Hi all, I made a pretty big write up about the upcoming expansion Arthur's legacy over on BGG, it included a retrospective tier list for the original 12 characters, here it is. Do check out the post on BGG as well since there's more there.
I quite like the trend that some in the fighting game community have. Instead of producing a tier list about the ongoing content, you do one as a final snapshot of the game before big changes are coming in. It’s more of a retrospective than a tool for prediction. So here’s mine for the original roster of Tag Team (By the way, there's no official seasons, I'm just borrowing language from fighting games with that one)
These tiers are ordered to the best of my ability. I’m never comfortable at being super decisive when it comes to making these. Ask me on any given day and I might flip my answers a bit.
Good Guy Gary (S tier): This tier is for the characters who are truly evergreen or embody what makes a character strong in Tag Team.
Mordred highlights how Tag Team plays: It is a game of managing to make your attacks slip through. I might have seen this referred before as Tag Team being a “Block heavy” game. It is often the lowest risk pick you can choose from your 3 cards. Mordred just happens to have 5 of them available with 2 copies of the best block in the game. His conditional attacks would be a weakness, but an attack has a much better chance to slip through when the fight deck has 7+ cards. A high scaling character with a surprise attack easily gives you a 2-3 turn window to answer. An attack or sum of attacks that require you chip away for 4+ turns is good, but you open up a lot of room for tempo swings due to how blocking works. An attack completely negated is good, but they also add an upside. Big & late hitters like Mordred simply forego some of the risk with getting an attack blocked for multiple turns. If only he could heal his partner.
Joan does everything well enough that she acts as a benchmark for the game overall. If someone outperforms her in some aspect, they need a downside somewhere else. Her biggest downside is that some teams have more exploding power for the longer games that will eventually outpace her damage and resilience. But her ability to race through healing equal to her damage is so so so good.
Matchup Madness Marty (A tier): This tier has really good characters, but they start encountering sharper matchup considerations. Overall I think you can pick any of these with anyone and it’ll have a baseline strength to work. But they each have some edge cases or difficulties where you will sometimes have the chance to exploit them or your opponent will.
Wild Bunch is oh so close to S tier. They have an immediate impact on turn 0 via a free starting cube, they have pseudo invincibility, their healing output is top notch, they have upsides on how their attacks target opponents, they have the potential to ramp 3 cubes a turn. All of these are premium perks. But I find that the draw variance can get swingy. Lots of early heal draws will impact their sustainability, but so will lots of late draws. The same can be said about all their benefits. This would be one thing, but they are a very polarized character in the draft. Some characters lose viability against the Wild Bunch and some gain instead. This creates exploitative moments where you can both lose or win matches just because one player isn’t properly drafting into the Wild Bunch. Every character can lose, every one can guess right 3-4 times in a row, but when you lose with the Wild bunch, sometimes it feels like it was pre-ordained. This isn’t regular enough to make them bad, just signs of inconsistency. That’s the theme for this tier.
Ching Shih is also one of my favorites overall. She’s flexible enough to adapt viably to most matchups, she’s got the best rushdown in the game with a starting attack and 3 more attack draws. One of them can be a finisher as well. In that sense, Ching Shih has enough gas to not get permablocked, she has enough attacks to be a blind pick into characters that get punished by attacks like Wild Bunch and Golem and she can adapt if the opponent opted for a different option. Heck even her starting card can fish out a block and make it lose value as it permanently becomes a healing effect. To me, the biggest weakness of Ching Shih is that the two best picks in the game have major upsides against her. That’s it, she’s the gatekeeper otherwise. A single Joan heal counteracts 1-2 attacks from her and Mordred has so many blocks that having this many attacks isn’t as useful. But otherwise, I feel at home so much with this character.
Brijit more or less offers similar things to Ching shih with different upsides / downsides. Having cancel effects is a big plus, being able to punish hyperscalers will make her invulnerable in some games, wasting your opponent’s attack and strength. That’s an edge against Mordred. Being able to punish healing this hard gives her some edge against Joan. Finally, a deflecting block is a premium ability. The reason why I give Ching Shih the edge is that Brijit can get locked behind blocks. With only one additional draw for attacks, being able to block her starting card removes any kind of pressure she has. Being able to lock it behind 2 blocks can force Brijit into doing no damage outside of deflects or until she draws a 1x copy of a card. I think this is a fairly easy matchup counter-measure to apply even with teams who have a limited amount of block cards. For this reason, I’ve been treating her more as a counter-pick than a main pick. Like, don’t get me wrong, she’s still very viable otherwise. But the more I play, the more these weaknesses manifest.
