Marvel Champions

Bunch of stuff getting spoiled for the next wave of heroes, and they sound really fun I think. Ant-Man and Wasp have three sided identities, with tiny and giant hero forms. Ant-Man gets bonus damage and thwart when he flips, so he always wants to be flipping. Wasp gets either to spread her damage to targets as she wants, or bonus damage depending on her form, so she tactically wants to be in one form or the other depending on her cards. Quicksilver's whole thing is readying a thousand times, and boosting his stats so using his ATK or THW 3+ times in a turn really adds up. I'm in on all of that.

Edit: they're adding a Power of X card for grey cards also, which could help lead to some neat Basic decks maybe?

hallofheroeslcg.com/ if you want to see all the spoiled cards

Speaking of which,

www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2020/...cord-breaking-speed/

Highlight: Multiple Man ally, the first non unique ally, comes with 3 copies. When you play one you can search your deck and put another one into play for free. That's just fun.

As a long-term comic fan who was raised on Marvel, this game looks appealing, and seems to overcome a number of issues that previous superhero games failed to overcome. But it also looks like a money treadwell, and I am still paying off major bills from 2019, and will continue to do so through next year.

Yea, it's less egregiously punishing to get into than other LCGs (largely because you only need one core set and it's only been around for a year) but it's still a hole to endlessly throw money into. It's about a $200 buy in for everything right now, and then $15-20 a month for new stuff after that. Some people will tell you you can just buy the hero packs you want, and that is technically true, but realistically you will want all the things if you enjoy the game.

You might wait until some bigger lots move in a year or something and just call that the whole game.

I tried out the Wrecking Crew scenario tonight. It's fun, but it also seems really easy to manage the threat which kinda takes the edge off the whole thing. Feels like it's almost there design wise, but needed a kicker to get it there. Some way to actually threaten the main scheme. Some way to integrate modular sets would be nice also. All that said, it's still a cool scenario.

Hero wise I ran Justice Iron Man (who crushed, but ended up with WAY more thwarting than was actually necessary) and Leadership Captain America (who also crushed). Jessica Jones is wildly OP vs Wrecking Crew, then Cap brought her back with Make The Call and gave her more HP to keep her around. First time I've run Iron Man, he seems fun. No tech upgrades in the Justice card pool currently is sad though.

Edit: I think playing Heroic vs Wrecking Crew might be the ticket. Their win condition seems to be running through their tiny villain decks and putting 3-4 acceleration tokens on the main scheme, and going through the decks twice as fast would certainly help. Will have to rematch them and try that sometime soon.

Edit: it could be as simple as discard the top 5 cards of each villain deck during setup, if one doesn't want to deal with the double encounter cards of Heroic. Or even simpler just don't use Jessica Jones lol.

From the general board games thread:

Ah_Pook wrote: We played through the entire Rise of Red Skull campaign box of Marvel Champions and it was a fucking blast. 5 games, 5 wins, took about 6 hours all told. I'm going to post significantly more detailed impressions in the Champions thread, but the short of it was all 5 villains were really fun and felt different. The campaign mechanics were light but were just enough to feel impactful and fun.

Alright so, we played through with Justice Iron Man and Aggression Ms. Marvel . Both decks worked extremely well, and I think Ms. Marvel might be my favorite hero I've played with so far. Her support Personas and having to juggle constantly back and forth from alter ego/hero to utilize them is really fun to pilot, and recurring attack events for huge damage is never not fun. The deck I built for her there is some setup cards and then pretty much all aggression attack events. Embiggened Melee for 5+5 damage, tap Ms Marvel to get it back, play it again for 3+3, fully charged Hall of Heroes in a single turn, flip to Alter Ego and prep for a nuclear turn next round when you use all her personas and HoH to get a zillion extra cards... Yea that all feels really good to do.

Villains: Crossbones, Absorbing Man and Taskmaster were fun slight twists on the basic villain formula. Rescuing heroes from Taskmaster is a fun thematic bit, as they will team up with you after you rescue then. Zola is a real jerk, with Retaliate 1 and an army of upgrading minions to throw at you. Really fun, and I love the thematic bit where your signature allies start captured in his prison. Very good villain, and he will be fun/nasty to replay with different modular sets. Red Skull was a blast. His side scheme deck is so fun. Plus he will really show off different modular sets, since their side schemes will constantly be in play. Red Skull + Modok... Nightmare scenario there. Overall a bunch of very fun villains, and the difficulty felt really nicely tuned on standard. Things got dicey, and obviously could have gone bad depending on how cards came out etc, but once you got your hero boards established you generally could dig out and carry the day.

Campaign mechanics: I really enjoyed how this was implemented. Based on how you do in a few parts you will get bad cards in the encounter deck going forward, or good cards in your hero deck going forward. Thats pretty much it, and I like that. It's just enough to feel like things are connected and to feel fun, but not enough to make you feel like you're missing out on stuff if you play standalone instead of campaign. I might replay on expert mode, where your HP carries over mission to mission, but honestly my urge to play 6 hrs straight through of this game is pretty low most of the time so yknow.

I haven't tried Hawkeye or Spider Woman yet. Soon!

The picture is the board at the end of the Red Skull scenario.

