Marvel Champions

I'm not sure if they just overtuned the difficulty to appease people who thought the game was too easy, or of they consciously changed their difficulty goalposts or what. But Standard here feels like Expert everywhere else. I don't think precons are going to succeed against this campaign on standard. Personally I quite liked where they had the difficulty level before, so I'm not sure if massively increasing it was the move. That's just a first impression obviously but I don't want this to be LOTR or Arkham yknow.

Edit: not sure what amount of this feeling is coming from Rocket and Groot, though they don't seem like weak heroes.

boothwah wrote: Actually Justice Hawkeye was one of the decks I was thinking might fare pretty well for him. His sig ally bounces back to hand instead of discard and he can fire off thwart events for the scheme and still have loads of damage in his deck of arrows.

I don't think I'll ever be sending Black Widow in to infiltrate the museum....yikes.

Basically this campaign throws a wrench into the disposable ally chump blocking strats. Ronan has a bunch of overkill effects. I'm looking forward to deckbuilding for it.

I get my box Friday, and I'm planning on letting Cap prot, teamed with Quicksilver Justice get first crack at it.

The problem with Hawkeye is that his arrows will end up in the Collection. Dr. Strange will also be hosed because he will quickly lose his entire incantation deck. Besides the problem with allies, it now seems like all ally upgrades would be a poor choice against the Collector. One-shot upgrades like Adrenaline Rush or Civic Duty are also not good here.

Shellhead wrote:

boothwah wrote: Actually Justice Hawkeye was one of the decks I was thinking might fare pretty well for him. His sig ally bounces back to hand instead of discard and he can fire off thwart events for the scheme and still have loads of damage in his deck of arrows.

I don't think I'll ever be sending Black Widow in to infiltrate the museum....yikes.

Basically this campaign throws a wrench into the disposable ally chump blocking strats. Ronan has a bunch of overkill effects. I'm looking forward to deckbuilding for it.

I get my box Friday, and I'm planning on letting Cap prot, teamed with Quicksilver Justice get first crack at it.

The problem with Hawkeye is that his arrows will end up in the Collection. Dr. Strange will also be hosed because he will quickly lose his entire incantation deck. Besides the problem with allies, it now seems like all ally upgrades would be a poor choice against the Collector. One-shot upgrades like Adrenaline Rush or Civic Duty are also not good here.

Events don't go to the collection.

Okay that isn't as bad. But what about arrows played from Hawkeye's quiver?

Arrows in his quiver are played as if they were in your hand, so still no. If you had to discard your quiver while it had arrows in it then they would go into the collection (I think?). I don't think Strange's invocations could ever end up in there either. They aren't cards that are discarded from being in play. There are plenty of ways for random cards from the top of your deck to end up in the collection, but none of that interacts with the invocation deck.

I haven't looked closely at the individual Guardian decks yet, but is it possible that the interaction between those decks and the GMW scenarios makes the Guardians characters slightly more effective vs GMW than the Avengers decks?

I wondered about Strange's invocation cards being discarded from play because the top card is always displayed face up until Strange casts it.

Shellhead wrote: I haven't looked closely at the individual Guardian decks yet, but is it possible that the interaction between those decks and the GMW scenarios makes the Guardians characters slightly more effective vs GMW than the Avengers decks?

I don't think so from what I've seen. I think they just upped the difficulty across the board, basically turning Standard into Expert and Expert into getting stomped into oblivion. I've seen people saying they usually play on Heroic and they've been getting stomped by the standard campaign in GMW. That's fine I guess since I typically okay on expert, I can play on standard here. I think people that usually play on standard will be on for a rude awakening though.

I haven't tried any of the S-Tier characters here yet so maybe Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch will still waltz through this stuff, but even if so that's a testament to how good they are not to the relative difficulty of this campaign.

I don't enjoy deckbuilding, but I have a lot of experience with it from the various CCGs I have played over the years. One reason that I have avoided deckbuilding to play Expert level in Marvel Champions is that I suspect I would need to buy a lot more cards if I wanted an Expert deck for each hero. Because deckbuilding isn't fun, even just borrowing some cards from another deck is annoying.

It still annoys me that I don't have enough good basic cards to build a fifth deck from the core box, despite all the extra cards in the solo hero packs. Whenever I play She-Hulk, I just borrow the aspect and basic cards from Captain Marvel. If I ever see a hero deck on significant discount, I might just pick that up so I can finally have a ready deck for She-Hulk.

I may eventually buy some of the Guardians of the Galaxy decks. They all look pretty good, and distinctive from all the other hero decks. I don't know if I will ever buy this GMW set. And I will wait for reviews before buying any of the upcoming villain sets like Titan's Shadow or Sinister Motives. There can be a fine line in gaming between challenging and just frustrating, and I think GMW landed on the wrong side of that line.

jeb wrote: I'm not sure they have access to the Fantastic Four--I think the game licensing and film licensing are under similar rules, so you won't see certain heroes or bad guys in the MARVEL CHAMPIONS game until all that gets sorted. I can't think of another reason to not tap X-MEN before now. Wolverine always makes money.

