Marvel Crisis Protocol Juggernaut
review by Alapai
Marvel Crisis Protocol is a miniatures skirmish game from Atomic Mass Games featuring characters from Marvel Comics. While serving in the US army with his stepbrother, Charles Xavier, Cain Marko found a ruby that granted him immense power, turning him into a human Juggernaut. Jealous of his father’s seemingly preferential treatment towards his stepbrother and bitter that his stepbrother left him buried under tons of debris, he used his immense strength to attack the X-Men at their home. A longtime adversary of the X-Men, Cain has, in recent years, found himself helping the X-Men more often than not, realizing his father was the villain more than Professor X.
My history with miniatures from hobby games basically starts with Crisis Protocol. While I collected some Heroclix back in the mid-2000s and was aware of miniature wargaming through the GW store that used to be in the Metreon as well as hanging out in Gamescape, I never got into the miniature hobby until much more recently. As a lifelong Marvel fan, when Crisis Protocol came out, I actually paid attention to what models were being released, even if I wasn’t interested in the actual gameplay. After assembling and painting a Crisis Protocol model as a gift for someone, I then purchased more Crisis Protocol models over time. While I technically have assembled more Age of Sigmar models than anything else (as I assembled and painted a Warcry team to look like Spiderverse characters and assembled a Seraphon Spearhead box), I have bought more and made more different Crisis Protocol minis than any other game.
Crisis Protocol’s models originally came with instructions inside the box, but Atomic Mass Games stopped printing the instructions and now only make them available online at their website. With most of their models, it is fairly easy to figure out how to put them together, as it often comes down to just assembling the model piece by piece in numeric order. With most of the ones I’ve assembled, they have been made of a torso, head, two arms and two legs. Depending on the size of the character, any of those sections can be made of two parts. Juggernaut is pretty big so while his head is one component, every other section is two parts, including two parts for each arm and two parts for each hand.
With Juggernaut, as is the case with some of Atomic Mass Games’ models, Juggernaut has two options for his left hand, either as a fist or holding a traffic light pole. Something I’ve been interested in doing is making two different options available by using magnets. I have 3mm magnets that would be the right size, so I tried to make a hole with my hobby drill. I didn’t initially have a 3mm bit, so I improvised with a smaller bit that I tried to expand a larger hole from, but eventually I realized that the best solution was the simplest: get a 3mm bit. To see if the magnet would fit, I pushed it into the hole and it fit so well, I couldn’t get it back out which I guess is good, but feels weird because one of the magnets for my model is only attached to the model by friction. Unfortunately, I lost one of the pieces for the fist, so while I have him ready to swap hands, there’s only one I can actually attach.
Juggernaut generally has a pretty simple design and while it’s slightly more complex than his classic brownish-red, his current X-Men outfit is not too much more complex, basically changing the color and adding an X to the design. I really like the redesign and used it as the version of Juggernaut I painted.
Juggernaut was one of the simplest models for me to paint, as his large size and simple design made it really easy to get the paint on him. The things that were trickiest were his face behind the helmet, as it required some precision to make sure skin color didn’t get onto the helmet, and the helmet itself as I wanted to make sure the helmet read as metallic. I didn’t feel like the Black Ice Turbo Dork paint was the right metallic consistency that I wanted and mixing metallic medium into black didn’t quite get it shiny enough. What I ended up doing was applying a satin varnish to the helmet after the initial black with metallic medium layer. I do like the final result as it’s not super shiny, but more of a dull metal that is still shinier than the rest of his outfit.
As with most miniatures for miniature wargaming, Crisis Protocol’s miniatures are a bit expensive if all you are looking to do is assemble and paint a mini. As opposed to a game like Warhammer 40K where all of the lore comes from the game itself, with Crisis Protocol, you are purchasing minis that are of characters you already know. As a big Marvel fan, I’ve purchased lots of minis of characters I like from the comics like Shadowcat, Beta Ray Bill and Dormammu.
If you are looking for some fun Marvel models to assemble and paint, I do recommend Marvel Crisis Protocol minis.
Marvel Crisis Protocol minis are available now from our webstore.
