Marvel Champions

Watching this game mature should be a lot of fun as the designers start to really push what it's capable of.

I hope we get a fantastic Four wave with a Coming of Galactus box or something. We need Doctor Doom at a minimum. Bonus points if it's all done up in Jack Kirby art but that'll never happen.

Spider-man and Black Widow (both Justice) went up against Green Goblin and his Risky Business, backed by Tombstone running interference. I figured that Green Goblin would be quite the schemer, and Justice decks are the best at thwarting. In hindsight, I could have really used a Leadership or Aggression deck in the mix. Green Goblin schemed his way to victory, but it took a very long time to play out. I think that I went through both hero decks at least five times, and through the encounter deck at least twice.

In theory, this scenario is a really neat idea, with the villain flipping back and forth between supervillain and alter ego in the same way that the heroes flip identities throughout the game. In actual practice, this generally meant that there were occasional narrow windows of opportunity where I could hit the Green Goblin for actual damage, with long stretches where he is Norman Osborn and unleashing seemingly endless goons and side-schemes. To make matters worse, the goons are really durable, like supervillain tough.

I don't quite have a feel for running Black Widow/Justice. She has various cool prep tricks, but most of them are disposible, so it isn't like a gradual buildup into serious power like Iron Man. And her prep stuff tends to be reactive in usage, making it less helpful in taking advantage of Green Goblin on the occasions when he is actually vulnerable.

Finished my Wasp/Ant-Man expert Red Skull campaign tonight, and it was a humdinger. Zola was a piece of piss, no problem. Expert Red Skull is just savage though, even without adding in harder modular sets. Took 2 tries to beat him. First time through Ant-Mans setup cards were buried at the bottom of his deck, and he wasn't able to start ahead of the curve of side schemes well. We cleard the board finally with Red Skull 2 at ~5hp, but an unlucky event card scheme activation threated us out before we could take advantage of the wiped board to actually gain ground. Game 2 started out marginally better, but eventually we got both heroes hit by Shadows of the Past and Red Skull stacked up 4-6 upgrades and was swinging for infinity damage every attack. It was either keep meat shields flowing constantly, or die in a single attack. The 0 cost allies from the Zola scenario put in WORK for us in this game, and it came down to the absolute wire. Wasp got KO 'd by an event card villain attack, and Ant- Man was left standing alone at 8 HP with 18 HP left on Red Skull 3. Giant Stomp + Giant form ATK left Red Skull at 6 HP. Red Skull's attack left Ant-Man at 1HP after defending, and thankfully he drew into enough damage to seal the deal.

So yea, fun game Quicksilver should be here in a week or two, and he looks super fun. Not sure who I'm going to play around with until then, as I think I'm good on Wasp for a bit. Or maybe I'll try Wasp Leadership? Dunno, we'll see

m.twitch.tv/videos/897312974

The vod, if you want to see Ant-Man's heroic final stand for yourself. Really it's Elektra and Moon Knight's final stand, but hey who's counting

Also, full Scarlet Witch spoilers
m.imgur.com/gallery/6KuZpmv

New Justice cards finally, including a new cheap Justice ally <3

Ooooh new info from FFG finally! Star-Lord preview is up, and he's got some pretty fun looking stuff going on.

www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2021/2/3/life-on-the-edge/

Edit: a character based on pressing your luck by dealing yourself face down encounter cards is fun. Him and Scarlet Witch vs Klaw + Energy Drain in a scenario I like to call "how long til we run out of acceleration tokens?"

Plus, a card that cares about Aerial. Finally! And a bunch of fun looking new Leadership stuff.

She-Hulk (aggression) and Hawkeye (leadership) vs Klaw and the Masters of Evil. Both She-Hulk and Hawkeye are great at dealing out damage, so it wasn't long before Klaw I was down and Klaw II was taking beating. I wasn't doing a lot of thwarting, so his scheme also advanced to phase 2.

Finally, there came a turn where both heroes were low on hit points (3 and 2) and needed to flip and recover. I felt like there was enough time to do a turn of recovery and then come back and focus on thwarting for a while, but I was wrong. Although I have gone back to playing basic instead of expert, I still left those three generic expert cards in the encounter deck. One came out for a heavy boost to scheming, and then a card that allowed Klaw to do some extra scheming came out and he drew another +2 boost and that was game over.

Captain America aggresion has been my jam the last few days, after he'd been on the shelf for a while. I've played him in all the other aspects and cakewalked through most everything. His kit is just so good. Agression games are a bit tighter but a lot faster.

guzikos wrote: Captain America aggresion has been my jam the last few days, after he'd been on the shelf for a while. I've played him in all the other aspects and cakewalked through most everything. His kit is just so good. Agression games are a bit tighter but a lot faster.

Direct repost of my reply from Nov 18 2020, misspelling and all. Robot?

Appreciate the heads up.

Had a couple of good games vs Expert Mutagen Formula lady night. Was planning justice Black Widow and aggression Ms Marvel. Been a while since I played Black Widow, and I had been wanting to run her again. She's not my favorite hero, but I do appreciate her different style with all the preparations.

