Brushwizard's 2025 Year in Review!

Hey everybody, as I close out my 2nd end of year here at Goonhammer, I've decided to move my Year in Review over here too. I normally would post it on my personal site, thebrushwizard.com, but since I've been more active here in recent times it made sense to do it here instead. 2025 has been a year with a capital Y for sure. Luckily, I have the hobby to keep me on an even keel and a good year it was for the hobby side of things. Multiple Marvel: Crisis Protocol characters were painted again this year. I accidentally started playing Star Wars: Shatterpoint too.

credit: Brushwizard

I went to Adepticon again this year and entered into Atomic Mass Games' Path of the Worthy painting competition with a piece I'm very happy with. Plus, we were able to experience the new venue, and meet up with some of my fellow Goonhammerers as well as a bunch of new people who found me via Goonhammer articles. That's super cool. Adepticon really is the highlight of my year, it recharges my batteries and is always so nice seeing everyone again.

Anyway, let's take a deeper dive into what I have been up to in 2025!

The Path of the Worthy 2025: Alas, Poor Steven

Credit: Brushwizard

This year's Path of the Worthy entry was a Red Skull diorama titled, Alas, Poor Steven. It's a scene that I had in my mind for years, based off of the Old Man Logan comic series. Here we have Red Skull surrounded by his trophies and admiring the helmet of Captain America. The pose oh this version or Red Skull always reminded me of Hamlet, in which he says "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio".

The original Red Skull miniature features the Cosmic Cube in his hand. I cut this out and replaced it with the helmet of the original Captain America miniature. This required carving out his face and resculpting Red Skull's fingers. The walls, shelves, table and globe were all painted from scratch. The "masks" and heads on the shelves were all character heads from their respective models. The portrait on the wall is a freehand recreation of the Red Skull portrait from Captain America: The First Avenger.

This is my favorite entry so far. I put a lot of work into this one and learned a lot about scratch building things. I came away with a bronze coin for my efforts again this year, which is nice. I always say, I don't really worry about judged results, I just want something in the case that people enjoy. I overheard a lot of people talking about it at Adepticon and that's a gold for me. I'm currently working on next year's piece and can't wait to share that with everyone.

Goonhammer Articles

This year I've continued my work here at Goonhammer with How to Paint Everything: Marvel Crisis Protocol tutorials. But also, I've expanded from just tutorials and have been exploring the MCP Ultimate Encounter game kits as well. My play group leans heavily into the casual side of Marvel: Crisis Protocol, and the narrative play scenarios are right up our alley. So it was good time going through them. I still have a handful in my collection to cover, plus others that are either print and play or physical kits that I need to find. Either way, I'm excited to do more in the new year as well.

It was a good year for articles, and I've published a lot more this year than I had last year too, with a grand total of 20 articles publibshed. Here's everything that was published this year, with handy links to each article.

Tutorials

Tomb of Dracula, Battle for Asgard, Darkstar, Nova, Phoenix, Asgardian Shrine, Beta Ray Bill, Yondu, Ulik, Blade, Doctor Voodoo, Rival Panels: Weapon X, Moon Knight, Spider-Ham, Outer Rim Outpost, Spider-Man Noir

Reviews

Incredible Hulk Ultimate Encounter, Adepticon 2025: Mastermold Ultimate Encounter, Separation Anxiety Ultimate Encounter, Infinity Gauntlet Ultimate Encounter

Marvel: Crisis Protocol Projects

Being my main game system, I did a bunch of Marvel: Crisis Protocol stuff this year. I'm slowly lowering the backlog count and as of right now I'm down to 33 models left to go until I'm all caught up on releases. But, AMG keeps releasing shiny new things, and that number is in constant flux. Its a good problem to have. I do wonder what I'll work on between releases though, when I get there.

Marvel: Crisis Protocol Characters

2025 was another productive year of character painting! This year I knocked out a total of 48 individual characters for Marvel: Crisis Protocol! This is down from last year's total of 62, but I also worked on some Shatterpoint characters as well and between the two I've surpassed that milestone fairly soundly. As I mentioned earlier, I am closing in on that mythical 100% completed collection. It's been really fun seeing the pile of unpainted characters dwindle. This year I have done a few repaints as well, thanks to AMG provided kits, which cuts into the unpainted queue, but I'm not complaining. Its really interesting comparing paint jobs with each other. Even models that were painted a year ago look completely different from the newer ones.

