Month: January 2023

It’s the end of my Marvel Champions week here at spalanz.com. For today’s post, I thought I’d keep it a bit more on the sub-theme of the week, playing through all the new stuff that I’ve now got for the game. I’ve got a lot of content for this game now, and I’ve had the chance to go through quite a great deal of it all. So today’s finale post is very much a summary of what I like out of everything that I’ve been playing!

To start with, let’s talk about the Heroes!

Despite all the new heroes that I’ve been playing with, I still find myself really enjoying Justice Spider-Man. I think there’s the strong element of nostalgia, if you can call it that, for him being the first hero that I played with. I’ve kept him in Justice, as well, and I find myself evaluating pretty much every Justice card that I buy against this deck. I really enjoyed pairing him with my Aggro Iron Man deck, as well, not just for the fact it’s a bit on-theme for the MCU mentor relationship between the two, but also because the pair of them seem to be able to cover a lot of bases really well.

I think one of the best things about playing the Spider-Man deck is how it can often feel like you have an answer to everything. He has his web kick for 8 damage, he can dodge all damage coming his way with a backflip, and being in Justice, he is able to remove threat – often with added bonuses, like dealing more damage if he defeats schemes, and stuff. Some great moments have come from Spidey when he’s done 8 damage (or more!), stayed in hero form for the villain phase, drawn a card when an attack is instigated against him, and simply backflipped his way from 4 or 5 damage with ease. Definitely on-theme for the nimble web warrior!

In terms of favourite heroes to pair with Spider-Man, I think it’s going to be a toss-up between Iron Man and Captain Marvel. Iron Man is great at dealing damage in the aggro deck that I have for him, but Captain Marvel is also a very effective hero too, so having both of them in play can lead to some very nice games. Sometimes, of course, those games are over quite quickly, but a win is always welcome!

Gamora was a stand-out hero for me when I first played her. While I’ve not played the Guardians expansion that much, each time I have it’s been with her and Star-Lord, and she has been the absolute star of that show. Interestingly, I’ve also been playing her deck as it comes, so she’s mainly aggro but can take up to six off-Aspect cards that must be either attack or thwart actions. I think it’s that kind of flexibility that makes her shine, really – pretty much any time a hero breaks the deck construction rules, you know it’s going to be quite powerful. Allowing her to take even just these six off-Aspect cards can mean you just give her the absolute best you can find in your collection. However, it’s not just this, but her hero specific cards work so well with attack and thwart actions, the deck just hums along really, really well.

A recent discovery for me in terms of precons is Black Widow, of course, and I’ve talked about how her deck is just amazing earlier in the week. The way her Preparation cards work within her deck really makes it feel like you’re playing the spy with a plan (and a back up plan). I think my first ever game with her saw me draw into a lot of the good stuff, meaning I was able to set up really nicely and therefore nothing was really a problem for me. Second game I spent a lot of time trying to get the Winter Soldier out, so it was a little hairy, but I still managed to prevail. The deck just works really well, and I can’t say any fairer than that!

Talking about favourite heroes is all well and good, of course, but the game is nothing without the villains! Now, I’ve not played against them all, for sure, but there are a lot of good ones among the rabble that I want to talk about, as they can definitely make for some really fun games, even when they’re beating us!

First up has got to be Crossbones. I was really looking forward to getting hold of the Red Skull box, as I love the whole Hydra mythos within Marvel. I’ve probably said this on the blog before, but I’ve been out of the comics world for about 15 years now, so pretty much all of my knowledge comes from the MCU. Crossbones was a new one on me until I realised he’s the guy in Captain America Winter Soldier, one of my favourite movies in the franchise, so I was excited to play against him. He also uses a lot of Hydra modular encounter sets, so that really excites me. He’s a good villain to go up against, because he’s not easy as such, especially when he gets more and more weapons attached to him, but he’s also not super difficult so the game can actually feel enjoyable, and not miserable. 

There are quite a few villains that I have enjoyed, although I need to play against them some more as I don’t always think a single game against anyone is a good yardstick. Mysterio was a lot of fun, from Sinister Motives. I did enjoy his whole thing with encounter cards going into player decks, that was a good touch. Nebula from Galaxy’s Most Wanted was another game I seem to remember as being good – a lot of reviews speak negatively of that box, of course, but I can’t say that I particularly noticed it. I know The Collector always comes in for some stick, but his mechanics were definitely interesting (once I had worked out the right way of playing, of course!)

