Rules Help: This, That [...] character

Hello and welcome back to SGP.

Today I want to take some time to talk about the differences in wording on characters and team tactics cards regarding this character; that character; other characters; allied characters; other allied characters; allied (affiliation name) characters; enemy characters and other enemy characters.

This character

The easiest rule of the bunch. This character refers to the character you’re reading the rule on :

See every superpower of Ancient One for examples.

Sometimes it is also found on team tactics cards that grant you permanent superpowers like Custom Upgrades:

That character:

That character refers to a character you have chosen for an effect for example as a target of an allied TTC. 

Other characters:

Other characters refers to every character on the board (friend or foe) besides the one using the attack or superpower which mentions it.

Black Panthers Spender attack Kinetic Burst has a wild trigger that mentions other characters, meaning everyone but Black Panther himself. So you have to be careful with the attack as to not push away and damage your own allies.

Gwenpool has one important nuance in other characters on her Spender This End Towards Target:

Since it calls for other characters within Range 2 of the target character this rule does include Gwen herself and excludes the target character.

Allied Characters:

Allied characters are all characters in your squad. Every model is also allied to itself so every leader can use his own leadership (except for Wolverine leading a Weapon X squad but that’s an extremely corner case*).

Most leaderships will call for allied character for example Daredevil’s Marvel Knights:

Some TTCs also call for allied characters. For example Cruelty:

While it is an affiliated Criminal Syndicate card, meaning you have to have met squad affiliation requirements, the card can be played by any character in your squad regardless of wether or not they are Criminal Syndicate affiliated.

Sometimes the wording “chose this or another allied character” or this character or an allied character ” is also used. It may be more clear but it is functionally the same as just allied character since every character is an allied character to themselves. Examples for the versions above can be found on Darkstars superpowers Dimensional Portal and Darkforce Barrier:

Allied (affiliation name) characters:

This refers to only those characters in your squad that have the affiliation tag of the squad affiliation you are using for the game.

One of the most commonly known TTCs for this is Avengers Assemble:

This means any splash characters you might have brought in along your affiliated Avengers in your squad can not play the card.

Currently there are two leaderships in the game that only work on allied (affiliation name) characters. Corvus Glaives TTC leadership First of the Black Order:

And the Weapon X leadership TTC Are you sure you want to remember?

* Since the card calls out for an allied James Logan Howlett, future proofing it to be usable by every version of Logan, like the character Weapon X we now know will be out later this year, Wolverine can play the card to making him the leader. But Wolverine doesn’t have the Weapon X affiliation tag so he can’t benefit from his own leadership.

Enemy character:

Any opposing character is an enemy character.

For example found on the TTC Bear Hug:

Enemy characters:

Enemy characters are all characters your opponent has brought to the game. The Sentinels TTC is an example for this:

Other enemy characters:

This would be used for attack triggers or superpowers that don’t apply to the target character and allied characters but to every other opposing character. I can’t think of an example of this currently in the game but I might have missed something.

Target character:

The character you target with an attack is the target character. Hulkbusters attacks both have examples of this:

Attacking character and Defending character:

These terms are mostly used in the attack timing chart. They mean exactly what they are called 😅

That’s it for today. I hope this is helpful especially for newer players. Please comment if I missed anything.

Cheers from Germany 🍻