Marvel Champions

Namor appears on the art of a couple of cards already, I saw him while playing a stage of the Galaxy’s Most Wanted campaign. Maybe it was someone else? They could have him as a villain or campaign or something, that guy has as much or more comics history than everyone else in the Marvel Universe. It’s like him and Human Torch and Captain America is a Johnny Come Lately.

There is an interesting fan-made Namor hero deck that I am probably going to pnp soon, just so I can play with a full Defenders team. There is also a decent fan-made Namor villain scenario, which features him attacking a freighter that is transporting Marvel Champions cards from China to the U.S.

I also enjoyed the Namor scenario. Was well worth the 30minutes or so I spent cutting and sleeving the print-outs.

Vision is a really great all arounder - His intangible state can be gamed for some funsies, but mostly he just has a pretty standard kit - THe fact that his sig nuke can also be his sig thwart is pretty cool - He plays well in all 4 aspects, and can play all of the flip forms cards....Perseverance is basically the reason to play him with protection. Viv and the ability to recur her is really cool....in fact that is basically the leadership build I have for him - 3x make the calls/get ready/reboot/command center - I usually burst swing or thwart with Viv for 9-12 a round, and play dense strike or solar beam - It plays fast like an aggression deck.

Valkyrie on the other hand - You can absolutely play her with the other aspects to give her a working solo build, and it will be ok. But in multiplayer, if you don't get dibs on aggression, you are all doing it wrong. Valk is a minion munching machine - One round, playing 3 handed - I had her moderately set up mid game (Sword, Valhalla, Combat training) and used her to wipe 28 hp worth of minions off the table, and then another 26 the next turn. In a minion heavy or neutral scenario, she is the bees knees.

Kmann wrote: I also enjoyed the Namor scenario. Was well worth the 30minutes or so I spent cutting and sleeving the print-outs.

I'm sold. Now I need to find out if Namor the hero can beat Namor the scenario. Hey, stranger things have happened in comics.

My kid and I have been playing Galaxy's Most Wanted with vanilla Nebula/Star-Lord builds and each game has come down to a madcap endgame crazy play by Star-Lord, which I have to believe that's what FFG's after.

Against The Collector, Sar-Lord won with 1-health, 19/20 threat on the main scheme, 9/10 items in the Collection, dealing 27 dmg with a collection of tapping/untapping/getting extra Encounter cards Element Gun shot buff'd blasts. It's hilarious.

We're planning to watch the MCU movies soon (the latter third of which I haven't even seen yet) and that's likely to inspire one or both of us to to want to play this a bunch. I'm really glad I went all-in before the price hike, even if it takes me a while to get around to playing all of it.

Does anybody know what the plan is going forward for promotional items? There are more than enough playmats available at this point but the full-art Hero cards are very cool. I wonder if the game ever stood a chance of seeing FFG-official acrylic tokens like they produced for X-Wing tournament promos.

jeb wrote: each game has come down to a madcap endgame crazy play by Star-Lord, which I have to believe that's what FFG's after.

For all the belly aching I've seen about about GMW's difficulty, I really get that was sort of the desired intent - After beating some of the scenarios we'd be like, wow, that was crazy - And those games were much more memorable than the looking at a clean board state and announcing that we had lethal on the villain next turn. It felt like a Guardians kind of story.

Ronan is still an a-hole, though.


p.s. We don't run his campaign side scheme in expert or standard
ps.s. We don't believe he should be rewarded for keeping Nebula's evasion count low either

I finally picked up some new Marvel Champions cards: Valkyrie, Vision, and War Machine, plus the Hood scenario. I've been a fan of Valkyrie and Vision since I was a kid. War Machine is okay, but my limited exposure to the Hood in comics is that he is a villainous Gary Stu, a nobody who the writers elevated into an implausible major threat. The Hood scenario is reportedly very good, so I got it in spite of my dislike of the character. The Valkyrie deck has not impressed the fan base, but I suspect that she will make a fine team player in my many 3- or 4-hero games. Too many of the MC fans are obsessed with True Solo play, and many others can only handle running 2 heroes at once.

So of course I immediately set up a 3-hero game of Valkyrie, Vision, and War Machine against the Hood. I'm really enjoying the game as I discover all the new cards through play, but I'm probably going to lose this one. The Hood has gone through his deck twice and picked up a total of 3 modules so far. Each of the heroes has just made a first pass through their decks. War Machine's leadership deck is not showing much leadership yet, and he is badly bruised. Valkyrie's aggression deck has dealt out some vicious beatings but her combos aren't going smoothly yet. Vision's protection deck is actually functioning more like a decent leadership deck, and he has only taken a little damage so far.

The problem is the lack of a justice deck in the mix. Vision should probably be running a justice deck. Without justice, the Hood has already advanced to his second scheme and is close to starting his final scheme. The good news is that we have his first stage down to nearly zero hit points, so we should probably shift to just directly attacking him for the rest of the game. All three heroes have attack cards that can do 7 or 8 damage in a single hit, so we might luck into a quick, violent win over the Hood.

The Hood's modulars so far have been: Ransacked Armory, the Brothers Grimm, and Mister Hyde. Ransacked Armory keeps equipping minions with armor and flamethrowers. I'm not clear on what the Brothers Grimm do yet, but the Hood is suddenly and currently equipped with three of their one-shot attacks, so his next activation is going to be devastating. Mister Hyde showed up first in his alter ego with an armory weapon, and then became Hyde, who is a horrid beast that we had to put down quickly. In addition, War Machine's nemesis The Living Laser is in the game and has been sniping our upgrades.

jeb wrote: Namor appears on the art of a couple of cards already, I saw him while playing a stage of the Galaxy’s Most Wanted campaign. Maybe it was someone else? They could have him as a villain or campaign or something, that guy has as much or more comics history than everyone else in the Marvel Universe. It’s like him and Human Torch and Captain America is a Johnny Come Lately.