Speaking of that, there is of course a bit of a trend for games to become more complex over time. Not quite like power creep that we often see with cards gaining in power, but just the amount of moving parts in a game becomes quite something. For example, I recently played Sabretooth from the Mutant Genesis box, and there is so much going on with the villain on his own, the fact that his scenario also has the whole rescue-a-senator thing added in to it makes it quite complicated when you first come to it. I think I could have possibly beaten the scenario a lot quicker if I had realised that actually, you can get by without rescuing Senator Kelly at all, especially given the fact he’s such a hindrance to you when you do get him.

The Tower Defence scenario from Mad Titan’s Shadow was also guilty of this, having two villains out and all the rest of it. Again, I think I need to play it again now that I know how it’s supposed to work, but there’s so much going on that it feels overly-complicated to play. 

Let’s not get too negative, though! I still have a few more villains to go up against, and I am particularly looking forward to trying out the Sentinels scenarios in the X-Men box, as well as the Venom scenario from Sinister Motives. I still haven’t played against Ultron from the core set, as it happens, so I definitely want to try my luck there, and I am waiting for my LGS to get the Kang scenario pack in stock so that I can try my luck against him, too.

In terms of heroes, I’m quite keen to give Shadowcat a go from the X-Men box, and I think I’m going to pick up Wolverine soon to try him out, as well. I really wanted to like Cyclops, but I couldn’t seem to figure out his deck when I first played him; I’ve taken a look though, and I think it might be interesting to pair him with Shadowcat to see how that turns out. I’ve heard very good things about the two heroes from Sinister Motives, as well, so I want to give those a try soon too. I also want to try Adam Warlock, as he has a very interesting deck idea in that he can use cards from all four Aspects, but only a single copy of each one.

There’s a lot still waiting for me to discover, for sure!

But what about the future? At the time of writing, the current rumours are pointing to at least one more cycle of X-Men, possibly two, so we aren’t going to have Fantastic Four anytime soon! I’m assuming the next wave of X-Men will involve the likes of Beast, Ice Man and Angel, although a lot of folks have been positing for X-Force, so Cable, Domino and so on. Deadpool keeps coming up, but I find myself shuddering at the thought of that. (I’m really not a fan of Deadpool). While we’ve had some of the classic X-Men villains, we still have the likes of Mister Sinister, the Hellfire Club, Apocalypse and even those that have already appeared in nemesis sets, like Mystique or Juggernaut.

Looking further ahead, I’m sure we’ll be due for a Fantastic Four cycle at some point, as that is a team just crying out for the Marvel Champions treatment. Getting characters like the Four themselves, Silver Surfer, Namor, Puppet Master, Galactus and Dr Doom would be just amazing, and I cannot wait! However, the biggest thing for me would be to finally get the street-level heroes, Daredevil, Elektra and so on. Actually, I’m not that fussed on the likes of Punisher or Jessica Jones, I just want Daredevil and Elektra hero packs! Give me a Kingpin villain, with Bullseye, Typhoid Mary, Echo and Tombstone in the box, and I’d be a happy chap indeed!

There’s so much still to come for this game that I think it has a long future ahead. Hopefully that isn’t the kiss of death, of course, but I am hopeful that we’ll continue to get great content for a long time yet!

Well folks, we’re now at the end of the week with Marvel Champions! I hope this mini-series of blogs has been entertaining in some way for you, especially if you play the game already! If you don’t, hopefully it’s shown you what you’re missing, and maybe even inspired you to pick it up for yourself!

Marvel Champions week is almost over here on the blog, but we’re not at the end yet! Following yesterday’s post about playing with the preconstructed decks that form the expansion structure of the game, today I’m going in the opposite direction, and looking at building my own decks for the game.

I’ve been a card gamer for years now, and in that time I must have spent months just going through piles of cards for any given game, trying to evaluate them for play. So even though I’m still fairly new to this game, I am an old hand at building a deck, and like to think I know enough of what I’m doing to jump into this particular pool early on. Of course, knowledge of the game allows you to better understand the relative worth of the cards you’re looking to include in your deck, and a lot of that will come through trial and error.

