Marvel Champions

With the introduction of player side schemes and now this aerial support they're doing everything right to make X-Force appealing.

PSA: Was scrolling Discord and learnt that there has been a rules update to Magento which lowers his difficulty.

"Also, there has been a rules clarification that you remove the magnet counters off the main before resolving the magnet card. And you also remove all magnet counters when the scheme advances."

"I was looking at the Magneto scenario in Mutant Genesis, and I noticed that about 1/4 of the magnetic cards add a magnet counter when revealed. When these cards are revealed as part of the response on the main scheme, does adding the magnet counter re-trigger the response before the counters have been removed (resulting in another Magnetic card)? If it doesn’t trigger the Forced Response, why not?
No; you should remove the 3 magnet counters first before resolving the Magnetic card you revealed.”


I don't feel so bad for spamming allies at him now

That said, I do hope they get on top of this sort of thing. This is a significant change to how the scenario plays and it was only by chance I saw it.

I've been playing Magneto correctly the whole time, but he is still a painfully difficult opponent. I wish this game offered additional ways to dial down the intensity of the final bosses, especially Venom Goblin and Loki. I wish they would make a few modular sets that make a scenario a little easier. Maybe easy villains like the Enforcers or the Frightful Four, or another mundane modular set like Down to Earth in Sinister Motives. Or even a modular set that represents a hero who misunderstands the situation --- he enters play initially like a minion, but after the first time you beat him, he becomes an ally, though his cards still cycle through the encounter deck.

After my second loss with four Avengers against the Hood and the Masters of Evil, I went for a quicker game with Hulk/aggression and Gambit/justice against the Hood and the Masters of Evil. I lost again, but this was a really close game, with the heroes getting the Hood down to just five hit points on his second stage. Both nemesis villains entered the game, and the relevant modular sets included Wrecking Crew, Beasty Boys, and Enchanteress. Gambit obligation card showed up on turn two, but he was rid of it by team three. I think the turning point was just after I started going for the final beatdown. Enchanteress showed up and Seduced the Hulk, and he had to waste two turns in alter ego before finally getting an energy resource to help him get rid of Seduced. The mental resource was no problem, because I had Banner's lab in play. Enchanteress is just about the worst possible opponent for the Hulk to face, because she completely shuts down his attack ability and he can barely do anything else. And his deck is mostly physical resources, so getting rid of Seduced is hard.

Some said this day would never come

www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2023/...reference-debrief-1/

Making changes like this is good for a healthy game, I'd be happy with this if I was a champions fan. Similarly, Taboo is really good an unobtrusive for Arkham, it looks like with that errata part that's where they're going.

The short little content break has been really good. I have my storage solutions all set and ready for the next wave - And I'm having a ton of fun playing through lots of plays that I haven't gotten to tackle. Revisiting old favorite heroes against new stuff, and vice versa.

Currently I'm running pairing of the Core set Heroes with the first waver against the Mutant Genesis stuff on expert. Peter Parker and the Black Widow took down Sabretooth. Next up is Cap and She-Hulk vs. Night of the Sentinels - Then Thor/Iron Man, Black Panther/Hulk, and of course I saved Captain Marvel and Strange for Magneto.

After that I think the Xmen are going to Outer Space and I'm going to play through GMW and my 3 least played scenarios - Collector 1, Nebula, Ronan. I'll probably use the Gideon's Gamin suggested tweaks - gideonsgaming.com/marvel-champions-fixing-galaxys-most-wanted/

Gideon's Gaming is one of the best Marvel Champions content creators out there imo.

They should hire Gideon to work on Marvel Champions. He seems to understand the game on a deeper level than even the designers.

It can happen, if memory serves the newer Arkham Horror LCG codesigners have some background in the community.

On a podcast MJ Newman talked about being hired by FFG off the strength of her fanmade LotR LCG campaigns which were hugely popular in that community. If I recall right she said she'd been making a trilogy of campaigns but got hired after the second so didn't complete the third. Apparently, she received emails asking about its status for years afterwards.

Back to playing two-handed solitaire. I knew that I wanted to play Wolverine/aggression and randomly paired him with Adam Warlock. I randomly determined that they would battle Absorbing Man with the Master of Time (Kang) modular set.

