Marvel Champions

This week I decided it was time to finally face GMW. Even though it's ill advised I'm using Rocket & Groot, mainly because they're such fun characters to play. But not wanting to run headfirst into a brick wall I have scaled the difficulty down and am playing Standard mode with the Standard campaign - although I have left the expert set of modular cards in the mix.

It took me three attempts to beat Drang but what a cool scenario to open with. It really takes off on you but stays fun. As the board filled with minions and side schemes I had Anchor-Man's famed words ringing in my ears; 'Boy, that escalated quickly'.

But so far, so good. Hopefully I'll get a game in this evening. I know these two heroes aren't the best to face the Collector but we'll see how it goes.

*EDIT*

The game went well with Rocket & Groot successfully infiltrating the museum using a basic rush strategy and enjoying a fairly lenient encounter deck - only one psionic ghost showed up, for example.

Cleverly I didn't read the victory conditions before starting so left a lot of units/points on the table at the end of the game, but realistically I couldn't have scooped them up anyway as both heroes were on 3hp, the main scheme was on 12 and the collection had 7 cards in it. Trying to snag the points would have led to a loss.

Enjoyed the game. Another cool scenario. So far GMW is 2 for 2. However I know the worst is yet to come.

Continuing to explore the game by going through the different villains, I ran a game against the Wrecking Crew, using Black Widow's starting deck and an Iron Man aggression deck I whipped up at the table. It's a fun scenario, but a lot less challenging than it looked at the front end. Still, it was a great change of pace after the base scenarios.

Also played a game with my son against Rhino, with Black Widow and Cap. I like Cap a lot, he might by my favorite hero so far.

Is your son taking to it then?

I took the mistaken approach of breaking down and organizing each Hero deck after I played its preset. I almost wish I'd left them pre-constructed, because boy oh boy do I not have any good idea how to build a deck for this game.

With Magic, at least, I could ballpark the ratio of spells and creatures, and I had a formula for calculating how many lands to include based on the number of mana symbols in the deck. MC only asks me to choose 25 cards and I'm in the dark.

I reassembled Spiderman's deck, swapping'"Great Responsibility' out for 'Foiled!', added BW's 'Stealth Strike', cut 'Tenacity', and tweaked one or two other things. I beat the first Green Goblin scenario, so the deck isn't worthless. But I have so many questions. For instance, how does one decide whether to include 1 or 2 copies of a card?

Like MtG, assume you want two copies if you want consistency. I have a Hulk deck that really just wants to hit things. It has dupes of almost everything, including cards that get other cards back, to really maximize the juiced bashes you can get going with the Hulk. It can do one thing, so dupes “pay off” because they minimize the chance that I might have do something else. Compare to more “toolbox” builds you might see with Spider-Woman, who can end up doing anything. You’d see less dupes here maybe, just to make her fun and flexible for every situation.

Gary Sax wrote: Is your son taking to it then?

Some, though it's mostly been a solo experience for me. He does like it, but it's a game with a lot of process, and his ADHD means it can be slow going sometimes. But he's into the combo-ing and card play a lot. He'll find his feet.

With deck-building, I've been net-decking a lot. I also think this is the sort of game where you can put a pretty decent thing together on the fly. I'll never be one to really optimize that sort of thing, but it seems like there's a pretty high floor to how well decks can work. One thing I have noticed is that it's pretty easy to see what a Hero wants to do with their deck, and it's not hard to find cards that will work well with that. Like I said, I really don't like to get deep into the weeds but it seems pretty forgiving for people like that.

Virabhadra wrote: I took the mistaken approach of breaking down and organizing each Hero deck after I played its preset. I almost wish I'd left them pre-constructed, because boy oh boy do I not have any good idea how to build a deck for this game.

With Magic, at least, I could ballpark the ratio of spells and creatures, and I had a formula for calculating how many lands to include based on the number of mana symbols in the deck. MC only asks me to choose 25 cards and I'm in the dark.

