Marvel: Crisis Protocol Announces Major Changes to Guardians of the Galaxy

Marvel: Crisis Protocol is making some major adjustments to the Guardians of the Galaxy. Over the past few weeks, Atomic Mass Games has shown off some planned updates to the stats and abilities of characters that appear in Marvel: Crisis Protocol, which will provide many characters with new life as the game enters its third year. Earlier this week, Atomic Mass Games showed off planned changes to characters from the Guardians of the Galaxy affiliation. The Guardians of the Galaxy were intended to be a flexible affiliation with the ability to adapt to just about any scenario, but Atomic Mass Games noted that several of the characters "fell just a little short" of where they were intended to be. 

Four Guardians of the Galaxy characters will be updated as a part of the rebalance, including the affiliation's leader Star-Lord. Star-Lord's Leadership ability receives a major upgrade, as it no longer costs a Tactics card to use. Instead, players choose in advance which figures receive a "Wingin' It" token at the beginning of the activation phase, which allows those figures to reroll two of their dice during their turn. The tokens go away at the end of the round, so players have to make quick decisions as to when to use those rerolls every turn. Star-Lord also gets the "Hit & Run" superpower, which allows him to attack and then move as a single action at the cost of two energy. 

Gamora also gained a new superpower, as she gains the Stealth passive superpower, which offsets some of her planned fragility. Gamora also saw her Stamina increased to 6 (was previously 5) to make her less likely to get knocked out by a single attack.

The final two characters to receive rebalances are Rocket and Groot. These two characters were designed to synergize together, with Rocket having an innate superpower that caused any attack aimed at him to redirect towards Groot if Rocket stayed within a distance of 1. However, players found that the best counter to the Rocket/Groot duo was to just chuck Rocket into Groot, which damaged both characters and effectively negated any reason to keep the characters close. To help offset this, Rocket now has the "Nimble" superpower, which prevents him from taking damage from collisions. Also, Rocket's "Personal Bodyguard" superpower had its range increased to 2, giving him more ability to maneuver instead of being attached to Groot's side. Groot also received some changes, with his basic Strike attack having a longer range of 3 but at the cost of his Living Plant healing ability having a limitation of once per turn. 

Overall, the rebalance should breathe new life into the Guardians of the Galaxy affiliation, which is one of the smaller affiliations but has a lot of flexibility to adapt to just about any situation. The new changes are set to go into effect in 2022.