Marvel Champions

Man, expert Ultron is a BEAST. I realized tonight I had never actually played vs him in expert mode, so I whipped up some decks and gave it a try. He absolutely crushed me twice. The first game took like 20 minutes due to some rough extra attacks, but the second one I made decent headway I thought. Once you flip to stage 3 though holy hell. Every time he attacks you you discard the top card of your deck and it becomes a drone minion, and in stage 3 they are all 2atk/2sch/2hp. The killer is Ultron can't take damage while any drones are in play during stage 3. I made two critical errors I think. 1) I think you need Stun badly, and I was sorely lacking it in the decks I whipped up. Cancelling attacks also cancels minions, which is huge. And 2) bringing Black Panther might have been a mistake, since he needs Wakanda Forever and Ultron mills your deck something fierce. I need to go back to the drawing board and come with some specific anti Ultron tech for next time. The second game ended on stage 3 with him up 4hp from his starting total. Fun villain, but brutal.

Edit: I just realized I made it WAY harder than it should have been. Ultron's stage 3 doesn't auto generate drones every attack any more. That right there probably turns our loss into a win tbh, since we wiped the drones he drops on you when he flips to stage 3 almost immediately. Mad at myself for that one

I have only gone up against Ultron (basic) once, with Thor (aggression), Iron Man (leadership), and Black Panther (protection). Although all three heroes had ways to address drones, the MVP was actually the War Machine ally. Not the Avenger version from the leadership aspect, the SHIELD version from the Iron Man deck who suffers 2 damage to deal out 1 damage to each enemy in play. Whenever the drones started to build up, War Machine would go on a strafing run and clear up the table. Black Panther kept him alive with a fairly steady supply of Med Teams and First Aid.

Alright well I did a salty runback vs expert Ultron lady night and lost 4 times in a row with correct stage 3 rules. One time we could have snuck a win with a clutch last minute Under Surveillance letting us get an extra turn before Countdown To Oblivion triggered the end of the game, but Ultron flipped Advance and crushed that brief glimmer of hope. Another time I thought we had it in the bag, but then a couple side schemes game out and Masterplan came out and suddenly we were playing on Heroic, and then double Upgraded Drones showed up and then double Advanced Drone minions showed up with guard and 4atk/7hp and well. My salt levels...

Also, I got a "pre-order shipping soon" notice for Scarlet Witch and I haven't received my pre-ordered copy of Quicksilver yet. Trying not to be too annoyed by the fucked state of shipping logistics everywhere these days, but man it's annoying.

Last night, I stopped by the Fantasy Flight Event Center. The vast gaming areas have been closed for nearly a year now, but the retail and kitchen areas re-opened last summer. I was out-numbered by helpful FFG staff 3:1, so I was in and out within five minutes. I think I got the last Quicksilver deck in the display, plus I also picked up Ant-Man and the Kang scenario pack. Scarlet Witch isn't available yet.

I'm also currently battling expert Ultron. I've added the Electro modular set and am running the classic combo of Ant-Man and the Wasp. Ant-Man is Protection and Wasp is Justice. I've barely used those aspects which is why I chose them for this challenge.

It had been a tough battle but after an hour I was heading for the win. I had scheme well under control and had him on the ropes with only 19hp to go. My previous attempt I'd lost before getting to level 3 so I was feeling fairly confident.

And then...

I'd been hit with a side-scheme that forced an extra encounter card each round and, on that same turn, had to reshuffle Ant-Man's deck meaning an extra encounter card as well. So all up Ant-Man had three encounters to deal with and Wasp had one.

Wouldn't you know it, that turn Ultron pulled both of the Yellowjacket tech upgrades (brought in from Ant-Man getting Shadows of the Past earlier - if Yellowjacket isn't in play the villain gets them) and he powered up to become an absolute beast. Each round he was scheming 7 (he already had an upgrade giving him one extra scheme making his total 7) and attacking for 8. This is before getting his boost cards!

Making matters worse was that the Ultron drones environment also ended up with two upgrades on it, so the drones which are usually 1 hit point/1hp were now 3 hit point/3 health...

And of course when Ultron is level 3 you can’t attack him at all if there are any drones on the board.

So yeah… he totally kicked my ass. I thought I had him but lol nope.

It was a fun game! I’ll make some deck adjustments and be out for revengeance tonight…

I'm still in the Red Skull campaign, running the default decks for Captain America (Leadership), Black Panther (Protection), Spider-Woman (Aggression/Justice), and Hawkeye (Leadership). We beat Absorbing Man and then the Taskmaster, and now we are up against Arnim Zola. His mutates are an ongoing hassle, but we are just about at mid-game and it looks like we will win this. We still haven't rescued our four allies in prison, but will hopefully get around to it in the second half.

It happened! I finally got Quicksilver in the mail

Going to try him out on stream tonight. Pretty excited, I think he looks super fun.

