What a year 2025 was for Marvel Crisis Protocol. In some ways, this was a year of stability with little volatility in the meta. In others, the game perhaps changed more than any other year. Denizens of the moon and ascended mutants rose to power while a few terrifying heroes and villains were knocked down a peg.
Join us as we look back across 2025 to recap what the year meant to Marvel Crisis Protocol and how it might inform us of what to expect moving forward.
Character Updates: Toning Down Kaiju and a New Normal
It seems like a lifetime ago, but in early 2025, big, impactful centerpiece models Thanos and Thor, Hero of Midgard were dominating the meta. The former had been a long-time staple of competitive MCP, surviving various direct and tangential nerfs to remain a piece many considered problematic and unhealthy. Thor, on the other hand, came out of the gates hot in 2024 and rose Asgard to the top of the meta. On the other end of the spectrum, Emma Frost and her open Hellfire Club affiliation produced unprecedented scenario play with flexibility.
However, in early 2025, each of these pieces was knocked down quite a bit, and the rest of the year saw various updates to move the game away from high-threat attrition “kaijus” and reintroduce the rise of five-wide scenario play. Thanos, Thor, and the Reality Gem were nerfed in February, and Hellfire Club was changed from an open affiliation to a standard one with an affiliation list.
However, these weren’t the only MCP character updates in 2025. This year, AMG introduced a new update schedule to look at characters as they enter repacks. So began the era of more frequent, but smaller, update waves. The next wave dropped in May and saw characters like Doctor Strange, Gambit, and Carnage go from borderline unplayable to legitimate competitive contenders.
Later, Ministravaganza in November came with a second batch of updates. Emma Frost and Sentinels were big winners, but we also got some discussion of a “new normal” that would inform certain updates moving forward. In an attempt to increase average time to kill, AMG is implementing fairly widespread HP buffs to 3 and 4-threat models. Included this time were characters like Nick Fury Jr., Psylocke, Hawkeye, and Star-Lord, among others.
How this new philosophy will shake out is yet to be seen, and it’s unclear just how widespread HP increases will be as they’re rolling out quite slowly. It’s possible that a shift back to more attrition-centric scenarios could partially offset longer TTK, keeping attrition in a relatively good spot while letting models stay on the table for an extra round or two.
Crisis Rotation: Speeding Up and Spreading Out MCP
Also new for 2025 was the concept of annual, themed Crisis rotation. Crises say very little change in the first five or so years of MCP, but AMG has committed to a new rotation every year, with each pack themed around a story or corner of the Marvel Universe. The first pack, War of Kings, completely changed the MCP meta.
While the new Crisis in the War of Kings pack were notable in their own right, the 2025 legal set of Crisis was more impactful in what it removed from the game. E secures - comprised of the divisive Gamma Wave and Demons Downtown Secures - were removed entirely, as was the largely-maligned “Extract” Research Station. This physically spread the game out, dramatically decreasing the number of games that devolved into piles of models in the center of the table.
Moreover, the minimum threat level was increased to 16 as the 15-threat Crises were rotated out, and even then, without any 16-threat Extracts, the lowest threat a player could be forced to play against their will became 17.
This new world of Crises, paired with earlier character updates, put a larger emphasis on mobility and scoring than ever before. While some attrition teams remained strong, the meta largely favored a more balanced approach between combat and scenario play.
Core Rule Changes - Crises, Collisions, and Priority
By and large, MCP has avoided big, sweeping rule changes throughout its six-ish years of existence; however, in November 2025, three significant tweaks changed list building and power levels.
As if Crisis rotation wasn’t a big enough change to the Crisis process, AMG updates the core rules for Crisis selection for the second time in the game’s history. Instead of players adding three Extracts and three Secures to their rosters, then randomly drawing one from one of the decks, opponents now have more say. Players now add five of each Crisis type, then draw two, and the opponent picks one of those two.
This means a few things. First, people have to play more Crises that may not be completely optimal. Moreover, players never have to play on that one Crisis they hate (or the opponent excels on), but they also probably won’t get to play their own best crises. Time will tell if the 2026 Operation: Zero Tolerance Crisis Pack and accompanying rotation increases the overall pool of Crises to accommodate more being taken in rosters.
However, Crisis changes weren’t the only update to the early game. A second priority roll was introduced that occurs after deployment, meaning players don’t know who will go first until Round 1 is about to start. Per AMG, the intention was to limit rote Round 1 plays. Will this tone down problematic combinations? Will it encourage less daring, more generic squads? Only time will tell.
The last big rules update was on collisions. Instead of the incoming damage being size +1, it’s now flat 3, meaning characters face the same potential damage from an incoming lamp post and a Sentinel. This dramatically tones down the impact of size 4+ throws, lowering the power level slightly of characters with large terrain-only throws and increasing the time to kill from collisions overall. It also means that big models like Apocalypse and Rhino aren’t such a liability to their own teammates when they’re thrown.
How dramatic will this change end up being? We’ll see. We know that Thor, Hero of Midgard is getting another look from AMG, likely due to his previous nerfs perhaps being a bit too much with the collisions changes. Other collision-reliant characters may get looked at in the future as well.
2025’s New Character Releases: Beautiful Sculpts and the End of Hot Kaiju Summer
If 2025 seemed a bit slow for MCP releases, it both was and wasn’t. Fewer new character releases this year, but there were more repacks/rereleases than ever before: 53 models compared to just 12 last year.
The actual new characters that dropped in 2025 are as follows:
- Yondu/Nova
- Elsa, Man-Thing
- Gladiator
- King Black Bolt, Maximus the Mad, Karnak, Gorgon
- Phoenix
- Avalanche, Exodus, Lady Mastermind
- Tigra, Ronin, Echo
- Spider-Ham, Silk, Spider-Man Noir
- Spider-Man 2099, Ultimate Spider-Man, Prowler
The big takeaway is that after a few years of new, high-threat models dominating the meta (Malekith, then CGR, then Thor), Phoenix, Gladiator, and King Black Bolt have failed to warp the game around them. In fact, while several of these models are great, none have taken over the game.
In fact, the competitive meta overall has largely avoided frequent turbulence after the February balance pass. Inhumans and Apocalypse have been meta boogeymen, though it’s yet to be seen how much new priority rules will affect both, and the new Crisis pack could see a shuffling of the top dogs.
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