Splashing is fluffy!

Welcome to SG Protocol on its original home while the owner of the Across the Bifrost site is trying his best to get it back online... I hope he'll find a fix as we'd loose a lot of articles ove the past year and a half if we don't... 

Anyway let's get to the topic of today's article: 

Splashing is fluffy!

Something I see very often on Reddit is that newer players and smaller communities play "only fluffy lists mostly or fully affiliated". Coming from other Wargames I get that splashing is a weird mechanic but here's a few counter arguments to common misconceptions: 

1. "Splashing makes the game unfair on a casual level" 

Maybe the most valid criticism of splashing on the face of it. Jamming Black Cat, Baron Zemo and Crimson Dynamo in every list can feel pretty annoying for your opponents on a purely casual level. That isn't really a problem of the splash mechanic per se but rather these particular models being extremely (maybe a bit too) good at what they do. 

Banning or restricting splashes in reality makes the game much more unfair. While most of them got bigger over the years some affiliations remain rather small and simply don't have a the necessary tools in affiliation to handle every situation it might get confronted with. 

The entire game is balanced around being able to splash in every character in the game (except for Dormammu. He ain't taking commands from anyone). There's a reason the Earth Mightiest Core Set isn't marketed as a two player box. It wants to teach you from the very get go, that splashing is an essential part of the game. 

There's the (unofficial) format or affiliation battle of course. A strictly competitive format where you know what you get into and try to overcome these restrictions. It has a wildly different meta than the standard format has. 

2. "These characters would never ever work together" 

Before I started this game in August 22 I've seen 3 MCU movies and hadn't read a comic in about 20 years (and only a couple issues of Spidey and the X-Men back then). I have a Marvel Unlimited subscription since June 23 and have read about 1000 comics now. You know what my short answer to the above statement now is: yes they would and probably have so already. 

Where most of us go wrong in the "justifying why character A is here with affiliation B" is, that we think of them as permanent members of that team. 

Let's take something like Baron Zemo with the Avengers. He absolutely wouldn't become a member of them but he certainly has worked with them in the past. Even in the MCU (Falcon and the Winter Soldier). 

The way you have to think about a splash character is that a situation, if not to say a crisis (😉), arose where these set of characters, usually a team of affiliated characters like the aforementioned Avengers, and some rather random characters are forced to join forces to achieve whatever it is they need achieving. 

Here are some super random team-ups all from just very recent comics (spoiler alert for Blood Hunt, Uncanny Spider-Man and Doctor Strange 2023 and Moon Knight 2023): 

Nightcrawler, Mystique, Silver Sable, Warlock with Spider-Man (Peter) and Rhino, who was mind controlled before also fighting the same villains in another location. 

Doctor Strange, Black Cat, Hunter Moon (essentially a stand in Moon Knight as Marc is currently dead in canon) and Taskmaster 

The Avengers: Carol Danvers, Iron Man, Sam Wilson and Vision with Miles Morales, Tigra, Hunters Moon, Bloodline (Blades Daughter) and Dracula against Blade who is possessed. 

Notice a trent here too? 

Mind control, clones, possession, Skrulls pretending to be a character and the like are everywhere in the Marvel universe. Oh wait its also a multiverse where evil versions of all of your favourite heroes exist in some reality or another. (And vice versa for the villains of course)

There are also often situations where the involved characters first fight eachother to later team up to beat the new threat that came up. 

Of course everything has its boundaries. Justifying the fluff behind the Convocation list that ran Ultron 2, MODOK 2 and Taskmaster with the minimal investment in actual wizards as needed by the games threat level would certainly be pretty hard. 

3. "Play what you like" 

This isn't a misconception. It's key to the game. As Will Shick always says: "Every character is someone's favourite.". Maybe your favourite character is Shadow King but you don't like the Brotherhood of Mutants (his only affiliated place and even that was more a convenience add than really representing his fluff). The thing this game allows, that no other game (to my knowledge) does is, that you can play your favourite model always. No matter what. 

Always remember that we do this to play with our little plastic dollies. Let people enjoy their toys 😉

I hope this didn't come of as mean or ranty because it isn't meant to be that, but rather an encouragement for those in newer/smaller communities to stand up for splashing. 

Cheers from Germany 🍻