Marvel Champions

Once I got sufficiently prepped, I went in for the win against Corvus Glaive and Proxima Midnight. Adam Warlock is still second-rate, but the rest of the team dealt out major damage. This will probably end up being the easiest of the five scenarios in the campaign.

Then I took on Thanos, along with his notorious Infinity Gauntlet and Black Order minions. Like the Red Skull, Thanos starts out with a side scheme that prevents him from taking damage until the side scheme is gone. Things were going along okay, except that Thanos is hitting us with a gauntlet effect on every other activation, plus he just hits hard in general. Then a couple of side schemes with the crisis (!) symbol came out. Then he got all five Black Order minions out on the same turn.

Right after we solved those problems and started making progress on the main scheme again, he had a big scheming turn and moved onto his second scheme. This triggered the infamous *Snap*. In the comics, half the population of the universe vanished. In the movie, lots of people turned to dust. In this game, the *Snap* forces each player to shuffle their discard pile back into their deck, then discard half their deck From The Game.

I decided to take a break for the evening, so I don't know how bad the snap will screw each of my heroes. Iron Man got 75% of his armor in play already, but not his arc reactor that allows him a free untap each turn, so that might be lost. Adam Warlock had a couple of very crucial support/upgrade cards that might be lost. Spectrum will probably be okay. Thor should be in pretty good shape, though he might not see Lady Sif again. Though it feels early, we might not need to start in on the violent beatdown now, possibly just leaving Iron Man to handle the thwarting.

Got in a few more turns against Thanos today. Starting to feel like I might win this one. Aside from the *Snap* and the ongoing +1/+1 bonus, the Infinity Gauntlet effects are tolerable. Thanos has a nasty group of minions (comparable to the Anachronauts), but Thor specializes in smacking down minions. Iron Man did lose his untap upgrade, but is doing a fine job of thwarting the main scheme, which is currently at 0. Monica managed to keep all of her allies and enough of her own power cards. Even Adam Warlock is finally pulling his weight, now that he has several of his personal upgrades in play. Thanos I is currently at 33 hit points, though he will get 112 hit points in his second stage. I think we can take him in 6 or 7 turns.

I forgot to mention that my previous game, against Proxima Midnight and Corvus Glaive did feature the early defeat of Adam Warlock. He got a little low on hit points near the end and got caught off card by a surprise attack from a treachery card. In previous games, I have found that losing a hero is only tolerable if the other heroes are close to victory. This time, I had to battle on for four more turns with just three heroes, but still won.

Thanos beat me, but it was a good game. We got him down to stage 2 at 54 hit points, but his main scheme was getting to be a problem. One of his Infinity Gauntlet cards requires discarding encounter cards until getting a minion and then putting it in play. That's brutal because Thanos only has like 4 or 5 minions in his deck, so it often leads to an empty deck and another acceleration token. We were also getting a lot of extra encounter cards, because a post-*Snap* deck is getting exhausted more often. With a hand size of 7 plus the Avengers Mansion in play, Iron Man was going through his deck every other turn.

Besides having a lot of hit points, Thanos sometimes gets healing from the Infinity Gauntlet and Tough status cards from boost effects. But my team should have been able to beat him, and I probably should have started pressing the attack a couple of turns sooner. One turn before the end, Thanos got a side-scheme with the crisis symbol, so we wasted a turn dealing with that. On the final turn, Thanos took out Iron Man due to a piercing/overkill attack followed by an Infinity Stone delivering a Quickstrike minion. Then he won by scheming, due to a couple of bonus activations from encounter cards plus an Infinity Gauntlet effect that delivered 3 extra scheme points.

After a loss, I sometimes switch out aspects to emphasize Justice and Aggression, but I don't think my current team needs that kind of adjustment. Spectrum is very flexible, capable of solid thwarting and big overkill attacks. I finally got her leadership combo working, where she brings out a few allies but keeps them alive, then plays Mighty Avengers to give them +1/+1, then plays Mass Attack (ideally paying for it with Band Together, which provides 1 resource per ally in play) to tap all her allies and add their ATK to her own for one big attack. Iron Man/Justice is great for thwarting, and also flexible enough to help clear minions. Thor is great at clearing minions and also dealing out some big attacks. I even got better at playing Adam Warlock, which means using his Battle Mage ability every turn and leaning into his big attacks and thwarts that require discarding cards from his deck.

Doing my Spectrtum/Warlock first MTS run.

Here's the rainbow leadership build i put together for Adam : marvelcdb.com/decklist/view/13982/adam-warlock-te-am-work-1.0

Spectrum is running tribal Avengers leadership deck - No doubt : Mighty Avengers is low-key bar-o-ken.

We cruised past Corvus and then his double date - Thanos was really good, the grind gave me some good critical thinking points were I was given a choice to push my luck with threat and risk losing half the deck, to make some build up plays that really payed off. It was super tense - At least 3 times mid game I was pulling boost card, and ending up 1 threat from getting SNAPPED. Good times

MTS made my cards go from 2 to 3 boxes, so I ordered one if those big BCW boxes to put them an in one. There's room to grow, and I figure once it outgrows this I'll supplement with the expansion/core boxes until I need another BCW one (assuming I keep going that long). I did a collage on the lid if the box and I think it came out looking pretty good!



(I don't think you can attach images here these days?)

