Marvel Strike Force: Team Positioning Tips and Placement Guide

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

This week we are going to deep dive into something I briefly touched upon in week 1, the positioning of your characters. Positioning is a question that pops up frequently in online community groups, because PLACEMENT MATTERS!

Positioning of your Marvel Strike Force characters matters for a variety of reason in fact; primarily for defensive disruption and proximity synergies. So let’s dive in!

I am working off of a well done video by FastingComicGuy. You can view the entire video below. While it is not terribly long, if you just want bullet points, skip ahead.

Marvel Strike Force: Placement Guide

We need to understand a few things about the setup to maximize synergies and combat attacks against us. There are 5 basic set up positions in MSF and they have a specific order as you can see in this graphic.

Whenever you start a battle these are the positions your squad must occupy. So as you place your toons, there are some things to think about, namely being that the team builder in MSF adds players from center out.

Chain Attacks

These attacks most often move player to player along the diagonal lines of the ordered players. A few exceptions are Mystique who can jump all over, and Green Goblin who has a “chain” pumpkin bomb throwing attack. Neither of which follow a specific chain pattern and neither of which can be disrupted.

For example, a popular character with a chain attack is Wolverine. So, if he starts at #5, he’ll next attack #4, and so on.

Adjacent Placement

An adjacent position is direct positioning next to or away from the target in any direction. So as you look at the graphic, 2 and 4 are adjacent to 3. 1 and 5 are not considered adjacent to 3.

This also can change with spawned or cloned toons. Hela’s undead Asgardian “Greg” will take any open spot on the board. The same goes for Ultron bots.

Eventually your team will max at 10 spots total, shown in the next graphic. So when you are setting up around characters that give off buffs or energy to their adjacent allies it is wise to limit how many characters spawn other toons: Hella, Nobu, Kingpin and Ultron, because they can inadvertently disrupt your placement strategy.

Synergies

When it comes to synergies the above graphic is a good example of placement mattering. Thanos’ passive ability gives off energy to adjacent cosmic allies on the death of an enemy, so Rocket and Minn-Erva both will benefit a great deal from their adjacent proximity to Thanos.

Star-Lord, however, will also disperse energy to adjacent allies with his special and passive, but since he is all the way on the far left he will only feed Rocket. The better set up for this team would be Groot, Rocket, Thanos, Starlord, Minnerva. Then you would maximize the ability energies from Thanos and Starlord.

Also, none of these characters will spawn any new characters, so your placement will be maximized the entire battle!

Defense

The other thing to consider are opponent attacks such as chain or smaller area of attack abilities that will splash damage to adjacent characters. We talked generally about chain attacks, but how do we best defend against the chain attack?

To disrupt chain attacks you can either use stealth, evade, and/or counter. I am not going to in-depth on each character; so when you are exploring your roster, just be mindful to read through each character’s ability to have a full grasp of what they can and can’t do.

Generally speaking, any of those actions (stealth, evade, counter) will break a chain, and the best way to maximize those abilities in breaking a chain attack is to place your characters who taunt next to a character who has high evade, stealth or can gain counter frequently. The early game villains team had one of the best combos of this strategy, as shown in the graphic below.

I like to utilize Crossbones, who has excellent taunt, in position 1. I then like to utilize Electra in position 2, as she has excellent stealth, which breaks a chain. Add to that the idea that you want your most vulnerable character far away from the taunting tank and you should place bullseye in position 5.

Placing characters to protect against adjacent attacks is also important. A prime example is the Defenders with Punisher. Punisher has a passive that allows him to counter-attack anyone who attacks Daredevil, so it is smart to have Daredevil next to Luke Cage who is the taunting tank. Then anytime Daredevil gets splash damage from an adjacent attack or there is a chain attack, boom!, Punisher is countering!

While there are consistent rules of thumb like placing a taunting tank far away from squishier (more vulnerable) character, some team synergies require a custom lineup. The below graphic should help in setting up your teams.

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

Be ready for what is coming down the pipe this week!

Blitzes: Monday blitz character is War Machine. Thursday blitz character is BEAST!!!

Legendary: Asteroid M starts tonight so you have a few days to beef up your X-Men and/or Brotherhood toons to 5-star as you can use a combination of both to unlock Magneto!

Game Radar

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)