Identifying which crises you want to play in your roster is a key part of designing your roster. Having a strong choice and building towards it can really pay off.

An example

The best way to illustrate this point is probably a concrete example. Imagine I’m building a Cabal roster and I think the best crisis for me to be on is Panic Grips City As Evacuation Efforts Continue! I like the power generation of Cabal combined with their ability to Daze/KO to take an evacuee off their character and then immediately evacuate it to get ahead on VPs.

With prioriry

If you win priority, you can choose to pick extracts. You discard one of your three extract crises, so you have a 2-out-of-3 chance of seeing Evacuees as an option, which you pick if you can. You also control threat level, so if you pick get evacuees you can guarantee it being at 19 threat.

That will happen 33% of if the time. A third of your games will be Evacuees at 19.

Without priority

Some people prefer to choose extracts, and some people prefer to pick secures when they have priority. All things being equal, half the time your opponent will choose extracts, but the other half they will choose secures, allowing you to aim for your flavoured extract. Again you have a 2-out-of-3 chance of getting Evacuees in this 50% of 50% of cases. That comes out to another 17% of the time you are playing on Evacuees, though you don’t control the threat level you are playing on.

Adding it together

That means if you have a strong preference, you will be playing on that crisis 50% of the time.

If you have a good second choice for that type of crisis – say Hammers in this example – that crisis will be played 25% of the time.

You will only be forced to choose between your secures 25% of the time (when you lose priority and your opponent picks extracts), and even then, sometimes your opponent will choose one of your favoured crises.

What does it all mean?

When you are building your rosters, having specific teams of models that excel on a specific crisis is a really good idea. It will come up very often, and if you are practised with that team on that crisis, you can get a serious advantage over your opponent. Think carefully about the crisis you feel your affiliation plays best in to, and build around it.