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Marvel United: Multiverse adds Maximum Carnage to the campaign! (Plus, the High Evolutionary!)

February 3, 2023 by krisis

CMON’s Marvel United: Multiverse Kickstarter campaign announced a sixth new expansion box today, and it was a major shocker to me (though it did not contain Shocker): Marvel United Multiverse – Maximum Carnage!

Why was this box such a surprise for me? I had it marked as “Not Likely” on my list of 20 possible predictions because we already have Carnage in the game. Plus, it felt like the cast didn’t contain enough possible symbiote villains or potential heroes compared to a later event like Absolute Carnage or King in Black.

It turns out, 90s nostalgia can always find a way! The Maximum Carnage box is anchored by an alternate “Dark Carnage,” who is explicitly from the much more recent recent Absolute Carnage event. (You can tell from the little swirl on his forehead.)

It also includes a “New Sinister Six” comprised of Scream, Shriek, Scorpion, Demogoblin, Doppelganger, and Morbius, which… I am fairly certain is not a thing.

(It may be a nod to a single issue reference to the “Sinister Sixty,” which included all of these characters – especially since it comes with a KS-Exclusive “Build your Own Sinister Six” play mode. Again, this concept is from the past few years – decades after Maximum Carnage.)

I have no objections to CMON being inventive in order to get an interesting group of characters together into an expansion. However, I find this particular selection puzzling considering they created a modern Carnage without Knull (one of the biggest villains of the past decade), skipped the chance for a re-do on Venom (or adding Agent Venom), and passed on several different “New Sinister Six” line-ups in the comics that include characters we’re lacking – like Lizard, Boomerang, Shocker, Beetle, and Tombstone.

If we’re being honest, I’m probably never going to touch Demogoblin or Doppelganger, but we got an Anti-Hero Morbius plus Scream, so I suppose all’s well that ends well.

I’m much more excited about one of today’s stretch goals, even if it means crossing off a possible expansion from my list: High Evolutionary!

High Evolutionary is a quintessential Marvel Villain with connections to many different characters and franchises. His sculpt looks perfect and he brings some interesting gameplay – including threat cards that double as master plan cards!

(Want to play Marvel United right now? Grab either the Marvel United or Marvel United X-Men core boxes right now. They are fun cooperative games that are fun to play with adults and kids alike.)

Suddenly, my predictive psychic powers aren’t looking so powerful. In my last post, I updated my list of 20 Marvel events and franchises that might merit an expansion box of their own. Now that we’re down to just 1-2 remaining expansion boxes in this Kickstarter campaign, will any of my 19 remaining guesses make the cut? Keep reading for the full list with tweaked odds on what we might see in the final days of the Marvel United: Multiverse Kickstarter campaign.

Updated: Guide to New Mutants, Generation X, Academy X, & other Young X-Men

February 3, 2023 by krisis

I’m excited to share this massive guide rebuild with you because it transformed a page that has been a “catch-all” guide for the past decade into a coherent and well-organized guide to every new generation of X-Men characters from their Giant-Size “Second Genesis” to the present day. Welcome to my all-new, all-different New Mutants Guide – covering New Mutants, Generation X, Academy X, Generation Hope, & other young X-Men titles.

Guide to New Mutants & Young X-Men

This New Mutants Guide now covers every “class” of new mutants, starting with the aptly named New Mutants in 1983 through the present day. If it’s a title focused on a new generation of mutants in the present day (or, in one case, an old generation), it’s covered in this guide.

What do those classes include? After much consideration, I’ve broken up them up as follows:

1st Class: The original Silver Age X-Men, plus Havok and Polaris. (Also Mimic, if you insist.)

2nd Class: The Giant-Size “Second Genesis” team, who Xavier quickly realizes he cannot treat as students. (Well, at least not Wolverine).

3rd Class: New Mutants, including Magma, Warlock, Doug, and their later additions from X-Factor, Fallen Angels and X-Terminators through their transformation into X-Force. (Technically, Kitty, Rachel, Psylocke, and even Longshot could be grouped into this class, but they all were promoted the main squad.)

4th Class: Generation X, including Jubilee although she debuted much earlier.

5th Class: Academy X, including their transformation into Young X-Men. Many are still students in the present day.

6th Class: Generation Hope & The Jean Grey School. Effectively, any mutant new enough to enroll in the Jean Grey School is, by definition, part of Generation Hope since it was Hope who reignited the emergence of mutant powers around the globe. I’d include all characters who debuted as students through 2019 in this category through late adds like Nature Girl.