When I played my first game of Marvel Champions, using Spider-Man and his suggested precon, I think I could see very early on how there were certain cards in there I would just never use. The unique resource mechanic of Marvel Champions almost guarantees that no card would be wasted in any deck, as it can always be discarded for a resource if you don’t want to play it for the effect. It’s definitely true that I look to include cards for their resource functionality as well, but what a card does is also pretty critical, for me. In the case of Spider-Man and the Justice deck, I know that I don’t like to gamble much when it comes to taking damage, so I knew very early on that I would cut Great Responsibility from the deck. As I got to play with Spider-Man more, I realised that I wasn’t using him for his base thwart, so could also very easily cut Heroic Intuition.

While these cards are never wasted, because I can always use them to generate resources, I prefer to build decks on the assumption that I will actually use the card for what it does, rather than because it could be a resource. That way, I’m never faced with the problem of having a hand of cards that are basically resources, which I don’t want to play for their effects. The flip side to that is that my turns can often be agonising events where each card I’ve drawn is really good, and useful, and I don’t want to have to discard a Swinging Web Kick to pay for anything!!

I’m not intending to write a deck building manual for Marvel Champions, as there are much better-qualified players out there than me who have already done that. However, this blog is intended very much as how I go about building my decks, so maybe you’ll find it useful by seeing a bit of my thought process, which I know tends more to the weird and wonderful when it comes to this stuff!!

I would say that Marvel Champions is unique among the games that I play, because building a deck for it can be relatively easy. While it’s not quite Star Wars LCG levels of “pick ten objective cards, and your deck will be built”, it is probably the next best thing. A deck for Marvel Champions must be between 40 and 50 cards, and common wisdom is to keep it as low as possible so that you have the best chance of finding your good cards when you need them. However, some heroes will be fine with bigger decks – Iron Man springs to mind as being able to move through his deck quickly, so you can potentially build a 50 card deck for him and it won’t be so bad.

Of those 40 cards, your hero will bring 15 along with them, so you’re already only looking to build a deck of 25 cards. While it is possible that you can build a singleton deck, in reality you’ll want to include a couple of cards in multiple, because you’ll either want to increase your chances of finding them, or you’ll want to benefit from the effect multiple times. Some cards can only be included once in a deck, either because of uniqueness or limitations on the card itself. For instance, there are the three neutral resource cards which can only be included once, and your Aspect resource doubler card, which can only be included twice. If you include those (and while I know a lot of internet folks will tell you not to, but why wouldn’t you want more resources?) then you’re looking at a 20-card deck that you need to build. If you include three allies, because that’s the ally limit, then you’ve got to find 17 more cards. If you find 5 good cards and include two copies of each, you then only need to find 7 more cards. The process to build this 40 card deck can be whittled down until actually it’s just a case of finding a few cards that you like the look of, and going from there.

I’ve already mentioned my Spider-Man deck as something I’m quite pleased with, and it’s something that has grown with me from the very start of this game. For someone who is not overly bothered with the webslinger, I have definitely played with this hero the most! My approach to Spider-Man Justice was to include a number of ways to remove threat from the scheme, because he has some pretty good attacks and defence cards in his personal cards already. As my card collection grew, and I was getting more cards that did more than just thwart, things were being swapped in and out quite rapidly. As it stands, he’s quite a powerful character at the minute because his is a deck that I have spent the most time with, and I would say that he’s the one I evaluate pretty much any Justice card against.

Captain Marvel has been another joy to work with, although that is principally due to her hero cards being so good. I’ve built her as Protection, I think primarily because I had been playing her as Aggro, but moved on to using those cards for Iron Man. As it happens, this change happened around the time I started buying more packs, and so I was getting a number of very interesting Protection cards whereby a hero could deflect damage back at enemies, for example, and so a lot of her deck is dealing almost accidental damage, if that makes sense! Coupled with the fact she is pretty damn powerful anyway, it’s another fun deck that I enjoy playing.