Edit: Villain MVP of the campaign has to go to Absorbing Man, who wildly improbably schemed for 15 threat in a turn. He came up literally one threat short of making us instalose, and that only because Iron Man had turned off his +1 scheme absorbtion power kind of as an after thought at the end of his previous turn. He had like 5HP left and we easily popped him immediately afterwards, but man he had some serious shenanigans up his sleeve on that last turn.

I'll give a proper rundown of my campaigns when I'm on my pc. I've had a blast with the campaign, too.

Just did my first expert run last night with prot cap and Hawkeye. Who went aggression on everything except Taskmaster (leadsrship) and Skull (Justice). I went into Red Skull with 5 delay counters, only rescued one captive, started with Hawkeye missing 1 health, we had burnt 1 of our techs on Zola, and managed to beat him with no minions engaged. Red Skull still cycled through his side schrme deck and we beat him round 10. Good good fun.

Holy crap, standalone expert Zola with a minion heavy modular set is BRUTAL . Going to have to run that one back but we got absolutely curb stomped. Iron Man took too long to get his board running so he could handle the side schemes that were wrecking us, and Ms Marvel couldn't get any breathing room to help with threat with the absolute onslaught of minions.

Edit: I think having a justice hero that can hit the ground running will be important for the salty runback. Starting with a nasty side scheme and nasty minions in play really hurts if a hero needs to spend 2-3 turns faffing around at the beginning.

Expert Zola + Hydra Patrol runback report: still lost with aggression Ms. Marvel and justice Captain Marvel, though it was very close. I threated out by 1 about 2/3 through. I would have been okay if I had flipped anything but a 3 boost card on a scheme activation, so naturally that's what I flipped. I played out the rest just to see, and squeaked out a win if I had flipped a 2 instead of a 3. That guy is a real big jerk 0_0

I have not messed with deck building yet. Just been playing the decks out of packs. I am most excited to build for Spider Woman. I love her deck construction rules.

Any ideas on how you would try building her out?

Ah_Pook wrote: Holy crap, standalone expert Zola with a minion heavy modular set is BRUTAL . Going to have to run that one back but we got absolutely curb stomped. Iron Man took too long to get his board running so he could handle the side schemes that were wrecking us, and Ms Marvel couldn't get any breathing room to help with threat with the absolute onslaught of minions.

Edit: I think having a justice hero that can hit the ground running will be important for the salty runback. Starting with a nasty side scheme and nasty minions in play really hurts if a hero needs to spend 2-3 turns faffing around at the beginning.

My only run at expert Zolo, so far, was in my duo campaign with Cap and Hawkeye - I popped one of my tech's for 5 cards right off the bat - Hawkeye did most of the damage and my cap was prot, and basically did threat control and minion mop up. Once I'm done with my current campaign, I think I want to run some decks through the expert gauntlet with him - He is a really good fight. I'm thinking Doomsday chair with Zola is probably end game boss right now.

Bernie wrote: I have not messed with deck building yet. Just been playing the decks out of packs. I am most excited to build for Spider Woman. I love her deck construction rules.

Any ideas on how you would try building her out?

If you run her partnered, there are implications, but I would try to make sure there is a decent amount of card draw opportunities if only because she is SO much better when she has access to both aspects in the turn. It's important to "not miss" as much as possible. So cheaper stuff, but including card draw to make sure you can access both aspects on the regular, even if in Hero form (ie, drawing fewer cards).

jeb wrote:

Bernie wrote: I have not messed with deck building yet. Just been playing the decks out of packs. I am most excited to build for Spider Woman. I love her deck construction rules.

Any ideas on how you would try building her out?

If you run her partnered, there are implications, but I would try to make sure there is a decent amount of card draw opportunities if only because she is SO much better when she has access to both aspects in the turn. It's important to "not miss" as much as possible. So cheaper stuff, but including card draw to make sure you can access both aspects on the regular, even if in Hero form (ie, drawing fewer cards).

What jeb said. I ran her as agression/justice - Clear the area and Press the Advantage (included in her starter) are great cards in that they do something and usually draw a card.

I also built her as aggression/leadership and ran her through the standard campaign solo - it was a cakewalk - I went with an Avengers theme and I think I ran 12 allies (all agression avengers sans Herc + the leadership goodstuff cheap dudes)- Avengers tower, quincarrier, heli + 2 x finesse was letting me drop two allies a turn for free. Earth's mightiest heroes was the mvp.

boothwah wrote: [quote="Ah_Pook
My only run at expert Zolo, so far, was in my duo campaign with Cap and Hawkeye - I popped one of my tech's for 5 cards right off the bat - Hawkeye did most of the damage and my cap was prot, and basically did threat control and minion mop up. Once I'm done with my current campaign, I think I want to run some decks through the expert gauntlet with him - He is a really good fight. I'm thinking Doomsday chair with Zola is probably end game boss right now.

We popped the 5 card tech at the start of Zola in the campaign as well. Expert Zola + Doomsday Chair is *vomit*. He's already savage with a minion heavy modular. I've been running Hydra Patrol, and the minion spam is crazy. A 12HP Modok with Retaliate 2, Guard and that you have to kill twice... Yeesh.