Next up for a deep dive tactics: Black Widow.

Black widow has a lot going for her. Long move, low cost, stealth, and Avengers affiliation. She is a great addition to round out a lot of teams, and can be surprisingly annoying to daze or KO.

Why include her in my team?

She’s not going to be the first name on your roster, but she has a significant role to play. In scenarios with a lot of extract pieces she can easily grab one and hold it, ticking along your VPs. Equally, secures with at least 4 objectives she can be relied on to camp a deep one.

But the real selling point is that long move. She’s fast. L is significantly longer than M. She gets around the board really well, so she is where you need her to be.

Die hard

Despite low defenses and health, her defensive abilities help keep her going. Stealth prevents attacks from outside of range 3 and martial artist increases her survivability within range 2.

Let’s look at a standard physical strength 5 strike:

Even using both attacks to strike, there is only roughly a one in five chance of dazing her. But you stand just as much chance of doing no damage at all. And of course you can’t attack her at all if you are more than 6” away from her.

Extract Scenarios

Natasha is great at skirting round the edges grabbing extract assets.

Spider Infected: having an L move helps overcome the random S moves the infected cause. The fact that you can only hold one means you want to have as many characters as possible on your team so get low cost helps. Add in that her attacks aren’t that powerful, so losing one to reposition has a very low opportunity cost, and she is probably the best character in the game for this extract.

Cosmic cube fragments: she’ll be taking a bit of damage from the cubes, but again she’s a great character on this extract.

Wakandan herbs: on the face of it, she looks like she might be good on this due to her long move, but by herself she can only score the herb turn 4. You can still score it as early as turn 2, but you have to have a plan.

Kree Power Core: she can get to the decoys easily, but if she does find one she probably won’t survive the amount of attention she will attract. Best left to someone more survivable.

Skrulls: the same as with the Kree Power Core, but with the loss of that L move to S, she really isn’t great on this.

Secure scenarios

Infinity formula: the one I like her most on. She can hold a quiet corner, building up power.

Extremis consoles: if you can get her without much opposition on a wide console, the healing from it can make her really obnoxious, but she won’t hold up to more than one character coming after her. But she can draw disproportionate resources from your opponent.

Gamma shelters: not one she shined on unless the extract suits her. But even then her low health means she’ll go down more quickly outside of the protection of the shelters.

Origin bombs: her 2 energy defense just doesn’t cut it. Even if you pack full of push/pull effects to clear objectives for her to claim, she still fails 25% of the time.