Milady is S tier some games and will deal her own finishing blow for the other half of the games. In spite of the variance of how her schemes work, having 3 poison draws is especially scary to certain matchups. Being able to punish large attacks / health pools like Mordred’s or Golem by clapping back just as hard is a matchup counter-measure. But will she do these effects before she fizzles out ? That’s a bet you’re taking every time you play her. Highest peaks in the game… but only sometimes. A bit like the Wild Bunch, this is a character that has an impact on the draft every game but in her own way. I also think her being weak to Wild Bunch or ill equipped to deal with their life bars gives her sharp edge cases for being exploitable.
Golem will always enable many characters to work with his once a turn invulnerability token. There’s no debating that this makes specific teams and characters viable. Having power cubes on a health bar is also a premium ability to turn your healing cards into 2 cubes a round at most, one for healing through the health icon, one for being hit in the face. Reanimation is also a card that can take an average one and send it through the stratosphere. But strengths aside, a lack of blocks is a clear weakness, this many attack draws can actually be a downside and the rest of his cards are otherwise low impact. Sure, the cube transfer and healing are worth playing, but they start to hurt you 3-4 turns later as they give you most of their value on their first or 2nd activation. Finally, it’s quite easy to counter pick Golem in the draft or in playstyle alone resulting in him needing to be very mindful of his own weaknesses. A barrage of attacks with 3 added free damage from his protection cost and that 25 health bar looks like a mirage really quickly.
Bad Beat Bobby (B tier): I quite like the characters in this tier, but they are characterized by two dynamics. The first is how lopsided their draws can feel like, often resulting in very uneven games. Fate is either on their side or their opponents. The second is how they have weaknesses and strengths that favors a counter-pick drafting option rather than evergreen stable picks.
Fey folks are definitely the best in this tier. Premium heal, good blocks, cancel effects, multiple “free” cubes at the start of the game and as they lose HP. There’s a lot here that mirrors The Wild Bunch, but I just think almost everything they do, the Wild bunch do it juuuuuust a bit better. Survivability, cube ramp, pressure. Aside from the better defensive cards out of the two, there are fewer instances where the Fey have an upside. If they are with a character that can reliably heal them, they actually stand a chance of getting hit and healed back to full to grant additional free cubes. When that happens once or twice, oh my are they scary. Since they have a bit of a swiss army knife draw pile, drawing 2 copies of the same card forces you in weird binds. Either you include this effect now even if it’s mistimed or you see it again 6 rounds from now. Even though I said this was a counter-matchup tier, they are more evergreen than the other 2 characters here.
Wong Fei-Hung’s main appeal is a great range of cards to pick in round 1 or 2. Crippling touch and Chi focus are nutty early game cards. With 3 cards out of 18 draws, punch in these numbers in a calculator and you get 44% chance to have at least one of them in your opening hand and 73% by round 3. Chi focus is the equivalent of Mordred’s starting card with upsides both for your future draws and now. Knowing you found your healing card can let you skip the mistimed Wong draws and favor your partner acting until you find your attacks. Crippling touch’s main downside is that you have to let your opponent’s card resolve once. This is much less of a downside in an early round and slows the game down meaningfully. It’s also especially good against characters with key signature cards. Mordred being capped at 2 cubes for the fight from round 3 onwards is a much much much weaker character and worth drafting Wong for. But keep in mind, this version of Wong does not exist for 1 game out of 4, at least not as potent. The draw order will determine how impactful each card is allowed to be and if you’re not careful you soon might be firing blanks at your opponent while they accomplish more meaningful progress. Getting an attack blocked is a big momentum reversal, imagine if on top of that your attack struck for 0 because you couldn’t get Wong’s cube generation online.