Made up a Spectrum Aggression deck and Captain Marvel Justice deck to run through MTS, and played Ebony Maw last night. He sends like a really solid Villain to add to the rotation. Like a way less swingy/bad/annoying Nebula. I spent wayyyyyy too long stressing over keeping Cosmo alive, having misread his text as him being gone from the campaign once he leaves play not just gone from the current game. I was like "No puppy left behind!!!!!!!!!!!!" trying so hard to min/max my damage to kill the villain before Rubblestorm went off in 3 turns time and took out Cosmo. A treachery removed the last spell counter from Rubblestorm a turn before I would have saved him, and I was sad. Then I noticed he wasn't permanently gone, and there was much rejoicing.

Spectrum seems fine... I'm a little underwhelmed because she's basically a categorically worse Ant-Man, but she's still pretty fun. Not being able to flip forms at will felt pretty annoying not gonna lie. I didn't have the time to dig into an Adam Warlock deck building adventure, so I teamed her up with her thematic buddy Captain Marvel (who is also one of my favorite heroes in the game).

That's great work on the storage collage. It's always interesting to me seeing how people are storing their game.

I'm using the game boxes and will just stick with them for the time being. Though I do want to get a small box as a 'game box' that I can just grab when I want to play and that has the heroes, scenario and tokens etc I need stored in it. At the moment I have to grab the Red Skull box out every time I play. One side of the box has the stuff I'm playing while the other half has all my villains and modulars. So yeah, a small dedicated game box is on the list.

In other news my long-ago-ordered GMW's box finally made it through Auckland's border and got down to me a couple of days ago. I haven't had time to start the campaign yet so instead I just grabbed Rocket (just the pre-con) and subbed him into my current game.

So I've been playing Rocket and Wasp taking on Taskmaster the last few nights. I haven't taken him down yet but I'm really pleased to say how much fun it's been. He's a neat character to play, I dig the funny vibe to his cards, and I'm enjoying his mechanics.

It's really reinvigorated my enthusiasm for the game.

I love rocket, he's a ton of fun. I strongly recommend proxying Side Holster with him no matter what aspect you play him in, assuming Venom hasn't hit there yet. +1 restricted weapon slot is huuuuuuuuuuge for him. A few other cards from Guardian packs are great with him too, but Side Holster feels necessary.

Ah_Pook wrote: @Kmann, my #1 tip for the GMW scenarios is if you find them annoyingly hard try swapping out the modular sets. They really went off the deep end with incredibly annoying minions in basically all of the modular sets in that box. For example, swapping out Menagerie Medley for Temporal in the Infiltrate The Museum scenario made the scenario actually fun instead of just savagely punishing the last time I played it. Mainly getting rid of the 4 copies of the Psionic Ghost who comes into play when drawn as a boost card really helped.

@kmann just bumping this for you, seems apropos also another thing to note, Rocket is specifically punished HARD by the second scenario in the GMW campaign so... just a thing to know i guess. him, Black Widow, and Nebula are definitely on the no fly list for that scenario.

edit: also a friend of mine is coming over today andim going to teach him Marvel Champions, so thats pretty exciting. hes a huge marvel nerd, and at one point in time played some CCGs, so i think it should go down well. going to start a run through the MTS campaign with Venom (aggression) and Wasp (justice), since Venom is his favorite hero and ive been wanting to try out this new Wasp justice idea ive been kicking around based on some new cards from the last couple packs.

Just got through Hela. My favorite encounter so far. Really neat design. I have really enjoyed Mad Titans Shadow. It's in the same wheelhouse as ROTRS as far as difficulty, without the campaign adds being over the top.

I can't wait to set up Loki tonight.

I lost my second game to Thanos, again with standard decks of Iron Man (Justice), Adam Warlock, Spectrum (Leadership), and Thor (Aggression). This one wasn't even as close as my first game. Thanos feels very manageable at times, but occasionally the cards fall wrong and he schemes like crazy. We could still cope, except when his side scheme with the crisis symbol is in play. My team didn't even do much damage to him before the *snap*, and after that was just a tough slog until Thanos had another big scheming turn for the win.

Now I'm on game three with the same team. In the past, I have only struggled this badly against Red Skull and the custom scenarios for Maestro and Super-Adaptoid. Red Skull was beatable once I switched up the aspects for my team to focus completely on Aggression and Justice, but with Maestro and Super-Adaptoid, I was forced to switch up team members, too. But I still feel like my current team has the right stuff to beat Thanos. Iron Man and Spectrum are great at thwarting, and Spectrum and Thor are capable of big overkill attacks. Adam Warlock is possibly the best character in the game post-*snap* (except probably Dr. Strange), because his deck actually works better when smaller IF Soul World is in play.

I remembered there were suggested difficulty nerfs to make the scenarios more fun, so thanks Ah_Pook for saving a trawl through the posts.

One surprising problem in my third battle with Thanos is Loki. Thanks to Shadow of the Past, Loki showed up early on, and I have a really tough time getting rid of him. When you defeat the Loki minion, you discard an encounter card. If the encounter card is a treachery, you don't discard Loki and instead heal all of his wounds. I'm not sure how common treachery cards are with other scenarios, but it turns out that 50% of Thanos/Black Order/Standard cards are treachery. And in actual practice, Loki survived my first three attempts to defeat him, and then it took one extra attempt to defeat him the second time he entered play.

Just for a point of comparison, I picked a scenario that thematically shouldn't have an unusual amount of treachery: Rhino/Bomb Scare/Standard. Turns out that Rhino is slightly more treacherous, with 17/32 treachery cards.

Stupid reading comprehension.


I will use the rest of the required space to say, Warlock is a very weird beast. Once you have his kit set up he is very versatile.

I just rebuilt him using most of this framework -https://marvelcdb.com/decklist/view/13922/wild-tutor-adam-warlock-1.0

When I first read the deck it looked like a pile of jank - after playing him, it totally makes sense.