Edit: played 3 Quicksilver games with an Aggression deck I whipped up for him, and he's SUPER FUN. He actually got knocked out vs expert Rhino, since he's only got 9hp. After that I put a copy of Endurance and First Aid in in place of a couple copies of Tenacity and it worked out. I ran 3x Tenacity at first, which is a card I've never even been tempted to run before. Theoretically it seems perfect fit QS, but I never actually played them in practice. I hit 30 damage in a turn without really doing any crazy shenanigans. Jarnbjorn + Combat Training + Reinforced Sinew + Friction Resistance + a hand full of Always Be Running = big punches. Would have cleared 40 if I had had the card in hand that gives you +2 to your stats for the round. If you really leaned your deck into it with a bunch of Tenacity, Battle Rage, etc you could get that number up to wild amounts I'm sure. He seems like he would actually make Protection fun too, which hasn't been my experience with it prior. So yea, Quicksilver seems great.

A pre-order page somewhere leaked some Gamora deets, and shes looking real cool.

hallofheroeslcg.com/gamora/

She can include some number of off aspect attack and thwart events. Any hero with different deck building rules im here for. Plus Nebula as both her signature Ally and Nemesis is fun.

Quicksilver is DOPE AF. Probably one of my top three.

Kang can fucking eat one though, struggling with that scenario. It’s pretty neat though.

Very excited about the GOG stuff coming. And Wanda.

"It happened! I finally got Quicksilver in the mail" - We're still waiting in NZ. It hasn't exactly been a speedy arrival.

I really dig the Kang scenario with its three part story. Feels like a complete little adventure as opposed to just a standard battle. I hope future scenario packs continue to be inventive like this.

But yeah, he's tough. His modular set is no push over either when added to other scenarios.

The Kang modular sets are so good. I really like playing Crossbones with all the of the Kang modulars. Anachronauts in particular is a fun one. The minions are nasty, and they all have brutal boost effects too.

Speaking of that, I need to try Crossbones with three of the Green Goblin modulars and see how that goes. Power Drain, Running Interference, and A Mess of Things seem like it would be a real cluster.

I have the Kang set now, and I swooned when I saw the Macrobots. A neat reference to the epic Kang/Celestial Madonna storyline of the mid-'70s. I was also pleased to see Rama-Tut and the Scarlet Centurion. I'm hoping to run Cap's Kooky Quartet against Kang, so hopefully Scarlet Witch is available soon.

Last night, I had a very satisfactory ending to the Arnim Zola scenario. I am anticipating that Red Skull will be a supremely scheming bastard, so I challenged myself to vigorously police Arnim Zola's main scheme. It probably dragged things out a bit, but we never let Zola advance to his second scheme. Near the end of the game, we had Zola down to 10 hit points, but then he cranked out five mutates with enhancements, and three of them had the Guard trait that would prevent two of our heroes from attacking Zola directly. It came down to Cap with a mighty shield toss, taking out the last two mutates plus Zola. Best of all, I was listening to Queen, and Cap's shield toss coincided with the final notes of We Are The Champions. (I am working on a two-disc mix of music from the MCU movies, but I plan to add We Will Rock You and We Are The Champions.)

As I cleaned up and set the table for the Red Skull finale, I saw that previous elements of the campaign were coming into play. Experimental weapons that came into play in the first scenario are back. It took us forever to put down Absorbing Man, so his 13 advance tokens translated into 13 starting threat on Red Skull's main scheme. Good thing that we put down all remaining minions in the couple of scenarios, as they would have turned into additional setup challenges against the Red Skull. I have a bad feeling about Red Skull. That Side Scheme deck promises trouble, and he gets +ATK for every side scheme in play. That plus a couple of attachments, and it's going to be lots of damage. At least we managed to rescue a couple of nice zero-cost allies previously. Shang-Chi is good at both combat and thwarting, and Elektra is murderous. It amuses me that Elektra ended up in Cap's deck, as he would not at all be happy about teaming up with an assassin.

So I had two friends over for a much smaller and quieter Boothcon this year. I did wrangle them into letting me get my Bday wish of playing Champions with other people! We played through the RoTR campaign as Captain Marvel, Black Panther, and Ant-Man. It was a gas. Black Panther player ditched leadership after two rounds and found much more joy in protection. I ran Cap Aggression for the first 4 and then switched to leadership for Skull. Ant-Man was Justice all the way through and we let him mine 3 of the 4 allies to replace the lackluster allies that Justice has. There was a tense moment on every fight other than Absorbing Man, but we ultimately powered through it without ever letting any schemes flip other than Crossbones first scheme.

Standard is a perfectly fine difficulty when playing with peeps that don't live and breathe this game - We all had a great time.

Standard is just right for me...expert games have been pretty heavy on the L..I don’t do super heavy deck building, really just kind of slapping stuff together thematically or because it seems cool/combo-y. No netdeckiing here...but maybe over time I’ll get more use out of the expert stuff.