When you select crisis cards for your roster, you take three of each. But when you draw them, you discard one and choose from two others. That means you can guarantee playing one of two crises. So how should you go about choosing your crises?

The obvious thing is to have a crisis you are trying to force: one you like playing, or think you play well. But maybe you don’t draw that, so that leaves your second best. But you can guarantee playing one of those two crises. The third crisis is one you never have to play. So what should you do with your third slot?

Here are some options:

Counter a powerful piece

Hulk hates carrying a spider infected. It pulls him out of position and makes him spend power on moving rather than hitting things. If you don’t want to have to deal with a Hulk, this scenario strongly discourages him.

Shuri is a lot less useful on some scenarios. Secures like Infinity Formula split the table in to two halves. Shuri really wants to sit on a defensive secure and do Shuri Things. This crisis forces her to either pick a side or hang in the middle not secure an objective. Her pushes don’t have quite the same effect on Origin Bombs, as they won’t necessarily change who scores the secures, and there is no obvious defensive position for her to hold.

Exploit a weakness in their roster

Some rosters can be light on smaller threat characters to grab multiple extracts. So again Spider Infected might be a good choice here. As each character can only carry one, a four character team is going to have to choose between grabbing extracts or secures. A larger team has more ability to cover both.

Equally, the Wakandan Herb crisis requires a plan. Without any help, a character can only start scoring their Herb on turn 4. There are a range of ways to speed that up, and even a way of scoring it turn 1. If they haven’t got a plan for it, especially at 15 threat, they can be seriously disadvantaged in that crisis.

Some rosters feature a lot of characters with a middling-to-poor energy defense. That’s a key stat in the Origin Bombs crisis. Black widow, Venom, Vision, Hulk and Crossbones all only have 2 energy defense. If you see a lot of those charcaters on your opponent’s roster, you might be able to predict their team better, forcing their hand into selecting a different team set up than they might want, or alternatively have them stick to their predetermined team, giving you an advantage in the match.

Bluff

Your opponent may look at your roster and the crises you brought with you to look for which crises you think your roster plays well in to. By inference then, they may assume the ones you left out at ones you are less practised in or think your team isn’t as good at. By strategically including a ‘bad’ crisis for you, you can obfuscate those signals to your opponent without actually ever having to play that crisis.

Hopefully this has given you some food for thought when building your rosters!