Marvel Champions

san il defanso wrote:

boothwah wrote: Lots of stuff...

That is, it's not particularly difficult to make a deck that is more effective than the ones that come preset in the game.

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This is the main takeaway. The precons often have stuff in them that just doesnt make sense because they have to include full playsets of cards with their release format. Even just taking the precon and dumping the head scratchers that literally never get played and subbing in useful cards in their place will really help you out a lot.

I'm sorry to report that Loki with the Infinity Gauntlet is too hard to beat on Standard. No, I haven't tried every possible combination of heroes yet, but I tried and lost four times with a very solid team. They were enhanced by campaign cards like Norn Stones and Shawarma and still never got close to even beating the first of two Lokis. Easy setting for this scenario would reduce it to the heroes just needing to beat one Loki, and I still couldn't do it. This last game, I even cheated a little more and started out each hero with a full deck as though I hadn't been Snapped by Thanos earlier on. This time, first Loki still had 63 hit points when he schemed us out.

The only previous time that I had this much trouble with a non-fanmade villain was Red Skull, and he was still beatable if I switched out my hero aspects to emphasize Aggression and Justice. But that wouldn't really work here because Adam must run all four aspects and Spectrum's big deck combo requires Leadership.

I could try again with a team made up of the best standard heroes that I have: Dr. Strange, Captain America, Scarlet Witch, and maybe Spectrum again. It will take at least two dedicated Justice decks to keep Loki from scheming to victory to quickly, and at least one dedicated Aggression deck to literally beat Loki. Maybe Hulk instead of Spectrum, then running Strange and Hulk as Aggression while Cap and Scarlet Witch go Justice. If I still can't win in standard with that team, I suppose I will reluctantly venture into deckbuilding. But I feel that the designers of Marvel Champions have broken an implied promise if they are creating villains that can't be defeated in standard mode.

The crux of the problem with the Loki scenario is the scheming. It makes sense that Loki would be an effective schemer, but there are some compounding effects. His deck dishes out Frozen and Seduced attachments that require the target to take an action in alter ego form to get rid of each attachment, so that creates extra scheming opportunities. One of the Infinity Stones has a scheming effect while another makes a hero Confused. There is a side scheme with a Crisis symbol, and discard effects that can cause Loki to discard chunks of his deck, resulting in more acceleration tokens.

During my recent struggles with Thanos and Loki, I came up with an idea to make both scenarios a little easier and more fun. But I don't have any previous experience with designing custom cards for this game, so I am open to suggestions here.

The primary idea is to add a side scheme called Take the Gauntlet to the encounter deck for both Loki and Thanos. It would start out with a base value plus a Hinder value that would make it a challenge comparable to the Red Skull's Sleeper. When defeated, the player who removed the last point of scheme effectively takes the Infinity Gauntlet from the villain, and Take the Gauntlet is removed from the play area. The villain's version of the Infinity Gauntlet and Stones are removed from the play area, and the hero gets a hero attachment version of the Gauntlet, with +1 THW and +1 ATK, plus an action that taps the Infinity Gauntlet to play the revealed top card of the Infinity Stone deck. The hero's version of the Infinity Stone deck would work just like Dr. Strange's five-card spell deck, with cheap and powerful effects.

Mind Stone: Confuse an enemy.
Power Stone: Stun an enemy.
Reality: Discard the attachment or minion with the least number of boost symbols.
Soul: Heal 3 damage from a friendly character.
Space: Discard cards from a hero deck until an ally is discarded, then put that ally into play under control of that hero.
Time: Discard the top four cards from your hero deck and remove 1 threat from the main scheme for each different card type discarded.

Once a hero gains control of the Infinity Gauntlet, a new side scheme called Take Back the Gauntlet is put into play. This side scheme starts at 0 and has a fairly low target number (maybe 2 per player), but all of the villain's scheming effects will target this card instead of the main scheme until he reaches the target number. When that happens, the hero's Infinity Gauntlet and Infinity Stone deck are removed from the play area and the villain gets back his Infinity Gauntlet and Infinity Stone deck. The Take Back the Gauntlet side scheme is removed from play and the Take the Gauntlet side scheme is placed in the encounter deck discard pile.

As a side effect, Thanos would not get to do the infamous Snap during his second main scheme until he has the Gauntlet in his possession.

I got a suspiciously light package on the doorstep Friday

- Yay! War Machine! and ......more bubble wrap that should have been The Hood. I yelled at the wall, left a very passive aggressive voicemail, and moved back into my happy place and started sleeving some cards -

I played this crazy Call to Aid deck that fetches Iron Man out of the deck and discard pile to grab all War MAchines's gear really quick. It was a blast, and it felt weirdly thematic, with Iron Man being the central theme of the deck. I took it against my expert warm up gauntlet ( base set villains - Rhino / Klaw / Ultron) and it is really fun and handled them all with ease.

