Marvel Strike Force: Swarm to the Next Event

Welcome back Marvel Strike Force (MSF) Mondays. Previous installments:

This week we will discuss the upcoming Swarm (Who?) unlock event, a really interesting one because Swarm is a 45 shard unlock and is getting a Campaign event for unlock. Normally the 45 shard characters are Blitz releases, and campaign releases are limited to 100 shard unlock characters. So why does it matter?

Most people are happy when it is not a Blitz release because the majority of players are kind of blitzed out. I especially prefer the Campaign releases to Blitz releases because after the Milestones are achieved in Blitz mode it goes to rewards which are more or less unassailable for the average Marvel Strike Force player.

In order to gain different levels of shard rewards you have to rank in a certain percentage or top 1000, so the biggest whales (players who spend major dollars on the game) always dominate the top and the rest of us are left competing for 35 -25 shard rankings.

The Campaign release is much more on you as the individual. If you go hard you will benefit a great deal without having to compete against the field of global players to rank for rewards. You also can get lucky drops and end up with a higher star level featured character than even the whaleiest of whales! This way is much more “dispassionate and fair, to both rich and poor alike.” Yeah, I quoted Thanos.

For instance, I have 4 Spider-Verse characters at 6 stars and I have a long way to go on my 5^th if I want to unlock Shuri. If I go hard at this campaign for Swarm, I very well could get lucky to have Swarm as my 5^th 6-star character. While that might be shooting the moon—as I will take 510 total shards to get Swarm to 6 star—it’s possible.

Like the Squirrel Girl and Domino events, these campaigns reward us with orb shards. As we open the orbs, we can get a variety of characters, or just a bunch of the featured character!

Marvel Strike Force: Swarm to the Next Event

How the campaign works: These orbs will give 1-2 shards of Swarm on both side drops, and the middle will be either Swarm at up to 24 shards, or any of the Rogue Agent tagged toons at lower amounts.

These Rogue Agent toons are also the toons in which you will create your team of 5 to compete at each node through the campaign. So, I want to walk you through the important steps of how to buzz through (did you catch what I did there?) this event.

Assembling Your Team

It can usually be as simple as taking your 5 strongest toons available, arranging them well, and getting after it. However, sometimes we have to make decisions based on synergy and node challenge.

There is also the unique overlap between the Emma Frost Milestone event, so you should be able and willing to spend gold to upgrade the right characters to dominate this event which will help you hit the High Roller milestones to gain more Emma shards.

If you are debating between characters, some of the characters are much more useful in the long run, like Carnage, Venom, Ghost Rider, Mordo, and Scientist Supreme. These characters don’t make the most cohesive team, but you will not regret upgrading them.

Some other characters that are very useful would be Killmonger, Vulture, and Taskmaster.

Campaigning

You will want to use all of your 50 core refreshes in these event just like in your day to day campaigning. If you start to run low on cores you will have to decide which farming is more important to your future game goals.

However, with some of the characters that will be available for drops in this event, I would maybe go to the event orbs. Carnage and Mordo are harder to come by so if you can boost both of those characters through this event, all the better!

However, if you are hardcore farming certain characters in the normal campaigns, then stay the course. You also gain first time win bonus rewards so you will want to go as far as possible (hopefully just 3 starring all the nodes) but as soon as you hit a wall, you will want to stop burning campaign energy trying to beat a node and just take the auto wins.

Then, if you upgrade your toons during the event, revisit the node you were stuck on and give it another go.

Orb Opening

OK, I am not superstitious, but if you read my post on seed theory, you know I am a little-stitious. The temptation of course is to open the orbs up as fast as you get them. However, if you can show some self-control, the rewards often seem better when you open a lot of orbs at once.

Also, yes I am going to say it again, open a basic orb or two first to see if you get a nice color orb drop and then go right away to the one of many orbs, because you may very well have a hot hand for rolling.

All that to say, it should be VERY easy for everyone to unlock Swarm right away at 2 yellow stars, but since Swarm fits Sinister Six and Spider-Verse tags, this character will be able to help unlock two legendary characters, Shuri and Invisible Woman. So you will want to go hard on this event, especially if you are a newer player, and level up Swarm as much as possible.

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

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

Game Radar

Blitzes: Monday Blitz is Baron Mordo, and hey, we just talked about he is harder to get. Thursday Blitz is Colossus who is also hard to come by, so be ready to roll!

Events: The Emma Frost Milestone event is THE event of all events going on right now, but we also have the Princess and the Symbiote starting Monday. And of course the “One of Many” event launches Friday.

Legendaries: The Shuri event returns the end of the month, so start leveling up your Spider-verse characters now!

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)