Namor debuted in 1939, but his peak popularity was in the '60s and especially the '70s. In the '70s, Namor appeared regularly in his own monthly title, the Defenders, the Invaders, and Super-Villain Team-Up. He joined the Avengers for an extended run in the '80s. He was also a guy who routinely got into fights with other heroes, though not to the same degree as the Hulk. He made a bit of a come-back in the '90s, with a new monthly title.

What the Brothers Grimm do is a bunch of meta-fuckery with attachments. Only they weren't in play so all their attachments came out in rapid order and went on the Hood. This isn't stuff that you can shrug off by blocking with a chump, ally, each attachment targets the player. Lose an upgrade, take direct damage, get a facedown encounter card, etc. I haven't had the displeasure of playing against Ronan yet, but Valkyrie got Ronaned good and hard that turn, facing a total of six encounter cards.

As predicted, we went down fighting. There was a hopeless amount of thwarting that needed to be done and the main scheme had four acceleration tokens. If we tried to go for the win and ignore the main scheme, we needed to deliver 54 points of damage to the Hood in 3 turns. But there was a fresh Mr. Hyde problem, as his side scheme came out and basically just gave him 15 extra hit points, plus he got a pair of powered gauntlets from the armory so he could hit for 4. We spent a full turn inflicting 25 damage on Mr. Hyde just so he wouldn't murder us before the end. Anyway, the game was fun, and I look forward to trying out other combinations of modular sets.

Played the Hood again, with Valkyrie/aggression and two randomly selected heroes, Black Panther/protection and Spider-man/justice. I thought that BP's retaliation and Valkyrie's minion-clearing skills would leave Spider-man free to thwart. Our initial modular set was Streets of Mayhem, which seemed great at first because the first environment gave everybody retaliate, including the villain. But he soon got Mister Hyde and Crossfire modulars in play, and the boosting effects of Streets of Mayhem became more advantageous to the bad guys due to their superior numbers. Late in the game, I thought we still had a chance, but the Sinister Syndicate showed up and the game ended with BP gone and Valkyrie engaged with 7(!) minions. Once again, Mister Hyde was our biggest headache, especially when his side scheme came out to pump up his hit points by 150%. Again, we didn't even get to the Hood's second stage before he won, though we got his stage one down to 3 hit points.

Yesterday, I started a new game against the Hood with War Machine/leadership and again two randomly selected heroes: Quicksilver/protection and Black Widow/justice. It's going great so far. Black Widow has got a lot of prep in place, setting her up nicely to blunt the impact of Hood's swingy surging turns. War Machine has done some serious damage to the Hood, while Quicksilver cleans up whatever needs cleaning. So the Hood is still stuck on his first scheme while we have him down to 22 hit points, and the Brothers Grimm haven't made much of an impact. They showed up once, Quicksilver hit them for 6, and then War Machine finished them off with a shot for 2. However, we did draw Shadows of the Past twice, which could have potentially put both Living Laser and Taskmaster into play. Both times, Black Widow had a prep card to block Shadows.

When I first started playing, it bothered me that some pretty respectable super-villains were expressed as minions with single-digit hit points. For example, Sandman enters play with a Tough card but only has 4 hit points. By comparison, a Hydra agent from that same scenario has 3 hit points, though no Tough card. Eventually, I came to appreciate that the main villain is challenging enough that it would throw the game off if there were extremely challenging minions in play as well.

Enter the Sleeper. It's a big robot with Toughness, retaliate, ATK 3, and 5 hit points per hero. Fortunately, once the Sleeper is defeated, you remove it from the game. That was pretty challenging, but tolerable because it happens once per game and usually early on. Also, the Sleeper scales nicely based on player count.

Now there is Mr. Hyde, the star of a modular set from the Hood pack. Mister Hyde is like the Sleeper on steroids, with Toughness, ATK 3, 10 hit points, plus he does one point of damage to every friendly character when he enters play. Unlike the Sleeper, Mister Hyde has multiple ways to re-enter play, and he can do so over and over. To make matters worse, his side scheme effectively gives him an extra 5 hit points per player. Hyde feels excessive and was definitely a decisive factor in my first two losses to the Hood. Maybe this is just a scaling problem and Hyde is merely a fun speed bump for expert decks. But I fear that Marvel Champions might succumb to some power creep that might cause the early heroes to become obsolete.

Shellhead wrote:
Maybe this is just a scaling problem and Hyde is merely a fun speed bump for expert decks. But I fear that Marvel Champions might succumb to some power creep that might cause the early heroes to become obsolete.

The modulars, for the most part, are the devs way of adding both flavor and complexity (or lack of) to the game - I think it's pretty cool - The villains with their suggested modules are accessible on standard to most of the pre-cons, or even a haphazard pile of aspect cards + Hero kit. I use modules all the time to make an easy villain hard (Play Red Skull with Legions of Hydra, or try Zola with Doomsday Chair) or make a difficult scenario easier (Swap Space Pirates for any other goons in Nebula)

I think it's fantastic that the game has really difficult content to add, for grognards like me that are playing a game or 2 on expert every night, while still remaining 100% accessible to people that play casually.

I hope they someday make one or two really easy modular sets that can be used to dial down the most difficult scenarios. One possibility: Spider-man's old foes, the Enforcers. One minion card each for Ox, Fancy Dan, and Montana, plus a lightweight event and side scheme.