Marvel Champions

Had a cracked game with Aggression Nova today. My friend brought his Spectrum protection deck over and we played vs expert Kang backed up by the Anachronauts. Friend first turn Symbiote Suited, so we basically played Heroic .5, but it seemed worth. The highlight was Unleash the Nova Force letting me clear the board of 5 beefy minions and a side scheme while drawing tons of cards and readying over and over again. It's the first time I've really gone off with that card, and man it felt good.

My friend wanted to do another campaign, and wanted to continue playing our unstoppable team of Iron Man/justice and Vision/protection. I persuaded him to give War Machine/leadership a try instead of Vision, so we ended up struggling and just barely defeating Ebony Maw. Due to forced discards, it took me much longer than usual to assemble a decent Iron Man armor setup, while my friend wrestled with the unfamiliar War Machine kit. But we still managed a win. He went back to Vision for the rest of the campaign.

We wrecked Proxima Midnight and Corvus Glaive without much trouble. And we did really well against Thanos, though he managed to pull of The Snap shortly before the end. Today, we went after Hela, and due to remarkable luck 6 of my 7 armor cards were in the half of the deck that I didn't discard, so I got my armor up and rolling really fast. We took a leisurely journey through Hel, controlling the tempo of the whole game with ease. However, there was one bad moment halfway through where we both had to discard our highest cost support or upgrade, and if I hadn't brought out the Helicarrier a couple of turns ago, I would have had to discard my armor section that gives me +6 hit points, which would have killed Iron Man. Loki is up next.

I sent back and messed around with Adam Warlock again and that dude is crazy if you build his deck right. I kinda bounced off him the first time around tbh, but this time I'm like whoa. Sorcerer Supreme + Symbiote Suit for 7 hand size and 21hp is already bonkers just to start. Soul World is crazy when it's healing you for like 18

Edit: took him and Justice Ironheart against expert Ebony Maw. He stacked literally every spell in his deck on us. I know because the treachery came out to discard cards until you find a spell and it discarded the entire deck and have us an acceleration token. Dropped a 42dmg hero phase to get out from under them all before getting nuked. 12 progress counters from Ironheart certainly helped.

My friend didn't have time for one more game of Marvel Champions before leaving town, so out of curiousity, I finished the campaign myself, with Iron Man/justice and Vision/protection against Loki with the Infinity Gauntlet. Loki put up a serious fight, but Iron Man got rolling quickly and soon was clearing off the main scheme every turn plus knocking out side schemes often. Vision got in some hard hits on Loki, helped with the thwarting, and was usually the one to take out the Frost Giants. Before long, Iron Man was also dealing out some heavy damage with his signature attack cards. By the time we got Loki to his second stage, victory was practically inevitable.

I don't think that all of my decks are on par with Iron Man and Vision yet, so I am in a weird spot where standard is a little too easy but expert is too hard. I like winning as long as it isn't too easy, so I will probably stick with standard for now but maybe step up the standard encounter cards with some expert or even standard 2 cards.

Switching to standard 2 Is a solid difficulty bump if you don't want to play expert.

Edit: expert Loki Is a bummer, speaking of. You just do the same thing for longer. Playing more stages of the same difficulty just makes the game longer, not harder or more interesting.

A while back I read a post from Caleb or Boggs or an interview snippet, that blew my mind, where they said something along the lines of expert and standard campaign rules =/= standard and expert villain stages - Like you could play the campaign with expert rules with the standard mods and stage 1 and 2 villains or vice versa.

Standard 2 should be called Expert 1.5 - For most villains the ridiculous amount of surge in the encounter set and nasty effects is far worse than starting on stage 2.

My sweet spot is, most of the time is stage 2 and 3 villains with the standard set. I like the additional set up stage 2 and 3 's bring. Sometimes, I'll play stage 1 and 2 villains and spice up (or tone down) the modular sets or add the expert set.

If I recall right, that interview was around the time of GMW and the furore around that campaign's difficulty spike. It is cool you can mix and match like that but the way it was highlighted felt initially confusing.

And Surge can get in the sea. They went way too overboard with it. I do quite like it now and then as something to rock your momentum and break your plans, but it was just too overused. In ivs the designers have got a little testy over speculation of rushed or lack of playtesting, but the ridiculous amount of surge coming through should have been called out.

I hope moving into X-Men it's toned down.

Surge seems like it's headed back in a better direction... It got really bad for a minute there. Standard 2 and GMW are the worst offenders for sure. I don't remember MTS being nearly as bad, and Sinister Motives isn't either.

Any of y'all grab the new spiders? My order hasn't come yet, but I'm pretty excited for them. Spider Ham has been getting really positive word so far, and he looks beefy (porky?) for sure. Probably will end up as the richest hero yet, which should make him really fun to deck build for and play. I haven't heard much about SPDR yet, and I'm still worried about her brutally small hand size, but we'll see I guess.

At the time I wanted to crack a Surgesiter Motives joke but could never get it to work. I'll inflict it upon thee now.

The Spider folk haven't made it down here yet, although they have landed next-door in Australia.

Spider-Ham appears to be close to top tier from what I've read but the pack also includes a huge amount of reprints. Haven't seen much about SP/DR yet but I'm also interested to learn more about how she plays. The design seems really unique.

I plan to pick up both Spider-Ham and SP//dr soon. The modular villain set that comes with Spider-Ham looks deadly serious, plus I like the idea of a powerful but silly Spider-Ham beating on the serious and challenging villains. SP//dr seems like more of an iron man type character, with some turns of set-up before ramping up into a powerful hero. Limitless Stamina and Unshakeable seem to be obvious patches for the early heavy hitters: Hulk, Thor, and She-Hulk. Ideally I would like six of them, but even one of each will be welcome additions to the game. Sometime after getting these two hero packs, I will take another run at Sinister Motives, maybe with Miles and Ghost-Spider for a Spiderverse reunion.

