A new reactive defensive superpower is coming out soon on both Gamora and Proxima Midnight: Martial Prowess.

Let’s have a look at the maths and some cute tech that goes with it.

The ability is identical on both of them. When being attacked at close range, they can up their defense – any defense – to be effectively 5. That’s really very good. If that results in no damage being done, the attacker takes two damage.

Here’s a quick look at the maths.

If you’ve played Vision, you might have a feel for what 5 dice defense is like, but as you can see from the maths, it’s pretty similar to Okoye or Black Widow’s abilities when rolling 3 defense and counting blanks.

But how likely is it that you get no damage dealt? Well that depends on how many attack dice you are rolling:

Unsurprisingly, it’s a lot higher against weaker attacks. That might mean you can intimidate your opponent in to not attacking with a low dice attack, or force them to waste an action moving, potentially away from a secure objective in order to get off the attack they want to make.

Sucker Punch

Edit – AMG has issued a ruling that this interaction doesn’t work.

An interesting thing happens when you put one of these Martial Prowess characters near a bodyguard. Once the attack is declared against, say, Gamora, you get a chance to activate reactive superpowers. Both Marital Prowess and Bodyguard – on Captain America and Okoye – fall in to that category.

You can activate them in the order you choose, so activating Martial Prowess first, then Bodyguard means that you guarantee not taking any damage on the martial prowess character, so two damage is always going to be dealt to the attacker. The five defense dice don’t carry over, but that’s a small detail. In Avengers, that only costs two power: one from each character. Two power for two guaranteed damage is a pretty sweet deal.

You can get a similar result by using the Sacrifice team tactics card. It costs one power from each of the two characters who also need to be within range 2 of each other, but that will also transfer the target of the attack and so trigger the automatic two damage. Another option is Venom’s Lethal Protector. That’s a tactic I can see Guardians of the Galaxy in particular taking advantage of, as they can Winging It away Sacrifice if that situation doesn’t come up.