Iconic teams?

SYSTEM: Any

Okay, sure, the Justice League, the Avengers, the X-Men. Any other teams that rival them for actual iconic status?

I can name other groups, sure (Challengers of the Unknown!). But each of them kind of has a place (well, the real difference between Justice League and Avengers seems to be DC vs Marvel). X-Men are hated and afraid. Doom Patrol are all about weirdness.

Fantastic Four? Aside from being roughly the four elements, they are the first family.

I was thinking of it more in terms of creating your game.

What's each group about? I mean, really, the fact that they're the PCs counts for a heck of a lot, but do you have a kind of theme statement that guides the adventures you create?

• The major hitters (your Avengers or Justice League)
• The outcasts (your X-Men)
• The dealers in weird (your Doom Patrol), except they are often also...
• The dealers in magic (your Midnight Sons, your Justice League Dark
• Your corporate sponsored team (has been done, but no example is leaping to mind)
• Your losers (Great Lakes Avengers, Justice League Antarctica, Mystery Men, and gah, I'm getting old: the DC team from the sixties with Dumb Bunny, Merryman, Awkwardman, White Feather, and the Blimp) EDIT: The Inferior Five
• Your patriots (must have been done)
• Covert Ops Deniable Assets (CODA), a villain team used by the government, along the lines of Suicide Squad or the 1997 Thunderbolts (Ed Ortiz)
• Street Level team isn't losers so much as restraining their activities to a neighbourhood. Individuals might be quite powerful, but usually only one of them is extremely powerful. (Ed Ortiz)
• Space Heroes work in space. The stories are generally in different places (Wagon Train), and might be cosmic in level but they don't have to be.

The other teams are a bit more constrained in the kind of stories that they appear in/adventures that they have on a regular basis.

Team	Stories
Major Hitters	The Major Hitters can get anything as a problem...even something small scale is a change of pace, and maybe you'll have a brainstorm and it will turn out to be the innocuous thing that leads them to the conspiracy.
Outcasts	Stories might be about the act of being excluded or closeted; about saving the world and not being recognized for it.
Dealers in Magic	The threats are usually occult (in the sense of hidden); there can be the occasional Scooby-Doo episode (and in fact, a Dr. Thirteen/Scooby Doo team of debunkers might be interesting). The characters often wrestle with odd rules for living to keep their powers, relationships with faerie or other dimensions, or curses. This can be small-scale or large.