26. 3 Daredevil, +13*
A huge jump up for previously unplayable Daredevil, who got a major rework this time around. His red was always very strong, but with unusably high variance – in the games where you could get it to go off, it’d down a character almost for sure, but in the vast majority of cases it’d just sit there doing nothing the whole game, or you’d have to match it yourself for negligible damage.
The new version solves one of these problems: matching the tile yourself is an excellent outcome, since you get 3k damage plus the potential to do it again, and it retains its cheap cost. However, the variance is still pretty high; it’s common to find your Ambush trap tile falling into a corner or just landing somewhere that you can’t match it for several turns. There’s also the problem of having the trap get overwritten, especially since Daken remains a popular character at the high end.
Blue fared quite a bit better in the revamp, and is now probably his best ability; where previously you’d get a very long stun, but at a random time, on a character you’d already been targeting so not at full health, now you can target the most dangerous opponent and get the stun immediately, albeit not for nearly as long. There are some interesting interactions here now too – Intimidation gives you the ability to lock down an opponent for 4 turns; matching your own tile usually will let you cast it again, essentially short-cutting the timer; and having two Billy Clubs on board is pretty fun as they fly around the board, keeping a single character stun-locked.
Lastly, there’s purple – much like red, the old version was massively powerful when triggered, but often sat there doing nothing. New purple is fairly underpowered; it’s useful for getting rid of troublesome special tiles, but it’s too expensive to rely on against enemies that are capable of spamming specials, like Daken and Blade, and the damage is way too low for something this expensive. Compare to Blade’s purple, for example, which can do almost as much damage per turn, or Fury’s purple, which does 60% more damage plus a bunch of side effects.
A natural pairing for Daredevil is Patch, since you can use Daredevil either to remove most of the strikes you give your opponent, or stun your opponent to keep him from being able to use the strikes. This combo isn’t bad, but consider that for just one more AP, you can use Trickery from Loki, who comes with a better set of supporting abilities.
At the end of the day, he’s definitely a lot more playable than he used to be, but considering how bad he was, that’s not really saying much. He’s a decent pairing with Patch, but otherwise he’s probably a tad overrated, since he’s not that great for PvP and has no special utility for PvE.
Purple: poor (fair if either you or your opponents generate strong special tiles)
Blue: good
Red: fair
Speed: low
Sustainability: medium
Power: medium
Recommended build: I like 3/5/5, which gives you maximum oomph on red and a big upgrade on blue over L4 – getting that extra turn of stun and the extra AP are both very worthwhile. That being said, if you plan on playing him with Patch a lot, 4/4/5 or 5/3/5 are worth considering as well.
25. 3 Psylocke, -4*
My irrational love of Psylocke is well-documented, but while I concede that the meta has passed her by, and her damage output is just too low for her to carry a team, I still maintain that there are few faster characters in the game, making her great for lightning rounds, easy PvE nodes, and any time you have easy opponents you just want to dispatch quickly and move on. It turns out that’s a surprisingly large niche. Is it worth investing in? Probably not right away, but I have only mild regret for having leveled mine almost to max.
24. 3 Colossus, new to the list*
Colossus looks pretty good on paper – top-tier 3* health, with a red that does significant team damage, a yellow that helps protect the rest of your team, and a spicy black that does damage and protects a team member from getting hurt AND lets you cast an ability for free!
In practice, though, the whole is significantly less than the sum of the parts, because the parts don’t play very nicely with others. Yellow helps protect the rest of your team, sure, but Colossus doesn’t have a healing ability, so you’re still taking damage, and anyway it’s way more efficient to avoid damage by using that ability to finish the game before the opponent can get off abilities of their own, not to mention that the 50% modifier only applies to base damage – strike tiles can still put a whuppin’ on ya.
Red is very good when Colossus is in front, and pretty bad when he’s not. Luckily, it’s easy to get him in front: either match a tile and cast Colossal Punch on your next turn, or cast an ability this turn before you cast Colossal Punch. Unfortunately, this puts a pretty hefty limitation on your flexibility – if you get red early, for example, you often want to sit on the ability for a bit, and you can’t cast someone else’s ability before you cast red, unless you also happen to have 8 yellow and nothing better to do with it. All these limitations means that while it’s quite powerful on offense, you can’t always get full benefit from it, and it’s not scary at all on defense unless Colossus is last man standing.
Speaking of last man standing, that black that looks so strong is literally unusable if he’s the only one left, and it might win the prize for the Best-In-Theory-But-Worst-In-Practice power in the game. Start with the expense: at 13 black, it’s got to compete with Surgical Strike, and Rage of the Panther, both top-tier abilities, and it has to be good enough to be a color you’re prioritizing, otherwise you’ll never have enough AP. And consider who you might throw – you don’t want to bring anyone who has a strong red ability, since Colossus’ red is his his best ability, and you don’t want to bring someone who has any crappy abilities, because then you might get that ability.