I reassembled Spiderman's deck, swapping'"Great Responsibility' out for 'Foiled!', added BW's 'Stealth Strike', cut 'Tenacity', and tweaked one or two other things. I beat the first Green Goblin scenario, so the deck isn't worthless. But I have so many questions. For instance, how does one decide whether to include 1 or 2 copies of a card?

Marvelcdb.com will point you in the right direction for a given hero/aspect. Generally, as San said, this game is quite forgiving wrt deckbuilding unless you want to play the hardest villains on Expert/Heroic. Read through a heroes cards, try to pick cards in your given aspect that complement what that hero does, and you'll probably have a solid enough deck to get going with. Then once you play it you can tweak stuff. My only real recommendation is include a lot of cheap allies, but That's just down to my play style

Edit: also personally I usually include 1 ofs for my setup stuff, and multiples of events (how many depends on the exact event and space in the deck). That's if I'm just making a generic deck, some decks play with the space a little more yknow.

san il defanso wrote: Continuing to explore the game by going through the different villains, I ran a game against the Wrecking Crew, using Black Widow's starting deck and an Iron Man aggression deck I whipped up at the table. It's a fun scenario, but a lot less challenging than it looked at the front end. Still, it was a great change of pace after the base scenarios.

Wrecking Crew is a fun change that I like playing every once in a while, but it's there with Risky Business in the "cool idea that needed a little longer in the oven" category of scenarios that don't really work as written. Losing the potential for extra attacks/schemes from the Standard encounter set, and making the main scheme irrelevant effectively neuters most of the threat of the scenario, and you can pretty easily game who's going to be active etc. If you shuffle the Standard/Expert cards into their decks and maybe give them an acceleration token or two at the beginning it gets a lot spicier.

I haven't done any deckbuilding so far, but I have been pondering it during some of my more difficult games. Having played the heck out of most of the starter decks, I can testify that they are all at least okay decks. If I wanted to start deckbuilding, I would take a starter and just strip out the more useless cards that I always end up spending for resources instead of playing. Then I would replace them with cards with comparable costs. Decks with smaller hand sizes (Hulk, Thor, She-Hulk) should focus on cheaper cards, while decks with extra resources or hand-size (Iron Man or Black Panther) can include more expensive cards. Leadership decks should have a few more allies than normal decks. If you are running any sort of card combo, include 3 copies of each card in the combo unless any of the cards are restricted.

On laundry night, I finally beat Thanos in my third game against him, and it was scary close. Unfortunately, he did the *Snap*, so I am now penalized by that for the rest of the campaign. When I started my game against Hela, I had to discard the top half of each of my hero decks. I was fortunate to keep Mjolnir, but Adam didn't get his Soul World, so now his deck recklessly churns through cards without any advantage. And Iron Man didn't get his arc reactor that gives him a free untap each turn. In a way, this is worse than getting the *Snap* during the game against Thanos, because at least there is time to get most of the crucial support and upgrade cards in play. By starting a fresh game with half a deck, I only have a 50% chance of getting access to a given important card that whole game.

Initially, Hela seemed easy, with just a 1 for both attacking and scheming. But it turns out that she has permanent upgrade attachments in her deck, so now she is a 2/2 and also gains a bonus once I started defeating schemes that get put in my victory display. One of her upgrades makes all of her attacks Piercing, and the other gives her a boost card after each time she schemes. She also dishes out nasty attachments that are similar in style to Kang's, forcing characters to go to alter ego and spend resources to discard those attachments. Her scenario features a single main scheme with a goal of 18 scheme per player, but defeating her requires defeated a series of side schemes paired with strong minions. It's a nice change of pace from Thanos and his powerful attacks and nasty infinity stone effects, but I might lose this first game against Hela.

