Marvel Champions

After a lengthy break, I am ready to try again with the four X-Men vs Klaw and the Masters of Evil. If I win, I think this team is ready to take on Mutant Genesis.

I have done the Defenders thing. For a fourth, I use Hawkeye because he was a member for issues #8-#11, including the awesome Avengers-Defenders War. However, my default Leadership deck for Hawkeye needs to be Justice instead, because Hulk and Valkyrie are both mandatory Aggression decks.

Although I tuned all of my X-Men decks, the game against Klaw and the Masters of Evil was a long, brutal slog. On a couple of occasions, one of my heroes got knocked to a single hit point. Both White Queen and Juggernaut showed up, repeatedly. Towards the end of the game, Klaw had 11 acceleration tokens in play, mostly on the main scheme. But the heroes won, and might even have held on for a few more turns if needed.

Colossus performed solidly, with only minor adjustments to his deck that included an Athletic Training in case he got Stunned. He closed out the game by doing 14 points of damage to Klaw with two attacks.

I also only made minor adjustments to Shadowcat's deck, but the big improvement came from more careful management of her density card. It was also crucial to keep Wolverine in play constantly, especially once Juggernaut got into the game.

Phoenix showed great improvement, once I improved her Justice cards with strong thwarting cards. I also deliberately let her slide into Unleashed form near the end, when her attacks were needed more than her thwarting.

Cyclops also showed great improvement, with better leadership cards like Rapid Response and Make the Call, as well as two copies of Team-Building Exercise.

I'm ready to take on the Mutant Genesis campaign, though I might not get to until next week.

Facebook group posted a villain of the week - Klaw with Doomsday Chair - haven't dusted that gem off for a while -I think I'm going going to play it with Black Panther and Iron Man to go similarly old school in hero selection and do it on expert - I'm thinking BP leadership and IM prot.

I tried that Klaw/Doomsday Chair combo at some point. MODOK is one of the nastier minions in the game, especially when he gets one of his attachments. The other issue is those 3 boost icon cards elevate the risk of Klaw blowing a hero out of the game, especially if he is getting a cheapshot in like Assault or Klaw's Vengeance.

When it came time for deck building I audibled, and built a Colossus Justice and Pheonix protection - I hadn't gotten Colossus to the table yet, and Pheonix only once with a slightly modded pre-con.

It was a slog for the first 3 or 4 turns but it ended up turning into a route for Klaw and Modok. Pinned Down on Modok felt like cheating. I ignored him the whole game, except when Jean would Psychic Misdirect Klaws attacks to him. Colossus will run really well as an all in aggression in 3+ multiplayer. In solo or two handed, pair him with Justice or Leadership to coast until he is built to handle threat, and then he will close out the game with his damage cards.

Apparently the Storm and Wolverine decks will be available this weekend. I haven't been buying everything for this game, but I do want these decks. The Storm deck looks interesting because there will be meaningful decisions every turn about the weather cards. And Wolverine looks just as good as the custom Wolverine deck that I have sometimes played in the last year. Aggressive, regenerative, and plenty of piercing damage.

Mojo is available too which looks awesome. My preorder hasn't shipped tho.

Stopped at the well-stocked local game shop today. Wolverine was sold out, but only one Storm deck had been sold so far. There was also plenty of Mojo packs. I bought Storm and walked out, thinking dark thoughts about Marvel fans.

A pretty funny card

Managed to win the Sabretooth scenario but just barely. On the final villain turn, both Phoenix and Colossus were defeated, but Shadowcat and a cop finished off Sabretooth. It was tough game, with 6 acceleration tokens in play by the end, plus seven damage on Senator Kelly.

A card from the Days of Future Past modular brought in the White Queen, but it was really just a special Sentinel that perfectly mimicked her powers, so we didn't need to deal with her Hellfire Club cards. In fact, the only nemesis that we faced was Dark Phoenix, and she wasn't quite as rough as I feared, though it did take attacks by Shadowcat, her ally Wolverine, and Colossus to put down Emma.

Sabretooth would have actually been easy except for two things: regeneration and his minion Mystique. Regeneration made it impossible to take down Sabretooth by attrition, so at some I just had to commit to going after him. And Mystique was much tougher than her comic book equivalent, nearly as bad as Dark Phoenix. Her shapeshifting cards were cool, taking the distinctive mechanism of the Mysterio scenario and dialing it down a bit.

www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2022/...7/bulletproof-belle/

Rogue article. Sure looks fun as fuck. Borrowing other heroes cards... Feel like there's gonna be fun broken nonsense potential there. Plus this pack should come with an errata copy of Deathglow for real her Touched makes Valkyrie cry.

I've never been a fan of Rogue, because she debuted in Avengers Annual #10, one of the worst comics that I've read. But this preview seems great, and it wouldn't be the first time that I ended up enjoying a Marvel Champions hero in spite of the character. I still have no interest in Gambit.

Started playing the second scenario from Mutant Genesis last night, with my team of four lightly-tuned X-Men decks, and it's going really well except for the fact that the Sentinel villain now has one hit point more than he started with. We have rescued three mutants and only lost one card to Night of the Sentinels and one ally to Operation Zero Tolerance so far. Gauntlet Beam is a pretty nasty attachment, but we got rid of it fast. It seems like a bad draw at the start could make this scenario impossible, like if all 4 copies of Abduction Protocols entered play in the first turn or two.

Project Wideawake (the 2nd scenario in Mutant Genesis) was relatively easy, but there were still some tense moments. Sentinel obligation cards can really be a burden, as they are more challenging to get rid of if you're engaged with Sentinels, and one of them allows the Sentinels to attack you even if you are in alter ego. But it was ultimately a somewhat easy win, given that the main scheme is somewhat toothless and the real threat is a permanent side scheme that is only triggered when allies get taken out by attacks.

Today, I started in on the Master Mold scenario, and that is much harder. There are quite a few Sentinels, sentinel attachments, and sentinel obligations in the encounter, leading to an unusual degree of synergy. Certain effects make your discard encounter cards until you get a Sentinel, so the acceleration tokens are coming quicker than usual. You start with one Sentinel engaged with each hero, and the second stage of the main scheme repeats this effect. And whenever Master Mold schemes, you get another Sentinel.

Just after Master Mold advanced to stage two, we had ten Sentinels in play, and five of them were engaged with Shadowcat! We were pretty well set up by that point, so we managed to clear all ten in a single turn, but not the main scheme is dangerously close to finish.

The interaction of the Sentinel cards is pretty great. Certain Sentinel cards explicitly instruct you to search the deck for a certain attachment or obligation, to attach to either the Sentinel or hero. Or if these attachments get revealed independently as either boost cards or encounter cards, they attach themselves to Sentinels in play or else cause surge. The result is that it feels like there are more than a dozen types of Sentinels when there are actually just a handful of types. The obligation card Targeted for Extermination feels very thematic, in that it allows engaged Sentinels to attack your hero even in alter ego form, giving the impression of these relentless hunters who might even attack while you are trying to hide and heal.

Three turns later, I lost that Master Mold scenario. The Cyclops nemesis Mister Sinister showed up, and his Gene Therapy attachments made the Sentinels even more deadly, plus his side scheme added a boost token to all villain activations. To make matters worse, we had another turn where a wave (okay, 8) sentinels showed up, but they received 6! attachments. We cleared most of them in one turn, but by now the heroes were pretty banged up and a couple needed to heal. The next turn, Master Mold got three extra scheme activation dues to card effects, and he schemed out for the win. We had his first stage down to 19 hit points.