Who of the current top characters fits those criteria?
- XForce: Surgical is more reliable; only 66% chance to get an awesome power since Recovery is pretty meh
- 3* Thor: 66% chance to get something awesome since red is weak
- 4* Thor: same as 3* but yellow is the weak color, and probably has the best red in the game
- BP: Rage is better, Defense Grid is a horrible result for Fastball
- Patch: TBTI will be weak since Colossus tanks yellow
About the only guy I can think of that works with Colossus is Nick Fury: no conflict on red or black, three good-to-great powers. But the problem then is that every single one of your powers costs 10 or more, which makes your team interminably slow and vulnerable to AP steal!
Yellow: fair
Red: good
Black: fair
Speed: low
Sustainability: medium
Power: medium
Recommended build: 5/5/3. 5 red is the only thing I’d be really adamant on; the upgrades on the others are pretty marginal so I wouldn’t worry too much about a 4/5/4 or a 3/5/5. In fact, if you don’t have a character with a strong black power, 3/5/5 might actually be ideal for you.
23. 3 Loki, +14*
What a difference a third power makes, huh? At first a lot of folks were underwhelmed – how often do you make match-4s, anyway? But then we got a taste of brand-new Loki in the Simulator and in his featured PvP, and it turns out, yeah, Mischief is the new hotness.
Personal aside: it’s very confusing for me to read Loki threads. I think everyone is talking about me.
Why is the passive so good? Let’s consider a matchup where you don’t have Loki, and your opponent does. Let’s say there’s a match-4 on the board. What do you do? If you take the match-4, you get 8 AP and potentially a cascade (though the cascade may trigger Mischief again), but Loki gets 8 AP back in another turn (technically they’re 2-turn tiles, but since it triggers on your turn, it’s functionally the same as a 1-turn tile cast on his turn), and it could be AP that you need more than the AP you’re getting. If you don’t take the match-4, you’re giving 8 AP to your opponent, plus cascades.
You might say, well, what if you just destroy the countdown tiles? 4 2-turn tiles is a lot to stop – it’s tough to get more than 1, and often you won’t be able to get any. Plus, having to match the tiles means having to deviate from your normal AP-gathering plans, which means you’ll usually be slowed down even without considering the AP steal.
Match-5s and 6s are even worse – you don’t get any more AP (in fact you often get less, since T- and L-way matches typically only get you 5-7 AP), and of course if you pass up that match to avoid triggering Mischief, your opponent gets first crack at a critical tile and the bonus damage it brings.
Also, Mischief is a strong counter to teams that are based on chaining AP abilities, since often these teams have multiple board shakeups and/or can place tiles to generate criticals. Loki doesn’t have a ton of health, but he’s got enough to stand up to a few cascades, and after that it can easily get out of hand:
And don’t forget that even if you’re being careful about not taking any match-4s until you can down Loki (which slows you down a lot and exposes you to increased damage, since now your opponent is more likely to take those match-4s and 5s), you can still accidentally trigger Mischief if the board just happens to drop a match-4 in off the top. Hey, if it happens for the AI, it can happen to you, too.
His other two powers are essentially the same as before; Trickery only changed for levels below 5 and Illusions is still the cheapest board shakeup in the game, good enough to be a solid fourth or fifth option or an early kickstarter into more powerful abilities. All in all, a solid upgrade for the God of Lies, enough to net him this edition’s biggest climb at +14, into solidly playable territory.
The only thing about Loki is that he doesn’t have any powerful damage abilities of his own, and his AP steal isn’t quite as reliable as OBW or Hood, so outside of a Patch pairing or against a protect-tile generator like Magneto/Falcon, he really needs to be a third character where the other two are providing strong abilities on 3-4 non-purple colors. This can happen in PvEs and some PvPs where the featured character is good, but it does limit his usefulness somewhat.
Black: fair
Purple: fair (good with other board shakeup abilities)
Speed: medium
Sustainability: low
Power: medium
Recommended build: 5/3/5; the upgrade from 3 to 5 purple is basically negligible in terms of both chance to create cascades and expected number of cascades.
22. 3 Rocket and Groot, new to the list*
I am Groot.
(When we first got introduced to the cryptic tree and his interpretive wisecracking buddy, a lot of people focused on the blue: here’s what Beast’s blue should have been, right? And yes, blue is extremely strong – a 2 turn countdown you get to place has a nearly 100% chance of resolving, and at max level it produces over 1k in strike tiles, which is one of the strongest strike tile producers in the game.)
