Marvel Champions

Just getting back from a camping trip, so I used my aching, sunburned, woe is me time to put my collection back in order. I had about 11 or 12 decks built or in part and it was immensely satisfying to put everything back in the box, and to sort and alphabetize all my aspect cards that had been ravaged by a couple of months of deck building.

I'm fondly remembering when there was a little content drought a year ago, and I ran a bunch of gauntlets and really got to play most of the hero kits 3 or 4 different ways. I'm in the polar opposite spot right now - I realize I have some heroes that I really want to revisit because I really only played them in one aspect while I was running them, or that have only gotten limited plays because of other content that was available contemporaneously. Then there's all these new cards to go back and make tighter/better decks with some of the older heroes.

My list :

All of the Web Warriors need some more table time. Spider-Ham deserves to broken in all 4 aspects.
Vision - played a fun Vivian-centric leadership build a ton. Need to build and play the minion gathering multiplayer aggro deck, I'm sure he's fun in Justice, and interested in working him in prot
Rocket - Need to play something other than agression
Groot - Need to try something other than my gold standard prot build
Drax - only played prot
Venom - just hasn't seen table time other than testing his precon and a few odd games
Ant-Man - there's 3 or 4 OTk decks that I want to play with
Quicksilver - Ditto
Hulk - They released a bunch of helper cards
Thor - ditto
She-Hulk - ditto + I think the best recipient of the new untap card- Give her combat training and sumbiote suit and she should be swinging for 5 at least twice most turns.
Valkyrie - suffers from Rocket/Thor syndrome- I really want to play her in something other than agression even though I know it's sub-optimal

Some announcements have come in:

Wolverine is the next hero pack after Phoenix

Mojo Mania is a three-scenario standalone pack due out “this year”. "The heroes get captured…and thrown into a gauntlet of crazy television tropes, because of the way it works you get three scenarios that can link together to get a mini campaign. You face off against different genres of television, so fantasy, crime drama all that stuff down to sitcom"

This sounds quite cool. Info about Mutant Genesis was dropped as well, which has been described as an entry point for new players but also brings some new stuff for veterans.

Before I copy and paste the whole thing I'll just link to the full info here: hallofheroeslcg.com/2022/08/04/ffg-fanta...ap-week-of-8-4-2022/

I would have been shocked if Wolverine wasn't getting a hero deck in Cycle 6. I hope his deck is similar to the custom deck that a fan made a while back. That is the very best of the custom hero decks that I have tried.

Mojo isn't even in my top 25 list of X-villains, but I have been hoping for a while now for another scenario pack that is similar in scope to Kang or Green Goblin. I was hoping that it would be Arcade and his Murderworld, but I suppose Mojo and his Mojoworld is fairly similar. The tv tropes thing could be interesting. I will probably get it anyway. For what it's worth, I have zero interest in the villain known as The Hood, but his scenario pack turned out to be my favorite so far.

That mojo thing sounds awesome.

I had so much fun with The Hood plus Spider-man rogues, that I set it up again, though I swapped out Streets of Mayhem for the Sinister Six. For heroes, I knew that I wanted to try She-Hulk/aggression, now that I had upgraded her with one copy each of Unshakeable and Limitless Stamina. The other three were random selections, but I ended up with an all-female squad that included Spider-Woman/aggression/justice, Scarlet Witch/justice, and Valkyrie/aggression. The first modular set in play was Sinister Assault, and they are nasty. Everybody in the Sinister Six is Villainous and their abilities are vexing.

She-Hulk and Scarlet Witch don't need any setup, so they were immediately effective. I forgot to mulligan, so Spider-Woman and Valkyrie both struggled to get set up. Before long, Electro and the Sinister Syndicate were also in play, making for two versions of Electro in the encounter deck. Then disaster struck, and Spider-Woman actually got eliminated from the game. This was pretty early, too, like turn four. Normally I might just throw in the towel because it is rough to keep playing without one of the heroes unless the end is close, but Valkyrie was pretty well set up to go minion-hunting. So I kept playing, partly to see if it was even possible to win. Since then, the Inheritors and Titania have joined the bad guys.

I didn't finish the game last night, but the end is in sight, and it could go either way. The good news is that the Hood is down to 38 hit points on his second stage, Scarlet Witch is consistently thwarting a lot every turn, and She-Hulk and Valkyrie are dealing a lot of damage. No minions or side schemes in play at the moment. The bad news is that the final stage of the main scheme is at 27/40, and there are 5(!) acceleration tokens on the main scheme. Scarlet Witch will need to some heavy thwarting for maybe two more turns, while She-Hulk and Valkyrie go after The Hood. But there are roughly 25 minions in the encounter deck now, so the forecast calls for pain.

