So good. I really hope they come to the game sooner rather than later.
I agree about Wrecking Crew. I think its a fun scenario to bring out and one that gets a lot of unwarranted bad buzz. It's fun to play and is a nice remix of the typical formula. My first run at them they smashed my power duo of Hulk and She-Hulk who I had been riding high with until then. lol. I think I ended up beating them on the third try.
Finished the Wrecking Crew fight last night. Bulldozer really dominated the game, and was the last one defeated. His combat technique is primarily focused on a combination of attachments that give him a base Attack of 6, Overkill, and milling the hero decks. In the past, my reaction to Bulldozer was that the milling was nothing more than a faint annoyance yielding an occasional extra encounter card. But with him holding the center stage for so long, my heroes were constantly dumping anywhere from 3 to 10 cards. The cumulative effect was that I never even got to play certain important cards, like the Eye of Agamotto or that Hulk card that gives him extra hit points and Retaliate 1. And thanks to the milling plus Thunderball, I often had zero allies on the table.
Having already dispatched Piledriver the previous night, we took out Thunderball next. But then the Wrecker surprised us (a Bulldozer wrecking card allowed the Wrecker a surprise attack) and stomped an undefended Hawkeye right out of the game. Normally, losing a hero is a disaster for the good guys, but Hulk and Dr. Strange were both able to deal a lot of damage that turn and take the Wrecker down. That left a tough Bulldozer who had managed to claw his way back to full hit points, but Hulk and Dr. Strange finally got him.
This is the first appearance of the Wrecking Crew:
I taught @sornars this yesterday on TTS and we took the decks I've been using in the GMW campaign (minus their campaign specific upgrades natch) up against expert Klaw w/ the Anachronauts. Playing these guys outside the campaign really accentuates the jump in difficulty, because they dominated Klaw. I noticed a few optimizations I wanted to make in Rockets deck while I was playing him, but on the whole it was quite a successful outing.
I'll let sornars elaborate if they are so inclined, but man I really like the turn to turn puzzle each hand presents you in this game (which cards to play now, which cards to pay for them with, etc). Eventually one day I'll try a 4p game and see how that feels.
I was describing to Ah_pook that I was tempted to go all into this game earlier this week given that I like the theme and I suspected that I'd like the game given my fondness for Arkham. My local retailer had just done an a full restock meaning I could get a complete set of the system without hunting for months on end. To that end, I'm very glad I got to play it before doing so thanks to Ah_pook walking me through my first game.
I definitely found the one turn optimisation puzzle of hand management interesting, the lack of variance (and ample card draw) is key to making this puzzle work in my opinion. As there is no source of randomness except for the card draws themselves, once you have your cards in hand there's nothing else to do with them but play them. This fought against my card gaming instincts (or maybe it's just the control player in me) as a I'm trained to think that a card in hand was an option and therefore getting rid of useful cards is kind of wasteful. In this game (or at least the decks played) spending all of your cards is the default expectation and holding cards generally seems to be a waste.
I suspect Ah_pook is a pretty good deckbuilder (and player) as at no point did I feel like we were in any danger of losing. Groot's role as a tank was straightforward to play into as between his growth counters and health I don't think I ever dropped below 12+ hits from death and as the primary character dealing with threat, repeatedly playing "I Am Groot" to remove ~10 threat every round or two seemed more than adequate to managing the villain's scheme. Rocket, even with thrwarting being a secondary priority, was also excellent at managing the smaller side schemes when needed.
While the optimisation puzzle is fun, I think it removes some of the potential drama from the game. When I play Arkham, every time I reach into the choas bag I do so with trepidation; it's an amazing moment of relief or regret when I barely pass a test I shouldn't have or auto fail a test I was supposed to breeze through. When bad cards came off the top of the deck from Marvel, the feeling I got was one of "ok, how do we deal with this new problem in front of us most efficiently". I think the strong decks played into that feeling as between the two of us, I was confident that we had the tools to deal with almost everything in front of us so tension remained relatively low. I think I enjoy the probability management of Arkham much more than the board management emphasis of Marvel.
I recognise that that may sound like a pretty negative review but I actually really enjoyed the game and would happily play this again; however, I'm glad I played before impulse buying in as I think Arkham is the superior game for me. I look forward to getting some more games of Marvel in to solidfy my thoughts, I just wish the game was more evocative of being a super hero!
Edit: To elaborate on being a super hero, one thing I noticed is that we were flipping between Hero and Alter Ego form to manipulate the villain to our own ends rather than feeling forced to do so by the machinations of the villain. Only at the end game was there a tough decision to be made about which side to stay on in order to trade off between my ideal plan and what would help manage the villain.
sornars wrote:
Edit: To elaborate on being a super hero, one thing I noticed is that we were flipping between Hero and Alter Ego form to manipulate the villain to our own ends rather than feeling forced to do so by the machinations of the villain. Only at the end game was there a tough decision to be made about which side to stay on in order to trade off between my ideal plan and what would help manage the villain.
