and it was totally fair so Emma was actually like key and I was playing her a ton and she's also really good on meteors are sorry uh uh not meteors um demons she was really good on demons um yes yes I agree so I was playing the insinerate on diamond form if you but diamond form was so bad back then you probably weren't going into it and then like yeah you would when people took the bait right so it was like they think you're insinerated and and then you just transform with not and not only that you're probably transforming into magnetic refraction and now you're four four four with cover and she's not dying but yes diamond form sucked it was a little better in brotherhood because at least you got some return on the throw like the player should trigger yeah so it wasn't the worst but it was still to be avoided you didn't want to be in diamond form um but it was not the absolutely dumpster fire who was for literally everybody else um so anyway um so I played a lot of Emma have a love for Emma but as soon as the crisis changed and Thanos Capole was out she left my list now she's back with a vengeance because she does everything brotherhood loves and more um and throws don't hurt her as much so you don't even necessarily shift into diamond form depending on what you need um but diamond form is so good now you don't care you still prefer to be in fleshy form I think that's still true you want to be in normal form as much as possible because I think that her spender is really good and I think that telepathic lash is really good but having the character throw now in diamond form and being 554 like 554 with magnetic refraction is dumb yeah it's I'm never dying yeah she's basically immortal I just used her to grab an extract on the midline now I'm like it's not safe grab but it's a safe grab if you know what I mean like um yeah no I'm a grabbing because the diamond form is free now so midline grammatical is really cool because you could just bump after picking the thing up and transform backwards you actually get like an interesting decision tree too depending on what's attacking you so for example the other day somebody walked up a grabbed an extract and then attacked her on the midline with dock arc and I was like I'll take it and they gave me enough power to asteroid M and Meggie to kill everything yep uh because you can't transform into diamond in the asteroid M because of the stupid no tactics card to rule but you still can you still have an interesting decision tree to make there um as long as asteroid M is online but all right she says yeah you're just bumping backwards and being like yeah or staying on the secure whatever and just being like I'm 554 now I'm probably fine because nobody's doing anything crazy damage wise on round one so uh she kind of just does everything now displacement damage she gets around a lot of the uh the defensive tech in the game even before these changes uh because I was playing her so much Barry bill was not a thing for me like she before she killed Bill like it was her job now she double like I'm she like one round zoom like uh yeah telepathic lash probably just dunks on Bill I even think about that I mean it is due five days five days telepathic lash good night Bill like you're just like yep um but and she dunked on him before honestly like uh you spend a bill in the old days and he was just dead uh very much so I mean still it still happens he's still spending a bill and he's probably just dead because he takes the one damage at the end and there's new adventure yeah like anybody with any bill concerns if you want to watch Bill meld Emma's your gal like she'll shred him in seconds um uh the same is true of like kingpin uh hmm so like she she just does so much work just a bodyguarding her um that rule I think is still slept on I don't think people realize how much or they forget that there's certain things people can't do I think that that sometimes happens where people like just let the recalgo or whatever or they let the sacrifice go and it's like no no you don't get any of that like nothing oh yeah um I remember I play a lot of shapeshifter characters it was always like I'm like all right this get my character's gonna attack this guy like my mystique's gonna dark raid and shoot this guy and they're like thinking about it I'm like uh there's another you can do man like you have to just roll it's not the thing about yeah yeah it's not what you've got is probably not happening yeah um uh no gambit will not backflip away and through a card at me no just die please um yeah it so I don't really know how much more I get exposed on Emma other than that she's fantastic learning the nuances of transform is really important um the one place is extremely good and recognizing what you can do with it at the end of her diamond form activations is really important like just shifting that one back to being in a critical spot or even just doing like the um I move up I throw you away I move back and then I teleport back one to create extra space like she just always has more space than you think um oh and lastly the weight of you her um transforming back into flushing form that they gave her like the new one where it's gonna be getting a reactivation she can dump her power uh basically the only bad value to do that on is two right or sorry the only bad value you have is two power because you that's when you don't want to that's when you don't have anything to do with its interesting in diamond form but you also don't want to lose two power because if you're on three power in diamond form you're probably throwing somebody right like that that's that's you have that online so you're happy if you're on one power in diamond form you have bump in the night that's you're spending one power to teleport one like you Emma has bump when she's on one power in diamond four um so if you were already like I don't want to lose one power just think how crazy bump is and then you're like oh actually I'm pretty happy yeah I like that logic yeah two power that makes sense you can't really do anything you lose it but like and then if you have anything more than that you could just do the diamond things if you're at like five or more you probably just like shatter them anyway yeah yeah another a we attack that got better because you don't friendly fire so and then cheap and it like a cheat is that a real true word anyway yeah they uh they made it cheaper so you can shatter and then maybe use your uh psychic spike to try to build a little power and get a telepathic lash off you never know so yeah also telepathic lash is crazy and I just say that it is uh yeah no that ability is that a rule uh yeah it's the freaking terror genesis that like bows somebody pretty much it's it's it's just more displacement and affiliation already full of it and it's so hard to work around like no d r yes normal d r works against it but only you still take one damage and you're moving um all the pay for dr's just don't work there's no defensive role so you're just like whatever she rolls is happening she's happy if she rolls one right like you don't really be on that so anything else is gravy it it's just such a powerful rule um very flexible to she's so flexible now and in a world where we've already talked about how flexibility is what AMG wants I think she just keeps getting better um haven't been sad to play her once um I think she's pretty staple to brotherhood at this point things can change but right now I think she's just insane hell yeah I love to hear it I know I need to I'm already in a my locals are all playing brotherhood otherwise I would take it to the shop uh I'll put I'll put it on the list of things to play when they're done they're over it uh all right let's uh let's go back to mystique uh we'll just keep the shape of the train going yeah I'm curious do you play a secret ship much like her kids the same so like so in the old world I did but not as much as magno um so in the new world I have found that the the way you pick crises lets you curate way better and I actually have played magno every game since the crisis changed okay prior to the crate to the way priority changed I thought mystique magneto was a necessity um I know there's people out there having success with one or the other so I I'm not trying to say that this is like blanket true but my experience was I wanted both leaderships available um you'll note I still have cosmic invasion in the list I think mystique on cosmic invasion at 16th rate is the closest thing to a free win brotherhood gets okay you just run mystique toad juggernaut and then in this case it would