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Marvel Champions
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Sabretooth is cool, but nobody likes escort missions.
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Because there is so much content coming out lately, and I have been busy with other things going on, I haven't been paying attention to custom content for this game lately. But someone posted a positive review for the Thor/Jane Foster custom deck at BGG, and it looks great. So I printed it off and sleeved it, and look forward to trying it out soon. I hated the idea of making Jane Foster into the new Thor several years ago, but the local library carried most of the run and it turned out to be great. Good art, great writing, and some interesting ideas.
Thor/Jane is an interesting build. As a hero, she gets the same starting stat line as Thor, 1/2/2. But Thor/Jane has a hand size of 5 in both forms, and she only gets 13 hit points and a REC of 2, because she has cancer. Accordingly, her Chemotherapy obligation card is somewhat harsh, requiring the player to either tap Jane and her Medical Clinic support, or discard 2 cards, or take 2 damage. But if she manages to remove her obligation from the game, Jane gets +1 hand size in alter ego form. Thor/Jane wields the same unique Mjolnir hammer as Thor, so playing both heroes in the same game would seriously handicap whichever deck didn't have Mjolnir. Thor/Jane's Mjolnir card is identical to Thor's, except that she can also discard Mjolnir to do a ranged 2 attack on an enemy, and she doesn't need to go to alter ego form to use an action to recover Mjolnir.
Thor/Jane's Hammer Swing is less devastating than Thor's Hammer Throw, but her Swing can be used as either a good attack or a great defense. Her Lightning Strike is more powerful than Thor's card of the same name. The rest of her kit is thematically somewhat less Asgardian than Thor's, and pretty flexible in terms of working with either Justice or Protection builds. Her Malekith nemesis set is not directly aimed at messing with her deck, but deals out quite a bit of indirect damage. I built her with a fairly standard Justice aspect focused on thwarting, but I included two copies each of Agile Flight and Yaw and Roll, because she has easy access to the Aerial trait.
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It was a good game, with some nice back and forth between hero and villain. Thor went through her deck twice, and the Rhino went through his deck once. The Malekith nemesis set entered play, but the Chemotherapy obligation never showed up. Malekith executed the Odinson and a Hostile Takeover caused Thor to take four damage rather than lose the Avengers Mansion. But Thor kept getting good upgrades out and started to really control the table. On the final turn, Rhino had 11 hit points. Thor hit him with a Lightning Strike for 6 damage and stunned him, then attacked twice thanks to Stand Fast for another 6 and the win.
The Thor cards have some nice synergies, and the overall deck played in a very well-rounded way that reminded me of the Captain America deck. Good at everything if you have the right cards in hand and in play.
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But availability is still a lottery. These are the only two stores with the full X-Men wave and they've already both sold out of most of the packs.
I knew if I waited I'd be able to get them cheaper but I didn't feel like waiting or checking in every day to boardgameoracle to see if anyone had them yet. I'd just had some bad news so it was a bit of retail therapy really. Although I thought the wait for a cheaper price would be longer than just one day... All that said they're still not widely available here and who knows when they will be. I'm happy I got them.
So far I've had a couple of quick games with Cyclops and Phoenix just against Rhino who I've gone back to in a big way recently. This week I've been playing the Mojo pack and am now up to the last scenario using Wolverine and Storm which has been a lot of fun. I really like its idea of being a mini campaign. I hope they do more like it.
These have all been with the pre-cons. I'm planning on starting Mutant Genesis once I have more of a feel for the characters and will attempt to make my own build.
I'm digging the character designs. They're all interesting and fun with lots to think about each turn. Especially Storm and her weather deck which I'm still getting my head around playing optimally. I could be wrong but I do sense the power creep in this wave. But they're all a lot of fun and feel thematic so I'm ok with it.
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Also, Wolverine and Storm are fun. The Mojo scenarios are great but definitely force you to rush a lot more than anything had before. Some SUPER fun modular sets thematically and mechanically too.
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At first, these decks were only lightly tuned, but I later went back and re-tuned both Cyclops and Phoenix. I gave Cyclops a few more X-allies and and two copies of the very crucial Uncanny X-Men card from Storm's pack. It gives you a discount on X-Men allies and gives them one extra hit point while in play. It's max one per player, but Cyclops plays the second copy on Phoenix, to help her pay for expensive allies life Storm and Banshee.
It took some time to get the hang of these decks. Cyclops has that handy blasting ability, but really needs to focus on getting out allies and the related support cards like Uncanny X-Men and Danger Room. Phoenix needs to get Storm out and keep her alive as long as possible, because a properly equipped Storm can thwart for a total of 30 points of scheme before getting discard, and possibly 40. Phoenix also needs to manage her power counters so that she doesn't get unleashed until late game when it's time to finish off the villain. Shadowcat needs to get Wolverine out and keep him alive, because his piercing damage is extremely useful, especially against a villain with easy access to Tough (like Magneto). Shadowcat also needs to plan her turns around ending in phased form. Colossus can overcome his small hand size with careful card management, especially after he gets Titanium Muscles and Iron Will into play.