So I watched Iron Man 2 yesterday -I love that scene with Happy when he looks up after knocking out his one dude, to see a hallway of Widow's wreckage.....I feel like there's a meme been missed there, because I feel like Happy in that scene a lot! Anyhoo - That final battle with the whole IM/WM back to back bit was fun,,,,,....and I'm inspired to put together Justice Iron Man and Aggression War Machine tonight, and taking on whatever the random scenario generator wants to throw at me.

boothwah wrote: I'm inspired to put together Justice Iron Man and Aggression War Machine tonight, and taking on whatever the random scenario generator wants to throw at me.

This exact combo is next on my to play list. Looks like it'll be fun.

I also have been using a house rule lately for heroes that have team up cards, where the team up card replaces their signature ally in their hero deck (assuming their Ally is also their team up character). Not a huge deal one way or the other, it just feels good to not have that dead card.

Played 3p tonight! Aggression War Machine + Justice Iron Man + Leadership Captain Marvel vs Expert The Hood. War Machine is awesome! He's a damage monster, and he deals it extremely efficiently. Plus he doesn't need his full suit to be effective, which is nice. The Hood is awesome! We absolutely devastated him! A Leadership support deck really amps other characters up. Basically you recur Maria Hill and Mockingbird a bunch to draw everyone cards and stun, and you block for everyone and just kinda smooth things out so other people can do what their hero wants as much as possible. Our last turn we did 48 overkill damage to stage 3 The Hood

The Hood's gimmick is super fun. Shuffling new stuff into the encounter deck is fun! He can really do some dirt depending on what gets shuffled in, and his Foul Play ability is just nasty. Really a great villain.

Marvel Champions Monthly is doing a series of podcasts where they upgrade each precon deck by replacing a max of 10 cards. Seems apropos to the discussion on this thread. Haven't listened yet, but their podcast is generally quite good.

First ep doing the core set precons
marvelchampionsmonthly.podbean.com/e/dec...el-champions-core-se

edit: the other restriction is every hero deck is built using one full set of MC, so if you have one of everything you could build all these decks and keep them built.

Ah_Pook wrote: Marvel Champions Monthly is doing a series of podcasts where they upgrade each precon deck by replacing a max of 10 cards. Seems apropos to the discussion on this thread. Haven't listened yet, but their podcast is generally quite good.

First ep doing the core set precons
marvelchampionsmonthly.podbean.com/e/dec...el-champions-core-se

edit: the other restriction is every hero deck is built using one full set of MC, so if you have one of everything you could build all these decks and keep them built.

That is really cool.

I get why some people don't want / have time to deck build. I think this a great project. This amazing for folks that play casually....turns it into a grab and go like any other asym co-op.

Neat idea.......might have tried a few moons ago....
Expert with tuned decks feels so much better than Standard with bad decks for me. So I just can't go back. #Lifestylegameproblems

I came up with a variant today: Acts of Vengeance. I might even get around to making a custom Environment card to put in play when using this variant.

Acts of Vengeance is a simple variant that you can easily use with any scenario. Whenever you are required to put your nemesis in play (via Shadow of the Past or Kang's Wrath, for example), instead use a random nemesis from a hero deck that you are not using in the current game. For example, Spider-man is up against the Risky Business scenario and Shadow of the Past enters play. Instead of the usual surprise quickstrike by Vulture plus the Highway Robbery side scheme, maybe Spidey gets Abomination and the Total Destruction side scheme from the Hulk pack. And the rest of the Abomination cards would get shuffled into the encounter deck instead of the Vulture cards. For additional variety, you could add some of the modular sets to the list of random potential substitutes, if the modular set has both a noteworthy villain and a side scheme.