I had a situation come up that I didn't know how to resolve. Spider-Woman's obligation card came up as an encounter after she was out of the game. By a literal reading, it seems like I have no choice but to resolve the discard effect and then discard normally. But maybe it should be removed from the game after Spider-Woman is gone? On the other hand, it thematically makes sense that a nemesis would stay in the game even after the relevant hero is gone, so I suppose the obligation should stay too. I went with the Grim Rule and resolved the discard effect and then put it in the discard pile.

Shipping notification just hit - My storage solution expansion is at my house! I'm moving from one hobby lobby art case with insert and a vertical storage box that my had built for me, to two of the art box set ups - I;m using the horizontal set up which fits fewer cards, solely because my 3d printed dividers are horizontal and they look amazing.

All of the villains and modulars fill 3/5's of box one, and I;m expecting the hero box to be about 3/5 as well. Probably get me through til spring. I had to order another 500 ct of my sleeves for villain cards - down to my last 100 and Mutant Genesis hits at the end of September.

In other news. I haven't bought a new board game in a year.

This has become a lifestyle game for me, too. I still play other games, but I average at least one game per week of Marvel Champions.

My current storage situation:

Base game box: 24 un-sleeved hero decks, tokens, status cards, rule book, and the 4 hero hit point wheels. All of the campaign rule books are with their respective boxes.

Rise of the Red Skull box: all of my un-sleeved villain decks, all of my un-sleeved modular sets, all the campaign-specific cards that I own, and the villain hit point wheel.

Mad Titan's Shadow box: four sleeved custom scenarios, several sleeved custom modular sets, six sleeved custom hero decks, and the sleeved proxy deck for the Bruce Banner deck.

Sinister Motives box: all the hero deck cards that I am not currently using, sorted alphabetically by aspect, plus a pile of unused card sleeves, plus all the folded up character posters.

All of these boxes are full, so I will definitely be getting the Mutant Genesis campaign and storing all of cycle 6 in there. I might get a 1" binder and put the hero posters in there in whole page sleeves, which would free up half of the Sinister Motives box.

I know I posted pics of my cool marvel collage on my storage solution, but after the last two heroes it is full to the brim. Guess I need to order another 4 lane BCW box and do another collage 0_0

Gotta love a good storage conversation! It's one that's very pertinent to where my head is right now as well.

I've been thinking of transferring the collection over to a BCW box. I've long been a champion of using the boxes the game comes in but it's now gotten a little out of hand. Everything is scattered across four different boxes. I have the heroes in core, villains in GMW, aspects in MTS and encounters and campaign cards in RS. The game/campaign I'm currently playing and the dials etc are in the SM box, so to play I just need to grab that and the small fishing tackle box the tokens live in.

But setting up a brand new game feels harder than it should and sees me at the table surrounded by game boxes. The game boxes do look really great though and have that X-Factor shelf presence.

Looking at the more expensive options and largely dismissing them, my thoughts have turned to a 4 lane BCW box. I have no evidence to back it up but my feeling is the 5 would just be too heavy and unwieldly. Or, I might go with two 2 lane boxes. Still musing on it. Tho I have decided that decorating a BCW will of course be a must

I'm also grappling with sunk cost fallacy, although in my case it's sunk time. Over the course of the game I've spent hours making dividers - printing, gluing and cutting. They're fairly relaxing things to make and I've been making them in batches as I've gone along so it's only taken a couple of hours each time to stay current and up to date. Aside from their essential functionality I also find it extremely satisfying opening the box ( or boxes...) and seeing the collection all looking great.

However, as I've been using the game boxes these dividers are all horizontal. Moving to BCW will necessitate switching to vertical dividers. About the only thing less appealing than starting over completely from scratch making vertical dividers is paying money for them.

I feel no shame in admitting that this is influencing my storage decision more than it probably should...

Shellhead wrote: I didn't finish the game last night, but the end is in sight, and it could go either way. The good news is that the Hood is down to 38 hit points on his second stage, Scarlet Witch is consistently thwarting a lot every turn, and She-Hulk and Valkyrie are dealing a lot of damage. No minions or side schemes in play at the moment. The bad news is that the final stage of the main scheme is at 27/40, and there are 5(!) acceleration tokens on the main scheme. Scarlet Witch will need to some heavy thwarting for maybe two more turns, while She-Hulk and Valkyrie go after The Hood. But there are roughly 25 minions in the encounter deck now, so the forecast calls for pain.

