Excelsior, heroes, and welcome to a Meeple Mountain article for Marvel: Crisis Protocol! Today, we’re here to talk about the newest supervillain to join the roster: Onslaught! This big boy boasts his own personal affiliation where anyone you bring is automatically affiliated with him and uses his leadership. The model is cool, but how does it all pan out?
I want to give a quick shoutout to one of my local players, Isaiah Cooper, who excitedly agreed to paint this Onslaught for me when he arrived. I would rather put impressive painting on display for y’all than my mediocre attempts at whipping something up.
Two Minds, One Grudge
Onslaught is a character lifted straight from the comics (and for my money, likely to feature heavily in season 3 of X-Men ‘97.) He’s a fusion of Professor X and Magneto’s consciousnesses after the two of them used their powers on each other. Here in MCP, he’s the first character to carry two alter-ego tags, serving as both Charles Xavier and Max Eisenhardt. This means you can’t run either character with him, but since Onslaught has the “peerless” tag, it means you can’t run him with any other peerless characters anyway, which Magneto has.
The box is just one simple model, but don’t let that fool you. This is one of the biggest models the game has ever released. The man is beefy, and that applies to the assembly as well. Rather than putting together small, finicky parts, each piece of Onslaught is big and snaps together with its counterpart smoothly, with one exception. The only moment of hesitation during assembly was figuring out how his weird backpack piece attached, but even that was simple after some trial and error. And let’s be completely clear: this guy is huge. He’s nearly double the size of Apocalypse, the other massive mutant leader, and he even stands toe-to-toe against Hulkbuster, who is one of the largest models in the game. I was pretty shocked when we put them side-by-side for comparison.
Onslaught is unique among these “build your own affiliation” style leaders like Dracula, Mephisto, and Dormammu, because he brings a wealth of Team Tactics cards with him. When playing any of the other aforementioned leaderships, you may struggle to fill out your cards, because they either don’t exist or are not exciting. I think AMG course-corrected properly here, because all of Onslaught’s cards are unique and offer cool effects. One lets Onslaught displace up to three characters within range 5 on his turn, another gives him the hypermobility of Juggernaut, another shuts down your enemy’s ability to modify their dice, and yet another offers massive threat range with a 10 dice attack that your opponent can take a penalty to dodge. These are all interesting cards, something not found with most other kaiju-style leaders.
Everyone’s A Pawn
When people see a character that is 8 threat, they tend to think about playing “tall” aggressive lists. That is, lists with fewer models that usually focus on killing. I think that’s the correct assumption when playing a model like Dormammu or Adam Warlock. With Onslaught, however, I think there are a few considerations that point us away from that.
First off, his leadership benefits from his allies dying. That would imply that you want more models on the table to get more triggers from his leadership. If you went tall with Onslaught, you may only have 3-4 models on the table, which means his leadership is triggering less often. Secondly, his leadership is a natural punishment mechanism. Kill his allies? Bad things happen for your opponent. You don’t want this guy powering up and teleporting all around the board, or fueling his engine for displacing your entire team.
Onslaught brings with him a range 5 teleport, giving him some of the best mobility in the game. A medium-move, large-base model is already really mobile, but a range 5 place on top of that is even better. His damage isn’t bad – he’s routinely rolling 7-8 dice into your opponent, and by having access to all three attack types, he can pick on his opponent’s worst defenses. He also brings a terrain throw to chip away and finish you off if you manage to survive his attacks. More importantly, two of his attacks have displacement effects, meaning you can get your opponent off of points. This helps him focus on scoring more than other big kaiju models and gives him a unique lane to occupy.
Punishment Engine
As mentioned above, Onslaught’s leadership naturally lends itself to a playstyle where your opponent is punished for playing the game normally. I believe this is where he will be strongest, and is the earliest list I plan to test with him. Some of the best leaders in the game right now create this dissonance as well. I think about Kingpin leadership punishing you for just going and standing on points by having all his guys count double, or Bastion leadership breaking the core rule of being able to clap back at your opponent with big attacks after your characters take damage.
I believe Onslaught lists will want to focus on creating suboptimal turns for your opponent. I think if you’re hearing your opponent say, “you’ve left me no good options here” at least a couple times per game, you’re probably playing him right. Consider someone like Mysterio, who punishes your opponent for moving; or perhaps a model that has a counterattack like Werewolf By Night or Dracula, who punishes you for attacking them. Couple that with the fact that Onslaught has a superpower that lets his allies get back into range for these counterplay abilities after being attacked, and it starts to look like his best lists will be the ones that can ensure consistency in his allies’ ability to react to the opponent.
Compare this against someone like Dormammu, who wants to bring aggressive models that are turned on automatically by getting the extra power from his leadership. It’s a very different playstyle that demands a different approach to the game, and it’s one I’m excited to test out on the table.
Here to Stay
It remains to be seen how Onslaught will fare in the current world of MCP. We’re all still reeling from the rules changes that dropped last month, and no clear meta has settled. Lots of things are doing well – some aggressive, some more control-oriented, some more focused on scoring. With players still in the early stages of iterating, dropping a massive model like Onslaught into the mix could be yet another seismic shift in MCP.
Only time will tell how he fares. As a fan of mutants and the X-Men in general, I’m hoping he makes a splash. I’m always smiling when mutants are doing well, and it’d be great to see Onslaught have a little reign of terror at the top of the game.
Until next time, heroes!
