Welcome to the first monthly stats article of 2026. As we did last year we'll split this up into All Events (AE) and Rated Singles Events (RSE). Since this is a new year we will be starting fresh and won't worry about where everyone landed in December. This year I will include Unaffiliated (even if I still don't get why you'd ever play that way) and this month already introduces a whole new Affiliation in the Mighty Avengers. And over the course of the year we might also see X-Factor, Thunderbolts and Young Avengers added to the list.
And now let's dive into how everyone did in January starting with AE:
Weapon X are the surprise first best affiliation of the month, even though the numbers of games played is very low of course. But whoever did get them on the table did so incredibly well. Here many games played leaderless is pretty likely to have actually happened. (AtB Jaime told us not to use the leadership, remember?)
Namor has dominated for a long time and while Nick Fury had a horrible month Invincible Iron Man has supported Namor well in his few games which overall brings SHIELD to rank number 2.
A-Force had a strong month with a decent amount of games played. It's going to be interesting to see how Rescue and later the She-Hulk buff will impact them over the course of the year.
New Mutants remain an Affiliation that's barely played (but more often than Weapon X for example) but have been seeing success lately and January wasn't an exception to that.
Only rank 6 for the Servants of the Apocalypse?! Yeah but still with a 58% win rate and 384 games.
Baron Strucker had a spectacular month for Hydra and Red Skull posted his usual good numbers. Some how 17 games were played with Helmut Zemo leadership to limited success bringing the total down a bit. But Hydra is a top team and needs to be taken seriously.
Speaking of top teams: Dark Dimension since the Dormammu buff are a staple in the top 10 and I would be very surprised to see them drop off in the current meta. After the next crisis rotation and possible character updates it's a different story.
Convocation continue their 2025 trend of around 100 games played per month and doing pretty well in those.
A bit of an unusual month for the few secondary Wakanda leaders (it's M'Baku first for almost every Wakanda roster), where Killmonger Usurper went positive and King T very negative. Both have few games played so it basically cancels itself out.
The Mighty Avengers are our new inclusion and they are Mighty popular as it seems. The leadership is fantastic, Spectrum and Blue Marvel are interesting characters in the lore and on the table and of course it's new and shiny. They also did very well in those many games. I've played against them twice so far. Once I got my teeth kicked in and the second time I was able to just grind it out in my favor on the back of my Black Swan being virtually immortal.
Probably inspired by Nicky Bartels great Episode on them with the Danger Room Black Order make a surprise visit to the top half with Thanos posting top tier numbers.
Both Jaime and I have always said Miles 1 leadership remains the strongest one for Web Warriors and we are proven right month after month. But of course Web of the Spider-Verse also posts good numbers in even more games played. Web Warriors also lead the way in games played here by quite a margin.
100 games played and a positive record is a nice surprise for the Winter Guard who are awaiting their updates still.
We know all the details about the new Guardians pack now and some people have started recording Adam Warlock games (I'll wait until I have the model finished painted in my hands, which will hopefully be later this month) and seen success with it. Star-Lord was played a gigantic amount of times, and stayed on a positive record as well. Good times for Marvels best property coming up.
Thralls of Dracula top the below 50% win rate collum and it was very close for them.
Kingpin and MODOK 2 stayed exactly at 50% for the Criminal Syndicate but Shadowland Daredevil and Klaw drag them under the line. Iron Monger is inbound for March and will probably shake up lists quite a bit.
Kang is the best leader in MCP with a mighty 1 game played. We don't even know his backside yet so I feel it's way too early to try him personally. Malekith had a good month and so did Sin but Red Skull 3 was unusually unsuccessful and Red Skull 1 continues to be one of the games weakest leaders. Leading to a below 50% month for Cabal.
Their Core Set opponents, the Avengers had a pretty mixed January. Sam and also Steve 3 and Hulkbuster did fine to very well but classic Steve 1 had quite the down month.
Midnight Sons remain popular (and rightly so, it's an Affiliation made up of my favorite earth based heroes) but couldn't reach 50% even under Blade and Elsa hasn't found her footing in 2025 and it does not look like that's about to change.
We were all very interested in how the collision changes would impact Magneto and the Brotherhood of Mutants but it turns out it didn't make a great difference one way or the other. But play rate is very much up for them at least.
Not sure what to write about Unaffiliated 🤷
Spider-Foes have always been popular and that has only increased with the starter set as we can see in the high play rate. They aren't the easiest Affiliation to win games with though and that's also reflected in the win rate.
Hellfire Club eagerly await the updates to Mister Sinister, Omega Red and hopefully also Shadow King. And if Angel and/or Archangel are to be included in the announced further health buffs that would help a lot, too.