be the blob and gambit at 16 okay and at that point I've done quick silver and I've done pyro in the past in the gambit slot but at that point the reason mystique's leadership token is so good is that it's kind of an action economy sink people have to go over there and touch it to get rid of it and then cosmic invasion is also an action economy sink because it's pushing people around so it's maybe harder to clear the mystique token and then you have a couple of characters that don't care do or not literally doesn't care he gets the power to slide if he gets cosmic invasions right so like he he loses nothing from getting pushed by it toad loses nothing because he gets exactly the power to hop um and the blob loses nothing because if he's fighting someone on a secure he gets one at the beginning of the round two forgetting push he can spenders way back right like he's coming straight back and probably maybe pushing you off as a result of the spender right um so you're almost to never losing value forgetting pushed off the point um and then mystique she's a long mover and she probably was just moving twice anyway and and given around for the most part then there's gambit pyro quick silver as like your your fifth character um I'm running gambit right now because I'm liking him with Magneto and I just don't have space for the other three uh so gambits sort of like the default uh quick silver would always get the power he needed to um to speedster so he was always going to whatever point he wanted if he got pushed and then pyro on d's is actually way better than he reads because as soon as you start firewalling people they're just not playing d's anymore yeah yeah that's true they just can't uh you can probably d against webs with pyro and you start firewalling them they start feeling like everyone else does against them they're like oh what do I do like um so pyro is also an option but it's more like uh uh I'm crippling them at playing it option rather than I'm playing it well myself so I think cosmic invasion of the mystique is like the highest win rate uh secure I have in brotherhood and it's like I mean I can tell you because like I keep a ridiculously meticulous spreadsheet on this stuff um but 83% woo over 36 games played on it hell yeah yeah I mean that sounds like a super efficient team and then we haven't even talked about like juggernaut just being a pain to deal with that 16th threat yes yeah he's a nightmare right and especially when you've got four other targets on the board also running around doing annoying stuff um dealing with blob juggernaut at 16 like that's so much beef to chew through especially when when you think about blob the dude um you only ever get to attack the guy once right like for the most part when you're fighting over secure you get one punch it better be a good one right because you're you're leaving the point so he's sinking action economy just by existing a lot of the time um so anyway the the whole fight on cosmic invasion becomes like this massive action economy sink with the mystique token adding like a bonus character for me so it's almost like you're fighting six characters because one of them none of my characters are required to stand on the back point yeah okay I like that you probably just have to put the token I maybe a toad interacts but uh yeah you can have whoever like you you just kind of like after around one it's kind of whoever whoever has the power mystique often can do it right she doesn't have like that much to spend her power on for the most part yeah um so you can kind of do it with whoever all of that said I don't know that this is necessarily still true because um I'm finding that it's much easier for me to lock in great crisis combinations for Magneto now so I don't know that mystique feels as necessary but I was playing her probably one in three games as the leader okay um I think that's true roughly one in three um and then just trying to leverage Magneto as much as possible so she probably still has value in the new world and if you're a mystique fan and you'd rather play her as a brotherhood leader you can probably do the same thing I'm doing and just curate your roster more towards mystique stuff and just make sure you're getting good combinations for mystique um I don't know how true this is long term I may have like the sample sizes maybe too small to say for sure that I don't want mystique leadership anymore but um yeah I was playing it quite a bit before I also have a like a certainly high win rate on scrolls with mystique and that I don't know why I'm just like I'm super curious about that one because I noticed it and I was like why is it that the case and I still don't have an answer like specifically at 20 points no just like just whatever points whenever I play scrolls on with mystique I just I mean it's not perfect it's not as good as the cosmic invasion win rate but it was high enough that I was like why is that happening interesting enough games I was like yeah well she is solid at grabbing your scroll and tow can grab a side scroll even so or I mean you have jargon not too who can grab the side scroll so like you got that core there it's like yeah we'll say there's no other five threat for mystique like Exodus doesn't for me usually make it yeah he doesn't really function with mystique yeah it's jargon odd jargon odd is the guy with mystique he's just insane um so yeah uh Exodus is non-starter there I neither I mean we want to talk wish had okay but um which never made the code with mystique for me either so yeah real quick on which we talked about this prior to the cast but yeah which is like like you said if there's some kind of weird kaiju coming in and out of the game she's like solid there with no more mutants and the fact that she can delete them yeah she like people were all complaining about um the damage off of cgr's builder and she's just had that forever like it's literally the same thing um yeah that's slightly better she does like instant rate text of potentially so yeah yeah um yeah yeah so she delete stuff her spender delete stuff uh I was telling you before the cast that she was my answer to malacust back when he came out she crept back into the list uh when uh Thor two is a big deal um she crept into the list when locals were troubling you with namor um and again this is all because of no more mutants where you just are like I would prefer you not pounce this round Thor just stand there please and then I will let you up um and it was the same with namor you just turn off his charge for around and namor standing there doing nothing for around is great for you um well they usually lose because of that I was doing that with Loki one people would safe grab with namor and then you park Loki and range four of him and he just like can't charge yeah that was usually enough to just win the game a lot of yeah yeah yeah you if you can deny even one charge is really critical for a lot of these characters right and it's the charge of your choice right so it's like maybe there's a charge you're okay with happening but you just pick the one that's bad for you right and you're just like nah not that one thanks um and then they have to make a decision as a do I back namor out or do I let scarlet which take around shooting him and namor doesn't like that much so uh yeah anyway she's always just kind of crept back in whenever there's a big bad but as soon as the big bad is diminished or I find a different answer she usually comes back out of the roster um because with Magneto if you try to play with Magneto you just have two turrets and I don't think that's a great starter like you just put two characters that just want to stand there is not great and she's not mobile enough from a steek so I think something needs to change for which to become a staple but she does oh she crept in for me for apocalypse too but it wasn't because of no warm mutants it was because of winds of chaos where you could just purge all the status effects that pestilence was pooping out um and if pestilence or anyone other than apocalypse was still standing around you just incinerate a bunch of dudes and you'd heal some stuff so you just be like I don't want any of these on my guys you can have them and that one gets stuff yeah because it doesn't have to be her activation right so you just like uh start in my first activation because you usually play taller than apocalypse if you can with brotherhood uh you just purge all the bad stuff give give it to them heal a little bit if you had to and then you go with whoever makes sense to kill who you just incinerated yeah how I