Ben Ransom is the head Developer for MCP at AMG and is the person responsible for picking the Challenger Crisis Rotation. He was nice enough to answer some of my questions which we will dive right into:
1. Unlike last year with War of Kings, all 10 new Crisis Cards from Operation Zero Tolerance made it into the Challenger Rotation this year. Was that a choice you made based on wanting players to have the new ones in, increasing the value of the set for competitive players, or did they just fit the theme of the rotation this year?
Ben: With Operation Zero Tolerance, we designed the Crisis Cards from the ground up to really change the way the game plays when they are in play, particularly with the Source Extracts. The Challenger rotation is meant to challenge players to confront those changes by getting those new mechanics on the table. Having all of the new Crisis Cards in Challenger match thematically is more of a nice addition. In general, our base assumption is that we want all of the new Crisis Cards to rotate into Challenger unless we've decided an individual card isn't appropriate.
2. Strike Team Secures Shield Relay! Is now in, when last year it was decided that it would maybe favor a "scenario" play style too much. What has changed here and how much has the new way of picking crisis influenced this and the rotation over all?
Ben: The new way of picking Crisis Cards has certainly had a large impact on which cards we rotate into Challenger. Strike Team Secures Shield Relay! is a spread-out map with a defensive reward for controlling the objectives, which is quite favorable for Squads designed around it. We decided having those more extreme Crisis Cards available was now more interesting and more fair since players now have much more control over which Crisis Card of their opponent's they will play on. That lets players opt-in to these more extreme styles when both players want to play that way. Expanding the styles players can choose to play their games fairly was the driving factor in changing Building a Mission in the first place.
3. With the inclusion of Strike Team, we now, for the first time since Ministravaganza 25, have five Pay to Flips as options for secures. Do you think people will build lists focused on this?
Ben: Absolutely. We think Pay-to-flip is a mechanic that works quite well, and it's not too much to ask Challenger players to make Squads that can play on them.
4. All Extracts in the rotation are now limited. I think that is a very good choice that makes a lot of sense but I wanted to ask how much did Adam Warlock (one of my favorite characters from the comics and great fun to play) influence this and was only allowing limited Extracts a deliberate choice at all?
Ben: Extracts that aren't Limited definitely take a lot more effort to balance. Very high threat characters like Adam ending up with the majority of the Extracts on them was certainly gameplay we noticed. That doesn't mean we won't make more non-Limited Extracts in the future, but we're certainly going to take that gameplay pattern, which we don't like particularly much, in mind when we design them.
5. What have your play test experiences with the Source Extracts been? There's some chatter on the various podcasts and such that don't love the mechanic. I haven't been able to test most of them yet but am looking forward to the challenge. Have you found these favor so called "Attrition teams" (in my definition I call them type 3 and type 4 teams) a lot?
Ben: Our testing also showed that Squads that want to fight like Source Extracts. That said, there are some play patterns on them that don't really match traditional "Attrition teams". In particular, it's quite rewarding for a character to make 1 move and 1 attack on their Activation. With that pattern, they can score the Source every Round while scoring on a Secure every other Round. For teams that just want to fight and not participate on the Crisis (Type 4), I would say that a team that focused on scoring some of the points on the Sources to stay ahead on VPs while still playing mostly attrition (Type 3) has an advantage in that matchup since it's very hard to completely deny scoring on the Source extracts even when that Squad has a large attrition lead, and the games still usually score out in 5 or so Rounds if you're minimally participating in scoring VPs. I would also say that Type 1 and 2 teams that have dedicated scoring pieces can utilize some different play patterns, like moving in to take a Source extract out from under the feet of an attrition piece then moving away. Overall, I would say Sources favor Type 3 teams the most.
6. Operation Zero Tolerance introduces all new map shapes, something players with marked mats might not be too happy about, but Will Shick always told us those were a bad idea and here in Europe those aren't a thing at all anyway. What is noticeable here is that very few Extracts have points on the midline now. Is that to make "Safe Grabs", that already took a hit from the second Priority roll, less viable or important as an option?
Ben: Safe Grabs were certainly a consideration, but I wouldn't call them the main driving factor of the new shapes. We've been playing with the shape of the maps quite a bit to try to find different play patterns. Some of the new Secures really show that, like Power Overload! Factory Goes Up In Flames, which rewards sending characters into a 2 to 1 matchup. Survivors Search for Safe Shelter was our first map that required we specified which player's deployment zone was which. We did that to make a Crisis Card where gathering multiple characters together on one point (bunkering) was advantageous, but there wasn't a central point that could be used to blockade movement between the objective tokens.
7. Speaking of shapes, Survivers Search for Safe Shelters, introduces the first ever non symmetrical Secure. As a TO I already make sure to have non symmetrical terrain placement on my boards and this makes picking table edge even more important. Is that something you wanted to facilitate?
Ben: Absolutely! Picking table side usually being a relevant advantage is certainly something we want to facilitate. That said, we don't expect TOs to plan and make that a reliable amount of advantage, just setting up non-symmetrical terrain should be enough to see that effect.
8. At the top of my head I don't think any shapes are repeated anymore. Was that a deliberate choice of yours?
Ben: It was not. We wanted a variety of play styles available, but making sure we didn't repeat shape wasn't a large priority. Shape is an important part of determining how a Crisis Card plays, but the special rules can make maps with the same shape have wildly different play styles, and we would be comfortable including a duplicate shape under those conditions.
9. Many of the new crisis cards appear to be lower scoring and slowing the game down a bit. In combination with the general Stamina increase we are expecting do you think games will take longer overall? A lot of games at Adepticon already went to time, so there is some concern about the time per round.
Ben: We do expect games to last a little longer. We're prepared to increase Round times if we see the need after monitoring how the Stamina increases play out outside of our testing.
10. How much does the play rate of a crisis affect whether it stays in Challenger or not? M'Kraan Crystals is gone, which was very popular but so is Terrigen Cannisters, which was not very popular at all. The latter was probably my favorite crisis of War of Kings from a design standpoint. Giving type 1 and 2 teams 5 VPs on the board but also having a negative for holding them for type 3 and 4 teams to be able to catch up felt like a great balance but it made it so that basically no team at all actively wanted to bring it.
Ben: It can have an effect. We want people to play on Crisis Cards that they like! Play rate doesn't necessarily indicate that a Crisis Card is something people enjoy, though, so we only use it as a partial factor in determining whether the card rotates or not.
11. Is there anything else you want to tell the readers about the new Challenger Rotation that didn't fit into the questions above?
Ben: Instead of expanding how many options players have, we kept the Challenger rotation to 12 cards per type. We've found the process of selecting 5 out of 12 to put in your Roster to be engaging roster building. Since we curate the Challenger rotation to include many different play styles, selecting such a large percentage of the available Crisis Cards forces players to broaden the capabilities of their Roster. That then makes it more likely the 2 players Building a Mission together find some common ground over what cards they are prepared to play. Both players engaging with both of the Crisis Cards in play makes for the best games, in our experience.
12. Out of personal interest: have you heard of or maybe read something on SG Protocol before?
Ben: I sure have! You've got a wide variety of content and a unique perspective; it would be strange if I missed it before now. I can't get enough hot takes whenever something I worked on comes out, so I've read quite a few of those articles. Your stats round-ups are convenient as well. You also do a lot of predictions, and you have a pretty good read on that in general; it's fun to see when you're really off, though 😄
Big Thanks again to Ben for taking the time to answer these questions!
That's it for today, thanks for reading and Cheers from Germany 🍻
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