Credit: Brushwizard

Characters who were finished in 2025 were: Ebony Maw, Black Dwarf, Proxima Midnight, Corvus Glaive, Nova, Yondu, Man-Thing, Angel, Shang-Chi, Sabretooth - Apex Predator, Mephisto, Ultron - Metal Tyrant, Phoenix, Phoenix Unleashed, Moon Knight, Blade, Doctor Voodoo, Ghost Rider, Wrecking Crew, Winter Soldier - Operative, Dracula, Loki - Prince of Asgard, Spectacular Spider-Man, N'Kantu - The Living Mummy, M.O.D.O.K. - Scientist Supreme, Abomination, Lockjaw, Shadow King, Werewolf by Night, Frankenstein's Monster, Gladiator, Spider-Man (Rival Panels), Spider-Ham, Silk, Ultimate Spider-Man, Spider-Man 2099, Prowler, Spider-Man Noir, Black Widow, Ronin, Echo, Tigra, Wolverine, Sabretooth, Magneto, Toad, Exodus, Avalanche

Terrain Projects

One of the main draws for me in Marvel: Crisis Protocol is the terrain. I have completely fallen in love with creating terrain sets for this game. I have something like 8 or 9 different terrain sets and they are regularly getting tweaks and updates to them. The highlights of this year are a reworked Cargo Container Yard, a new Wakanda terrain set and more work on my Mojo Ball set.

Cargo Container Yard

credit: Brushwizard

My favorite terrain board for Marvel: Crisis Protocol is my Cargo Container Yard table. I had previously built an entire set of cargo container stacks based on some 3D printed cargo containers from Corvus Games Terrain. This year, they were starting to show their age and needed replacing. I decided to pick up some new ones at Adepticon, and bought cargo containers from Monster Fight Club. The MFC ones are really nice and I've used them multiple times since March, but the layouts didn't feel as natural to me and the scale seemed a bit off.

When I got the MFC ones, I binned my original foamboard containers. They were showing their age and thought that replacing them with MFC ones was the answer. After a bit of debate, I decded to make new ones and even painted up a new 3D printed container with the Atomic Mass Games logo. All was right with the world.

I still have the MFC ones and they will be getting used with the Cyberpunk Edgerunners Combat Zone game. But for now they live in a storage box.

Wakanda Shoreline

Credit: Brushwizard

A new layout for this year was a Wakanda themed set. I had previously picked up the Rival Panels: Throne of Wakanda set for the characters and wanted to use the waterfall for some sort of project.

AMG was kind enough to send me the two Wakanda terrain sets and the Rival Panels: Weapon X pack. I was able to pick up some nice looking hills from Monster Fight Club too. I had originally intended to merge the waterfall and bunker together, but I couldn't figure out a good way to go about it. I might revisit the waterfall later and add a back to it. But that super back burner and probably not going to actually happen.

I'm still working out layouts with it and it hasn't really clicked together yet. Perhaps it needs a few other things, like trees or something to get that jungle vibe going. But overall, I think it works fairly well. Some of the terrain pieces feel a little out of place. But it'll get there eventually.

Mojo Ball

Credit: Brushwizard

A project that I've been working on for a while now is a custom Mojo Ball terrain set. The idea was to build terrain pieces based on the Assault game in the old American Gladiators tv show and have a matching tile set to go with it.

This year, I finally ditched the idea of having tiles and made a custom mat for it instead. The tiles were too labor intensive and it was proving difficult getting all of the lining and edges to match up. Luckily I was able to dust off my old graphic design training and designed a mat from scratch. I then shipped it off to Mats by Mars, who were great to deal with and the print job turned out really nice.

I still need to finish up the rest of the terrain pieces, but headway is being made and that's the most important part.

Star Wars: Shatterpoint Projects

I'm a big fan of Star Wars and this game has been very tempting. I was able to resist it, until now. In August, AMG sent me the This is Rogue One character pack and the Outer Rim Outpost terrain pack out of the blue. Which caused a friend of mine to buy into the game, which also caused me to end up playing Shatterpoint. We are limiting ourselves to fixed rosters of Republic vs Separatists and Empire vs Ewoks/ Rebels.

I have a scratch-built terrain set based on Endor that has been sitting unused since we stopped playing Legion. It'll be nice to get that back to the table and finish up some parts that I never got around to. So far, we've only played the Prequel trilogy era though.

