Marvel Champions

The SHIELD announcement didn't wow me either. After doing Beast wrong it was another disappointment tbh.

But I've slowly come around and now think it could end up being cool. I liked the SHIELD tribe they made for Justice so it'll be cool to have that going into other aspects.

And I'm not gonna be mad about having Winter Soldier, Falcon, Nick Fury and Squirrel Girl in the game. Assuming, of course, that they don't get shunned in favour of some random-ass, b-tier characters instead.

I hope that the SHIELD cycle offers some more prep options for Black Widow. I like the Black Widow deck, but she is working at a disadvantage if she is running anything that isn't a justice build that is heavy on prep cards.

Printed off three more custom hero builds, and tested two of them on Friday night while doing laundry. Jack of Hearts/aggression is a good deck, maybe just a little too good. In the comics, he flies and fires powerful blasts of zero energy, and wears a containment suit to keep his excess zero energy from erupting in uncontrolled bursts. His cards revolve around generating, manipulating, and spending zero energy tokens, which he can story on himself or any of his supports or upgrades. His signature ally is Triathalon, another fairly obscure Marvel hero. Jack did well against both Rhino/Bomb Scare and Sandman/City of Chaos.

Luke Cage/protection is an even better deck. His signature ability is his bulletproof skin, which translates into reducing all damage that he takes by one point. However, he can only heal from using a basic REC action, and he has a hand size of 4/5. He has some very nice upgrades, however, including +1 hand size, retaliation 1, a resource generator, and more. I loaded up his protection cards with Counterpunch and Powerful Punch, so he deals out pretty good damage for a non-aggression deck. Luke doesn't do much thwarting, but his signature ally Jessica Jones does well to compensate. Luke did extremely well against Rhino/Bomb Scare.

The third custom hero that I printed off is Daredevil/justice. His main gimmick is that he gives the villain an extra boost card during activation, but then gets to choose which boost card to discard. He also has a nice Radar Sense event card that allows him to do the same with encounter cards, and that card comes back to his hand after each use, which is probably a little too strong. Daredevil also has a variety of thwart cards. His nemesis is the very nasty Bullseye, but judicious use of Radar Sense makes it unlikely that Bullseye will get in the game. My friend came over on Sunday and played the Daredevil deck. He said it was a solid deck, but seemed slightly bland. His abilities do cause the villain deck to cycle more quickly.

We played against the latest custom villain deck that I printed off, which was Punisher. I ran the Luke Cage/protection deck. Punisher is a very controversial character, as he is a true vigilante and not an actual superhero. When his wife and son were killed by stray bullets fired by mafia types, Punisher fell back on his special ops experience and declared war on crime. Normal superheroes subdue the bad guys and turn them over to the authorities, while Punisher just kills them. Over time, Punisher comics became too popular with bad cops and 2A enthusiasts, so Marvel has struggled at times to redefine the character. In this custom scenario, Punisher has a single-stage scheme plus an environment card where he places XP tokens (war counters) that unlock additional abilities for him. Once he scores 6xp per player, the players are no longer able to thwart his main scheme. Punisher gets these XP tokens because his deck spams out a lot of criminal thugs, and he attacks them after he activates against the heroes. The worst thugs get to activate (against the heroes) before Punisher activates, and those are the ones that Punisher gets XP for defeating. The players must rush to defeat the thugs before Punisher in order to deny him XP, while directly attacking the Punisher and thwarting his scheme.

In play, Daredevil did a great job of thwarting Punisher's schemes and managing the weaker goons. Luke Cage took a while to build up, but eventually was dishing out serious damage to the stronger thugs and also the Punisher. His counterpunching style was especially useful at taking out goons before the Punisher could finish them. On the one hand, we never felt like we were at risk to lose, but on the other hand, Punisher managed to place two acceleration tokens on the main scheme before we finally defeated him. Fun game.

My latest custom deck download was my first venture into DC material: John Constantine. I've been a fan of Constantine since way back in the '80s when he showed up in an issue of Swamp Thing. His solo comic lasted 25 years, all the way to issue #300, which is rare for any comic character created after the '60s. I even went as Constantine for Halloween a few times. In D&D terms, Constantine is a social rogue/wizard, but he is better understood as a middle-aged British punk with a knack for magic and a great talent for trickery. He walks a very fine line between Heaven and Hell, with enemies in both places. A particular doom seems to stalk him, as most of his friends and lovers have become casualties of his various supernatural conflicts.