Shango suffers from similar problems as Wong but with certain upsides. IMO there are simply less matchups where I would consider Shango as an all but guaranteed counterpick. He’s especially well positioned against low block teams / low attack count teams. Aflame as a card can force the opponent to play in one location and allow you to see a very telegraphed upcoming slide on their part. This is often a great way to get Shango’s excellent block online 1-2 turns into the future. It’s much safer for him to have this go on if the opponent is limited in the quality and quantity of their attacks whenever they need to move out of Aflame’s way. Brijit is a fantastic example of such a matchup. If Shango isn’t attacked by her at game start, the odds she will opt to move in Aflame’s path with an attack are much lower than Joan or Mordred. But the cost of those benefits is a lot of your draws you would rather not play in most situations. Breath of fire can negate your own Aflame advantage, Lightning Strike will often help your opponent defeat your partner or cause double KOs, the cube transfer card is giving two openings to your opponent considering you are forced to have Aflame already. Lightning Strike has major upsides in certain matchups like Golem or Wild Bunch, but outside of those this makes Shango a character with 5 attack draws that are highly conditional. That already bricks some of your draws, but given Shango starts at 0 power it is just a little too underwhelming for the risk associated. Picture Shango & Joan, 9 of your 18 draws will be attack cards. On a coin flip, your draw will include 2 attacks and 10% of your draws will force you to pick an attack card. You simply are taking so much risk, even more so when facing block-heavy matchups.
Not Now Nelly (C tier): This tier is rather straightforward : There are better options available for the perks these characters offer. They have viable spots, they can win, but I just think it’s such a narrow range where these characters would have an edge over someone else in the roster, it’s basically invisible.
Mephisto is sooooo cool y’all. It hurts me to put him this low. I sort of group him with Ching Shih and Brijit when it comes to characters who can apply early pressure and play quick games. His power generation is somewhat reliable and it’s not too hard to have 1 or more attacks with 4+ power in the mid game with no partner support. There’s a very small and negligible upside with how this is a modal character with cards doing one thing for a round and something else for the next round. It’s pretty good to have some mechanisms that lowers the expected value of blocking conditionally, but you can’t guarantee having a handle on how the game will play out. In my brightest Mephisto plays, I correctly predict the face of the Snake token on a given card and exploit my opponent for reading this correctly. But you’ll notice that this can be done even if you’re not the Mephisto player. Having a health trigger to flip the token invites manipulation coming in from both players, the Mephisto player has a slight edge over the opponent in these guessing games but not a definitive one and it’s rare enough dynamic to make this a huge advantage. It’s one thing to have 4 cards that are above rate, but the downside is that they are conditional or blank cards on every other turn. Even without these modal cards, 2 of Mephisto’s cards are all in on their condition and otherwise do nothing. Very powerful if it works, very noticeable when it fails, especially with a health pool this small to take risks with. The final nail in the coffin is that having a single block is a challenge in itself. I will play Mephisto every now and then, but my frequency picks for this kind of gameplan goes to another character instead.
Bödvar is all in on his one shot dreams. I said earlier having the ability to play an attack into a very wide deck that strikes really hard is often a game winning position. Bödvar wants to achieve this and once he does, he typically does so with more spectacle. He’ll transform and suddenly transform half your deck into lethal attacks. He’ll play an attack that does dual targeting early in the fight deck and close the fight irrespective of targeting the weaker opponent. That’s not the problem though, because to achieve this level of luxurious might, Bödvar makes all of the necessary concessions. Small health pool, slow and conditional racing up the rage bar before he starts mauling, he still needs to accrue cubes on the way there to just land 1 or 2 attacks for the win while resisting one counter attack. He has the ability to gain that power quickly himself, but oftentimes at an added risk if attacked and dependent on card draw. It’s just asking for a lot upfront and your payoff is a pretty good matchup into a character who is more incremental and outpaced by the enraged bear. Technically, this is a good dynamic to have against Joan who is usually durable through many self-healing instances. A one shot against one of the best characters ? That should be good? But in reality, there are characters who are plenty scary enough with only 5-6 power and have many less concessions to make to do so. Now, Bödvar and Golem still remain a very potent team who is pretty good at mitigating the partners' flaws. There are still reasons to pick Bödvar, just more reasons to pick others for the same role.