Also in Protection is Black Panther, which caused a bit of trouble for me at first because I had already used a lot of the good cards for Captain Marvel! This is perhaps where the hero specific cards come into play, however, as the way that I would evaluate a card changes, based on what I want the deck to do. When it comes to Captain Marvel, she’s doing a lot of damage through her own cards, so she doesn’t necessarily need all of those cards that reflect the damage back to an enemy during the villain phase. Black Panther has no shortage of resource cards within his deck, of course, so he can afford to bring much more expensive cards because they won’t end up being used as resources due to having no way of playing them. I’ve been able to lean more into the healing aspect of Protection with Black Panther, though, which is nice to have that kind of flexibility within the Aspect, but also it’s nice to have that real sort of team-spirit when playing the game, so having the healer, the brute, etc.

The last deck that I have “scratch built” is Iron Man, in the aforementioned Aggro build. Unsurprisingly, then, he has a lot of cards that are basically there to beat the living daylights out of enemies. However, Iron Man can be quite a janky hero to play, I find, due to the fact his hand size in hero mode is based on how many Tech upgrades he has, but will be a minimum of 1. Due to bad draws, I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve ended up playing him basically every other turn, as he requires re-setting to Alter Ego to draw cards, then plays them in Hero form, only to then need to switch back on the next turn and therefore do nothing, etc.

Much like with Spider-Man and the thwart cards getting better, there are now more attack cards that will do additional things, which I like because it makes the deck a lot more multi-functional, but also I love the value you get from multiple effects. While I have had some despairing games with Iron Man due to lack of drawing any upgrades, I’ve also had a few where it’s almost been an embarrassment of riches as I draw all the good stuff and can’t decide which cards to ditch for resources, and which to keep!

However, for all that there are fancy new cards that are available in the later packs, I do find the core set stuff provides a backbone for these decks, regardless. It’s interesting, because people talk about power creep all the time with games like these, but while the newer cards do often seem like they’re flashy and amazing, it’s still core set cards that I find myself coming back to time and again. I suppose that could partly be due to the size of my collection, of course, but nevertheless, I do think that it’s interesting how the core stuff holds up for years.

My other decks are pretty much slight tinkerings with the pre-constructed decks for heroes like Captain America, Doctor Strange, Spectrum and the like. Interestingly, the Star-Lord precon deck that I mentioned in yesterday’s blog as being widely disparaged has only had three cards swapped out for me, and I’ve not found it that bad to play. I suppose I still have a lot of heroes where I’ve not tried them much, however, so I have plenty more life left in this game for me yet!

Marvel Champions week is in full swing here at spalanz.com, and today I wanted to talk about the distribution method for the game, and weigh up some of the pros and cons.

As you hopefully know by now, Marvel Champions is a living card game that follows, to some degree, the established pattern from Fantasy Flight by releasing content in a big box, and subsequent cycle of smaller clamshell packs. Here, the big box calls itself a campaign expansion, though I’ve already talked about my thoughts on that this week, and comes with five villains plus two hero decks. The villains add to the stable of what makes up the game, and function a bit like scenarios that you play through. You’re never really doing anything different each time – it’s always just a case of trying to defeat the villain before the main scheme is completed. The villain’s encounter deck is what makes games unique though, and what’s more, you the player can further customise it through the use of modular encounter sets that can change up how villains feel to play against.

The heroes will each come with a pre-built deck in one of the four Aspects (Justice, Leadership, Aggression and Protection). The subsequent cycle of hero decks will then bring out yet more heroes, who each come with a pre-built deck, as well as some extra cards designed to go into your collection, and that you can use to swap in to your decks to change up how your heroes play, usually one card per off-Aspect.

Each cycle also features a Scenario Pack which gives another villain to fight, meaning each cycle generally has six villains and six heroes, although the very first cycle after the core set technically had 11 heroes, and the current X-Men cycle will finish up with eight heroes.

Anyway! The pre-built decks for heroes can vary wildly in how they play, from a deck like Doctor Strange that is widely admired and is very often recommended for play as it comes, to Star-Lord that is baffling for some of the cards he comes with, and has been criticised for including Aspect cards that don’t play in accord with his Hero cards.