Great write up, totally fair assessment. I personally like the lack of randomness vs Arkham, as i found that game extremely frustrating I do think playing Groot vs Klaw might have colored your perception somewhat, as not every character has a renewable ablative shield to basically ignore the villain attacking them plus Klaw had singularly weak attacks against us for the entire game when he has the potential to really go nuts w/ the Anachronauts backer. If your hero has 1 defense and 9hp, you have no allies in hand, and the villain has the potential to attack you for 11 in a single attack it changes the math a little for having to flip down to Alter Ego etc. All that said, I do think your points are totally valid. You usually have the tools to deal with the things the game hits you with, and puzzling out the correct line of how play your hand is the heart of the game. The variables are usually pretty knowable, and if that lack of drama is a sticking point there not much that's going to change that feeling. Though I do recommend playing some harder content before totally writing it off
Happy to give some harder content a try in our next time around ! To be clear, any harder and the decisions would've been even more opaque so I'm grateful for not having to slow down the puzzle with that burden during my first time through.
I'd also like to go a few rounds two handed solo to get a feel for the precon decks in the base as I think that'll give me a taste of the difference in strength between a well built deck and a generic one.
I finished out the GMW campaign tonight. Nebula was fun, I feel like she didn't fire off her really nasty stuff on me but I saw the potential. She seems like she'll be fun to play outside the campaign. She supes up her attacks with techniques which fire off special stuff, and she has the potential to stack loads of them up and get really nasty.
Also, Ronan. Holy CRAP Ronan. Ronan is a BEAST, and not really even in any interesting ways. He hits SUPER HARD, he dumps tons of extra encounter cards and boost cards on you, he was ways to get overkill and piercing... hes just hard as shit. He killed me on the first turn of the first game against him, so... yea. My second game was a serious grind, as I think any game against him will be. I finally ground him down, but he never lets you get comfortable. I actually won on the final possible turn before I died, as I was at 4 and 1 HP and he had an attachment that gave him Overkill and Piercing for 3 attacks. Plus he has lots of nasty ways to stop you from removing threat from the main scheme, and it gets tons of threat every round, so the main scheme would threat out if I flipped down to not die. My only line to do the damage required that round was to fire everything off, then play Hulk ally and specifically flip a Wild resource for him to do 3 extra damage. Incredibly, I flipped a Wild and won. I think I lose that game 9/10, and was lucky to have survived that long.
So... I'm not sold on him as being a fun villain. But he's certainly hard as hell so thats something I guess. I have no idea how you could stand against him on Expert tbh.
The following user(s) said Thank You: sornars, Kmann
The more I hear about GMW the more I'm finding myself on the fence about purchasing it.
I don't mind a challenge. For example I'm still banging my head against expert Klaw with the Anachronauts modular and I spent almost a month battling expert Mutagen Formula with the Kang Master of Time modular before tasting that sweet, sweet victory and probably an equal amount of time taking on expert Ultron before that.
I'm used to getting the smackdown, dusting myself off and going at it again. It's frustrating for sure but I can see minor progress and I know it's going to be so great when I finally KO Klaw.
I expect expert to be tough and I have no qualms or pride around dropping back to Standard for GMW but Ronan especially just sounds like a drag.
From what I'm seeing with comment around GMW it appears the difficulty has skyrocketed in not fun ways. Even accounting for the usual online complaining, the vocal "true solo" players and those who think they should be able to beat everything on their second run it still sounds like GMW has misread the room.
I've been amped for this new campaign since it was announced but now I'm not so sure about it. It still hasn't got a release date here so I've got plenty of mulling time.
Sorry, there's no real point to this, just verbalising thoughts, but I have been enjoying the more grounded takes on the campaign here from those that are playing it.
Is recommend watching the ronan fight at least, because he's ridiculous. I'll post some more thoughts when I have time later, but I would strongly caution buying this if expert Klaw is giving you that much trouble tbh. Unless you just like getting brutalized I guess
The following user(s) said Thank You: Gary Sax, Kmann
I've been trying to avoid GMW spoilers but I've read so much now I'll check those out.
I've beaten expert Klaw before, but with an easier modular set than the Anachronauts and with my favoured aspects. Some of the problem I've been having is that I set myself the challenge of playing with heroes I hadn't played much and then also using the Justice and Protection aspect combo, as I'd barely touched either of those.
Justice is great with Klaw obviously but I'm still getting to grips with the Protection play style and building a deck with it for this scenario.