I won, but it was a sloppy win that indicated I need to tweak both of these hero decks. As you might guess, I had Wolverine focus on the fighting while Adam Warlock did the thwarting. By its very nature, Warlock's deck is very unfocused, so I didn't draw into much thwart, and his allies weren't super helpful. Wolverine did what he does best, but his nemesis Omega Red popped out on turn 3 or 4.

Absorbing Man got his all-keyword side scheme early, so he was punching above his weight for most of the game. Wolverine got stunned a couple of times while Warlock got stunned four times and got hit with Omega Red's poison gas twice in a row, leaving him gasping.

Fortunately, we got Absorbing Man down to his second stage after a while, and also got the Surveillance thing in play that adds 4 to the target number for the main scheme. Then Wolverine nearly got defeated, but he had his I Got Better upgrade in play for the save. Two turns later, Wolverine got defeated for real, with no allies in play and both heroes tapped.

In addition, villainous Kang finally showed up while Adam Warlock was stunned, low on hit points, and in alter ego to try to get rid of the second Omega Red poison card. There were two acceleration tokens in play, and Absorbing Man still had 14 hit points. Adam wasn't well set up, as he accidentally discarded several good upgrades while paying for a Cosmic Awareness Thwart.

In alter ego, Adam discarded a card to get rid of Stunned, tapped to get rid of the poison card, and went back into hero form. Between his two allies, his mage discard, a boost from Audacity, and a Magic Attack, he pulled off the win.

My Wolverine deck works okay, but I need to include more attack events in his aggression cards and find better basic and aggression allies than the ones that came with his precon deck. Psylocke sucks, while Colossus and Longshot are both expensive. I haven't tuned my Adam Warlock deck in over a year, so there are probably better cards that I should be using for his aspect cards.

Played another game with one of the newer X-Men decks and a random hero: Rogue/protection plus Spectrum/leadership. I got Norman Osborn as the random villain, with his Risky Business scenario. Instead of using the recommended Goblin Gimmicks, I subbed in the more challenging Goblin Gear modular set, to compensate for Risky Business being a somewhat easy scenario.

Risky Business is actually a challenging scenario until you realize that you can somewhat control when Norman becomes the Green Goblin, and prepare for the 3 indirect damage when he changes forms. However, I forgot that his second stage (yes, I am still playing on standard) form would also bust out some indirect damage when revealed. So careless play caused me to receive 7 points of indirect damage per hero in very short order, costing me four allies and knocking both of my heroes low on hit points. And then Green Goblin reverted to Norman Osborn again.

So even though I was within two turns of winning, I had both heroes go to alter ego for a turn to do some recovery and fill up on cards. They came out swinging and finished Norman in two turns.

Though Rogue could have used a few different cards from Spectrum's deck, she went with Gamma Blast all three times that she borrowed a card. Both heroes did decent amounts of attacking and thwarting, but Spectrum was a little more effective at thwarting while Rogue was dealing a lot of damage with Southern Cross and Gamma Blast. After the game, I tuned Spectrum's deck. It's still pretty similar to the original starter deck, but I noticed there was 41 cards, including three Mighty Avengers. That's a great support, but has a one per player max, so I took two out and added a Get Ready.

X-23 hero pack announced.

www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2023/6/8/slicing-through/

I don't know anything about her but this design looks fun. Her main mechanic is take damage and then ready and a lot of her kit is based around protecting an ally named Honeybadger. I also dig the art. I'm glad Andrea Di Vito has been illustrating most of the heroes for this wave.

Someone worked out that if you went to the shop you could see the back of the pack and even though it wasn't announced her Nemesis set is Lady Deathstrike.

I had a look on the shop and the pack doesn't say anything about an extra modular set, which has been a trend recently. I'm guessing that space has been filled with cards for the new Player Side Scheme which introduces 'Linked'. Defeat the side scheme and each player gets to choose a reward card for their deck. Seems neat.

x23 pack is STACKED with awesome looking stuff. multiplayer boom boom meme decks are definitely gonna be a thing, since her damage hits the whole table and theres no upper limit. the linked side scheme looks SO GOOD. the aggression side scheme that gives you huge on demand burst thwart in agression is SO GOOD. her hero kit looks really fun. just great stuff.