In Marvel Champions terms, Constantine is a mystic who is allowed to include spells from any aspect. He has a mini-deck of 4 pact cards, which allow him to place dangerous attachments on minions. These attachments always offer a boost to either scheming or attacking, and usually also grant the Villainous trait. In return, Constantine gets a stat boost, and an ability to spend a token on a pact for a useful effect, like 2 thwart or 2 damage on an enemy. Each pact enters play with at least 2 pact tokens. Constantine's cards offer him ways to extract more value from these pacts, which initially look like a bad deal. In addition, Constantine's nemesis set gets shuffled into the encounter deck during setup. He is fragile like Hawkeye, with 9 hit points, DEF 1, and REC 3, and his obligation card does either 2 direct damage or 4 indirect damage. I built Constantine as a justice deck because his best hero stat is THW 2. I tried to go for thematic card choices, like Making an Entrance and Lay the Trap.

I didn't get a chance to try out the Constantine deck before my friend came over to play Marvel Champions. I showed him the Constantine deck because my friend likes to play justice decks, but instead wanted to try the Jack of Hearts/aggression deck that I recently assembled. With all that weirdness in our decks, I picked a relatively normal scenario: Crossbones/experimental weapons/hydra patrol/legions of hydra/weapon master. The first game, we were doing okay, except that Jack of Hearts was leaving my nasty pact minions in play for too long and letting them dish out a lot of damage. Late in the game, we were forced to both go into alter ego at the same time, and Crossbones schemed his way to victory. The second game went better, except that I got an alarming buildup in minions late in the game, including the very nasty Madama Hydra. But instead of going to a great deal of hassle to clear the minions first and try to catch up on the thwarting, Jack went wild with three attacks on Crossbones, getting him down to 6 hit points. I happened to have a couple of attack spells in my hand and none of the minions on me had the guard trait, so I finished off Crossbones.

Constantine is a tricky deck to play. It's somewhat like Deadpool because it makes the play environment worse and then exploits it for advantages. The pacts are the most difficult part. It is very counterintuitive for me to enhance minions and keep them around for more than a turn, especially when the weakest little Hydra minion is suddenly hitting for ATK 2 plus a boost card, often averaging 4 damage. The trick seems to be that Constantine needs to keep putting pacts in play, but maybe not more than two at a time. And then he needs to quickly exploit those pacts and get rid of the minions as soon as possible after using them up. The other noteworthy challenge of the Constantine deck is that a couple of the better spells in the game (Magic Attack and Zone of Silence) cause the caster to discard several cards. This means that Constantine has a harder time getting set up with his upgrades, and burns through his deck faster.

Downloaded and printed off the custom Ka-Zar deck. Ka-Zar is the second Marvel hero of that name. The original Ka-Zar debuted in 1936 as a fairly generic Tarzan rip-off, and got picked up by Marvel in 1939. This Ka-Zar debuted in an early issue of X-Men back in the '60s. Though still essentially a Tarzan sort, this Ka-Zar lives in the Savage Land, a vast tropical region in Antarctica that was created by alien researchers as a place to study ecology and evolution. The Savage Land is populated by dinosaurs, prehistoric mammals, and a few dozen species of sentient humanoids. Ka-Zar is the self-appointed defender of the land, and his trusty sabretooth tiger Zabu is constantly at his side.

The custom Ka-Zar deck depicts him as a relatively basic human, with a statline of 1/1/1, 11 hit points, and a REC of 3. However, Zabu is a permanent support card that functions as a reservoir of stat-boosting tokens, and Ka-Zar also has good access to cheap untapping effects in his 15-card set. He has some moderately good thwart and attack cards, and a couple of ways to enhance cardflow. And that is it. With careful play, Ka-Zar is an effective hero but somewhat bland. To liven him up, I borrowed the Savage Land modular set from the Age of Apocalypse campaign, and automatically shuffle those cards into the encounter deck for each scenario Ka-Zar plays. In effect, it relocates the scenario to taking place on Ka-Zar's home turf in the Savage Land. There is no direct benefit to Ka-Zar for doing so, except that it dilutes the villain deck a bit and adds in some creature minions that Ka-Zar is capable of defeating in one or two attacks.