Played Expert The Hood vs Justice Spider Ham and Aggression Sp//Dr. Hood got absolutely crushed. I was looking forward to Spiderham more but man SPDR is wild once you get her set up. Like absolutely wild. Get tiny hand size probably means a slow start for her is extremely bad, but if she gets set up relatively easily she is absolutely beast. It's fun to play around her hand size puzzle, which makes her feel very different from the earlier small hand size heroes (who were just bad at the game).

Even with backup from Scorpion, Rhino, Iron Spiders Sinister Six, AND The Inheritors the Hood didn't stand a chance. The Inheritors modular is brutal vs web warriors tho 0_0 I love it.

Edit: aggression SPDR was going 10dmg a round from basic attacks without playing any cards or doing any shenanigans once she was kitted up. That's... Pretty good.

Edit edit: She got 7 even if she was stunned or exhausted, which seemed wild. Stunned AND exhausted is an issue, but that's an issue for literally any character so yknow. Plus with her new basic card that gives her Steady even that wouldn't do much to slow her down.

I picked up Spider-Ham and SP//dr on Friday and started up a 2-handed game against the Hood with untuned decks. Spider-Ham feels like the game is on easy mode, but SP//dr is a challenge. Spider-Ham/justice is doing a fine job of holding back the main scheme. At this point, The Hood is still on the first stage of his main scheme and has taken 12 points of damage. Both heroes are in good shape. The only modular sets in play right now are Bomb Scare and Scorpion, but SP//dr's nemesis just entered play. That will probably doom our plucky heroes because SP//dr is only halfway set up right now. Oh, and there are two acceleration tokens on the main scheme already.

I was wrong. Spider-Ham (justice) and SP//dr (protection) won. SP//dr has a nasty nemesis, but one attack each from the heroes took MORBIUS out of action. SP//dr finished putting together her assortment of suit upgrades and became a solid and efficient defender, capable of decent thwarts or attacks each turn. Spider-Ham is possibly on par with Dr. Strange as one of the most powerful characters in the game. However, the Hood managed to advance to the second and third stage of his scheme, and got 6 acceleration tokens on the main scheme. And there was one scary turn where 3 brutal minion villains nearly entered play, though each SP//rd happened to have two cards in her three-card hand that allowed her to cancel two of those villains. Spider-Ham delivered massive thwarting and they both shut down the Hood and took him out.

I haven't done any deck-building with the recent spider-characters, in part because their untuned starters are already quite good. The Miles SHIELD deck feels overshadowed by the SHIELD theme, but is so good at thwarting. The Ghost-Spider deck has a couple of protection clunkers but is otherwise great at counter-punching. Spider-Ham doesn't need much tuning, though some of his justice cards are just filler. SP//dr seems like a serious deck-building challenge due to her very small hand size, but could easily become a huge threat with a build that focuses on improving hand size and card flow. During this first game, the Spider-Ham deck and the SP//dr deck needed a lot of those green miscellaneous, so I am probably going to create a dozen Toon tokens just for Spider-Ham. I currently like the idea of making them look like word balloons (like the first player token, but smaller) filled with cartoon profanity, like "@#$%&!" It turns out that there is an actual word for that, and it is "grawlix."

Was in a Spider-mood today, and it is laundry night tonight, so I set up a 4-player solitaire game with both Spider-men, Spider-Ham, and SP//dr. (Ghost-Spider randomly got to sit this one out.) I put them up against The Hood with seven Spider-modules. A Mess of Things, Power Drain, Running Interference, Sinister Syndicate, Hunting the Spider-Totems, Iron Spider's Sinister Six, and Streets of Mayhem, just because I wanted a non-minion module in the mix.

The first couple of turns were going well, though the first module in play was Iron Spider's Sinister Six, and was soon followed by Running Interference (Tombstone). But when Surge in Crime hit the table, followed by eight minions in the same turn (Thanks Surge!), it got ugly. We are talking Madame Masque, Tombstone, and the entire Sinister Six. Half of them were piled up on SP//dr.

1.5 turns later, only Spot was still in play but that meant that we still couldn't quite get rid of Surge in Crime. The next villain phase, we got a couple more minions in play, and most of my heroes were battered or in alter ego. On the plus side, SP/dr is nearly fully equipped and Spider-Ham is ready for a big turn. Spider-man is low on hit points but otherwise okay, but Miles is far from assembling the mighty SHIELD thwarting team.

It was a long game, and the Hood had 7(!) acceleration tokens on the main scheme near the end, but we managed to win. First, we got rid of that nettlesome Surge in Crime. Then we started thwarting hard, though not soon enough to prevent the Hood from going to the third stage of his scheme and acquiring another modular set, which was Power Drain (Electro). That led to a couple of amusing card interactions because there were now two unique Electros in the game to interact with the other Power Drain cards.

One thing that the spider-characters tend to do well is cancel encounter cards. Everybody except Miles had at least a couple of cards in their deck that could cancel a treachery or possibly any encounter card. As an experienced player, I usually used these to cancel Shadow of the Past. This game, there were three different moments when a Nemesis could have entered play except that a hero canceled Shadow.

There was one more big wave of super-minions to deal with, but otherwise we just focused on beating down the Hood for victory. However, a power drain event managed to kill Spider-Ham after he had flipped into alter ego but hadn't had a chance to heal yet, by doing just enough indirect damage to his identity while he didn't have any allies in play. That left the other heroes scrambling to do 21 points of damage to the Hood before the end, and they managed to 22 for the win. Miles' SHIELD Sky Destroyer got the killshot.