Marvel Champions

I am still just playing untuned starter decks, but I eventually came to appreciate the Adam Warlock starter deck. Surprising number of allies for a deck that isn't specifically running Leadership aspect. Pip is probably the best 2-point ally in the whole game, but only Adam gets to put him in a deck. I like the aspect resource cards that give a little freebie when you spend them, and they make more sense for this deck then the usual aspect resource cards that give two resources when paying for a card of the same aspect. He has attack, thwart, and a card to fetch an ally that all involve discarding cards, so he churns through his deck faster to speed up tokens on Soul World. The occasional extra encounter card is a small price to pay for complete healing from Soul World.

A recurring problem is that Adam needs a hand size of six to really benefit from his battle mage ability. He often draws a good 2pt card and a good 1pt card, then needs to spend two cards and tap his staff for one more resource, leaving him with no cards to discard for his battle mage ability. Or he can toss a card for battle mage and then maybe get a card or two for free if he has the right upgrades in play. The cosmic entity cards are funky, and help shrink the deck to take better advantage of Soul World, but I would like them better if not for the card backing problem and the fact that they cost 2 each. One other thing to watch is to try to avoid doing discards his first time through his deck, in order to not skip over his crucial upgrades and supports.

Heimdall also seemed like an excessively expensive ally for Thor, but I finally discovered his value. Defeating the Loki nemesis/minion can be a real hassle for Thor, with possibly less than a 50% chance of actually defeating him due to the chance of drawing a treachery card. Bring out Heimdall and you have an outstanding chance of rigging the encounter deck so that the next card or two won't be a treachery card. Then you can defeat Loki with complete confidence.

I am used to getting all the setup cues from side 1A of the main scheme, but playing in campaign mode requires consulting that campaign's rule book for additional setup info. Even so, I seem to have completely overlooked how Black Swan enters the game. But I am having such a tough time with Thanos that I am not willing to start over with my current campaign. Part of the problem is that the Victory Display concept was apparently explained in Galaxy's Most Wanted, and I don't have that set.

Victory display is just a set aside out of play area - GMW has a mechanic where you added the victory points up to buy cards from the market place at the end of a run- It is recycled in MTS, primarly to use the out of play area. If a card has Victory x, when it is defeated, it will go to the victory display, rather than any relevant discard pile.....So you only have to deal with it once. Victory is much shorter than "remove this card from play once defeated" plus, there are cards that use the victory pile contents for checks/triggers.

Shellhead wrote: . Even so, I seem to have completely overlooked how Black Swan enters the game.

She enters play when you defeat the Save The Shawarma Place side schemes in scenario 2. She's the back of that card, like Cosmo was the back of the side schemeb in scenario 1.

I got the giant pile of stuff from jpat yesterday, and I immediately feel like I am in way over my head. I'm not even sure where to start eating this elephant. After moving cards around, figuring out how I want to organize it, etc., I've settled on a couple of decks to just start playing with. One is the Spider-Man starter deck, and the other is a modified She-Hulk one. I've not even really had a chance to play a proper game yet, since I've been organizing cards for most of the last day and I'm a little fried.

Still, I did just order the War Machine deck. Maybe that Covid booster is affecting my judgment...

One of us one of us

I recommend netdecking some stuff from marvelcdb.com while you learn the card pool, or just in general if you don't feel like futzing with the deck building. Also the Red Skull campaign is great and simple to play through (ie the scenarios are straightforward wrt extra mechanics, and the added campaign stuff is very low overhead). Its great once you settle on a few decks you want to take through it.

I can't remember what all was in that MC lot that you bought, but I recommend learning with the base set heroes and playing scenarios in order of publication. Not because there is any direct linkage between the standalone scenarios and the campaigns, but because the complexity ramps up a bit over time. Except skip Galaxy's Most Wanted until after you tackle Mad Titan's Shadow.

With the base set, Rhino is the easiest, Klaw is moderately challenging, and Ultron is hard.

Of the standalone scenarios, Wrecking Crew and one of the Green Goblin scenarios are the easiest, Kang is moderately challenging, and the other Green Goblin scenario is hard.

Red Skull offers the easiest of the three campaigns, but the Red Skull himself is hard. I'm still in the middle of the Thanos campaign (Mad Titan), but the actual Thanos scenario is hard while the first two scenarios were moderately challenging.