like it so she was she was in there for a little bit against apocalypse but she's back out because I actually have found oddly enough apocalypse is not my worst matchup so okay uh well I guess the last thing I want to say about mystique is do you play so we talked about leadership when you play as a leader I mean do you still play do you play or the magneto at all ever like yeah yeah I do I do uh and the reason I do is because she's still one of the most efficient asteroid ambicans on around one if you position her equidistant between like uh two alien ships or two legacy viruses you get your pick she can walk and then shoot whoever's on either one and then she automatically will generate the power for asteroid amb and then you just take that extract so if you're going first on those extracts you just grab two if you're going second again on those extracts you wait for whichever character you want to kill the most and mystique goes and triggers the asteroid amb and then you probably get to on around one that way so yep either way you're trying to do that with mystique you can try the same thing with pyro but because he doesn't go as deep it's not as reliable uh yeah the long move is pretty critical there makes sense uh okay and now we've got we've got your three threats here like it's kind of blob and gambit are in the list but it was also like pyro and avalanche exist and quick silver uh I don't know where he wants to start with these we could be briefly talking about blob and gambit but yeah let's do that gambits here because gambits crazy um yes that said he's better with apocalypse um he is pretty good with magneto uh he's pretty good with mystique you're happy to have him but I would not begrudge anyone taking pyro over gambit I think pyro has higher utility than gambit by a significant margin I think pyro wall is absolutely absurd I think it's a crazy power it's super cheap it's very reliable pyro does it every turn if he wants to um and his card is not bad pyro techniques it's not great it's not bad um yeah so I quite like pyro um I can see myself flip flopping between gambit and pyro because it's very difficult to dice fix for brotherhood um so gambit isn't super reliable like you're just like really hoping you just roll wilds um and there's no rerolls he is more survivable in brotherhood a lot of the time with exodus and magneto lurking around being able to give him additional dice and cover makes him pretty durable so he's like uh he's like a toad upgrade in a lot of ways where you're just like I go grab an extract for somebody punches him he's leaving and then he probably will never die again yeah um that's it so he's pretty good there the blob couldn't come out of the list at this point he couldn't before because I thought he was so clutch on cosmic invasion I do still think the blob is slept on um I think he's close to his good is pyro out of that box I think that people were really down on the blob I think that his his uh ha ha that tickles is really good um like apocalypse often only gets to hit him once right and then you're going flying the fact that its size agnostic is just crazy right like hulks punch him once like if you see a hulk playing the blob into him into them into them is great uh yes because they get basically one punch unless they saved their uh gamma leap but even then depending on where they did their punch from the gamma leap isn't as far as the as the pushback so they have to be really careful um and if they take their second punch they're probably off the extract if they don't kill or off the secure if they don't kill him right like uh and he's pretty durable with four physical and dr so yeah and they can't move with the triggers on the attack either like push or no exactly yeah yeah yeah no I've always like blob into hulks yes yeah um also he can move them with uh he's spender he's spender size agnostic push so the fact that it's a size agnostic push just means like wherever he decides to thundersplash he will move everything that's there if he hits the wild of course but it's pretty reliable on seven days like you miss it sometimes but when you hit it you're happy um and uh because it's size agnostic everybody goes flying and it's great um and often does it significant amount of damage to the guy you're splashing so yeah I like blob he could leave the list at this point um yeah because I mean like how many I really like to moonlight the center line stuff I love him with me nido playing on the center line because you can actually like get the spender round one and just like body slam the midline it's like pretty fun yep um your opponent has to give that to you I think because it's short move medium base range three which like doesn't reach the full midline even if you're in front of it yeah uh so he has to like be given that a little bit but yeah blob is just like a pain in the ass to deal with for a lot of the game but yeah I see what you're saying like he's not he's not like so good that he could he'll never leave the roster also do quite like him with mystique if you can grab an extract on the way to a secure and have blob get the power back off the leadership and standing on the secure with the R available which means when he has an extract it is one of the most nightmarish things in the world to beat an extract out of that guy like yeah that's a lot of people why they complain about him is like he spends to pick up and then he can't the R around one but yeah and see fixes that yeah yeah yeah so when you when you've got that online people have to be really cognizant of it like walking up and punching him on round one and beating that extract out of him like even some of the characters that have like attack steals because they're gonna go flying afterwards like the when the when they so for example like when miles tries to kick it out of him or whatever it's like well it's not gonna be anywhere convenient for you because you're gonna go flying and I'm gonna make sure you're not near this thing right so it's yeah if like if like he venn and bless you or something yeah yeah exactly like if you come up and try to try to do an attack that's gonna knock the extract out of him um you're not gonna be in a place to pick it up afterwards yeah if he doesn't kill you then he sure he would drop it and then you get to move him so you can move away from it yeah yeah yeah so um yeah I I do like him he's one of those characters that if people had them it had him in their roster the I would never bat an eye um but it is not an auto include um I will just say one thing really quickly about the reason I'm so close to affiliated is that um I played a lot of games of Magneto featuring a splash but when you're four wide and you've got one character that can't participate in Astrayed M that can sometimes just lose you games um so I got to the point where I was and I might just like overvalue Astrayed M um but I got to the point where I was so frustrated with having this character that can't participate in Astrayed M that I think the only characters I personally like with Magneto that are splashes are characters in the Clia lockjaw category where they're making up for the Astrayed M loss with mobility all right well let the Clia's here so let's let's talk about her yeah there's some fun new stuff with Clia actually uh I think she's like a huge winner in the throw changes obviously for massively obvious reasons her uh physical is two so having all throws only you three means no more buildings falling on her head um having the six health is obviously great with the changes that they gave her what a year ago now uh knows back in May was it may okay uh so that's great um her throw is basically buffed um because size ones do more now and the teleport I prefer her teleport over lockjaws because it's actionless and you're trickling power into her with Magneto all game um so you don't need to you don't need to do the descendant of the fall teen all the time to top her up um and now that descendant of the fall teen doesn't accidentally just like rip or destroy any more that's more viable anyway the other thing that I really like with her now is the talons of Ferrello the additional base and this is where I was talking about enhancing stuff with books of truth um when you get these gigantic dice pools that you're really hoping to do something like you're adding dice to Exodus to make him eight you're adding dice to Magneto to make him eight you're adding dice to juggernaut to make him ten and you're not using their power to do it you can fix the role afterwards with books of truth um if you rolled into skulls the