The new year starts out with a giant tournament in London the coming weekend, from the Across the Bifrost Team Championship, hosted by Jaime and Norbert. The rosters for the event are locked now, so let's take a look: The event hosts 24 five person teams, for a total of 120 players. Just like WTC you are limited to singleton characters across your team but TTCs and Crisis Cards aren't limited.
10 of 24 teams chose to not include the clear cut best affiliation in the game, Servants of the Apocalypse, in their team. But as weird as that sounds at first I think it's still understandable. You do need someone comfortable with piloting it and just picking the affiliation up for the event is probably a recipe for disaster.
Criminal Syndicate is always a safe pick and in a team format you can either throw them out first or pick a match up that should favor them so it's very understandable that half the teams chose to have a CS player.
Webs are hugely popular in Europe anyway and with their recent additions they are an absolute top team as well, which makes 12 teams again actually feel few. But we had huge problems getting the new models in hand here so that may have been a factor.
Avengers have tanked a bit since the rules update but they have a huge pool of characters and multiple viable leaders so they are a safe all comers pick.
Talking about a former top tier faction that has been tanking Midnight Sons have fallen very low since the rules update. It's going to be interesting how they will fare here.
Cabal is kind of untypically popular at the event but I don't think that's a wrong call at all. Sin and Red Skull 1 have kept the numbers low for the affiliation overall but Master of the World has put up top tier win percentages all of 2025 and Malekith was decent mostly, too.
Dark Dimension feels low at 8 players in my opinion. Since his buff Dorm has been putting up extremely good numbers and it's super easy to just have him in your roster as a plan B. But maybe in a team format that's less important.
Defenders, SHIELD, Guardians and Wakanda are all good but not top of the meta teams at the moment (Defenders definitely least so). I think 7 uses each feels appropriate.
X-Men have their loyal fans and under Professor X they've been really good as well.
Five A-Force players seems a lot, while five Spider-Foes seems few on the other hand.
Hydra is kind of popular with 4 uses and Brotherhood has gained popularity after the rules update as it seems.
If the teams played fewer than 3 times I think Asgard with only one player surprises me the most.
None of the unused teams should really surprise anyone outside of maybe New Mutants who have been doing well lately but I think they might require too many resources out of the rest of the team.
Edit: turns out there's a roster that has Hellfire Club as an option but Longshanks didn't catch it.
A very European and of course UK based player group with two Americans making the trip and some decent spread of non UK Eruopeans. Characters:
Black Cat is the only character taken in every single team. And I can totally understand why as she might be the most overtuned model this game has ever seen, but she doesn't do it in super flashy ways that have her on people's radar all of the time. Zemo 1 and Shang-Chi (who is confirmed to get nerfed) in spots 2 and 3 is also a surprise to no one at all. It's more that they aren't 24 of each which is unexpected.
Gambit, a character that last year would have been described as a nice mini to put on your shelf and never play, has made it into 21 rosters. He's an absolute main stay in Apocalypse nowadays but he also managed to get into multiple others.
Toad still leads the 2 threats with rarely any competition, but at least he is much fairer than he was.
After two and a half years Spectacular Spider-Man has definitely cemented his status of being by far and large the best model in the Earths Mightiest Core Set. Red Skull 3 is very good and so is Ultron 2 but neither comes close to the treat for threat value of 3 threat Peter Parker. Only four teams chose to not include him as a result.
Nebula has seen a massive rise in popularity as a cheap fast killer machine lately and also makes 20 teams.
Echo is the surprise winner of the last release wave edging out Ultimate Miles, whose many uses do very much surprise me. He didn't reach the same number as his original version though.
Namor, Nick Fury, Doctor Voodoo, Okoye, Beta Ray Bill and Red Skull 2 are all staples of their Affiliations and common splash pieces so it's also no wonder to see them in the top 20. And neither are N'Kantu or Magik. Colossus maybe so.
The biggest surprise here is a Kingpin that's just used as an affiliated 4 threat for Spider-Foes.
2099, Noir and ASM all match the amount of Web Warriors players which probably isn't a coincidence.
And I would have expected more teams to pack an Abomination.
Nothing says "it's not a Hulk meta at the moment" quite like only 10 of him across 24 teams at a highly competitive event.
Luke Cages popularity is down probably for the same reason.
Here it's great to see Emma Frost hitting the ta me after her card update even though there's no Hellfire Club. She's just a good affiliated 4 threat now in all of her affiliations which is awesome.
Janes popularity definitely took a hit from the collision changes.
One She-Hulk was brought not to be an A-Force leader even before her incoming buff, which is cool to see.
No 24 Richard Riders is just objectively false and every team not bringing him should be ashamed of themselves.
Just four Thor 1s makes AMG and me sad. They will be awesome for the people who'll bring them.
The amounts of Cyclopses does surprise me while I like the inclusion of the Wrecking Crew in 5 teams. They are undervalued by many in my opinion.
Four Carol 2s is definitely more than I would have expected.
Tigra makes the list and Professor X is in only three X-Men rosters, which kind of blows my mind. Also Magneto is in fewer Brotherhood Rosters than Exodus which feels weird as I can't see Exodus having much synergy with Mystique at all but I'm also no expert on the matter.
TTCs:
Brace falls all the way to numer 6 in the first major event after the collision changes and I think that's still too high honestly. I have replaced it with Indomitable in all my rosters that brought it personally.
With less forgone conclusions and thus more variation in terms of restricted cards, Recal is the most taken card with unrestricted universal card like it in Survival and Warpath also being in the top 4.
The rest of the list is made up of staple character and affiliation cards as you would expect.
Crisis Cards:
No huge surprises here with what's popular and what isn't. This is very much an expected spread here.
With absolutely no disrespect to any of the attending teams, who'll all have a great shot of winning it, here are some teams I think to watch out for:
Led by AtB Jaime, whose in full Sweaty mode, Nations finalist Weapon Flex definitely are a team to have on your radar.
A combined All-Star team of Jeff and Art from Pork Roll Protocol joining forces with Kollar Higgy and Torbjörn from Malmö is automatically going to be an absolute top favorite to win the event.
Nations winners, and multiple members of the current WTC champions means Raging Egos are probably the top favorite to win.
AtB Dr. Norbert leads his London team with extra Podcaster power in person of Angus and they are definitely also a team to look out for. Interestingly enough both Jaime and Norbert were able to snag Apocalypse for themselves in their event 🤔😅
Led by Seth and Sophie the Polish Hussars of the Galaxy (yeah I'm very jealous that I don't have a cool German version to steal the name for my WTC team) are always a team to expect to put in good results.
Nicky and Tim from Belgium Go Figure came to my event in November and kicked our butts and I wouldn't be surprised at all to see them make a splash at the AtB Team Championship either.
Shout out to the second Swedish team which hired by Austrian friend JJ who'll crush all those mutant lovers with Sentinels 🦾
The event has a completely new Pairing Process which you can see here:
Just from watching it does seem to be fast and balanced and gives a little more control over the match ups for team B. I hope, that table choice does matter because it's an important part of the process but I think we can trust the hosts there.
Best of luck and mostly have fun to everyone going!
Cheers from Germany 🍻
Wonderful article Soren. Thanks for highlighting some teams at the end. That was fun. Let the salt flow.
ReplyDeleteThank you Norbert! Have a great event. I'd love to be there some day but sadly that isn't an option at all at the moment...
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