The next time that I sat down to play was the final turn of this game. It was just an unfortunate villain turn where the Hood got to do some additional scheming and we lost. So I set it all up again for another try with the same team and the same scenario. I used the same Spider-foe modular sets, but rolled randomly again to see which ones came in play.

She-Hulk and Spider-Woman never got set up very well this game, and none of my heroes brought out many allies. We started out with just the Scorpion modular set, but eventually got both the Sinister Six and Iron Spider's Sinister Six, as well as the Tombstone modular set and Scarlet Witch's nemesis Luminous.

Valkyrie brutally dispatched many minions. Scarlet Witch did a decent amount of thwarting, but nobody else helped much. Spider-Woman had an unimpressive game, but She-Hulk intermittently dealt some big damage. But for some reason we were really plagued by side schemes this game, including a couple that couldn't be ignored for long. Though we managed to knock Hood down to 46/64 on his second stage, he got 6 acceleration tokens in play and soon schemed out for our second loss in a row. Will need to take another look at Spider-Woman's deck.

I haven't had much time recently but after making the last batch of dividers I realised I had three heroes still sealed; Drax, War Machine and IronHeart.

Usually I play two-handed but I decided to shuffle up a 1-hand solo game cos that's all I had time for.

So for the last few days Drax and Rhino have been engaged in an all out slugfest. I spiced Rhino up a little by putting in two modular sets instead of the recommended one, so he has Bomb Scare and another Hydra one.

These games have been quick and brutal. Almost like an arcade beat 'em up. I'm just playing with the Drax precon and after four efforts am yet to beat him. I consistently get Rhino from L2 to L3 but either scheme out or get KO'd shortly after.

I came close to victory last night but misplayed and got too greedy going for one more big hit - I had 3 anger tokens on Drax and his +1 knife - instead of being more conservative and thwarting. I had to flip because I wouldn't have survived another attack phase and then Rhino schemed to the win. Had I thwarted I would have been in the clear for one more round at least.

Very fun challenge and thematically it feels spot on as these two giant lugs biff it out. Games are only taking 20 odd minutes, which at the moment is about all I have time for.

I realized I had been misplaying a few things w/ Spiderham and SP//DR to my detriment (Cartoon Physics is an upgrade not an event, and your pilot is an interface so you start w/ 1 wild resource generation a turn). I tweaked their decks and ran them against Expert Mutagen Formula w/ Sinister Assault. They pretty well walloped GG, despite some furious backup from the Sinister Six. At one point I flipped 6 minions in a single turn, but they all fell like so much wheat to the Web Warriors. I did flip a bunch of nasty stuff and the board got gnarly right at the end, but a 35dmg turn got us out from under.

Edit: the main deck tweak was replacing some cheap stuff in Ham's deck with powerful expensive stuff since he's insanely rich. I kept finding myself running out of stuff to spend resources on

I like playing Hulk, but not true solo. I don't have an exact card list in front of me, but I have moderately tuned his aggression deck for improved performance. But I need to make his deck better because an old childhood friend is going to be visiting soon, and I am nearly 100% certain that I can talk him into a game of Marvel Champions and he will want to play Hulk.

Offhand, I think that my current Hulk deck has these Aggression cards:

Power of Aggression (2)
Drop Kick (3)
Martial Prowess
Clobber (I only have one, and neither of the MC singles sites has a Clobber for sale)
Piercing Strike (2)
Brute Force (2)
Combat Training
Counterattack
Uppercut

And maybe these Basic cards:
Energy
Genius
Strength
Enhanced Physique
Helicarrier
Unshakeable
Limitless Stamina
Tenacity
Invulnerability
First Aid
Beat'em Up
Quincarrier
Plan B

I realize that there are no allies in this deck, and Blade would be a likely choice if I did want an ally. Maybe I could put She-Hulk and Brawn back in and include a Team-Building Exercise to play them at a discount. But I have noticed that new players dislike chump-blocking and my friend probably would be happy just smashing the villain and minions.

Would I be better off with a protection build that focused on smashing? Maybe using Counter-Punch, Preemptive Strike, Tackle, First Hit, and Hard Knocks.

I think the best play is to stay with aggression. For a new player its straightforward and easy to get your head around. You're Hulk, you're aggression, go smash everyone. Fun.

Protection is more nuanced and doing stuff in the villain's turn will be harder to grasp for a new player. It also makes your turn anti-climactic as you may not have any cards to play. A real problem with 4card Hulk.

If your friend likes Hulk and likes smashing don't complicate it. Aggression all the way.