We’ll get more into these kinds of points in another blog, though. Today, I wanted to talk about the more positive aspects of having the preconstructed decks for heroes. The most obvious, I think, is the appeal of the game to non-gamers. Heck, even some gamers don’t like building decks to play card games like this, so to avoid having a product that would potentially only appeal to a sub-set of a niche hobby, FFG have taken the interesting route of producing content for their game that allows pretty much anyone who wants to try this game the ability to do so. If you’re a Captain America fan, then you can pick up his deck, shuffle up and play, without spending an evening (or longer) going through stacks of cards.

Cap comes with a Leadership deck, naturally, but that doesn’t mean you have to play him as a leader. A Cap Protection deck is entirely possible, of course – it just requires you to have a collection of cards from which to build a new deck. That said, it’s entirely possible that you could take the Protection cards out of Ms Marvel’s precon deck and put them together with Captain America’s Hero cards, and have fun. It might not work that well – as we’ll see, precon decks are often built to work really well with the Hero-specific cards. But it’s certainly possible!

Now, I’m a card gamer of many years, and have spent countless hours of my life going through stacks of cards to build decks for games from scratch. I think I t’s fun, and can be almost as engaging as playing the game itself, trying to find combinations of cards that should work well together. When I first got into this game, after playing my initial games with the core set suggested decks, I was aching to build my own, and as I began to buy new packs, I don’t think I used a single hero in his or her preconstructed form. Probably my inner hipster just wanted to go my own way, and I didn’t really want to be taking what I had begun to think of as the easy route. Hmph.

So I’ve been playing some games with the preconstructed Hawkeye and Black Widow decks, as I’ve gone up against the villains from the Rise of the Red Skull box.

Before I started, I hadn’t really heard a great deal about the Hawkeye deck, but Black Widow didn’t seem to be very popular, because of her reliance on Preparation cards. These are upgrades and support cards that you play, sometimes very cheaply, and can discard when their trigger is met for a certain effect. A lot of her personal cards interact with this mechanic, meaning that you would never build a deck for her without a lot of this type of card. It does make me wonder if the fact there is such a clear reliance on the Preparation cards that Black Widow is therefore not a popular choice for players?

At any rate, I have played with her a few times and had an absolute blast – it can be a little rough at times, don’t get me wrong, as it can take a bit of set-up to get things working, but in my very first game with her, the whole deck just seemed to hum along so beautifully, I was playing with such a huge grin on my face for that fact!

The issue I mentioned about Black Widow relying on her Preparation cards is perhaps compounded by the fact that the game doesn’t actually have a lot of these cards. Black Widow’s hero pack comes with them, of course, and there are cards in each Aspect included in the bonus cards at the back. Since then, however, only two other cards have been printed, one in Aggression and one in Protection. So I guess you are pretty much stuck in the Justice deck that she comes with, if you want to play Black Widow. 

Hawkeye has a Leadership build and his main thing is, naturally, arrows. Something that I was really quite impressed by with Hawkeye was how well his personal cards work – you almost have the rest of his deck there simply to provide the resources to pay for his Hero cards. In pretty much all of the games that I have played with him, I have pretty much relied on having his bow in play (which you can search for by his Alter Ego action anyway), Expert Marksman (to generate resources to pay for his arrows) and then his arrows. You exhaust his bow to shoot an arrow, but then his hero action is to ready his bow, so normally you can fire two arrows per turn, unless you have additional ways to ready him.

Those arrows are just so damn good, though, I think I would definitely look for ways to recur events from the discard pile, as well. They pretty much all do damage, of course, but they can also Stun and Confuse enemies, and remove threat from schemes. It’s just a delight, which is even more of a surprise considering I wasn’t entirely sure I would like it as much as I do!

The Leadership build that he comes with is certainly fine, and for theme I would want to keep him as that because of Kate Bishop being a Leadership card, but I think the main way his deck is going to work as I would like it to is by having a number of allies out, and then playing Earth’s Mightiest Heroes to exhaust them to ready Hawkeye, to allow him to shoot again. Bit clunky, of course, but it might need a little tinkering to see what I can come up with. I think I’d also like to investigate using different allies, though each game I’ve played has been interesting because I’ve had some team cards out with no allies to benefit from them. But anyway!