1st Class Returns: All-New X-Men, from when they were snatched from Uncanny X-Men (1963) #8 through their return to the past in Extermination. (Their adventures sometimes included 5th & 6th Class members.)

7th Class: Age of Krakoa, including all young mutants who have debuted since House of X and Powers of X.

Each of these classes all have obvious starting points, major stories, and some form of graduation to define them. I’m sure we could get into a lengthy fan debate about different sub-classes within New Mutants, or if we should really say that the 6th Class lasts that long, or to which class Scout truly belongs.

Those distinctions would only complicate a guide to these titles. In this newly renovated New Mutants Guide, every young mutant title is accompanied by a “class” tag to indicate which classes are active in it. For example, New Mutants (2003) includes the 3rd Class, but they’re also assembling the 5th Class in that title. And, Wolverine & The X-Men (2011) was the home of the 6th class, but many 5th class students continued into that run.

As with many of my recent guide updates, reorganizing this guide in a coherent way for modern readers meant rebuilding it from scratch. As I did that, I had the chance to reflect on why my 2010s guides now require so much re-building – which is actually making them much simpler.

Cable Math & Maps: Collected Issue Counting and Future Omnibus Mapping

February 2, 2023 by krisis

Welcome to a post comprehensively mapping Cable – from his 1990 debut in the pages of New Mutants to present day!

This is the second pilot of my “Math & Maps,” series where we dissect how every issue from a character or title has been collected and then figure out the best way to add it to our shelves in omnibus editions. Last time, we tackled X-Factor Mapping. This time, we’re looking at Mapping Cable – Nathan Dayspring Gray Summers – based on my recently-updated Guide to Cable.

Are you ready to map?!

To get started with our Cable Math & Maps, let’s look at the current collection standings for all of Cable’s series. This only includes series where he is a title star, but not series like X-Force (1991) and Cable & X-Force (2016) where he’s the leader in a team book.

Series	Total Issues	in Color*	in Epic	in Oversize
Cable	262	247	0	136
as a percentage:		94.27%	0%	51.91%

Note that Cable: Blood & Metal (1992) #1-2 are collected in the X-Force Epic Collection line, but Cable does not have his own line.

How does that break down across every Cable series from 2012 to present? What am I even counting? And, how can it all fit onto our bookshelves in a set of tidy hardcovers? Read on to find out! And, when you’re done, be sure to leave a comment to let me know if you’d like to see more posts like this in the future.

Marvel United: Multiverse adds Annihilation (plus, 20 potential Marvel Event expansions and their predicted contents)

February 1, 2023 by krisis

CMON’s Marvel United: Multiverse Kickstarter campaign announced a fifth new expansion box, which was not a big surprise: Marvel United Multiverse – Annihilation!

Why wasn’t it a surprise? I perfectly predicted this box and its characters in my last post of 20 Marvel events that might turn up as expansions. It was my #3 choice with 70% odds, and the only miss in my prediction is that I thought CMON might squeeze in the obscure Cammi in addition to Annihilus, Richard Rider, Quasar, and Phyla-Vell.

Score one for me! Score another one for everyone backing this campaign to get the Marvel United Multiverse – Annihilation box, because it sounds like serious fun!

Marvel United Multiverse – Annihilation introduces one new gameplay mode with “Complications,” a deck of extra cards to intersperse with your villain’s Master Plan deck to up the ante with new challenges and restrictions. This is a familiar cooperative game tool for escalating the difficulty of easy games – Spirit Island has a similar mechanic. We happen to enjoy the simplicity of Marvel United, but for anyone who wants a harder version of the game I think this mode will become essential across all expansions.

(Want to play Marvel United right now? Grab either the Marvel United or Marvel United X-Men core boxes right now. They are fun cooperative games that are fun to play with adults and kids alike.)

Annihilation also introduces some fun hero dynamics that show off exactly why I love Marvel United.

Quasar can bank his actions as Wild Tokens, but can’t unleash them until the end game – if you manage to live that long. Phyla-Vell can use Heroic Tokens to shield her from damage. Richard Rider has extra wilds and adjacent location opportunities, plus a triple-wild knockout blow (for the villain and for himself). Moondragon’s special abilities involve plenty of card manipulation for both heroes and villains. And, Annihilus depletes a special pool of Crisis Tokens and regenerates his health as the game progresses.

All of these play options take advantage of the simplicity and extensibility of the game system. It doesn’t need a fourth kind of action, like “Defend,” because the basic system of Move-Attack-Heroic-Wild allows for so many different hacks and customizations via special powers. That makes the game adaptable to any hero, even cosmic heroes whose powers are extremely different than Captain America or Wolverine.