I built a justice deck around Ka-Zar and tried him out against Rhino and Klaw. The Rhino game was a solid win for Ka-Zar, and would have played even faster if I hadn't put 3 copies of Athletic Conditioning in Ka-Zar's deck. Because of his ready access to untap effects, Ka-Zar didn't need the Athletic Conditionings to clear the occasional stun or confuse status cards. The Klaw game was more challenging, as the Masters of Evil modular set features some nasty minions. Also, Ka-Zar's nemesis (the son of) Kraven the Hunter entered play. Kraven has some neat tricks and would work well a modular set for various Spider-heroes. In the end, Ka-Zar was triumphant again, and still had 8 hit points left when he won.

I set up a big 4-handed solo game a few days ago, and finally finished yesterday. Doctor Doom (custom) against the Champions: Angel (protection), Black Widow (justice), Hercules (custom aggression), and Iceman (aggression). As always, I played Doom on expert level, and he offered an epic challenge. Doom's gimmick is that he gets random stages to his main scheme, and each stage brings in a portal environment card and a modular set. If he gets 4 portal environments in play, he wins. That usually means a 3-stage main scheme, not counting a brief initial stage that really just sets the table.

My Angel deck is moderately tuned to focus on multiple untaps per turn, for multiple actions and easy ability to clear stun or confuse cards. Black Widow is running a standard justice prep deck that is very reactive. Hercules is a solid bruiser with a surprising quantity of good upgrades and supports. My Iceman deck is a very good starter that would benefit from some moderate tuning.

First Doom recruited Electro to perform some New York Villainy, then he staged a Big House Breakout to unleash the Wrecking Crew. This vexing quantity of dangerous minions kept my heroes on defense for a long time, struggling to build up their upgrades. Fortunately, New York is an environment card that can be dismissed by paying one blue and one green resource. However, a nasty side effect of the Electro modular set (Power Drain) is having numerous encounter cards discarded each pass through the deck. Then we got an alien invasion and a fifth (!) acceleration token and gave up on thwarting to just go for the kill. Three turns and one Hydra assault team later, and we beat Doom. Collectively, my four heroes had a total of 7 hit points at the end of the game.

I finally printed off the legendary Karnak custom deck, which modders consider to be an early gold standard for custom decks for this game. I made an Aggression build, with a focus on being able to tweak the attack event damage, with cards like Warrior Skill and Honed Technique. Karnak gets to do a point of damage to an enemy every time he completely thwarts a scheme or defeats an enemy by the exact minimum damage needed to do so. In the comics, Karnak is an Inhuman martial artist with a superhuman ability to detect weaknesses.

Instead of doing the usual test run with the Rhino scenario, I picked the Wrecking Crew. I realize that the conventional wisdom is that this scenario is too easy because it is easy to manipulate which of the four members of the Wrecking Crew is the current active villain. Actually, the conventional wisdom is wrong, and the real reason why this scenario is a bit easy is because the villains normally only scheme on their own personal side scheme. The personal villain side schemes trigger a tactical effect each time they hit 10 scheme, then reset down to 3 scheme remaining on the side scheme. Meanwhile, the main scheme has a relatively low target number, but is typically not gaining much each turn, even when a hero goes into alter ego. That makes it easier for the hero to go to alter ego often and control the tempo of the scenario.

Karnak dismantled the Wrecking Crew like a cheap wristwatch. On average, he eliminated a member of the Wrecking Crew once every three rounds, while also keeping the main scheme under control. Things did get close at the end, when Piledriver attacked Karnak three times in one turn and destroyed an upgrade and a support, but Karnak survived due to a couple of useful defense cards.

Although I have been playing and enjoying a lot of custom content recently, both heroes and scenarios, I just played a couple of official games in true solo mode. Someone at BGG recommended Cyclops/leadership versus the Mutagen Formula as a great matchup, and they were right.

I lost the first game because I went into alter ego to heal too soon, when I had a couple of available chump blockers, er allies in play. Green Goblin schemed normally, then got two bonus scheme activations from encounter cards, and one of those got a 3-point boost card. This allowed him to go from 0 to 11 on his second and final stage of the main scheme. It wasn't a shameful loss, as I at least defeated the first stage of the villain.

