Marvel Strike Force: Unlocking a Wide Cast of Characters

Welcome to the 4th installment of Marvel Strike Force (MSF) Mondays. Previous tips:

1. Early Player Tips
2. Avoiding Early Player Mistakes
3. Understanding Alliances

This week’s topic is why you should be building your stable of characters wide, not tall!

With all the game modes available in MSF you need a variety of characters (toons) to use. Some campaigns require VERY specific tags such as Villain or Mystic, and some toons are just superior for certain modes.

Take Arena for instance, you should be very specific about which 5 toons you use as your Arena team. Arena is one of the most competitive game modes and you need to be extremely intentional because the rewards get really good as you climb the ladder, but also you only have 5 battles each day. 

Why is a Wide Cast of Strike Force Characters important?

I used the above example for a reason because the main idea behind building your team tall is for Arena. If you can finish in the top 100 or higher, Arena rewards (power cores and Arena credits) are terrific and will give you a great edge on the rest of your opponents over time.

To build “tall” means to focus on leveling a smaller group of toons to be your main focus. Some MSF players legitimately pour no resources into the majority of their characters so that they can focus on a few, ensuring their top is stacked.

Again, if you are maximizing this for Arena or perhaps to have 5-10 toons to really dominate PvP, then this is for you. Ideally, to build tall you would have God-tier characters or one of the “Meta” teams. Below is an infographics on how the teams rank as well as a breakdown of all the characters into tiers:

However, building tall will sap your resources, especially as an early player. That is why I am glad I followed the advice to build wide, not tall. Building “wide” means to unlock as many toons as possible and leveling up your characters as needed. To do this, you should follow these 3 rules!

Leveling up Marvel Strike Force characters.

Instead of using currency to purchase character shards, use the currency to open orbs. Both the Blitz store and Raid store will net you FAR more through orbs than just buying the shards straight away.

A Blitz orb will give you 5 random shards and some gold to spend instead of buying just the 5 shards of a specific character. In the Raid orbs you will get a total of 9 shards, 2-2-5, of random characters. Both of the orbs cost less that buying the specific shards.

The downfall is of course that you won’t get to choose which character’s shard you’re going to get, it’s a random drop. So when you get within 10-15 shards of unlocking and leveling up the specific characters you want, then buy the shards at store cost.

The War store is different because it does not offer character shards in orbs. Also the Raid store and War store rotate characters, so only 3 of the 12 or so are available at a time.

Finally, the Arena store has an orb (Kingpin’s vault orb) but it is universally agreed that it is trash. So you need to be more focused on who you farm out of the Arena store because the currency is at more of a premium. 

As you build wide, try to level your set teams together, as team synergies are important enough that you want to keep them together for the Blitz and War modes. So, true to gather all Guardians or all X-Men, don’t just ransoming mix and match characters, if possible.

This does get tricky as you need to unlock legendary characters to complete certain teams. However, there are a handful of plug and play characters who can fill in for most teams as you wait on the legendary capstones. Captain Marvel and America Chavez are just a couple to utilize in these roles!

There is a little fun in toying around with lineups while we wait to put together the entire teams, but ultimately any combo you can put together will fall short of a properly set team. 

I cannot stress this one enough as I am currently feeling the strain of getting the right number of stars for my Sinister Six team in order to unlock Sue Storm. Legendary events are on a scheduled release and they require very specific characters and certain star levels to unlock these characters. Here’s the info:

• Black Bolt: April 27th, August 17th, December 7th (Requires Asgardians 5-star)
• Shuri: May 11th, August 31st (Requires Spider-verse 5-star)
• Ebony Maw: May 25th, September 14th (Requires Inhumans 5-star with Black Bolt)
• Phoenix: June 8th, September 28th (Requires Mystic Villain Controller 6-star)
• Star-Lord: June 22nd, October 12th (Requires Guardians or Ravagers 5-star)
• Invisible Woman: July 6th, October 26th (Requires Sinister Six 5-star)
• Nick Fury: July 20th, November 9th (Requires Kree Minions 5-star)
• Magneto: August 3rd, November 23rd (Requires X-Men and/or Brotherhood 5-star)

As you unlock legendary characters you will really have fun with your teams. These legendary toons are the lynchpins of each of their respective teams, so unlocking them is paramount to your success!

So you should start to plan accordingly on stashing gold, gear, and ability materials for them! I promise you can go lite on minion toons and lower level teams, such as Hand and Ravagers, and in the long run you will be better for it. I am currently working on leveling stars for my Kree minions to unlock Nick Fury, but I don’t regret not having a strong Kree team with those minions. 

When building wide you will struggle in Arena and at the player versus player (PVP) game modes, but you will start to crush Blitz and Raid modes, which gain you so much more currency you will eventually catch up on building top flight squads.

In Raid you need to start to carve out a few teams that are primary, but you can do so very intentionally, without blowing huge amount of resources, such as t4 ability materials (t4 mats). These are valuable so you need to choose wisely who you put them on and the further along into the game you are, the more educated your decisions will be! Then you can start to focus on the top of your stable and building up, up, up.

Well I hope this helps you take your Squad from a D+ to a solid B-, Commander! 

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Be ready for what is coming down the pipe!

Blitzes: Monday Blitz is the Gatekeeper – Heimdall! Thursday Blitz is Captain America in celebration of July 4th.

Events: Chaos Theory – You will need 4 Wakandans to enter the event, and the complete Wakandan team to advance past level 4.  

Thanks to Tauna and Papokeman for the infographics!