The current game is going well. We have Magneto down to 35 hits points, but won't be able to get him below 24 hit points until we clear the Orbital Decay side scheme, which only has 6 scheme left on it. Now that I have both the Sunfire ally (plus card recursion) and Shadowcat able to clear Magneto's attachments, the scenario feels more manageable. I have learned the hard way to prioritize clearing the Acolytes quickly, lest they get bonus attacks from their teamwork mechanic.
After I beat Magneto and finish this campaign, I think that I am done with playing four-hero solitaire for a while. While it's fun discovering synergies between the heroes and seeing them fight each other nemeses, I think that I would rather play two-handed solo for a while. The games won't take so long and I can still see some fun card interactions between two heroes while not having to monitor a large amount of open information on the table. Also, I'm looking forward to trying the new Wolverine and Storm decks, and playing more with custom Thor/Jane deck.
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I don't enjoy deckbuilding, but this game makes it easy. After you play a couple of games with a given deck, you will notice which cards you are playing and which cards you are consistently just spending for a resource. Because the overall design parameters for a deck are straightforward, tweaking a deck generally consists of just swapping cards of the same aspect. Before starting another game, I did tweak the Phoenix and Shadowcat decks again. I pulled out a couple of unproductive thwart cards (Lay Down the Law) and brought in Under Surveillance, Foiled, and a second copy of Soul Sisters for Phoenix. For Shadowcat, I brought in Counterattack, Into the Fray, and a second copy of Surprise Attack, and ditched Gatekeeper and Aggressive Energy.
So I am partway through a game seven against Magneto, and I feel hopeful. The good news is that we have cleared all three stages of Magneto's side schemes, so we are free to go for the kill and Magneto has lost his Steady trait. The bad news is that he is just getting started on the final stage of his scheme but we haven't even defeated his first villain stage yet. He also has four acceleration tokens in play. And Phoenix is already unleashed, so there is a risk of Dark Phoenix showing up. Shadowcat and Sunfire keep stripping Magneto of his helmet and armor, and Cyclops finally has permanent attachments on Magneto to give him -1 ATK and +1 damage from all of our attacks. It will probably take 3 turns for us to beat Magneto, but it may be tough to keep his main scheme under control for 3 more turns.
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Keep fighting the good fight, you'll get him. Magneto is a real bastard tho.
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Ah_Pook wrote: Not to be the bearer of bad news, but Field Commander only makes attachments on minions permanent I know because I did that too for a couple games.
Keep fighting the good fight, you'll get him. Magneto is a real bastard tho.
You're right about Field Commander. That makes things a little harder, but I tend to flip Cyclops in and out of alter ego often, and use his alter ego ability to keep retrieving the -1 ATK card to slap on Magneto. I can live without the +1 damage card for Magneto until the end game, if I can ever get to that point.
The campaign allows me to splash in cards from off-aspect for each hero. I gave Cyclops a copy of the aggression tactic card that allows overkill for attacks on a target minion. Phoenix got a copy of Psychic Kicker and also Uncanny X-Men (to help her bring out Storm cheap). I gave Tackle to Shadowcat, though it hasn't been much use against Magneto. Colossus got Great Responsibility, which has been huge. The bonus ally cards from the campaign have been less impressive, except Wolfsbane has been great. Close to half of the other campaign cards (the ones involving a character's special campaign aspect (like brawler or leader) have been junk, but a few have been great.
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This is a good example of a significant issue in this game: there is not a large enough gap in challenge level between standard and expert. In fact, by the time I won this last game, I had done enough re-tooling of my decks that I should have been playing (and losing again) on expert level, but it took everything I had just to win on standard difficulty. I also resent the design philosophy that dictates that the final bosses should be so brutally difficult. It's just my personal opinion, but I think that a co-op game should be winnable maybe a third of the time, and anything less than that diminishes the entertainment value of the game for non-masochists.
I sometimes see comments at BGG about certain tough bosses that seem to verge on gaslighting, like people saying they had no particular trouble beating Red Skull with an untuned starter deck. But I haven't played much in true solo mode, so maybe any scenario really can be won on standard difficulty without deckbuilding if you just play in the very swingy true solo mode.
My own preference has been to play mostly three- or four-hero solitaire games, with the idea that it doesn't really feel like I am playing a given team (like Avengers or X-Men) unless I am playing more than a couple of heroes. But that seems to be a possible downfall due to the scaling brutality of the game. In theory, most aspects of this game smoothly ramp up or down based on player count. But in actual practice, I have found that the tough final bosses tend to require hero decks that are focused on attacks or thwarts or both.
Having finally completed this Mutant Genesis campaign, I intend to play strictly two-hero games in the coming months. Managing four heroes can become mental labor, and I sometimes miss particularly good plays because I am trying to see everything at once. Meanwhile, the villain deck plays itself just as well (allowing for randomness) no matter how focused or distracted I get. I look forward to using my randomizer spreadsheet to generate random pairs of heroes against random villains with random modular sets, though I will leave Magneto out of the mix for now.
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