Let me know what you think, cheers
I quite like the trend that some in the fighting game community have. Instead of producing a tier list about the ongoing content, you do one as a final snapshot of the game before big changes are coming in. It’s more of a retrospective than a tool for prediction. So here’s mine for the original roster of Tag Team (By the way, there's no official seasons, I'm just borrowing language from fighting games with that one)
These tiers are ordered to the best of my ability. I’m never comfortable at being super decisive when it comes to making these. Ask me on any given day and I might flip my answers a bit.
Good Guy Gary (S tier): This tier is for the characters who are truly evergreen or embody what makes a character strong in Tag Team.
Mordred highlights how Tag Team plays: It is a game of managing to make your attacks slip through. I might have seen this referred before as Tag Team being a “Block heavy” game. It is often the lowest risk pick you can choose from your 3 cards. Mordred just happens to have 5 of them available with 2 copies of the best block in the game. His conditional attacks would be a weakness, but an attack has a much better chance to slip through when the fight deck has 7+ cards. A high scaling character with a surprise attack easily gives you a 2-3 turn window to answer. An attack or sum of attacks that require you chip away for 4+ turns is good, but you open up a lot of room for tempo swings due to how blocking works. An attack completely negated is good, but they also add an upside. Big & late hitters like Mordred simply forego some of the risk with getting an attack blocked for multiple turns. If only he could heal his partner.
Joan does everything well enough that she acts as a benchmark for the game overall. If someone outperforms her in some aspect, they need a downside somewhere else. Her biggest downside is that some teams have more exploding power for the longer games that will eventually outpace her damage and resilience. But her ability to race through healing equal to her damage is so so so good.
Matchup Madness Marty (A tier): This tier has really good characters, but they start encountering sharper matchup considerations. Overall I think you can pick any of these with anyone and it’ll have a baseline strength to work. But they each have some edge cases or difficulties where you will sometimes have the chance to exploit them or your opponent will.
Wild Bunch is oh so close to S tier. They have an immediate impact on turn 0 via a free starting cube, they have pseudo invincibility, their healing output is top notch, they have upsides on how their attacks target opponents, they have the potential to ramp 3 cubes a turn. All of these are premium perks. But I find that the draw variance can get swingy. Lots of early heal draws will impact their sustainability, but so will lots of late draws. The same can be said about all their benefits. This would be one thing, but they are a very polarized character in the draft. Some characters lose viability against the Wild Bunch and some gain instead. This creates exploitative moments where you can both lose or win matches just because one player isn’t properly drafting into the Wild Bunch. Every character can lose, every one can guess right 3-4 times in a row, but when you lose with the Wild bunch, sometimes it feels like it was pre-ordained. This isn’t regular enough to make them bad, just signs of inconsistency. That’s the theme for this tier.
Ching Shih is also one of my favorites overall. She’s flexible enough to adapt viably to most matchups, she’s got the best rushdown in the game with a starting attack and 3 more attack draws. One of them can be a finisher as well. In that sense, Ching Shih has enough gas to not get permablocked, she has enough attacks to be a blind pick into characters that get punished by attacks like Wild Bunch and Golem and she can adapt if the opponent opted for a different option. Heck even her starting card can fish out a block and make it lose value as it permanently becomes a healing effect. To me, the biggest weakness of Ching Shih is that the two best picks in the game have major upsides against her. That’s it, she’s the gatekeeper otherwise. A single Joan heal counteracts 1-2 attacks from her and Mordred has so many blocks that having this many attacks isn’t as useful. But otherwise, I feel at home so much with this character.
Brijit more or less offers similar things to Ching shih with different upsides / downsides. Having cancel effects is a big plus, being able to punish hyperscalers will make her invulnerable in some games, wasting your opponent’s attack and strength. That’s an edge against Mordred. Being able to punish healing this hard gives her some edge against Joan. Finally, a deflecting block is a premium ability. The reason why I give Ching Shih the edge is that Brijit can get locked behind blocks. With only one additional draw for attacks, being able to block her starting card removes any kind of pressure she has. Being able to lock it behind 2 blocks can force Brijit into doing no damage outside of deflects or until she draws a 1x copy of a card. I think this is a fairly easy matchup counter-measure to apply even with teams who have a limited amount of block cards. For this reason, I’ve been treating her more as a counter-pick than a main pick. Like, don’t get me wrong, she’s still very viable otherwise. But the more I play, the more these weaknesses manifest.