With this box out relatively early in the week, it seems like we can expect two more expansions – one to kick of this weekend, and one late-campaign addition just before the campaign closes on 9th February. At this point, the “Expansion Boxes are Events” theme has been 100% consistent. Does that mean we’re getting two more Event boxes? Or, will the campaign pivot hard at the last possibly moment, as it did last time by adding a Fantastic Four expansion to an X-Men campaign!

This is the third time in this campaign I’ve accurately predicted an expansion (and, fourth if you count my pre-campaign guess of this exact “Coming of Galactus”) box. Will my psychic powers extend to the final two boxes? Let’s check in on my list of expansion box predictions, based on my Guide to Marvel Universe Events. [Read more…] about Marvel United: Multiverse adds Annihilation (plus, 20 potential Marvel Event expansions and their predicted contents)

New Comics & Collected Editions: Marvel Comics – February 1, 2023

February 1, 2023 by krisis

Welcome to a trial of a kind of post I haven’t written for years: a post covering Marvel Comics February 1 2023 releases! This list includes every comic and digital comic out from Marvel this week, plus collected editions in omnibus, hardcover, paperback, and digest-sized formats.

For every new release, I’ll point you to the right guide, which will be updated to reflect the current series and issue.

I last attempted this sort of post five whole years ago. Time flies! Seriously, it feels like it was just a few months ago. At the time, I had several dozen fewer Marvel guides than I do today and I was more than a year behind on reading the entire Marvel Universe. Trying to point readers toward the right collection information for every issue was like trying to bale out a boat with a sieve. I needed to spend the time guide-building!

There are still many more Marvel guides left to build, but I have much better coverage than I did a half a decade ago. I’m going to experiment with bringing this post back this month as a way to catch up on everything that Marvel is offering – both for myself and for my 100+ Marvel reading guide pages.

Marvel Comics February 1 2023 Collected Editions

Vol. 1: The Man in the Ant Hill (2015 paperback, ISBN 978-0785198505 / digital / 2023 paperback, 978-1302950354)
See Guide to Ant-Man for this straight reprint of the existing Epic just in time for the Ant-Man movie.

Captain Mar-Vell Omnibus Vol. 1 (2023 oversize hardcover, ISBN 978-1302948658 / digital)
See Guide to Captain Marvel, Carol Danvers for coverage of this series (though, a Mar-Vell guide may be coming…). This omnibus is a big deal, as the three color Masterworks that cover this material have been out of print for some time. It’s nice to see Marvel focusing on a classic hero without much current exposure.

Daredevil By Frank Miller & Klaus Janson Omnibus (2023 oversize hardcover, ISBN 978-1302945534 / digital)
See Guide to Daredevil for this reprinting of the perennial one-and-done classic Daredevil ominbus.

Fantastic Four by Dan Slott, Vol. 3 (2023 oversize hardcover, ISBN 978-1302945343 / digital)
See Guide to Fantastic Four for this hardcover recollection line, which continues to be one of the lines Marvel is reprinting most-aggressively. It’s almost as if they’re getting reading for a movie…

by Gerry Duggan, Vol. 2 (2023 oversize hardcover, ISBN 978-1302945213/ digital)
See Guide to X-Men – The Age of Krakoa for this hardcover recollection line. This completes Duggan’s run in hardcover.

Miles Morales: The Avenging Avenger! (2023 digest-size paperback, ISBN / digital)
See Guide to Spider-Man, Miles Morales for this digest-size recollection of Miles’s post-Secret Wars Marvel-616 series.

Silver Surfer Epic Collection Volume 5: The Return of Thanos (2023 paperback, ISBN 978-1302948290 / digital)
See Guide to Silver Surfer for this new Epic Collection! This brings us past halfway point of Silver Surfer’s Epic line, with 8 books released and 6 still to go to cover his material through the end of his 1987 ongoing. Still missing are Volumes 2, 8, 10, 11, 12, & 14.

Star Wars: Doctor Aphra Omnibus Vol. 1 (2023 oversize hardcover, ISBN 978-1302947941)
See Guide to Star Wars, Episode 4 – A New Hope or Star Wars Expanded Universe Comics for this new printing of the surprisingly hot 2021 Gillen omnibus.

Read on for a rundown of Marvel Comics February 1 2023 single-issue releases, including a link to their accompanying guide pages on Crushing Comics.