other thing that's cute with Clea is the talons of Ferrello work on lady masterminds your reality attacks so true you can take those builders you like and be like hey black bolts slap your friend for eight let's go so you can suddenly have apocalypse just one-shotting his team right like they're just obliterating people um they're just rebelling nine dice attack from a pocket yeah from like downtown too yeah so far away when you're doing this um and if you're happy to be swinging into somebody that is five-thread you're judging them too right like um so there's a lot going on with the talons of Ferrello and Brotherhood which is a sort of bereft of dice fixing otherwise or you can uh talons gambit and that gets pretty dumb pretty quick true um and again gambit can if you don't like the role you can books of truth it because again you're you're often not taking out of their pool like it's not often it's always a spender the the dice pools on Brotherhood builders are usually sufficiently good that you're not spending power to do damage a lot of the time on the character themselves so they're sitting on the necessary power for books of truth so in Magneto rolls those rolls really like oh sweet I got like a crit or two but also got skull locked on a bunch of stuff you're suddenly at like 10 dice reroll any reroll at the end if you didn't like the result um with you to bother skulls too so yeah yeah exactly you get out of the skulls too um so you can just like those those big swings that you're trying to affect with Clia suddenly uh can be fixed again at the end um another just kind of works on some of them anyway like juggernaut is actually pretty happy a lot of the time where you're like you throw away dice and you're either looking for the push or big damage and you get neither it's like yeah maybe I'll book this one uh oh yeah all those these odds are you're gonna get one of the two right uh so the other thing oh Clia is her throw is actually randomly pretty good like having the range three size two character throw is that's pretty much always online for her is actually pretty nice for displacement because oddly there aren't a lot of character throws other than like Emma in brotherhood it's mostly pushes advances so just having the ability to chuck some one off the point is quite nice a lot of the time um so you're just playing a mini game of with Clia of what's the best way to spend three power this round because everything she does cost three power yes and Magneto is trickling it in all the time and the thing that i another thing I prefer lock jaw over her over lock jaw for is that the towns of fralda doesn't require her to activate prior like lock jaws uh what happened yeah um and everything she does is actionless so like there's a lot around you can just move move teleport somebody or move move throw a character um so she's not as reliant on her activation and she's not as reliant on spending actions um and i like her gainer it's fine it tops her up when she's sitting on two and you want three you just chuck a gainer out it's fine um she doesn't do a lot of damage though like so that's not what you're taking her for you're taking her to shift stuff around there's a lot of uh scenarios now where you can shift Exodus up with clia's teleport and it's valuable um so i've been running Magneto clear Exodus and then fill on deadly meters and that's what you just love in 14 brain of three yeah yeah yeah so it's 17 I've been running gambit um and then at 18 it it just the Emma because Emma uh yeah and uh yeah yeah you could see here's a retella yeah fair enough yeah yeah and then at 19 you can go three two or talking off take a pick sick yeah yeah i i love that all right uh is there anything else about characters characters i mean there's also avalanche maybe briefly touch on him since he's new he's my least experiences in the new box um i haven't put a lot of effort to him mostly because he's boring i saw someone else i don't want to say the name because i'm afraid i'll get the name wrong it was like a pretty prolific player and i'm scared that i'll just say the wrong person um because i want to make sure i give credit to credit where credit is due but i saw somebody say the thing about avalanche is the his floor is nearly identical to his ceiling um and that is correct like he can wake up with 10 power and he still does the same thing he does with two right like nothing changes so i'm not wild about him i think that he's boring if anything and i have played him a little bit and the times that his push is relevant it's incredibly relevant and then the times that it's not he's just three threat of six health like that's all he is i'm not high on him he's he's the thing i like the least in that box i will happily amend my opinion if somebody shows me some cool stuff with avalanche i'm not even looking to experiment with him that much because i just don't think it's the most interesting thing to be doing right now um and he's just not not fun i guess yeah i but i think it's a real missed opportunity for a mg with avalanche i feel like you know how when people play professor x they bring magic to like start the engine yeah i think aval that should have been avalanches job in brotherhood for magneto yeah i probably should have just had like an art auto starter like set like terrain breakage thing i don't want to do it and then that would be i think that like i remember when magneto leadership came out like when magneto was spoiled many years ago i was like oh my god it's the most thematically perfect thing i've ever seen and i was like when avalanche comes out someday it will make so much sense with him yeah then then he came out and they just like he can't even like break terrain on his own turn which is just like doesn't make any sense for this character like in the theme yeah so anyway that's all i want to say about avalanche yeah yeah uh quick silver is good i wouldn't begrudge anyone playing quick silver he's actually like randomly really good in a nick fury so if you're worried about nick fury take quick silver because with either seek or magneto if i'm correctly for sure uh can't remember basically the grunts don't matter he can pick up the thing they drop if you manage your power correctly on round one um right because of if you if you've taken um can i borrow that you do one damage you steal it from them because they don't die you do two damage it pops out but that's the power you need to speedster so you go pick it up mm-hmm so they have to put it somewhere that's like super dangerous for quick silver on round one in order for it to not be viable so if you don't like fury grunts stealing your stuff on round one quick silver is one of the best answers because you're just like nah i'll either steal it or kill them unless i just do nothing which like what the odds of that right like zero damage is bad obviously but any other damage amount he gets what he needs to take the thing yeah that makes sense all right uh so we got cards uh we read them off do you know who i am i mean we talked about this do we really need to elaborate on it i mean the card has been amazing since its existence it's stapled to jargonaut is he brought jargonaut bring do you know who i am i don't care if you have to leave a restricted card at home i'm not kidding yeah it is absurd it's displacement primarily you can use it for damage i don't not much anyway you just put like a you just put baby in the corner get out of here like please never come back um that card is nuts take it cool uh and then other cards that are like absolute staples i think are here we got ash right um i mean you're probably playing this all the time so yeah yeah yeah even a mystique led teams like i think yeah yeah 100% you'll win games at the end of the game with astray ad with mystique where you're just like out toleport mystique over here double moves stand and secure i win the game like that that happens a lot and then refraction you're playing this every game with mag right i'm assuming accept accept on scoundrels okay yeah i could see that um just diminishing returns you still get some value but just not as much i would play it on scoundrels um you want to avoid scoundrels anyway though true and you can just video it now so yeah yeah yeah uh and then we talked about mirage a bunch uh so you're probably playing this every game you play lady mastermind yes uh i yeah you play this over in my opinion you play this over recal if you brought lady mastermind okay it it it's like your recal first that that that said last night i played mirage recal and books of truth in the same