Milady is S tier some games and will deal her own finishing blow for the other half of the games. In spite of the variance of how her schemes work, having 3 poison draws is especially scary to certain matchups. Being able to punish large attacks / health pools like Mordred’s or Golem by clapping back just as hard is a matchup counter-measure. But will she do these effects before she fizzles out ? That’s a bet you’re taking every time you play her. Highest peaks in the game… but only sometimes. A bit like the Wild Bunch, this is a character that has an impact on the draft every game but in her own way. I also think her being weak to Wild Bunch or ill equipped to deal with their life bars gives her sharp edge cases for being exploitable.
Golem will always enable many characters to work with his once a turn invulnerability token. There’s no debating that this makes specific teams and characters viable. Having power cubes on a health bar is also a premium ability to turn your healing cards into 2 cubes a round at most, one for healing through the health icon, one for being hit in the face. Reanimation is also a card that can take an average one and send it through the stratosphere. But strengths aside, a lack of blocks is a clear weakness, this many attack draws can actually be a downside and the rest of his cards are otherwise low impact. Sure, the cube transfer and healing are worth playing, but they start to hurt you 3-4 turns later as they give you most of their value on their first or 2nd activation. Finally, it’s quite easy to counter pick Golem in the draft or in playstyle alone resulting in him needing to be very mindful of his own weaknesses. A barrage of attacks with 3 added free damage from his protection cost and that 25 health bar looks like a mirage really quickly.
Bad Beat Bobby (B tier): I quite like the characters in this tier, but they are characterized by two dynamics. The first is how lopsided their draws can feel like, often resulting in very uneven games. Fate is either on their side or their opponents. The second is how they have weaknesses and strengths that favors a counter-pick drafting option rather than evergreen stable picks.
Fey folks are definitely the best in this tier. Premium heal, good blocks, cancel effects, multiple “free” cubes at the start of the game and as they lose HP. There’s a lot here that mirrors The Wild Bunch, but I just think almost everything they do, the Wild bunch do it juuuuuust a bit better. Survivability, cube ramp, pressure. Aside from the better defensive cards out of the two, there are fewer instances where the Fey have an upside. If they are with a character that can reliably heal them, they actually stand a chance of getting hit and healed back to full to grant additional free cubes. When that happens once or twice, oh my are they scary. Since they have a bit of a swiss army knife draw pile, drawing 2 copies of the same card forces you in weird binds. Either you include this effect now even if it’s mistimed or you see it again 6 rounds from now. Even though I said this was a counter-matchup tier, they are more evergreen than the other 2 characters here.
Wong Fei-Hung’s main appeal is a great range of cards to pick in round 1 or 2. Crippling touch and Chi focus are nutty early game cards. With 3 cards out of 18 draws, punch in these numbers in a calculator and you get 44% chance to have at least one of them in your opening hand and 73% by round 3. Chi focus is the equivalent of Mordred’s starting card with upsides both for your future draws and now. Knowing you found your healing card can let you skip the mistimed Wong draws and favor your partner acting until you find your attacks. Crippling touch’s main downside is that you have to let your opponent’s card resolve once. This is much less of a downside in an early round and slows the game down meaningfully. It’s also especially good against characters with key signature cards. Mordred being capped at 2 cubes for the fight from round 3 onwards is a much much much weaker character and worth drafting Wong for. But keep in mind, this version of Wong does not exist for 1 game out of 4, at least not as potent. The draw order will determine how impactful each card is allowed to be and if you’re not careful you soon might be firing blanks at your opponent while they accomplish more meaningful progress. Getting an attack blocked is a big momentum reversal, imagine if on top of that your attack struck for 0 because you couldn’t get Wong’s cube generation online.
