Marvel Strike Force: Blitz, please!

Welcome to this week’s installment of Marvel Strike Force (MSF) Mondays. Previous tips:

1. Early Player Tips
2. Avoiding Early Player Mistakes
3. Understanding Alliances
4. Building Wide
5. Farming Guide and Seed Theory
6. Underrated Characters

This week we are going to deep dive the game mode that is likely to get the most visceral reaction from MSF players than any other: Blitz. 

In my first post had this to say: 

“Blitz is a fun little ladder to climb. The more characters you have, the better off you will be in Blitz, because a squad of 5 toons can fight, then there is a cool down period in which you can spend Blitz energy to fight that squad again, or wait 2 hours. So the more teams you have, the more rounds you can get in without spending all of your energy.”

Marvel Strike Force: Blitz, please!

In the past few months it seems as if the MSF community is souring on the Blitz game mode, and some are even talking about, “blitz fatigue.”

MSF has chosen the Blitz mode as one of the most frequent modes for unlocking new characters. So, for some, blitzing has turned into a chore of the game.

PaPokemon made a great video about maximizing blitz mode and in it he stated that “it is arguably one of the most efficient rewards-to-time-spent modes.” However, just a few months later and most people consider it a time sink. Not to mention there was a whole fiasco that involved using bots in Blitz! 

But love it or hate it, Blitz is a major part of the Marvel Mobile Strike Force experience, and if you listened to my advice on building wide, not tall, you should be doing alright in this mode. The Blitz game mode is all about how well you can grind. More toons equals more teams, and more teams equals more points. However, there are a few little tricks to blitz than can take you right to the next level. 

There is an in-game feature in which you can set teams and I recommend utilizing this for blitz exclusively. The game also allows to scroll through these teams in the Blitz matching mode. So as you set these teams you can order them in the way you want to use them.

The most straight forward way is to order them in order of weakest to strongest. Based on the multiplier feature in Blitz, the more you win in a row the higher points you stand to gain. HOWEVER, this brings us to our next trick.

This game mode does cap at level 8.3 for the tier multiplier, and it also gets exponentially more difficult to win each the higher level you reach. So, you will likely have to manually compete in each of these battles and you are bound to lose at some point regardless. 

So, the strategy is to find a level that you can essentially just auto win at, and just auto win while cycling through your teams. You thus saving mental energy and time (the A.I. will go MUCH faster than you, trust me).

Eventually you will hit a level where your teams can no longer auto win and you will lose. In this case it behooves to be intentional with what squads you use to take these losses. As you put together teams, it is wise to make them as complete as possible, or to at least maximize synergies.

However, you should also keep the characters within close power of one another as an early game player. You will find that some teams just roll while others struggle, so take the squads that struggle and make them your auto-lose teams. 

This taking a loss strategy also blends well with how to use your energy. Ideally, when taking a loss you would not use energy, so this takes a little planning on the front end. As you gain more teams you will have a lot more opportunity for this, but you should skip your very bottom level teams and leave about 6-8 teams for auto-losses.

You will take wins with your highest power teams and losses with lower power teams to net the most points possible each blitz cycle. 

Another Pro Tip: Your blitz energy maxes at 500 (unless you have gotten a special deal with cores or otherwise) and we also get the medical supply run challenge Mondays, Thursdays, and Sundays, which gives us more blitz and raid energy. Plan around these events and make sure you maximize your energy, because if you cash max out at 500, the extra turns into gold, and not nearly enough to make it worth it. 

Another thing to do is curb your rewards expectations. The first benchmark is to complete the milestones. I realize that early on that seems impossible, but if you grind while applying these tips you will get there. The next level is understanding that the rankings are a HUGE pool to jump into and that those at the top are the big time whales (Whales – those who spend mad money on these types of games) and they have max characters and teams that make it easy for them to outscore even the most avid of blitzers. 

You can find predictions for each individual character blitz fairly easily, but generally if you can start hitting 1.75 mil. then you are on track for the 11-25% range which is usually 25 character shards of the featured toon.

If you complete the milestones you are almost always a lock for at least the 26-60% range which is 15 character shards. Last bit of advice, if you know a blitz is coming for a toon that most players already have and that is following the second round of a new release toon, you might want to go mildly hard on the new toon and really crank it up for the other toon because you can really take advantage of people needing a break and you then can really beef up a character that way!   

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

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Be ready for what is coming down the pipe!

Blitzes: Monday blitz features Toad shards! Thursday blitz is another shot to unlock or boast up your X-23! 

These two blitzes will be a little hard, but wait for next week’s blitzes to see if you can get lucky and beef up someone you have unlocked! 

Legendary: The next Legendary event – Nick Fury – starts TONIGHT (July 20) and this event requires 5 star Kree Minions – you cannot use Ronan, Minn-erva, Captain Marvel, or Korath 

The following legendary event is for Magneto.

Legendaries:

• 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)