@sornars--I just picked up DUNWICH HORROR and RETURN TO DUNWICH for AH LCG. My FLGS had a restock on that, and I was wondering if there are any must-haves for that game. I also have been frustrated by the difficulty of AH LCG, it's really hard for me, so maybe I am not getting something. Any sets give assets that can help me out?
I am caught up on MARVEL CHAMPIONS. I can wait on GMW, and want to work through some of the older stuff a little more. I feel like I want have better chops before tangling with the big boys, haha.
I am currently running Cap's Kooky Quartet through the Red Skull campaign on standard difficulty. I just finished defeating Crossbones last night, and am starting to think that I need some Aggression in the mix. The default decks are Cap (Leadership), Hawkeye (Leadership), Scarlet Witch (Justice), and Quicksilver (Protection). Cap, Hawkeye, and Wanda can all occasionally kick out some good damage, but nothing like Thor or Hulk on Aggression.
Sometimes there are distractions while I am playing, like shirts to iron or my cat jumping up on the table. So once in a great while, I will mess up and discard cards in the wrong pile. It's easy to sort out when I discard a villainous encounter card in a hero's discard pile. And now I realize that even a wrongly-discarded hero card is easy to sort out. Just squint and look at the fine print at the bottom of the card, and you will see a symbol that identifies the hero deck it came from, even if it's a basic or aspect card. For example, all of Cap's default deck has a little circular shield with a star in the middle. That's very thoughtful.
jeb wrote: @sornars--I just picked up DUNWICH HORROR and RETURN TO DUNWICH for AH LCG. My FLGS had a restock on that, and I was wondering if there are any must-haves for that game. I also have been frustrated by the difficulty of AH LCG, it's really hard for me, so maybe I am not getting something. Any sets give assets that can help me out?
If you want to post in the dedicated Arkham thread, I would love to help, too. Quick answer is any of the starter decks (Arkham’s answer to the Marvel hero packs) are a great buy for a huge infusion of player cards.
I'm still not interested in deckbuilding for this game. The card pool is still fairly shallow, and I don't feel there are enough good cards for me to build an expert-level deck for each hero and be done with it. Swapping cards from one deck to another is not too terrible if I just do an entire aspect from one deck to another, but anything more than that becomes a not-fun task that prolongs setup time.
The base set includes five heroes, but only enough cards for four decks. There are four of each basic card, so obviously each deck should get one, and there are four decks worth of aspect cards, so clearly each deck will be one of the four aspects. I arbitrarily assigned them as follows: Spider-man (Justice), Black Panther (Protection), Iron Man (Leadership), and that left Captain Marvel and She-Hulk to take turns using an Aggression deck.
I thought that if I bought enough of the hero expansion decks, I could put together a decent set of basic and aspect cards to make that fifth deck, but the extra basic and aspect cards from those expansion often seem too specialized, requiring a tuned deck to make them effective. So I ended up looking into a couple of online sellers of single cards for Marvel Champions. Asgard Gate seemed mostly stocked out, so I ended up buying cards from Crazy Jackelope. I bought one each of the all the basic cards from the starter set, except that Jackelope didn't have any Helicarriers in stock. I also bought a bunch of Aggression cards in quantities matching the starter set, though Jackelope didn't quite have enough of some. So I bought a few other Aggression cards that looked generally useful, like Melee and Into The Fray. Since they didn't have any Hulk or Tigra ally cards in stock, I bought Wasp (Janet Van Dyne) and Thor (Jane Foster), which are from the Wasp deck that I will probably never buy. Anyway, all these new cards will now go into my standard She-Hulk deck. while Captain Marvel gets to keep the Aggression deck from the base set.
I don't really deckbuild a TON, but I do it a little, especially after getting rolled or if I want to try a new aspect out with a Hero, but like you said, that often ends up a swap more than a build.
There are officially some cards that make decks now though, with WASP and ANT-MAN and those Team-Up cards, whatever those are called. You need to build a team with the decks in mind for those. I think the pool is large enough now to tolerate a good deal of tuning, at least, and that allows FFG to step up difficulty.
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So good. I really hope they come to the game sooner rather than later.
I do think playing Groot vs Klaw might have colored your perception somewhat, as not every character has a renewable ablative shield to basically ignore the villain attacking them 
plus Klaw had singularly weak attacks against us for the entire game when he has the potential to really go nuts w/ the Anachronauts backer. If your hero has 1 defense and 9hp, you have no allies in hand, and the villain has the potential to attack you for 11 in a single attack it changes the math a little for having to flip down to Alter Ego etc. All that said, I do think your points are totally valid. You usually have the tools to deal with the things the game hits you with, and puzzling out the correct line of how play your hand is the heart of the game. The variables are usually pretty knowable, and if that lack of drama is a sticking point there not much that's going to change that feeling. Though I do recommend playing some harder content before totally writing it off 