game so uh yes uh but it's the first one yeah cool uh and then instant recovery obviously i think ex is the only character that could play this in this roster yeah you take it with apex two if you had apex and exodus in the same roster i don't know that it makes the cut with just apex but probably sure so actually so are you playing this every game you play exodus typically no no it's not the first thing that makes it in but it's a strong consideration like i would probably take it over in dom for example okay okay their time sacrifice doesn't make the cut to if the scenario just looks too spread out okay fair enough and then uh your safety cards are sacking in dom so i guess i elaborate why and maybe maybe not brace or fallback or whatever so um all right i'm gonna see some super controversial i think braces are rated um i think that it's been overrated for a long time and that's not to say that it's not good it is good it is one of the best cards in the game but when i see like a 97 percent or whatever inclusion ratio or whatever it's too much um i think there are rosters that were taking it because it was the no-brainer and they shouldn't have uh i did this deep dive on watching tts games and documenting spikes and valleys of uh of builders and spenders versus throws and mathematically speaking recal saves you as much if not more damage per game then brace um that's interesting i think i one of my previous guests on this so far has said they play recal over brace sometimes i can't remember who it was but you might be honest something there yeah so like i think that embrace is so sure people value it more because recal is still a game like it's still a chance right like it's it's a gamble and brace is a sure thing but i think that a lot of people forget that brace maybe it didn't save you anything because you just didn't see the role right like you never rolled it although you should but you never rolled it so you don't know like for all you know there's some well for a fact there's some number of braces that didn't need to be played because the role would have saved you right like correct we know that that has to be true for some number of those braces we just don't know how many we have no idea right um the other thing is that playing Magneto uh especially in the old world i baited brace like it was my job like it doesn't be like uh throw this size to you i just want the power i don't care oh you brace it sweet like you just do this like as a matter of course eventually for a while it's tilting like you just got to play enough games the Magneto before you're like oh i have so much to throw one brace doesn't matter like if you're if you're doing it correctly and you're you're thinking about your throws and who needs the power and why you're throwing things you'll just find that you start baiting brace and you're like oh that dude's that dude's on too health and has an extract i'll just throw a size to it and see what i get the size four can wait right like you just brace comes out and you're like thank god they didn't have sacrifice this game um i actually find patch up more tilting um because i struggle with kaiju sometimes so when somebody patches up apok or patches up hulk i'm like oh god please no where brace i'm just like eh i'll i'll get through it it's fine um so in dom is there because Magneto hates being displaced that's pretty much it sometimes he isn't another characters like exodus but you just you just don't want to move with Magneto so i play in dom it's a lifesaver against other terranauts i've literally won games in a mirror because we both had in magneto and chariote we both had do you know who i am but i had in dom and they didn't and i just like your magneto is going to the corner and my magneto is not going anywhere and sacrifice is just really strong in brotherhood you have a lot of great options to sacrifice into sacrifice you need a blob is great sacrifice e sometimes you just sacrifice into magneto and you can make net iqra frac because you're not modifying any dice you're just using your mystic defense or sorry not magnetic fracover um force project so you can force project after sacrificing uh yes yeah you would not get a refreshing because of getting comfortable yeah yeah so i'm misspoke i mean yeah force project yeah force project is not adding dice you just like you use your mystic dice that's right yeah yeah so like he's a good sack target exodus is often fine you don't get to add dice obviously but like he's just not going to die a lot of the time chariote not's fine um there's there's plenty of sometimes you just sack in a mystique because like i just don't care about mystique right like yeah yeah she can take the head who cares good sack into blob and then he can send people away yeah yeah yeah yeah so uh also sacrifice works great with mirage because i'm not modifying my dice i'm modifying yours um true so you can still monkey with people after you've sacrificed with mirage and make the dire worst so um yeah i just use it to save either an activation or scoring um never sacrifice for no reason right like if it's just like i just don't want my character to die that's not good enough right like if your character's already activated isn't scoring anything don't sack out of them but we'll just love them take the head for the most part i think that's a hard lesson for people to learn they don't like to loot they don't like to lose their stuff but um holding on to sacrifice is more important a lot of the time um i can see sacrifice becoming patch up sometimes because i play a lot of beefy characters but i don't know um sometimes you just don't have the power yeah let's go no i i think i think they're yeah i think indom seems objectively correct and then you can go like brace doesn't seem brace seems even worse for this list now with the changes so like i definitely see that not being here yeah i i don't uh i think new brace is fine i think there's still some rosters that want it badly that's that's always been my argument it's like i think there are some rosters in the old world that really should have taken brace like i that's objectively correct i i don't want to sound like i hate brace and no one should ever take it i just think too many people were taking it and they had a better option um and uh it's funny because of who that's changed for right like do webs even care about brace anymore um uh so they do with the auto damage that's the biggest problem just the one point in my in my experience yeah it character throws they do the auto damage because auto damage into webs is sucks but like i don't think they care much about terrain throws that much anymore yeah that's a big change for me because i was used to throw it size four as out of you like hey hey take that but now now it's like they take what one point like that's like average now it's one um so yeah anyway if they still take it great um i wasn't sure yeah but yeah there's got to be some teams that did take it for i don't think sandals take it now right like probably not i think patch up in like in dom or some shit in that list is like good patch up seems really good in that list patch up and sack i think probably um because you're in a sacrifice into someone you're just gonna rebuild later anyway right so yeah sandals are like overflowing on power in my experience you can yeah yeah yeah there were one of the other affiliations i've dabbled with i played them when they were really bad so yeah no they're pretty good right now my locals are whining that they're overpowered so perfect okay and then re-cals here you briefly touch on that it's just good yeah yeah it's good just go with magneto yeah in my experience so you got tanky boys it's good yeah it's good anytime you take Exodus when you're gonna have a lot of defense dice lurking around so um yeah it's just a solid card um tough to go wrong with all right and what about ponds go first this you wanted to mention this card uh yeah i don't think it's like good so tell me about it yeah so i was i was kind of using it as like a maybe a way to clear staggers on magneto or heal somebody who needed a little bit of healing or just move people around um i wanted to give it it to do i i've not found it to be particularly impactful if somebody's out there doing something awesome with it let me know because i want it to be cool but i i've just found that you end up spending one power on one character to move them small in a way that barely matters that's like the the majority the use i've found for it so far uh i wish it was great it doesn't seem to be this is how i feel about genetics