Natasha’s deck is pretty good by itself, and the cards that I would traditionally have cut in favour of others have actually been perfect for generating the resources I need to play those cards that I do want. Indeed, every game with Natasha has been fascinating to me so far, because I’ve never had a bad run with card draw – I’ve only ever had an embarrassment of riches!

This is perhaps in direct contrast to the X-Men game that I played recently. X-Men are, of course, the new kids and they have a single cycle so far. I tried out Cyclops and Storm against Sabretooth from the new Mutant Genesis box, and I was actually surprised at how different it all felt. Two Leadership decks seemed like it could be an interesting idea at first, but in execution it turned out that Storm was just using all of her personal cards, much like Hawkeye, whereas Cyclops felt very much like a hot mess. It seems to be the case that Cyclops works from attaching cards to enemies, and then using that to his (and his team’s) advantage. I really struggled to get this kind of engine going, however, and in the event, he barely did anything all game. I think there was one moment of clarity where he could attach a card to Sabretooth, then play another card to deal +8 damage to an enemy with a card attached. It was beautiful, but I think in the context of the Sabretooth scenario as well, everything just felt so damn weird! 

I think it is interesting, then, to see how a deck like Black Widow can be so damn good, Hawkeye and Storm are pretty decent, but Cyclops was just too clunky to get going. I do want to try the X-Men again, but I’m thinking I might actually go up against a different villain to see how they do. 

Having the preconstructed decks does mean that you can very much treat this game like a board game – and that is actually how I was selling it to my wife when trying to get her interested last summer. You don’t have to build a deck, you simply need to buy a deck and play with that. I think I will certainly be keeping Black Widow in her precon form, and as time goes on, I may well be doing this with more decks that I buy. I’m sure my inner hipster will recoil at that, but it’s definitely the way forward with some of the heroes!

This week is Marvel Champions week! I have declared it so!

I’ve been enjoying Marvel Champions for about six months now, and in that time it has become a real favourite for me. True, I have waxed and waned a bit, as I’ve tried to get into the game slowly, without overwhelming myself with the amount of content that is out there for the game. Between Christmas and my birthday, though, I’ve had a significant injection of content that has left me with a lot of stuff to discover, and so that’s really the aim of this week on the blog – my attempt to really get to grips with the game and all the new stuff that I now have!

This game was chosen as one of my 10×10 games for the year, but in actual fact I think I’m going to smash this goal before the end of January as a result of this endeavour! I think that’s one of the big attractions of the game for me, though, that it can be played as a pretty standalone experience. There are hundreds of heroes in the Marvel pantheon, with as many villains for them to go up against, and I love the fact you can get all manner of mash-ups going from this game.

I have previously talked on the blog about how each big box expansion for this game is sold as a “campaign expansion”, but said campaign is actually pretty weak, especially in comparison with the other co-op LCG out there, Arkham Horror. However, I actually now think that this is a good thing, because it doesn’t lock you in to playing in a specific way. Yes, there’s a vague storyline going through each box, and even the core set, and it kinda makes sense to enjoy that story by playing through each villain in the recommended order. But there’s really nothing stopping you from just playing a single game against Hela, without first going through Thanos and his minions. Or you can just play against Ultron, or just against The Collector. Or whatever.

In modern games, it seems to be a bit of an expectation that there will be some form of campaign play, or some way of linking together different games to form an overarching narrative. It’s not always a requirement, though, and I’m a big fan of the fact you can pick this game up and have a great game by playing a one-off fight against, say, Red Skull.

Indeed, the campaign system is weak enough that it almost encourages you to avoid it. I’ve only really tried the Thanos campaign, but was so decidedly unimpressed that I gave up after Thanos himself, the halfway point, as it didn’t really seem worthwhile. Each box has a not insignificant amount of cards for campaign play, but I’m thinking they could just be used for regular games, if at all. There is some theme involved with them, but it’s not Arkham Horror levels of immersion.

I feel as though I’m ranting here, but that’s really not the case! Suffice it to say, the campaign system in Marvel Champions holds very little interest for me, but this is not a bad thing because I love the fact this is a game you can just pick up and play.

It’s Marvel Champions week, so let’s look forward to a week of rambling about what has very quickly become one of my most-played games!!