First game we got completely wrecked. A few minions showed up, then back to back Goblin Reinforcement side schemes (+1 threat per goblin in play, +1 encounter card symbol), then Masterplan so each Goblin Reinforcements ended up with 10-11 threat in it. So basically we were playing heroic mode from like the second turn, and we got buried under garbage from the encounter deck without really ever being able to get out from under. Black Widow died and there were like 7 minions in the board, and we had done I think 4 damage to the villain

The salty runback went way better. The huge amount of excellent aggression allies worked in our favor, and basically we got set up and the board never really threatened to get out of control. Even the 8 encounter cards from flipping to stage 3 didn't hurt is particularly. What a difference the encounter deck shuffle can make.

Also, I figured out that I've been playing Jarnbjorn wrong due to (imo) poor wording in the Response section of the rules reference. You can only trigger it's effect once per attack. I need to run Black Panther aggression again soon and see how much that nerfs it. I feel it'll still be a great deck, since he's doing a bunch of attacks per turn with Wakanda Forever once he's set up.

Thor (Aggression) and Hawkeye (Leadership) against Klaw (non-expert) was going pretty well, but I got careless in the second half. I don't look at the villain decks carefully in advance, and the same goes for the nemesis modules, because I like to be surprised. I was doing well against Klaw, though he managed to move on to his second/final scheme shortly after we beat his first body down.

Then Hawkeye's nemesis Crossfire showed up via Shadows of the Past, and he has quickstrike for 2. Hawkeye takes a turn off to recover, letting Klaw build some momentum on scheming, which is already clocking in at 5 threat at the start of each villain turn. Hawkeye comes back, but tapped out due to his Villainous Past card, so he just manages to fire off a Cable Arrow for some threat reduction. Then Klaw hits Hawkeye, then a Crossfire event pops up, and it's a nasty sniper attack that "deals damage" instead of doing an attack, so nobody can do a Defense action and Hawkeye drops dead from the 3 points of damage.

I knew that I was screwed at that point, because Klaw was scheming so hard and Thor wasn't running a Justice deck. Plus Klaw still had 28 hit points. But I nearly always play out a losing game, so I can learn from my experience. And suddenly Thor was getting just the right cards at the right time: Defender of the Realm, Chase Them Down, and those 8-point hammer throws. So for three more turns, Thor heroically hung in there, smashing down minions with overkill hits and knocking down threat faster than even Klaw could scheme. But Thor got worn down to 3 hit points, so I decided to have him take a turn to Recover, on the assumption that Klaw and a couple of minions couldn't possibly scheme his way from to 4 to 16 threat in a single turn. I was wrong. Klaw starts his turn adding 5 threat. His minions scheme for 2 more. Then an encounter card allows Klaw to scheme again, for 4 more threat. And a side scheme meant another encounter card, plus Thor just had to shuffle his deck, making for a third encounter card. That third encounter added more threat and I was done.

Now that I have been schooled two games in a row by Klaw, I have learned my lesson. Knock down his threat level to zero as often as possible, and don't waste any resources on dealing damage unless that threat is at or near zero.

I am currently tackling the Red Skull campaign, with Captain America (Leadership), Black Panther (Protection), Spider-Woman (Justice/Aggression), and Hawkeye (Leadership). They are fighting Crossbow (basic), plus the experimental weapons and an excessive amount of Hydra.

It was a lot of fun at first, but things are going sideways now. I know that I am supposed to be gradually tooling up, then finishing off Crossbones I and then stomping through Crossbones II, but that plan doesn't work so well when all these Hydra guys keep getting in the way, and Crossbones is slinging around all this indirect damage with his machine gun. So far, the only nemesis in play is Viper, which amuses me because Viper eventually became the second Madame Hydra in comics.

We currently have Crossbones I down to 17 hit points, but Madama Hydra and four other Hydra goons are in play. Crossbones has just reached the third and final stage of his scheme deck, and my only ally left in play is a fresh Spider-man. Looks dark.

My strategic priorities have been: thwart the main scheme and then beat on Crossbones. But as Mike Tyson once said, "Everybody has a plan, until they get punched in the mouth." Or swarmed with goons, or shot with flamethrowers or a machine gun or both.

So Quicksilver finally arrived. I played through Rhino and Klaw on expert to try him out. I put together a stun lock prot build. Early game is a slow crawl, but once he's set up, he explodes like Iron Man. I will make a few tweaks, but I really like the first solo deck I put together for him.

I'm about halfway through a four handed run against Ultron with Quicksilver pro, Cap leadership, Hawkeye aggression, and Black Widow Justice, and his base stat line 3/3/3 thanks to the mods from Justice and aggression and he is just wrecking face.

Also, you mulligan for Frictionless resistance. It's more important than Hawkeye's quiver, Ant Man's helmet or Asgard. The difference once it hits the table is huge.

My quicksilver tracking number hasn't progressed past the "shipment info received by ups" stage, where it has been sitting since 2/4

I managed to turn around that Crossbones game. Cap and Spider-Woman had nice card engines up and running, but Black Panther and Hawkeye got whacked a few times on effects that made them discard upgrades and/or support. But I finally got them both running smoothly and Crossbones II got beat like a gong.

Then I rolled right into the Absorbing Man scenario. He's a neat villain in the comics, but his mechanical translation in this game falls a little flat. Game is only half-over, judging by his his points, but I feel confident about the outcome. Madame Hydra is back for more punishment.

I've never been a big fan of Spider-Woman in the comics, but she always had a snappy costume and I like the way she works in Marvel Champions.