Deckbuilding is absolutely not necessary for this game. If you do enjoy deckbuilding, this game offers only a limited amount of deckbuilding, due to some inherent restrictions on deck design and also the limited current card pool. Every hero deck comes with a list of cards in the default deck for that hero, so you can reconstruct those if your purchased cards weren't left in playable decks. Even if you didn't get those checklists with your set, you can look them up at:

hallofheroeslcg.com/browse/

Thanks for the advice, everyone. I ran a game against Rhino this morning with my son. We lost, but mostly because Threat got a little further along than it should have, and then She-Hulk's nemesis appeared at the exact worst time. Seems like the sort of game that can get out of hand with a couple of bad draws, even if you're playing on an easier level.

The structure of the game feels more intuitive. Efficiently using your hand every turn is difficult, but totally doable.

Apologies if this has been hashed out already in this thread, but here are a couple of things I'm noticing...

- If an event card gives you the option of taking threat or taking damage, you take the damage.
- Cards that give more resources (like Spider-Man's Web Shooter) are super valuable, and should almost always be put into play if possible.
- Seems like the first turn should really be spent getting some things into play in Alter-Ego form, before jumping into the fray. Probably best to not leave both heroes in Alter-Ego form after the first turn, so that there isn't too much scheming.

I'd recommend putting everything aside and just playing with the contents of the core box for a while. Honestly, there's a lot of game in there to explore, you'll get to grips with the mechanics before new concepts are introduced and it will keep you entertained for a good while.

Once you feel you've got the hang of the mechanics then start introducing new heroes. Because the heroes all play and feel so different old scenarios are reinvigorated by attacking them with someone new.

Here's how I'd recommend playing through, which is pretty much release order:

Core
Green Goblin's two scenarios
Red Skull
Kang
Wrecking Crew
Mad Titan's Shadow. I'm waiting on this to arrive but it's said to be easier than Galaxy's Most Wanted which has a rep for being brutal.
Galaxy's Most Wanted

I love the Kang scenario but it's a bit fiddly bookkeeping wise to jump straight into. And, as mentioned, MarvelCDB is the place to go for decks.

san il defanso wrote: Thanks for the advice, everyone. I ran a game against Rhino this morning with my son. We lost, but mostly because Threat got a little further along than it should have, and then She-Hulk's nemesis appeared at the exact worst time. Seems like the sort of game that can get out of hand with a couple of bad draws, even if you're playing on an easier level.

The structure of the game feels more intuitive. Efficiently using your hand every turn is difficult, but totally doable.

Apologies if this has been hashed out already in this thread, but here are a couple of things I'm noticing...

- If an event card gives you the option of taking threat or taking damage, you take the damage.
- Cards that give more resources (like Spider-Man's Web Shooter) are super valuable, and should almost always be put into play if possible.
- Seems like the first turn should really be spent getting some things into play in Alter-Ego form, before jumping into the fray. Probably best to not leave both heroes in Alter-Ego form after the first turn, so that there isn't too much scheming.

1) if you have a strong Justice deck a lot of the time the threat add is negligible, depends on the board state

2) econ is great early certainly. A lot of decks are built to play control and ramp, then kill the villain once they're set up (and have thinned their deck by playing supports etc). Once you pivot into killing the villain you probably don't want to play econ cards any more. Also some heroes and decks don't care about ramping and just want to rush the villain asap.

3) personally unless I'm playing Iron Man I never stay in Alter Ego turn 1. Mulligan hard for setup stuff, and flip to hero. Generally you will do better in the game the longer you stay in hero form doing hero stuff (some heroes break this rule and want to go to AE often). Especially with lower player counts against a 1 stage main scheme like Rhino if you stay in AE without confusing him your odds of unexpectedly threating out go way way up. Also a lot of villains start with immediate threats on the board that you want to handle asap (side schemes, minions etc).

My third game against Thanos with my team (Iron Man/Justice, Adam Warlock, Spectrum/Leadership, and Thor/Aggression) is going sideways. Everybody except Spectrum has a good setup with upgrades and supports, so we started to attack Thanos seriously, and he is currently 5 hit points away from going to Phase II. Unfortunately, Thanos has already done the *Snap*, and has built up 5 acceleration tokens on the main scheme. To make matters worse, we have had terrible luck with Thor's nemesis Loki. The third time that he showed up, my team defeated him 8 times, and would have failed 8 out of 8 if not for the timely reappearance of Heimdall before our 8th attempt. Roughly 50% of the encounter deck is treachery cards, so this was the equivalent of flipping a coin 8 times and getting 8 tails, or a 1 in 256 chance. Spectrum doesn't have much of a setup because she doesn't have much in the way of upgrades or supports, and her Leadership aspect inevitably leads to chump blocking.