I finally realized that the likely reason why Marvel Champions is not using the X-Men yet is X-Men: Mutant Revolution. FFG doesn't want to compete with itself right for X-fan dollars, so they likely want to wait until 2022, after they have sold as much X:MR as they can. As for the Fantastic Four, there is an MCU movie in development, so FFG will likely delay Fantastic Four expansions for Marvel Champions until sometime well before the actual release of the movie. Because of the poor performance of all past FF movies, it would be risky to delay until after the movie comes out.

i dropped the difficulty to Standard and played through both Collector scenarios. Felt like Expert, and I still lost the first attempt at the first Collector scenario. I'm glad theres fun to be had in this campaign, though i feel for people that liked to play on Standard before. There is nothing for them here.

The second Collector scenario is REALLY cool and different. You have to thwart down each stage of the main scheme (they start really high and you lose if any of them pop), and once they hit 0 you advance to the next stage of the main scheme. You win by advancing through all 3 stages. The Collector has very low HP (8/player on standard), and when you kill him you remove a bunch of threat from the main scheme and he flips to a form with 0ATK/0SCH and infinite hitpoints for the rest of the round then flips back with full HP. The stages of the scheme add in harder stuff as you go through them. Very cool design.

I'm still not sold on the first Collector scenario, mainly because you can only remove 1 card from the collection per player per round. If you flip a bunch of minions early you basically autolose, because you can't get out from under the collection. if that DOESNT happen though, its a really neat scenario.

Shellhead wrote:

jeb wrote: I can't think of another reason to not tap X-MEN before now. Wolverine always makes money.

I finally realized that the likely reason why Marvel Champions is not using the X-Men yet is X-Men: Mutant Revolution. FFG doesn't want to compete with itself right for X-fan dollars.

X-Men is the ace up their sleeve and I don't expect FFG to play it until sales start dipping and they need to give the game an enthusiasm bump. I'm sure they have their X-plan at least sketched out but Marvel Champions is riding high right now so I think it will be a fair while until the ace is played.

Personally I'd rather see characters like Ghost Rider, Moon Knight, Punisher, Daredevil etc before X-Men, but that's just me.

I've been looking at the GMW cards over at Hall of Heroes, and it does look like the Collector offers his own mini-campaign within the overall campaign arc of the set. It sounds like maybe the way to go with Collector's first stage is just a full assault on his hit points. I am hoping that maybe the groupthink at BGG is again wrong about this game, and that the increased difficulty of this set might be more manageable on Standard with 3 or 4 heroes in play. Their preferred mode is true solo or two-handed solo, but I sometimes like playing with more heroes because each hero has a specialized role to play based on their aspect. Aggression hero wipes the minions and pounds on the villain. Justice hero thwarts the main scheme and sometimes the side schemes. Leadership hero more reliably delivers the blockers while Protection hero is basically theMC equivalent of the D&D party cleric. And when some element slips out of control, two or more team members can focus on that for a turn or two to get things back on track. The only time that I've lost with a party of four is against the Red Skull, and he is a scheming bastard.

Kmann wrote:

Shellhead wrote:

jeb wrote: I can't think of another reason to not tap X-MEN before now. Wolverine always makes money.

I finally realized that the likely reason why Marvel Champions is not using the X-Men yet is X-Men: Mutant Revolution. FFG doesn't want to compete with itself right for X-fan dollars.

X-Men is the ace up their sleeve and I don't expect FFG to play it until sales start dipping and they need to give the game an enthusiasm bump. I'm sure they have their X-plan at least sketched out but Marvel Champions is riding high right now so I think it will be a fair while until the ace is played.

Personally I'd rather see characters like Ghost Rider, Moon Knight, Punisher, Daredevil etc before X-Men, but that's just me.

Good points. I too would like to see those solo heroes in action, especially Daredevil, who has had his own comic in circulation for over 50 years now. That's more than any solo X-Men can say, including Wolverine. Speaking of Wolverine, they could have slipped him into the phase one or phase two cycles since he was an Avenger for a while, though I agree with your assessment of the publication strategy.

As for Moon Knight and Punisher, I saw this amusing panel pop up in one of my Facebook groups today:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EEtdIygXYAE_AFY?format=jpg&name=large

Last night, I started a new game against the Wrecking Crew. BGG is all wrong about this scenario, because somebody expressed a strong opinion and they all just bought into it. Yes, you can try to manipulate the active villain in this scenario by selectively thwarting side schemes to influence the active villain trigger. And while you are doing that, the main scheme is advancing, and every single member of the Wrecking Crew has a couple of cards that can abruptly switch the active player to whoever has the least points on his scheme instead of the most. Half the team has cards to wreck your all your allies at once, and the other half of the team can cost you support or upgrade cards.

The Wrecking Crew first appeared in the original Defenders run, so I wanted to fight them with old school Defenders. But all I have is Dr. Strange, Hulk, and Hawkeye, who was a Defender for a handful of issues. But that's a pretty good team for MC even with their default decks, offering a mix of Protection, Aggression, and Leadership. Compared to some scenarios, Justice is more optional against the Wrecking Crew, since all of their scheming is in support of their side schemes which actually function more like battle strategies.



I only played for an hour last night, but it's going well so far. Piledriver is already out, and both Wrecker and Thunderball are currently both Stunned and Confused. However, my only ally in play is Clea, and a couple of the side schemes are about to blow up on me. So it could go either way. At any rate, my Defenders are fun to run as a team. Hulk deals out the hard hits. Hawkeye's various arrows often offer a flexible response to the current priority. And Doc's invocation deck is just great when the available spell is relevant, which is often the case. And when it isn't, he has few options for moving on to the next one.