superiority as well by the way from the same box yeah um wish it was cool i was really hoping exodus we can have the accolades of magneto leadership um even if it was just not a card and that ended up not being a case so that's like the closest thing to you and the problem with that card is that magneto generates enough power in my experience and so exos is the only one that benefits and it's just not that valuable it's fine i don't know yeah it's why do they make the thing what it's basically like a second leadership but why is it more power like yeah and tying it to a leaventhreat makes it so that you're kind of stuck in the rest of your roster creation in that you're not going to have like a ton of benefit right like yeah uh take two fours and hit 19 great i'm getting like this trickle of power that isn't helping me that much because it's mostly going to exodus and i guess it gives you more telekinect shields but you're limited to one per turn anyway so it's not even that effective yeah i've i tried it wasn't impressed put it on the shelf maybe i'll revisit it a future to hate but not for me uh what do i locals play in brotherhood when this box came out and he was playing like generic superiority and i think he made like one power in like three games with it oh no yeah it was it's not great especially if people don't want to fight you right like if nobody's conscious you're playing as webs or something like that they're just like running around it's like uh what do i do this not that i play exodus against webs i don't think but doesn't doesn't feel great uh instant recovery is the better exodus card in my opinion yeah like that that makes sense to me and then we talked about books of truth i mean there's a bunch of applications here like yeah yeah it's something that may not shake out long term but right now it seems to be working like it seems good it seems like there's a playtime in place over reek how i think it's mostly if you've taken clear i do you think that you tie it to clear in a lot of ways because that's what's good exactly yeah the bigger dice pool that you're really banking on doing something of quality with so i think that's true but this is a relatively new thing that i'm trying so i don't really want to say that it's it's great uh i'm liking it so far though so that's that's where i'll i think i'll leave the books of truth cool all right let's talk about these crises then uh oh boy lots of confusion here yeah yeah let's let's hear so i mean secures we've said it earlier we got fisk meteors causing evasion intrusion wedding party we talked a bunch about causing evasion it's like it seems like a mystique focus game play yeah yeah yeah i would never drum magneter yeah the rest these other four read very magneto to me so uh is that correct yep uh there are times i have played mystique on fisk that that has happened um but not many uh and less so now if i get 16 on fisk i've actually played magneto exodus jagernaut a bunch and it's really good i've always like magneto on fisk yeah um the magneto exodus jagernaut at 16 is just like can you actually chew through this probably not yeah um and i've done the same on deadline and it's very good on deadline as well at 16 um so i like that 16 and the nice thing is you have a crazy pivot depending on the extract where you can go three wide with magneto and feel good and you can go five wide with mystique and feel good and your opponent's guessing right like what am i getting um so i have played i think i think i played 16 fisk mystique on senators one time and i was like i don't like my magneto play here we're doing mystique and you just get them off one of the fisk points and throw the token on it and let it ride and it it can work out but it depends on what they do with it when they place it so and anyway um i like this uh my secures i think are more firmed up than my extracts like wedding party i could see switching out for extremists at some point um like right right something yeah yeah yeah yeah riots yeah for for something i'm not sure what it wouldn't be causing a invasion i like that too much but if i if i think that i want to play mystique more i could see wedding party or intrusions becoming um riots okay so but for now i'm pretty happy i'm still experimenting though i don't understand the new crisis world yet uh i think that i think it's kind of the wild west so i don't really know what i'm doing i know that the three that i would keep almost no matter what um if we were officially the old world would be causing a invasion deadly meteors and merefisk those would be like the three that i'm looking to play but now who knows yeah that's something i love about the new crisis uh set up i i don't have perfect knowledge of this either but what i do know is it's it kind of is like pushing people to play the game in the way that i think i've always played the game where like the before when you only had to play three scenarios it felt like you could have like one plan and it could play the three scenarios like pretty good you could just like fill with splash characters or something but now like five scenarios definitely feels like you have to pick stuff that is different like different different like whether it's like different speed different setup like like you have like causing a very different from the other four you have here right so like you have to have alternate game plans i think now yes you can't you can't just be like i play this one thing every game and that's what i do like i'm gonna play kingpin every game like i just don't think that works like you have to play some alternate game plan you to find something else and you can't be attached to like like if the scenario comes up in such a way where like what you want to what your main plan doesn't make sense you can't be attached to it you have to play the other thing hot take true single cores are dead yeah i mean i always felt like that idea sucked anyway but like uh but yeah i agree with you like i've never really felt like cores or thing i mean i guess apoc kind of has a core but sure yeah but there's not many no yeah extract wise much confusion i was telling you earlier i don't understand why i win on scrolls uh so it's in there to try to find out i want to puzzle that out either the sample size is too small and i'm wrong or there's something there and i'd like to know why i've always loved alien shipping legacy virus from a needle you almost always end round one with two extracts regardless of prior um it's very hard to keep me from killing someone who picked one because almost nobody takes two safe grabs so even when they had prior and they knew it i was still probably gonna get one of them from them um yeah your list doesn't care so much about the second prior roll like you can get two of them either way correct correct that's right um because i have a lot of characters that'll build that one power for aster i'm like lady mastermind does it Emma often does it uh she needs one damage um mystique does it uh yeah there's there's lots of ways to get up there exodus automatically does it provide it i don't attack or don't spend any power yeah i'm i'm coming for one of them that you that my opponent grabbed and i'm probably ending round one on two extracts um guests is just to like stabilize scoring while i try to get into the game attrition wise i'm not sold on it that could easily be something else but right now i kind of like it and then spider infected i've actually always kind of done well on i was only one i'm not totally sure why but i think with me need it it's just because like their extract guys are coming back to me like there yeah you're you're coming my way at some point and i'm yeah you're like you're like never picking this thing up with mag ever no no no and then juggernaut juggernaut can actually hold one of these pretty easily a lot of characters actually can yeah juggernaut uh toad doesn't really care that much even mystique is like okay it doesn't mind that much no exodus doesn't care at all yeah he's fine um yeah you got a lot of characters that don't care Emma doesn't particularly care she can hold one okay yeah like and then you can always fix your positioning if you've decided to run clear to right like you know i should be like and you guys shoved up whatever let's put him where i want him so yeah i quite like spider infected i'm not really sure if it's gonna stick around either like maybe i find something better i haven't tried any of the new ones yet so yeah i'm gonna run this by you because i've recorded the black order episode for the series and what i what we figured