Shango suffers from similar problems as Wong but with certain upsides. IMO there are simply less matchups where I would consider Shango as an all but guaranteed counterpick. He’s especially well positioned against low block teams / low attack count teams. Aflame as a card can force the opponent to play in one location and allow you to see a very telegraphed upcoming slide on their part. This is often a great way to get Shango’s excellent block online 1-2 turns into the future. It’s much safer for him to have this go on if the opponent is limited in the quality and quantity of their attacks whenever they need to move out of Aflame’s way. Brijit is a fantastic example of such a matchup. If Shango isn’t attacked by her at game start, the odds she will opt to move in Aflame’s path with an attack are much lower than Joan or Mordred. But the cost of those benefits is a lot of your draws you would rather not play in most situations. Breath of fire can negate your own Aflame advantage, Lightning Strike will often help your opponent defeat your partner or cause double KOs, the cube transfer card is giving two openings to your opponent considering you are forced to have Aflame already. Lightning Strike has major upsides in certain matchups like Golem or Wild Bunch, but outside of those this makes Shango a character with 5 attack draws that are highly conditional. That already bricks some of your draws, but given Shango starts at 0 power it is just a little too underwhelming for the risk associated. Picture Shango & Joan, 9 of your 18 draws will be attack cards. On a coin flip, your draw will include 2 attacks and 10% of your draws will force you to pick an attack card. You simply are taking so much risk, even more so when facing block-heavy matchups.
Not Now Nelly (C tier): This tier is rather straightforward : There are better options available for the perks these characters offer. They have viable spots, they can win, but I just think it’s such a narrow range where these characters would have an edge over someone else in the roster, it’s basically invisible.
Mephisto is sooooo cool y’all. It hurts me to put him this low. I sort of group him with Ching Shih and Brijit when it comes to characters who can apply early pressure and play quick games. His power generation is somewhat reliable and it’s not too hard to have 1 or more attacks with 4+ power in the mid game with no partner support. There’s a very small and negligible upside with how this is a modal character with cards doing one thing for a round and something else for the next round. It’s pretty good to have some mechanisms that lowers the expected value of blocking conditionally, but you can’t guarantee having a handle on how the game will play out. In my brightest Mephisto plays, I correctly predict the face of the Snake token on a given card and exploit my opponent for reading this correctly. But you’ll notice that this can be done even if you’re not the Mephisto player. Having a health trigger to flip the token invites manipulation coming in from both players, the Mephisto player has a slight edge over the opponent in these guessing games but not a definitive one and it’s rare enough dynamic to make this a huge advantage. It’s one thing to have 4 cards that are above rate, but the downside is that they are conditional or blank cards on every other turn. Even without these modal cards, 2 of Mephisto’s cards are all in on their condition and otherwise do nothing. Very powerful if it works, very noticeable when it fails, especially with a health pool this small to take risks with. The final nail in the coffin is that having a single block is a challenge in itself. I will play Mephisto every now and then, but my frequency picks for this kind of gameplan goes to another character instead.
Bödvar is all in on his one shot dreams. I said earlier having the ability to play an attack into a very wide deck that strikes really hard is often a game winning position. Bödvar wants to achieve this and once he does, he typically does so with more spectacle. He’ll transform and suddenly transform half your deck into lethal attacks. He’ll play an attack that does dual targeting early in the fight deck and close the fight irrespective of targeting the weaker opponent. That’s not the problem though, because to achieve this level of luxurious might, Bödvar makes all of the necessary concessions. Small health pool, slow and conditional racing up the rage bar before he starts mauling, he still needs to accrue cubes on the way there to just land 1 or 2 attacks for the win while resisting one counter attack. He has the ability to gain that power quickly himself, but oftentimes at an added risk if attacked and dependent on card draw. It’s just asking for a lot upfront and your payoff is a pretty good matchup into a character who is more incremental and outpaced by the enraged bear. Technically, this is a good dynamic to have against Joan who is usually durable through many self-healing instances. A one shot against one of the best characters ? That should be good? But in reality, there are characters who are plenty scary enough with only 5-6 power and have many less concessions to make to do so. Now, Bödvar and Golem still remain a very potent team who is pretty good at mitigating the partners' flaws. There are still reasons to pick Bödvar, just more reasons to pick others for the same role.
Let me know what you think, cheers
. And I really like your Drafting Guide on BGG!