Star Wars: Shatterpoint Characters

Star Wars characters are super fun to paint. I get to look up a ton of references and then try to recreate them in miniature form. This year, I painted 20 characters for Shatterpoint, with more in the queue!

Credit: Brushwizard

Shatterpoint characters painted in 2025 were: Baze Malbus, Chirrut Imwe, Bohdi Rook, Jyn Erso, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Commander Cody, 212th Clone Troopers, Padawan Ahsoka, Darth Vader - Jedi Hunter, Kalani, B-1 Battle Droids, Lord Maul, Stormtroopers, Stormtrooper Seargent, General Veers

Terrain Projects

Years ago, when we were trying to get Star Wars: Legion going, I built Ewok treehouses from scratch using pvc pipe, Milliput, wooden dowels and bamboo skewers. Sadly, Legion never stuck, so they sat unused for years - other than for the occasional game of Crisis Protocol. There's three treehouses and they can connect to each other in various configurations via bridges. Now that we are playing Shatterpoint, I get to revisit it and can flesh out a few more things for this terrain set.

Credit: Brushwizard

I used a pair of Scout Trooper speeder bikes from Legion, which were laying around unassembled. I left the Scout Troopers off of them and modified the grips to get rid of their hands. Now it looks like a paid of speeder bikes hovering in place, waiting to be used.

Credit: Brushwizard

Previously, Fantasy Flight had released a small terrain set of cargo boxes. I had bought some for Legion and after I was unable to find more, I made a silicone mold of them so I could reproduce as many as I want. While digging for other things, I found them in a drawer and decided to stack them up into piles. One for Endor and one for the desert terrain. They compliment the official Shatterpoint ones well, since they are different sizes. The mold has long since disappeared, but I'm glad past me made these up for sure.

Shatterpoint Desert Terrain

Credit: Brushwizard

Between two core sets and every terrain release so far, we have an absolute pile of things to build on when we're playing games of Shatterpoint. I was able to get everything assembled and primed, but not fully painted. At least now, with the Winter upon us, I won't have to dodge weather to prime anything. Which means I can pick up any pieces that I want and crank them out. Hopefully it doesn't take too long and at least I'm not doing non-metallic metal on them, which will speed up the process.

Cyberpunk: Combat Zone

Credit: Brushwizard

This year, I picked up the Cyberpunk Edgerunners Combat Zone collector's edition. In order to get the style I'm going for, I picked up some other Cyberpunk Combat Zone minis to work on a cell shading paint style. I only painted a couple miniatures before getting sucked back into Crisis Protocol stuff, but I like where its headed. I'm sure with a bit more practice I can nail the look I'm aiming for.

I also decided that I didn't want to deal with painting bases on these. I want them to live in whatever terrain they are playing on. So I picked up some clear acrylic discs to use as bases instead. I'm really liking that a lot. Plus, I don't have to worry about trying to cell shade/ comic style bases.

GOALS FOR THE FUTURE!

Obviously the biggest goal for 2026 is to finish off the Marvel: Crisis Protocol backlog. Amazing new things keep coming out and pumping up the overall number, but that's ok. In 2024 I couldn't get below 40 unpainted models and this year I'm down to 33 unpainted models. So that's still a win in my book. Once I get the backlog finished, then I can focus on other projects and finishing up terrain sets that have been hanging around.

Speaking of terrain sets, now that the rules for Crisis Protocol are more friendly to dense layouts, I want to go through my tables and make sure I've got between 19 and 25 pieces in each box. I also want to finish off my Mojo Ball set and I have plans for 1 or 2 more sets and then I'll be happy. There's new terrain for the Dark Dimension on the horizon too, which will boost that terrain set as well.

Next year is also going to be the year of Shatterpoint. AMG was kind enough to send me the Core Box and a bunch of unit boxes. Next year, we're going to be playing that alongside MCP and I need to get all of my squads painted up and the terrain.

Other than that, I want to do some more cell shading style painting on Cyberpunk minis and maybe get some Combat Zone rolling too.

It's been a great year for hobby and I've had a lot of fun being here at Goonhammer. I'm looking forward to the future and producing more tutorials and other articles. See you all in the New Year!

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Tags: Cyberpunk | Year-in-Review | Crisis Protocol | shatterpoint