out or i guess we were talking about it and he is corvus i was in a mothership and talking about it i was thinking i was like wait a minute the new extract like i was like magnetos same way corvus so you like you don't ever pick up the thing until like ashore never motherships use and i was like wait the new extract disappears off you at the end of the round that's true so like you could just you could just pick it up on magneto on round one if you're not gonna asteroid that round and then it just goes away anyway right that is very true yeah okay all right you have a toad already and you have a juggernaut who's running around already so i i think you should try it uh is it it's jailbreak is what it's called yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and i never want to flee to the well toad likes fleeing to the corners but like no one else ever fleeced to the corners everyone else wants to fight in the middle so i'm not worried about the well so the scenario doesn't the scenario doesn't let you run into the into the same yeah yeah they they can't run from me either right like right yeah i think jailbreak has some gas here that is worth trying out that is true all right uh goes on the list uh i'm actually writing that down right now because uh i keep a lot of notes and i would like to remember that because that does seem like great tech okay cool uh oh man that sounds infuriating yeah yeah it don't on me during the black order episode i was like yeah i've played so much black order and i was like can't yeah you can never pick anything up on corvus i was like wait a minute the new extract you could this just goes away that's true yeah that's that's really cool okay i'm down uh i need to try this now yeah and juggernaut seems great on it because he's running around anyway oh yeah yeah juggernaut's perfect um if i remember correctly maybe i'm thinking of the new secure but i i remember measuring oh yeah i'm thinking of the new secure lady mastermind literally reaches the entire table like uh all the secures on the new secure so like nothing safe from her um yeah the new secure seems good because mag can push up farther off of it really far really still be on it and like makes refraction better and it's builder better and all that stuff so makes ammo better too for the yeah yeah yeah yeah a lot of models in that list and this seems to like the new scenario so i'd be excited to try those out yeah yeah yeah uh i i'm getting sold i agree yeah sounds great um anyway that's see that's the extracts the only three i'm confident well all right so two i'm confident in alien ship and legacy virus scrolls is confusing to me and then unexpected guests inspire infected either could go like both right now but i think on his but unexpected guests will probably become jailbreak not gonna lie after the yeah i'm confident yeah because it's they're both in the box shape right so you don't you don't really lose anything by swapping it out because like because you kind of want stuff in the midline right ideally because then you can fight people but but either of these on the midline so you might as well pick the one up that like works better with ash right them and yeah i guess they're both civilian so you don't you don't get that there either uh yeah you don't like dodge tear genesis better or something like that no i was talking about this with one of the local and humans players last night though and they were saying that they find them they plan to be tear genesis doesn't like they don't get the time to get their scoring online um sufficient the tear genesis is gonna make a difference because i'm just killing them so fast yeah jug is really good at running into the base and like breaking up like the the car neck like throwing car neck into the corner is horrible for him like you can just kill the dog just like all this stuff and then like he's we talked about lady mastermind and amma just like trolling black bolt so like yes yeah yeah yeah yeah the experience has been that uh the experience has actually been the car neck dies on contact um yeah he sucks into the collisions so like yeah uh he's actually in shagginought too honestly he is really unhappy about jugging out punching him uh he just kind of explodes whenever jugging out rolls fine interesting because i feel the car neck would be okay i mean he's like three defense reroll martial arts he takes auto point but if he doesn't kill if you don't kill him then he weaknesses you and just like karate chops you to death so like uh he usually gets in double tap usually pushing him uh okay fair enough so he's not doing a whole lot if it takes two swings from jargonought whatever but like you usually there's usually enough obliterative damage happening other places that you're just kind of like yay he's already like taking a point here or something like that uh he's not fond of lady mastermind either to be honest uh if he gets incinerated and it's like range five mystic he's not super pumped um yeah anyway my experience has been car neck just kind of vaporizes okay um so uh actually i've found that with shank chi as well uh kind of uh contact with a lot of this stuff too yeah i think brotherhood's always been good into karate people like they just get kind of get beat up yeah uh i've found that old ammo even messed him up pretty bad and new new ammo is just gonna mess him up even worse uh shank just destroyed by telepathic lash yeah yeah uh i guess i do have a question about alien ship that you do get punished for having power on this you have to make needle leadership like is that an issue or no um yes and no so yeah you take you take damage but i'm usually fighting in their midst a lot of the times they're taking it too like yeah i'm in their grill everybody's taking this pop and that's usually good for me um the quick side note in magic the gathering i always played red black which raised you to the bottom see who dies first and he's much damaged to everybody as possible so i'm pretty comfortable exactly uh so i'm very comfortable living in the space of like we're all dying you're just gonna die first so um i've never felt that much discomfort with alien ship uh again i'm usually in their face so they're taking it too i'm also very comfortable with magneto dazing by the way like uh i think players should be comfortable with magneto dazing if he's not scoring anything and who cares like let him days um it doesn't matter so as long as he's activated i really don't care if he goes down so if he's sitting on an alien ship on a gazillion power and he pops and dies i don't care like that that's fine as long as he's flipping not k owing right so um and provided asteroid am's already spent i almost never pick anything up before asteroid am is spent but once asteroid am is spent pick it up go for it yeah explode who cares you've dragged people in with your builder a lot of the time they're standing in front of you they're dying to like uh i'm just gambling the dill di first and that's usually the cases the when i was talking about magnetic refraction beginning the game and like the earth beginning of the podcast with the uh um added value over the course of the game the chances are i've taken less overall damage than my opponent a lot of the time by the time you get to the point of alienships popping such that the damage is just more beneficial to me yeah not makes sense i'm with you with alien ship man i think this and meteors are like criminally underplayed in the meta or i just like in the community yeah i agree uh similar to the brace conversation i think there's some stuff that's massively overplayed and yes scrolls considering scrolls hammers of some fear grips yeah i think way too many people play that because i think it's actually a janky scenario that seems like a sort of funsy oh we're both beating each other up bigger it is so much abusive stuff on that scenario that like the big thing with hammers in my experience is people just don't remember the tactics hard tax so like people play without that and it's very different when that's a case yeah yeah yeah and then there's also just some people that abuse it so heavily that it's like unless you know what you're doing and have like something incredibly abusive to do on it you should just avoid at all costs because you don't you don't do the thing that makes it strong so uh i think i think that that's like a big community or to see its play rate as high as it is because we can't all be the best at it and i know i'm not so i avoid it like the plague yeah hammers for sure scrolls i'm very convinced is overplayed yeah and i'm