If you have everything published so far, here is a possible list, based on the above criteria:

Acts of Vengeance
result name
1 Abomination (Hulk nemesis)
2 Avalanche (Quicksilver nemesis)
3 Baron Zemo (Captain America nemesis)
4 Beetle (Wasp nemesis)
5 Blackjack O'Hare (Rocket Raccoon nemesis)
6 Electro (Power Drain module)
7 Enchanteress (Enchanteress module)
8 Enchanteress (Valkyrie nemesis)
9 Furnax (Groot nemesis)
10 Kang (Master of Time module)
11 Laufey (Frost Giants module)
12 Living Laser (War Machine nemesis)
13 Loki (Thor nemesis)
14 Luminous (Scarlet Witch nemesis)
15 Madame Hydra (Legions of Hydra module)
16 Mister Hyde (Mister Hyde module)
17 Mister Knife (Star Lord nemesis)
18 MODOK (The Doomsday Chair module)
19 Radioactive Man (Spectrum nemesis)
20 Scorpion (A Mess of Things module)
21 Taskmaster (Black Widow nemesis)
22 The Magus (Adam Warlock nemesis)
23 The Viper (Spider-Woman nemesis)
24 Thomas Edison (Ms. Marvel nemesis)
25 Titania (She-Hulk nemesis)
26 Tombstone (Running Interference module)
27 Vulture (Spider-man nemesis)
28 Whiplash (Iron Man nemesis)
29 Yon-Rogg (Captain Marvel nemesis)
30 Yotat the Destroyer (Drax nemesis)

Took War Machine and Iron Man up against the first 3 scenarios in the Mad Titan campaign, and theyve been both a lot of fun and effective. I'm playing on standard, since i don't like Iron Man vs really hard villains. If you get a bad shuffle and don't find your suit fast enough to just lose, whereas vs Standard villains you can typically hold on long enough to turn the corner even if your suit is near the bottom of the deck. I've got IM as a Justice deck and he's a thwarting machine (the classic Arc Reactor+Heroic Intuition combo is still beastly), and Making An Entrance and Sonic Rifle are nice cards to slot in there. War Machine is super fun and deals HUGE DAMAGE, extremely efficiently to boot. loading up your munitions bunker with like 10 ammo and just going nuclear is real fun, plus if you can throw in a charged up Hall of Heroes at the same time... well... you can do some work.

Ebony Maw is a great easier villain, and certainly joins the ranks of Klaw and Crossbones for fun easier guys to fight. Tower Defense is nice to see another take on multiple villains, and is a solid fight. Want to play this one more for sure. Thanos is like a better designed Ronan. He hits like a truck and has constant nasty effects, but he's reigned in enough to feel fun rather than to make me want to never play him again. Looking forward to trying Expert Thanos, though I imagine thats going to need some spicy decks to take on. Onward to Hela next!

Also, throwing the Gauntlet onto random other villains is definitely onthe list of fun looking things to try soon. Gauntlet Rhino should really be able to break stuff good.

I get a friend hooked on AmeriTrash games more than a decade ago, but he moved away several years ago. He is back in town for a few weeks, so of course I got him hooked on Marvel Champions. We played standard against Rhino with Bomb Scare. He ran Scarlet Witch (Justice) while I played Ant-Man (Leadership). My friend learned the game fast, and we beat Rhino worse than I have ever seen a villain get beat in this game. Rhino only got through his encounter deck once, and we beat him just before either one of us needed to re-shuffle for the first time.

So I've been positively giddy over these two decks, playing them to the exclusion of anything else for about a week now. I'll get bored at some point and tear them down, but for the moment they are newly ensconced in their own special section of the storage solution.

marvelcdb.com/decklist/view/15287/spider...eration-underoos-1.0

marvelcdb.com/decklist/view/15286/black-...mighty-blue-wave-1.0

Spider-Man just basically goes hero turn one and never flips back unless it suits the board state to do so. Peter gets the snot knocked out of himself the whole game. He doesn't have to thwart or attack anything...he just needs to keep on not dieing, and not allowing the villain to scheme until help shows up...

Meanwhile, Black Panther builds an Avengers dispensing Pez machine that poops out a bunch of b listers and Cap.....who then rally to give the rich African ruler even more resources, and eventually the game ends with everyone shouting "Avengers Assemble" and "Wakanda Forever" and the villain going from stage 2 to dead in 2 turns.

So apparently I really like playing the Hood, I have the Champs area set up for him and haven't taken him down for a week - I'm running him with a pool of like 15 or 16 sets (all of his + the green goblin sets + masters of Evil) and have a randomizer setup for when I need to pull one.

I'm revisiting all the Hero's in the order of release, to see what their builds look like with all the new cards - Iron Man Justice and She Hulk aggression felt a lot different from when I was running them with just the core box and a few packs. It was nice to wreck some face with some old favorites.

Tonight I think I'm going to dust off my Captain Marvel Gamma Assistant build with Hulk and feed him a bunch of cards to smash things with.

Man, when you get a character in these LCGs that just hits you right---often unrelated to power level---it is such a good feeling. It reminds me of one of the guys on the space cats, peace turtles TI:4 podcast who just loves playing Sardakk Norr, one of the bad factions. I get it now that I've played these LCGs.