Second game was a win. Leadership is my least-favorite aspect, so I had to force myself to play highly useful leadership cards like To Me, My X-Men! and Med Lab. But once I got into the groove in the second game, I consistently had plenty of allies in play, buffed by Uncanny X-Men and Danger Room Training. At one point, Green Goblin got three more Goblin minions in play (plus he already had one out), and that took me two turns to clear up because it was Goblin Knight plus three Goblin Soldiers. Late in the game, Mister Sinister showed up, but buffed Beast, Phoenix, and Blindfold took him out before he could activate even once. By the end of the game, I think that I had more than half my deck in play, in the form of upgrades, supports, allies, attachment to allies, and attachments to minions.

My friend came over to play some Marvel Champions, so I showed him all the recent custom decks that I downloaded and printed. We ended up playing Luke Cage/protection and Iron Fist/aggression against expert Dr. Doom. The first game was very, very close. We got Dr. Doom down to one hit point and then he schemed to victory at the start of his turn. We made two mistakes at the end. First, we waited one turn to long to directly attack Doom and go for the win. Second, after nearly putting Doom down with a flurry of attacks from Iron Fist, my friend sent Iron Fist to alter ego to heal, because he was down to one hit point. Instead, he should have stayed in hero form even Doom would have likely defeated him, just to deny Doom any additional opportunity to scheme. Assuming that my encounter card didn't let scheme, I could have easily done one more hit point of damage on my turn.

Of course we had to play again. In the first game, we had to deal with Doom's schemes involving a vibranium heist in Wakanda and overriding nuclear launch codes in Russia, China, the UK, and the USA. In the second game, we got New York Villainy (featuring C-list Spider-man villain Tombstone), a Doombot factory in Latveria, and a prison breakout. Cage picked up his retaliate upgrade on turn one, and Iron Fist also made sure to keep hitting Doom nearly every turn. Luke Cage got in the final blow after his allies Jessica Jones and Blade also hit Doom.

Played another game of all custom content. This time, I played Shang-Chi the master of Kung Fu, while my friend played Moon Knight. Our opponent was Scorpio and his Zodiac minions, plus the Goblin Gimmicks modular set from the Green Goblin scenario pack. I deliberately picked Scorpio because he is a bit on the easier side and I knew that we were both going to be very unfamiliar with our decks.

Moon Knight in the comics started out as mercenary werewolf hunter and soon became more of a Batman-type with multiple personalities disorder. In Marvel Champions, Moon Knight must play with all four aspects, and none of his cards may cost more than 3. He also gets 3 alter ego identity cards and 2 hero identity cards. His core alter ego personality has a hand size of 7 (!), but each of his other personalities gets a 1-point discount on cards of a specific aspect. For example, the Mr. Knight hero personality gets a 1-point discount on all Protection cards. The result is a very flexible hero who can unreliably pivot from strong attacks to strong thwarting to strong defense.

Shang-Chi is also allowed to include cards from more than one aspect in his deck. Specifically, he can include up to three identical attack cards from each aspect other than his primary chosen aspect for his deck. Because he only has 9 hit points and 1 DEF, I built a protection deck for Shang-Chi. His main gimmick is Flow, where his personal attack cards are cheap and weak but gain more powerful bonus effects when if the Flow effect is keyed to the same aspect as the topmost attack card in his Flow discard pile. All of his played attack cards go to the Flow discard pile, to ensure that his most recent attack discard is visible.

Scorpio is a minion-heavy scenario, with 11(!) minions representing every Zodiac sign except for Scorpio. Each minion has a special ability that is only triggered, either by card effects from the scenario or from being defeated. Our first game ended very quickly (turn 3), because Moon Knight carelessly defeated a minion who gives Scorpio a facedown boost card, just after another card already gave Scorpion a facedown boost card. So on turn 3, Scorpio attacked Shang-Chi with a base ATK of 2 plus 3 boost cards. I had no allies and Moon Knight had just blocked an attack, so I was defeated. Moon Knight could have tried to keep going, but my friend quickly surrendered.

I got Shang-Chi well set up with defenses in the second game, so I got a better look at how his Flow effects worked and saw that it was hit-or-miss. On a bad turn, I might get a single modest attack off. On a good turn, I could string together 3 attacks with nice bonus effects. So I focused on clearing minions while Moon Knight did thwarting and we both occasionally attacked Scorpio. We solidly won the second game without Scorpio ever getting to his second scheme stage.