You just discard the top half of your deck in later scenarios, not remove them from the game yes? You should still be able to get your stuff... Eventually

From what I have seen so far in the Thanos campaign, cheap allies have lost some value. Overkill attacks are becoming more common, and there are boost cards that penalize a player if an ally takes damage from a given attack. Stun-lock decks have also been diminished by the introduction of new keywords like Stalwart and Steady.

Ah_Pook wrote: You just discard the top half of your deck in later scenarios, not remove them from the game yes? You should still be able to get your stuff... Eventually

I don't remember the exact wording, but I think that I discard the top half of each hero deck at the start of the Hela scenario, and those cards are out of the game until I defeat Hela. Then I discard the top half of each hero deck again at the start of the Loki scenario, and those cards are out of the game until I defeat Loki.

I checked the campaign rulebook and the wording is "discard the top half of your deck" during setup. Literally, it sounds like it goes right to your discard pile, so you can be playing with your full deck after the first time you re-shuffle. Thematically, the wording should be "remove top half of your deck from play," because that is what happens when Thanos does his *Snap*, and the heroes would have no way to undo that loss until after defeating Loki and recovering the Gauntlet. The Dire Rule from the main rulebook would suggest that I go with the interpretation that is worst for me, but I think that the literal wording is sufficiently clear and besides I am only playing on standard. Besides, the flavor text indicates that we briefly had the Gauntlet before Loki tricked us, so we could have undone the loss then and the subsequent stuff is less damaging harassment by Loki.

But since I already committed to the loss of half of each deck in my first game against Hela, I continued playing that way to see how bad it would get. It got bad. Radioactive Man returned, making him 4 for 4 so far this campaign (since he showed up in at least one of my Thanos games). I need to get a restraining order against Radioactive Man instead of just beating him down repeatedly. And some really beefy goons showed up, in addition to the guardian for each side scheme.

Anyway, I got to a point where the main scheme was at 49/72, but all of my heroes had flipped into alter-ego for healing (or in Thor's case, to discard Odin's Anger from the game). Hela still had her scheming attachment that gives her an extra boost card after each time she schemes. So she did that bowling thing where she kept rolling strikes, so to speak, and piled up to exactly 72 for the scheme, even when Iron Man totally sacrificed himself to block 6 points of scheming.

So I started a new game, and it's a good thing that I am only temporarily losing the top half of each hero deck, because Iron Man only got 4/7 of his armor upgrades and Thor didn't get Mjolnir. I paused for the night right as each hero is ready to shuffle back in that lost half of the deck. We already defeated the first guardian and nearly the first quest, and the main scheme is only at 18/72. Hela has her scheme boosting gear out already.

When I finish this first run through the campaign, I am going to re-write the setup rules for each of the five scenarios, because I am frustrated by the way some of the setup rules are only found on the various campaign cards, so they are easy to overlook during setup. I totally missed the Norn Stones side scheme thing during my first game against Hela.

I think you only discard half your deck rather than remove them from the game in later scenarios to make them still playable after a Snap yknow.

I got The Hood in the mail yesterday, which is great! Excepti haven't even finished MTS or played War Machine yet. They really piled all this on in a very short amount of time.

I played with Cap and Spider-Woman last night, against Crossbones. I was doing pretty well, especially in the first turn when I absolutely pummeled him almost down to pushing him to the second form. But after he got a couple of weapon attachments I started getting in HP trouble, some side schemes came up, etc. The situation went really pear-shaped when several minions came up in a single turn, right after I had shuffled my hero decks. But even then I was able to float it for a turn or two and get him almost totally done. I lost when he had just 2 HP left.

The encounter deck can be really swingy. I don't think it's a problem exactly, because that's just how a lot of cooperative games work. I actually think one of the things I like best about this game is that it is won or lost at the table, rather than in deck construction. That might not be absolutely true, but I think it's proven to be the case for me. Most heroes need some things to come into play before they can really handle the worst of the encounter deck, and deck construction can only cover so much of that.