Assuming this game is another loss, I will play one more game with this team against Thanos, going heavy on the attacks. My usual style is to prioritize getting upgrades and supports into play while doing some thwarting. Minions are targeted for defeat ASAP. Attacking the villain is a low priority until most of my heroes have a solid array of supports and upgrades in play. But this next time, I'm going to just focus on hitting Thanos, early and often, and see how that goes.

If that fourth game fails, I'm going to try a different team against Thanos and go again, then switch back to my original team to finish out the campaign. For my alternate team, I might trade out Iron Man and Spectrum for Dr. Strange and Captain America.

I played a couple more games last night and yeah, side schemes need to be handled. My first game got way out of hand because I had tons of side schemes in play. I won the second one by bird-dogging those schemes as soon as they hit.

Like all cooperative games, luck plays a factor. Bad draws from all the decks will make things tough. But it feels winnable, which is really what I’m looking for.

It says something that as soon as I lost my first game, I cleared it and immediately played a second time. That’s not typical for me at all, and it speaks to the quality of the game.

Ah_Pook wrote:

san il defanso wrote: Thanks for the advice, everyone. I ran a game against Rhino this morning with my son. We lost, but mostly because Threat got a little further along than it should have, and then She-Hulk's nemesis appeared at the exact worst time. Seems like the sort of game that can get out of hand with a couple of bad draws, even if you're playing on an easier level.

The structure of the game feels more intuitive. Efficiently using your hand every turn is difficult, but totally doable.

Apologies if this has been hashed out already in this thread, but here are a couple of things I'm noticing...

- If an event card gives you the option of taking threat or taking damage, you take the damage.
- Cards that give more resources (like Spider-Man's Web Shooter) are super valuable, and should almost always be put into play if possible.
- Seems like the first turn should really be spent getting some things into play in Alter-Ego form, before jumping into the fray. Probably best to not leave both heroes in Alter-Ego form after the first turn, so that there isn't too much scheming.

1) if you have a strong Justice deck a lot of the time the threat add is negligible, depends on the board state

2) econ is great early certainly. A lot of decks are built to play control and ramp, then kill the villain once they're set up (and have thinned their deck by playing supports etc). Once you pivot into killing the villain you probably don't want to play econ cards any more. Also some heroes and decks don't care about ramping and just want to rush the villain asap.

3) personally unless I'm playing Iron Man I never stay in Alter Ego turn 1. Mulligan hard for setup stuff, and flip to hero. Generally you will do better in the game the longer you stay in hero form doing hero stuff (some heroes break this rule and want to go to AE often). Especially with lower player counts against a 1 stage main scheme like Rhino if you stay in AE without confusing him your odds of unexpectedly threating out go way way up. Also a lot of villains start with immediate threats on the board that you want to handle asap (side schemes, minions etc).

Depending on the villain, I might leave Hawkeye or Black Widow in alter ego on the first turn, depending on their initial hand. Hawkeye can't take a punch, so he needs an ally in play ASAP. Black Widow can be fairly effective while staying in alter ego, and once she gets her suit upgrade, she has 3x DEF compared to either Hawkeye or Iron Man. As for Iron Man, I typically leave him in alter ego for the first three turns, unless I get lucky with drawing the upgrades.

I played twice today, both times with Klaw. I had been running a Black Panther/Aggression deck and a Spider-Man/Justice deck, but after the first game with Klaw it just didn't feel right. I got way behind on side schemes, etc. So I ran it again, this time with Cap's starter deck instead of the Black Panther one. It felt way better, and I think I enjoy playing with allies a lot more than I enjoy dishing out punishment. (It should be said that the BP deck was a net-deck, and I am not sure if it worked that well with BP's cards.)

Of course, after winning and tearing down the game, I realized that I had been cheating on accident, by using Cap's ability to ready by discarding a card. You're only supposed to do it once per turn, but I definitely broke that a few times. Oh well. I am still counting it, because I'm sure I've lost games by messing up other rules too. That's how that works, right?

I have played five games in three days. Clearly it's working for me.

Glad it's hitting right!