My friend and I had a limited amount of time to play on Saturday, because he had another commitment later in the day. So we ended up playing the same set-up two games in a row, in order to minimize setup and takedown time. Still exploring the custom content, we played Karnak/aggression and Ka-Zar/justice versus the Baron Zemo/Firestarter scenario.

Karnak has long been considered the best custom deck for Marvel Champions in terms of sheer quality. In the comics, Karnak is a short martial artist who is also a member of the Royal Family of the Inhumans. He has a superhuman ability to detect weaknesses. In the game, he can untap and deal out a single point of damage, IF he first defeats either an enemy or scheme by the exact minimum amount needed to defeat it, up to twice per turn. I built his aggression deck in order to give him multiple ways to add to his damage, like Honed Technique and Warrior Skill, to increase the chances of dealing the exact correct amount of damage. His very surprising nemesis is the Supreme Intelligence, a huge floating, scheming alien head in a vat of chemicals.

Ka-Zar is an imitation Tarzan with a surprisingly long history in Marvel Comics. In the comics, he is a very athletic human who lives in the Savage Land, a vast, prehistoric jungle hidden in Antarctica and kept warm by alien technology. In game terms, Ka-Zar has a very basic statline of 1/1/1, but good access to untap effects and stat-boosting tricks. His cards have an appealing but restrained color palette of jade, tan, and brown, so I decided to make him a justice deck because the yellow cards look better with his cards than the colors of the other aspects. I also give him the Savage Land modular set from the Age of Apocalypse campaign set, to dilute the villain deck a little in his favor. More importantly, it does a good job of providing a thematic context for Ka-Zar's presence, effectively making each scenario take place in the Savage Land. His nemesis is the son of Kraven the Hunter, with a theme of hunting heroes.

Baron Zemo (in the Firestarter scenario) is almost entirely made up of existing modular sets: Standard, Bomb Scare, Legions of Hydra, and Masters of Evil. Zemo himself is a schemer who is a little low on hit points, but his various modulars potentially generate a lot of minions.

The first game saw us both get set up nicely early on, and just dominate Zemo. Karnak usually mowed down minions with ruthless efficiency while Ka-Zar did a great job of thwarting. However, both of our nemeses showed up in the second half of the game. And Madame Hydra made an unwelcome appearance. She and the son of Kraven both had linked side schemes that created headaches. Madama Hydra can't take damage until her side scheme is gone, while son of Kraven's side scheme can't be thwarted until he is defeated. Despite those challenges, we got a solid win, with Zemo never getting to his second stage scheme.

We lost the second game. To make Zemo more challenging, we removed the fairly easy Bomb Scare modular set. We had a little more trouble getting set up, and took a few surprise hits. Also, the son of Kraven showed up early. Finally, there came a turn when we both had to go to alter ego, and Zemo schemed into the second stage of his main scheme. In this second stage, he had a target number of 10 per player but gained 4 scheme per player at the start of each turn. To make matters worse, he had already gone through his deck once and received an acceleration token. Then a couple of side schemes came out with acceleration tokens, so threat was piling up fast and he schemed his way to victory.

My MC-playing friend recently bought a new (to him) hero deck: Starlord. He never reads comic books and only vaguely remembers a few characters from the MCU movies, but he bought Starlord because he didn't recognize him from my collection, and also because the deck was on sale. Oh, and also because the prebuilt deck is for leadership aspect. I wish my friend had talked to me first, because this deck is not compatible with his playing style. Starlord wants to push his luck, in return for extra card draw and some bonuses based on current number of face-down encounter cards in front of him. But my friend is generally a cautious and analytical player who dislikes dealing more than two encounter cards per turn. So he never voluntarily took more than one extra encounter card per turn, and tended to use Starlord cards that supported the push-your-luck just for resources to pay for leadership cards. He also swapped in a few leadership cards from his Cable, Ant-man, and War Machine decks. As a result, his deck seemed weak and ineffective.

We player several consecutive games against a fairly difficult custom scenario (Super-Adaptoid) and lost every game. I played Iceman/aggression, Wolverine/aggression, Dr. Strange/protection, and Lady Thor/justice (custom), and just kept losing. Wolverine even got defeated on turn three due to an especially bad run of luck.