Marvel Champions

Shellhead wrote:
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.


. 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.

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Expert is significantly harder, because it puts a lot more pressure on you at the beginning of the game when you're not set up to handle it. Just looking at Magneto, you're starting with 4 extra encounter cards on the first turn. Doesn't sound that bad maybe but that plus every attack hitting for 1 more dmg is hard to handle. The endgame is largely similar Standard vs Expert, you get built up and you crush the villain. Getting there is way hairier in expert.

I play exclusively expert (except vs Ronan and Collector 1, but I usually just don't play them) and I've got a recorded win rate of 71% over 177 games. The game is generally regarded as easy for a reason, and you can hardly blame them for upping the difficulty of some scenarios over the years I think.

I don't like 4p games though, they just take too long .

I haven't played MARVEL CHAMPIONS in a while, but I love it every time I do. Like HEROSCAPE, there is enough game here to satisfy someone as "the only game." If you had nothing else, but a decent collection of MC, you'd be a happy gamer for a long looooong time. The issue is internalizing the rules.

I have all the stuff - just recently went through a play time lull due to the holidays. I had a very satisfying evening recently unmaking every deck and filing everything back into the boxes. I then had a satisfying evening the following night building 12 decks. I played those over the next couple of weeks - playing 2 handed solo vs random expert villains and mods - sometimes choosing hero pairing, sometimes just randomly grabbing two -

I had a mix of old favorites and some newish heroes that hadn't gotten as much playtime - Led to some fun combos that I wouldn't have played - Storm/Drax was a blast. Gaming Storm's weather to make Drax even more nuts was especially satisfying. This Vision/Wasp game was amazing simply because the cards had some great story beats.

Unfortunately, I got jazzed about running a new Symbiote Cap Go All out deck, and then I wanted to try a Iron man repurpose deck that borrowed cards from half of my built decks....and then my friend Eric was like " We should Black Panther and Storm next week. The King and the Queen." so I built those last night and had to tear down 2 other decks. While I was doing that Adam Warlock jumped into my head while I was sorting out the cards and...

Tonight I am going to have a satisfying evening sorting cards and filing everything back into the boxes.

I recently set up an account on marvelcdb.com so I could keep analyze the four X-Men decks that I was struggling with against Magneto. It's helpful to get a quick view of card cost curves and things like that. It also advised me that one of my decks requires 26 packs to assemble. which is wild because I have purchased the base game and exactly 25 expansions, counting hero decks, villain scenarios, and campaign boxes. It seems numerically impossible that I took one card each from 25 sets plus 15 hero cards to make a 40 card deck, given that my deck includes a few duplicates. That said, I have purchased some single cards, so I do have cards in my collection from more than just the base set and 25 expansions.

I rediscovered the joy of this game tonight, after so much misery while battling Magneto with the X-Men. Thanks to the local public library, I have been re-reading the excellent Thor (goddess of thunder) run, so I knew that I wanted to play the custom Thor/Jane deck again. And I knew that I wanted to play two heroes. I ran my randomizer spreadsheet and got:

Thor (Jane) and War Machine

vs,

Crossbones
Hydra Patrol
Sinister Assault
Frost Giants
plus his usual mini-deck of Experimental Weapons

It was fun. War Machine is an above average hero and I might have built this Thor deck a little too well. Then again, I didn't win until Crossbones was on his third and final main scheme stage, with 7/10 scheme on it. Though both Thor and War Machine have some access to Toughness, Crossbones first experimental weapon gave him piercing on all of his attacks, and I never got around to getting rid of that one. He also got his armor for a while, plus retaliate and a discard effect.

A couple of frost giants showed up, including Laufey himself, but War Machine is excellent at dealing with enemies with toughness because he can ping them for one damage for free with his Shoulder Cannon. Thor can also toss her hammer for free once per turn (though it costs a resource to retrieve it from the discard pile) for two ranged damage. Hydra Patrol guys are the most fragile minions in the game, so they were screwed. Sadly, only Vulture from the Sinister Six made an appearance. The rest kept showing up as boost cards.

I can't rave enough about the Thor/Jane deck. It's really fun to play, comparable in power to the best official heroes in the game (like Dr. Strange), and thematically right on target. I used to consider the custom Wolverine deck the best custom deck, but the official Wolverine deck is very similar, leaving this Thor deck my new favorite.

jeb wrote: I haven't played MARVEL CHAMPIONS in a while, but I love it every time I do. Like HEROSCAPE, there is enough game here to satisfy someone as "the only game." If you had nothing else, but a decent collection of MC, you'd be a happy gamer for a long looooong time. The issue is internalizing the rules.

One thing I really appreciate about the game is that you don't need to min-max the whole thing within an inch of its life to succeed. You certainly CAN play a very hardcore version of Marvel Champions, but it's hardly necessary to get joy out of it. I have everything through the end of 2021 and it's just so much content. But it's gotten a lot of play, and I've really liked it.

I got Sinister Motives for Christmas, and with my brother-in-law and nephew around this holiday season we played a few rounds of it. My son joined in, and we had a great time. Miles Morales got a lot of play from my BIL. We actually played a four-player game with Venom, using MM, Cap, Hulk, and War-Machine. I had anticipated a four-player game to take way too long, and there's some merit to that, but I really liked how the game felt with that many people. While I play solo some of the time I much prefer it with a second human brain at the table, and truthfully more players makes it more enjoyable for me.

I've been running a She-Hulk Aggression deck lately. My son (12, almost 13) has been asking for this one a lot, which is very gratifying. He built a Miss Marvel deck, so I think we might take on one of the earlier campaigns at some point.

Sandman is a relatively easy scenario once you get some allies in play to keep the streets clean. But I randomly swapped out the usual City in Chaos modular set (featuring Rhino) for Crossfire's Crew, and that really made for a more challenging scenario.

I wanted to finally try the Storm deck, and randomly got her ex, Black Panther. I had already tuned my BP/protection deck a while back, but hadn't had a chance to play it yet. I did spend a few minutes tuning the Storm/leadership precon, because it was obvious that she didn't need three copies of certain cards, like Endurance or Uncanny X-Men.

The game did not go well. Whenever I got allies out, somebody in Crossfire's Crew would toast them, leaving the sand counters to pile up. Storm has some neat tricks with her weather deck, but it was taking forever to assemble BP's five crucial upgrades. Storm's nemesis Callisto showed up on turn two, knifing Storm once before we got rid of her. Later, Sandman got her switchblace and then got into a couple of knife fights with Storm. We got Sandman down to 28 hit points in his second form before he schemed out for the win. I plan to do a re-match after spending more time fixing both hero decks.

Storms nemesis set is one of my very favorite modular sets in the game. It's so fun thematically and mechanically.

While tuning these decks, I was surprised to find that my Black Panther deck had 45 cards. Even I know that it's important to keep these hero decks down to the minimum of 40 cards if at all possible. Especially BP, since he needs to get his upgrades in play ASAP and then hope to draw at least one Wakanda Forever every turn or so.

At some point between the releases of Sinister Motives and Mutant Genesis, I simultaneously tuned all of my decks, though not heavily. Usually I added maybe 3 to 6 new cards and removed and equal amount of existing cards from each deck. I think that I might have gotten interrupted while working on BP and forgot to remove five cards.

My second game against Sandman plus Crossfire and Rhino was even worse. We never quite got Rhino to his second stage, and BP's nemesis Killmonger showed up at an inconvenient time. Sandman raced through his decks even faster than usual, partly because my allies got screwed by some Crossfire cards, especially Crossfire himself and the side scheme Out For Blood. In addition, Rhino added two acceleration tokens with his Now or Never cards.