I am Groot.
(But actually the blue probably isn’t even their most powerful ability – that honor goes to yellow, which is actually kind of like two powers in one. Used traditionally, it’s a true heal that can bring him to full health, which is huge for sustainability and can combine with his blue to make for some awesome (or awful, depending on whose side you’re on) comebacks. For the unconventional, you can enter games with R&G under 25% health, match yellow, and reap the cascades that follow – this is especially powerful with other board shake abilities, since their effects are amplified by not having Team Up tiles on board, and can quickly catapult you into getting your ability engine rolling.)
I am Groot.
(Lastly, there’s green. It’s not bad, smashing 13 tiles and doing around 2.5k damage, but it’s a bit on the expensive side at 12, and of course it has the age-old problem of competing with everything else in green.)
I am Groot?
(Speaking of R&G, if you’re ever in San Francisco, there’s a place called R&G Lounge where they serve a salt and pepper crab that will change your life. Seriously. No raccoons with guns, though.)
Speed: low (high if under 25% health)
Power: high
Sustainability: high
Green: fair
Blue: good (borderline excellent, especially with a blue generator)
Recommended build: Are you a traditionalist, and/or are R&G going to be one of your go-to guys? 5/3/5 lets you heal up to full and keep things rolling, while delivering all the power of blue and letting someone else use a better green power. On the other hand, if you like doing wacky fun stuff, or R&G are going to be splitting time with lots of other characters, you might be better off with 3/5/5 or 4/4/5 – at L3, yellow will heal for an average of around 4k, and a single retreat knocks off 3400. Personally, I think 5 blue is the important bit and everything else is kind of tweaking around the edges.
21. 3 Black Widow (grey suit), +1*
- 3* Mystique, new to the list
Quick, what’s Mystique’s best ability? The answer might tell you a lot about your gamer personality:
a) purple; cheap stun plus AP steal helps prevent damage and accelerate your own team
b) blue: cascades all day, kitties!
c) black: 7k damage. 'Nuff said.
d) Who cares, she only has 6k health
If you answered c), you’re probably a bit of a Timmy (if you like personality tests and are kind of a gamer-nerd, read the article, it’s great!) – you like abilities with big effects, and you’re not terribly worried about efficiency, since Masterstroke requires both 8 purple to make a Shapeshift tile and another 11 black to actually cast the ability. This isn’t as slow as getting 19 AP of a single color, but it’s a fair bit slower than getting 11 black, which isn’t that fast to begin with, and of course it’s a lot worse on defense since the AI will happily cast Masterstroke without a Shapeshift tile, if it can even get 11 black AP in the first place.
If you answered a) or b), but especially b), you’ve probably got a bit of Johnny in you (um, let’s all agree not to take that line out of context) – you like putting together cool combinations of abilities and exploring the synergy between characters. Infiltration has a ton of that going for it; if you haven’t tried playing Mystique with MMN to play purple into blue into purple, it’s a real treat. Shapeshift is a bit more traditional, but if you can construct a team that can protect the tile, it’s quite strong as well; the only problem is that having Shapeshift on board makes using Infiltration risky since it might easily cascade your tile away.
Finally, if you answered d), you’re probably a Spike – yeah, Mystique is fun, and she can do some real damage when paired with the right characters, but at the end of the day 6k health is just PvP roadkill. She doesn’t kill fast enough to compensate for it on offense, or have cheap, easy abilities that the AI can use on defense, which really limits her ceiling. Fun for PvE, though.
Purple: good
Blue: good (excellent when paired with AP-generators in purple and black)
Black: good
Speed: medium
Sustainability: medium
Power: medium
Recommended build: This is a tough one. There’s a real dearth of purple skills, and stealing on every match is almost as good as Hood’s passive (while the tile is out, of course, which is a big conditional), so you’d like to have at least 4 there. If you’re planning on running Mystique in any kind of purple/black combination, like MMN or XF, you really want to max out blue. And at the same time, the jump from 4 black to 5 black is almost double the damage.
So what to do? I guess it depends a bit on who you plan to run her with and your playstyle. If you like cascades and you have a well-developed roster, mostly what matters is 5 blue, and you should probably go 3/5/5 – you likely won’t be casting her purple or black that much, but when you do that will still give you solid return. I had a 1/5/2 that saw plenty of high-level playtime.
If, on the other hand, you’ve got a Timmy-esque, HULK SMASH playstyle, or Mystique is one of the few well-covered characters on your roster, I’d probably recommend 5/3/5 or 4/4/5, so that black still packs a wallop, and you get maximum steal from purple.
19. 3 Falcon, even*
