Marvel: Crisis Protocol – Black Order Updates

CP159 Marvel: Crisis Protocol – Black Order Updates

Today’s article continues our look at character rebalances, with Thanos’ fearsome Black Order getting their turn in the spotlight.

When we began work on Crisis Protocol, we knew that we didn’t want to wait very long to get Thanos into the game. Not only is he one of the biggest and, these days, most well-known threats to loom over the Marvel Universe, he was also the perfect character to build what would become known as Ultimate Encounters around. Combine that with the inclusion of the Infinity Gems as a new mechanic that we could introduce shortly after launch to help give players a taste of just how big and bright the Crisis Protocol future would be, and everything was in place to have the Black Order be a huge foundational pillar for the game.

While there are more stories that could be told about the design and development of these characters and their affiliation, the short version is that the Black Order identity was the first to be largely based around the idea of KO’ing characters as their primary mode of winning the scenario battle. The Black Order has a significant lack of scenario control compared to many other affiliations. Additionally, it is an affiliation that brings a lot of power in a relatively small package, often having fewer activations than their opponents. All of this, however, plays well into their game plan of having to carefully control the front end of the game to ensure their opponents don’t jump out to a huge initial lead, while they do the job they were made for and whittle down their opponent’s numbers, all while scoring VPs for each KO they make.

With this in mind, it seems a perfect time to discuss the first two characters seeing changes, the husband and wife duo of Corvus Glaive and Proxima Midnight.

Since the couple’s release, there has been plenty of discussion about their unique Husband and Wife superpowers, especially with how it allows them to really excel at what the Black Order in general want to do: maintain priority and Daze or KO a single target before it can react. Even without his beloved wife at his side, Corvus has certainly shown that himself to be a fearsome boogeyman in Crisis Protocol, and a character whose name most often appears in discussions about how to deal with him. While there will always be characters that sit on the high end of their threat value and the pack of characters in general, after carefully watching these characters since their release, it was clear that their play pattern was a little too automatic.

First things first. You’ll see that Husband of Proxima Midnight and Wife of Corvus Glaive now have a new Power cost of 1. While this may not seem like much, it does mean that players will have to be more mindful of managing each character’s power if they want to ensure that they can double activate. Additionally, we have reduced the Range of the superpowers from 4 to 3. With both Corvus and Proxima having attacks that provide quite the burst of mobility the restricted range requires players to more carefully plan the characters’ activation and makes it much more difficult for the pair to benefit from the superpower and still reliably contest objectives in more spread-out Crisis. While undoubtably still a powerful piece of the characters’ kit, these changes allow several more opportunities for opponents to counter play, whether by using abilities to reduce the pair’s power or using throws and pushes to make it harder for them to be in range to trigger the Husband and Wife abilities.

Additionally, you’ll see that we added an additional trigger requirement to Corvus’ Death Blow Flurry. Depending on which order you’ve read these articles, this may not be a surprise, or this will be the first in a trend to come as we look at future character adjustments. Given the high strength of Corvus’ attacks, the requirements to achieve the perfect 4 attack turn was just a bit too low. This change again makes having the perfect Corvus turn just that much less predictable and therefore rewards players for having contingency plans should they miss one of the triggers.

Next up is the psychic powerhouse of the Black Order, Ebony Maw. While Corvus and Proxima have been terrorizing tables since their release, Ebony Maw unfortunately hasn’t quite lived up to the hype of his initial preview. Similar to characters like Hulk and Gamora, Maw found himself absolutely destroying opponents during playtesting, requiring several adjustments to bring his powers in line with the rest of the pack. Unfortunately, as can be the case with characters developed and designed early on, his dominance was partially contingent on the smaller pool of characters, limiting his opponent’s ability to answer the questions he asked of them in game. As such, he found himself left more and more behind, which was a shame not only for a very cool character, but also because he was meant to offer a different play pattern for the Black Order, providing them with several control elements between his impressive Black Tongue’s Sinister Influence and the throw on his Herald of Doom attack.

The first thing to note is that the strength of Black Tongue has gone from 5 to 6. Not only does this put its damage potential better in line for a modern-day Threat 5, it also significantly increases the chance of Sinister Influence triggering. While the increase to Maw’s damage output is useful, where Maw really struggled was in his durability. Mind Over Matter allowing him to use his 6 Mystic defense against any attack type was impressive, but ultimately led to a play pattern where Maw was forced into not using the rest of his cool kit so that he could bolster his rather weaker defenses. With this in mind we made several adjustments to both make Maw more durable and more thematic to the disrupting force he embodies in the comics and on the tabletop. The first thing we did was boosted his energy defense from 2 to 4, reducing his primary weakness to only Physical attacks. Next, we increased his Stamina on his injured side from 4 to 6.

While pure stat bumps certainly helped push his durability, we also wanted to fix Maw’s play pattern problem of never being able to comfortably spend power on all his offensive kit. Mind Over Matter was completely overhauled to not only solve this problem but also add more of thematic punch to Maw as a character. Instead of being a Reactive and costing 2 power to use, Mind Over Matter now is innate and works exactly like Enchantress’s Enchanting innate superpower. This forces characters who rely on physical or energy attacks to have to spend 2 power or have Maw roll 6 defense dice against them. The second we put this on the table we loved how it played perfectly into Maw’s whole theme of disruption. In addition to the Mind Over Matter change we also added a new superpower Telekinetic Deflection. While this will cost Maw power defensively, it provides him with some critical counterplay to pretty much every Mystic character’s primary weakness, having terrain thrown into them. Having access to this power in the right situation really makes Maw feel like a true Threat 5, who will not be easily removed without significant effort and resources.

Rounding out this look at the Black Order, it seems only fitting that we also take a look at the two Infinity Gems that are seeing rebalances.

The first one to go over is pretty simple, the Space Gem is getting a reduction in cost from 2 Threat to 1. Our hope is that this small adjustment makes the Space Gem a more interesting choice for characters that can take it, especially compared to the Mind Gem. Additionally, we expect that the change to the Time Gem we are about to look at will also increase consideration for the Space Gem as well.

From the start the Time Gem was the most difficult of the Infinity Gems to both reflect its power and balance in the game. After a lot of consideration, we decided to rework the gem from the ground up because, while the original ability was fun and flavorful, it opened too many negative first turn play patterns when it came to Crisis design. Rather than having to restrict or even ban the gem, we felt this was a golden opportunity to remake the gem to still have a powerful and thematic effect free of the issues that have come to light with its original design. As a bonus, we were also able to reduce its cost as well, meaning that all the Infinity Gems are a standard 1 Threat.

We hope you enjoyed this look at the changes coming to the Black Order. Be sure to join us next time as we continue our look at more of the rebalances coming to Marvel: Crisis Protocol officially later this month!