contributing well i mean your your win rate suggests that you should play it but like yeah i think a lot of people who just play because there's 20 points you can like play all the stuff at 20 but like yeah i find a lot of strong so it seems like strong midline interaction which your list has is like really good on it yeah yeah i would agree with that yeah um so yeah i think uh with broken on the crazy spritigues or anything else you want to talk about i don't think so man we're like super over time but i really enjoyed this and i think it's pretty cool i guess actually one thing i guess overall thoughts on brotherhood because like we said it's like controversial factor right now like where how do you feel like they existed the game right now so i think they have a really strange matchup spread that makes it so that um they look worse than they are because they lose to some of the stuff that's like a middling but i actually think they have a lot of play to the high-end stuff like we've talked about i actually quite like them in humans um because i can kind of race them damage for scoring and i'll win the damage race um i i think that magneto one-on-one actually is advantaged into apocalypse like if if those two guys have to fight magneto should win that fight but at 17 i think i'm disadvantaged get me to 19 and i think i'm heavily advantaged yeah that's been my experience too apoc and just so a dodge 19 plus so easily it's even easier now i think apoc is like a junior jwinter yeah i think i think so like realistically i think i'm disadvantaged in apocs i think i'm always playing 17 now but when i have played him on 19 it's like actually frighteningly easy um it was it was worse for him before when rogue turned apoc into a huge liability for his team um when you just balance him off his team a million times with something hospitality um we also did the math on on magneto or sorry rogue into apoc with apoc trying to double tap rogue to death under magnetic refraction and she takes like no damage for that guy like it was actually pretty absurd that he he is ineffective into rogue a lot of the time and she is so effective into him um so that's changed obviously um so i'm not sold on rogue anymore but yeah playing 19 into him felt great i loved it um it was fine um whams i think we took a big hit in the change i used to like brotherhood into webs a lot i thought it was actually a good match up for brotherhood i think it is not good anymore uh i always like jargonaut he doesn't change he's still great in the webs that's fine but magneto is worse apex is worse um emma's better so maybe that's fine maybe the answers play all the shapes of your characters now it might be you know i i'm not gonna lie because i'm already playing emma lady mastermind and mystique i'm looking at a hellfire pivot yeah that might be good into web warriors honestly like yeah i mean it's 16 you can just drop in jargonaut um and then got to know gambit and uh blob or probably take pyro out or in from blob after that but like gambit pyro of it's 17 yeah so i think the webs go worse uh i've always hated playing in vendgers i think of enters is actually really rough on on brotherhood for the most part cap one and particularly i hate that match up so i got bodied by cap one she hulk and like carol one at the shop playing magneto i hate it it's um i really don't like playing that match up uh midnight signs is all over the place depending on the threat um that's not like one of the things i match up so that i find hard to discuss is i think it's more crisis and threat dependent than just straight up like i'm bad into this affiliation i think it i think that there's more likely that goes into the conversation than that um this is like shockingly similar to a force for me like i was like i was like bro if i could play 19 or higher with a force every game i don't give a shit what the scenario or what the match up is right yeah yeah you're suddenly like feeling really strong i just like just need the tools like if i could just play the tools i can play anything like it's fine yeah because it's it's funny uh comparing midnight signs to apocquer it's like apocka 119 midnight signs i'm like give me out of 19 i got to get away from that number right like i'm just like give me out of here give me to 17 as fast as possible so i do you think the matchups are way more dependent on other factors than just my affiliation good your affiliation bad kind of thing um so in that respect you're kind of looking for those those edge cases to either get you an advantage or understand where your disadvantage is and then play out of it um that said i think brother it is a pretty good all-rounder i i don't feel like i have a bad threat like i can play every threat and feel pretty good um oh i also hate playing crimson kingpin specifically i think that's a nightmare matchup for me as well um the rest are fine like i'll play mode off go play shadow lands those are fine but kingpin is bad um yeah i could see that at least you can dodge councils now always yes yes yes um also uh i've found that other than deadly meteors most pay the flips are very bad for me um yeah i see that i hate mutant madman and i've developed a burning uh passion for trying to destroy emcrane i want that out of the game i hate emcrane so much our past hates emcrane good uh despise it um play it uh so if i ever you see like a flop of madman and crann i'm just gonna table flip i'm gonna go into my opponent i you win buddy you got it yeah i am fine on madman i don't love it it's always like more stressful than it needs to be because of variance um but a carnalist has beasts so beast is good on it um yeah my my issue is i'm trying to play a game where i'm baiting people off of their secures to come fight me and they're gonna lose scoring as a result but when they flip the madman they can just leave it yeah my refused flank doesn't work anymore right so it's like well i guess i my entire the points of the magneto side of the list it doesn't work here and mystique leadership sucks so uh since i'm not getting to put the token down i can't even do that it's not like infinity formula where i can like run the bases it yeah it's yeah as a refuse flanks like almost don't work on me the madman no maybe maybe that's by design but yeah it's tough it's tough for like when your list has to play like refuse flank like magneto and she Hulk i feel like half to play refuse flank i think that's true yeah yeah so it's tough for them um like madman was by far my hardest game i'd up to come with a force um the only reason it's even viable is because i got twenty thread and i can play bill yeah i'd be happy you're on twenty thread for sure yeah yeah because they're the refuse flank god so like everyone else can go over there and that's just because bill's overpowered sure yeah but yeah i don't know emination rise up take bill it yeah yeah true i a little i'm a little nervous about em i'm with bill but i don't play that list right now so yeah all right i think we're that's probably everything yeah i do on for hours okay let's let's call it here i have so much to talk about with brotherhood uh oh uh well okay with that in mind where can the listeners find you if they have more questions i'm actually on your discord for sure uh weakened demo is my name there and i got a little magneto helmet next to my name so if you want to hit me up um happy to talk um and so i think it's the easiest place i literally have no social media presence so there's nothing there me either so yeah i think the closest thing to a social media account i have is a youtube account um and that's it so no twitter no facebook nothing uh yeah it's all poison yeah exactly i don't need that sludge in my life so discord it is but yeah we can demo on discord happy to answer questions talk about anything happy to have my mind changed tell me i'm wrong sounds great uh yeah i'm wrong about stuff all the time so uh yeah happy to discuss happy to bounce ideas to i one of the things i love about this game is refinement i love talking about stuff uh i am so pumped to try jailbreak now so yeah it sounds very cool yeah um so yeah don't be shy um cool i love talking so all right well with that uh i want to thank you so much for coming on this was awesome uh you were the longest episode so far but i think it was worth it and brother it is brother it's a faction that deserves a long episode because i think they're in a weird spot right now and but but there also like characters that people love yeah well i hope it was valuable listeners thank you for listening and uh we will see you next time