Asgard will get a fantastic new 4 threat later this month but the new 3 threat, where they traditionally don't have the best options, seems not that great either. The second readjusting of Thor 2 is announced (but no idea how that will look like yet) so maybe that helps them get back on track.
X-Men also have gotten a starter set, which of course is half Brotherhood (also explaining their increased number of games) but the best leader by far is not included there. People do really love Cyclops and want to make him work but it just doesn't happen.
Huge amount of games played to pretty low success for the Defenders.
Legion of the Lost didn't do great in a fairly low amount of games. I think Mephisto just works better in Criminal Syndicate anyway.
Disappointing start of the Year of the Sentinels. But another huge increase in games played and up until the release of the four new models it's a three Stat Card affiliation so making them work is not that easy.
No light at the end of the tunnel for the freshly re releasing X-Force.
It's very close (which is great) but it seems loosing priority 1 and winning priority 2 is the ideal combination.
17 threat is still the most used but 18 has gotten a lot closer and the spread is more even nowadays.
Rated Singles Events
Just like in AE someone has been crushing it with Weapon X, especially under X-23. Still a very low amount of games played but impressive nonetheless.
Who said Winter Guard needed buffs? They absolutely crushed it in their 51 RSE games.
A-Force finish the top three, who combine to only 114 games but all three won at least 60% of their games.
Servants of the Apocalypse open the strong and also often played part of the list. They were played more often than the top three together and still held their by now signature win rate of 58%. Inhumans got a slap on the wrist with the removal of The Great Refuge, but Servants remain untouched. I'm guessing we won't see changes before the crisis rotation. If games start to average back to needed 5 rounds that could already slow Apoc down enough but we will see.
While everyone is complaining about Apoc and Inhumans, Namor SHIELD is quietly performing better than either and has done it for a long time. Namor gets re released this year so it's going to be interesting if he'll be touched or not. Renaming his Reroll bubble to Strategic Genius would help kill the double bubble but personally I would find the much cooler solution (but less likely as two cards would need to change that aren't up for re release) would be to rename both Zemos to Inspiring Leader. This way double bubble is still possible but would require Baron Strucker who isn't abusing it as much as Zemo can and Hydra would have it in faction which would also be cool to see.
Convocation just continue to do their thing and do it well. They might even finally get a new model this year in Wiccan.
Dark Dimension will stay in the top 10 barring any major changes to the game (like the next crisis rotation), absolutely 0 doubt about that in my mind.
Wakanda had a down month in games played in RSE but did well as you would expect.
Remember what I said above about Miles 1 being the better Web Warriors leadership? Yeah it continues in RSE. Spider-Verse is also good and Peter Parker is at least semi competent for the most played affiliation.
Rumors of the Inhumans demise were greatly exaggerated. At least in the last month with Great Refuge still available to them. We'll see how much that will impact them next month.
Guardians are very popular and Star-Lord was also pretty successful in RSE.
It appears that most of Red Skull 3s losses happened outside of RSE and he is back to his usual 56% win rate here. Malekith had his strong month mostly in RSE as well and Sin and Red Skull 1 didn't drag them down too much for a positive record for Cabal.
Black Order were also able to carry the success over to RSE.
Already a good chunk of games in RSE for Mighty Avengers and a finish comfortably over 50%.
Hydra went exactly even in RSE. With 11 games played under Zemo 2. Can someone explain that to me? Has his value gotten higher with the priority changes or something? I don't see it.
10 RSE games for Unaffiliated. And a perfectly even split in them.
MODOK 2, in only 14 games of course, did incredible while none of the other Criminal Syndicate leaders could even reach the 50% mark.
For the Avengers a terrible month for Steve 1 drags the whole affiliation down to 48% eben though all other three leaders were well above the threshold.
Blade made it to 50% in RSE and Elsa is Elsa so she drags the Midnight Sons to below 50.
Defenders didn't really do much better in RSE than in AE but are 8 ranks higher, which doesn't really look well for the affiliations coming next.
Brotherhood were often played but couldn't win more than 44% of their games and leader didn't matter a whole lot there.
The most played leader for Asgard, Loki 2, was also by far the least successful. Let's see what the new release does for them.
In RSE Sentinels did a bit better than in AE but still a good distance to 50%.
Many games played with the Spider-Foes and in an unusual turn of events Doc Ock beats out Green Goblin for a better win rate even though he led only 1/4 of the games played.
Thralls of Dracula couldn't carry the good numbers from AE over the RSE.
New Mutants hope Dani Moonstar will be affiliated and expand the affiliation in a meaningful way.
These three affiliations are currently just not competitively viable choices. Hellfire Club is close though.
That's it for today.
Cheers from Germany 🍻
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