Marvel Champions

My friend is still obsessed with Marvel Champions, and I still enjoy it, so we played a couple of games yesterday. He played a lightly-tuned Domino/justice deck, while I played a moderately-tuned Colossus/protection deck.

First game was Klaw, with Iron Spider's Sinister Six (from the SP//dr hero pack) replacing Klaw's usual modular set of Masters of Evil. The difficulty level was approximately the same, except that the Sandman minion really accelerates Klaw's encounter deck, either as a minion or as a boost. Colossus got an incredible starting hand (after mulliganing three cards) with all of his most important upgrades. It still took some time to get Colossus up and rolling, but eventually he was routinely dealing out good damage, with Protection cards like Powerful Punch and Tackle. I beefed up his card flow and defensive capabilities with Unflappable and Judoka Skill. Klaw did make it to the second stage of his main scheme before we defeated him.

Second game was the custom scenario Scorpio, only I replaced the recommended modular set Experimental Weapons with the nasty Goblin Gear modular set from Sinister Motives. Scorpion is modest SCH 1/ATK 2 sort of villain, but his Zodiac Key gives him +1 ATK, as do various bomb gear cards from Goblin Gear. His scenario includes 11 (!) minions representing the other 11 signs of the Zodiac. They are all roughly on par with Hydra minions, except that each has a special ability that occasionally gets triggered by other Zodiac cards. I was worried that Colossus might not be as useful against a minion-heavy scenario, as he tends to just do one or two powerful attacks per round, but Domino was able to help by shooting one or two minions every turn.

The Scorpio scenario is a bit easier than average, aside from the quantity of minions, but it suddenly turned nasty when Scorpio got the Advanced Glider. Suddenly he was activating at least twice per turn against both of us, either double-attacking or double-scheming. The only way to get rid of it was a player action to discard attack cards totaling at least 3 points of cost. Aside from Tackle, my attack cards were either cheap or not even classified as attack cards (Made of Rage), so I was unable to quickly get rid of Advanced Glider. Domino ended up getting rid of it after we suffered through three turns of double activations. Once we got rid of it, Colossus finished off Scorpio with two consecutive turns of big damage.

I am currently working on printing off an epic Dr. Doom custom scenario that somebody made. It looks amazing and thematic, and effectively includes several custom modular sets that are all specific to Doom. Each one of those modular sets has a side scheme that can contribute to a special victory condition for Doom. I think the full set is maybe 80 cards. Unfortunately, the designer didn't include print files (because it is not quite fully playtested), so I am downloading it one card at a time and then re-sizing each card to fit my own print template (a simple spreadsheet) before I am ready to print the full set off in sheets of nine cards.

I'm very disappointed that Beast didn't make the cut in the X-Men wave. FFG's hero selection once again proving baffling.

There's a handful of heroes in this wave that while fine should not have been selected over Beast, IMO. And while I'm #ranting they made an X-Men wave without Professor X? Or Emma Frost?

Meh.

I'm a little disappointed that Beast didn't make the cut, but I guess I can see that the designers might not have felt inspired. He has low-end superhuman strength, agility, and endurance, small claws and fangs, super leaping ability, and a superhuman intellect. That's an okay set of abilities that could be represented with cards, but doesn't really suggest a cohesive deck concept. They may get back to him later if they do another Avengers wave, along with Wonder Man, Black Knight, Hercules, etc. Notice that the Dark Beast scenario in Age of Apocalypse strictly treats Beast as a furry mad scientist.

I find it more disappointing that we didn't get Emma Frost. She was first introduced as a villain in 1980, but has been a hero for the last 30 years. Emma would have called for another one of those double-sized hero cards, as she has two distinct hero forms: psionic and diamond. In her diamond form, she is extremely durable, but she can only use her psionic powers if she isn't in diamond form.

Still, Magneto looks pretty neat. He only has 10 hit points and 3 REC, but a solid 2/2/2 stat line in hero form. His cards seem to deliver reasonably good effects with a situational bonus, like an attack for 7 damage that also gives him a toughness card if he defeats the target. His hero card ability to fish for a magnetic card is a nice way to mimic the way Magneto worked as a villain in his scenario in Mutant Genesis.

I finished templating that whole Doctor Doom custom scenario for printing, but it's like 10 sheets of color printing, so I am going to take another hard look at it before committing to printing and sleeving it. In the meantime, I noticed that there is a nice custom scenario for Justin Hammer, a villain featured in the legendary Demon in a Bottle storyline for Iron Man, as well as the movie Iron Man II. There are three things that I find appealing about the Justin Hammer scenario. First, it's a minion heavy set, featuring a more than a dozen low-end minions who once ganged up on Iron Man and lost. Second, this scenario has two versions of most of these minions, and the potential for any given minion to level up during the scenario. Third, these minions protect specific potent side schemes that can enter play. I should probably take a look at more of these custom scenarios, because the quality of a scenario is almost completely independent of the quality of the villain in the comics. For example, I dislike The Hood in the comics, but I enjoy The Hood scenario for this game.

Magneto is fine. I tend to see him more as a villain than a hero even tho he's on that grey line and flip-flops between his alignment. It would have been cool to have a Prof X pack to go with him.

Seeing as it will be a long while before they come back to mutants, I find the hero selection a massive fumble.

I'm keen to hear how the Dr Doom scenario goes if you do commit to printing it out. At my old job a few years ago I had access to a printer and would print the occasional custom hero or villain that I heard good things about. They were usually pretty fun.

Being printer-less now, I haven't checked in with that scene for a while. But if it's any good I'll head down to the local print place.

I printed the Justin Hammer scenario and played it. Although you may remember Justin Hammer as the incompetent Elon Musk-like villain from the movie Iron Man II (the real Musk made a cameo appearance), this scenario takes its inspiration from one of the all-time great Iron Man storylines in the comics: Demon in a Bottle. Although the story is best remembered for Tony Stark's spiral into alcoholism, there is also a great fight scene in the penultimate issue, where Iron Man battles a significant quantity of minor league super-villains.

review of Iron Man #127 here: bronzeagebabies.blogspot.com/2010/05/get...n-bottle-part-2.html

Justin Hammer is a wealthy, amoral, and ruthless businessman, a rival of Tony Stark. He doesn't have any superpowers, so he employs mercenary supervillains to commit crimes that further his interests. This custom scenario does an excellent job of expressing these concepts with cards. There is a separate deck of 15 lackey cards, as well as a second lackey deck consisting entirely of improved versions of the lackeys in the first deck. These lackeys enter play several ways, often by attaching to side schemes as the side schemes enter play. Justin Hammer is a scheming villain, but when he is supposed to activate for an attack, the attack is actually performed by a lackey attached to a side scheme, if any. Otherwise, the hero that was supposed to be attacked instead draws a bad guy from the lackey deck, and said bad guy attacks immediately. The stage one lackeys tend to have 3 to 5 hit points, and scheme/attack scores of 1 or 2, while the stage two lackeys tend to have more hit points and slightly higher scheme or attack values.

Although Hammer has really low hit points for a villain (9 per player at stage 2, for example), he is often shielded by his lackeys. He starts with a permanent environment card in play that makes him immune to damage while there are any lackeys in play. Once there are no lackeys in play, this environment card flips to a side that allows Hammer to take damage. Every time a lackey enters play, you put a token on side two of the environment card. Once there are five tokens on the environment card, you discard the tokens and flip back to side one. In order to defeat Hammer, players need to beat all the lackeys in play and then directly attack Hammer while they can.

As previously mentioned, side schemes come into play in this scenario with at least one lackey attached. While that lackey doesn't defend the side scheme, the lackey does engage the player who defeats that side scheme. In addition to the lackeys, Hammer also has some conventional minions in his encounter deck. His encounter deck also offers ways to upgrade the lackeys and minions, and it is recommended to play with the Ransacked Armory modular set from The Hood pack.

I played this scenario two-handed solo with a well-tuned Iron Man/justice deck and a lightly-tuned War Machine/leadership deck, as these are the two heroes that fought Justice Hammer in the comics. Initially, I struggled to clear the lackeys long enough to get in attacks on Hammer, but this got easier once both of my heroes got most of their tech upgrades into play. Thanks to early deployment of Under Surveillance, they prevented Hammer from ever getting to stage 2 of his main scheme. When they finally beat Hammer, both heroes had at least 9 hit points. While the scenario felt a little easy, I think that could be testament to the effectiveness of the two hero decks. It also made a big difference that Hammer never got to the second stage of his main scheme, which would have upgraded all of his lackeys to stage 2. Because there a total of 21 minions and lackeys in the scenario, I can easily picture certain other hero decks getting overwhelmed by attacks, especially Dr. Strange. This also seems like a scenario where a well-constructed Valkyrie deck might really shine, especially if paired with another hero who doesn't need a lot of setup to get rolling, like Captain Marvel or Spider-man.

I enjoyed the Justin Hammer scenario, and definitely recommend it. However, it is not yet finalized, which may be why the font size of the card text is a little too small. At some point, I might reformat those cards and reprint them.

Valkyrie is generally considered to be one of the worst heroes in this game, but I keep trying to make her work because I am an old school Defenders fan. Because she was designed to be a minion whacker, she is probably doomed to functioning as a specialist in a multi-player game. I have found that she works especially well with her Defender teammate Doctor Strange, who is also considered to be somewhat overpowered in this game, even with the overall power creep in the last two years. Thanks to his invocation deck, Doc is great at everything... except for dealing with a lot of minions. He doesn't have any cards that can effectively target multiple opponents at once, whereas Valkyrie is quite efficient at eliminating minions one by one.

So I paired my latest Valkyrie/aggression deck with my Dr. Strange/protection deck and played against Justin Hammer and his horde of lackeys again. While this is an ideal situation for Valkyrie, I also got a good starting hand. On turn three, Valkyrie blitzed through six (!) minions, one by one. At the end of the game, both heroes were still fairly healthy and never even went to alter-ego once, while Justin Hammer was stunned, confused, and all out of hit points.

My mighty Valkyrie deck:

marvelcdb.com/decklist/view/40517/valkyrie-the-berserker-1.0

Kmann wrote: I'm keen to hear how the Dr Doom scenario goes if you do commit to printing it out. At my old job a few years ago I had access to a printer and would print the occasional custom hero or villain that I heard good things about. They were usually pretty fun.

Being printer-less now, I haven't checked in with that scene for a while. But if it's any good I'll head down to the local print place.

I tried the Dr. Doom scenario today. It was a bit of a struggle to decide who to play against him, since it really should be the Fantastic Four. And there are custom decks now for the Fantastic Four that are considered fully playtested, but I looked at them and they don't do a great job of capturing the characters, in my opinion. For example, Reed should be deploying player side schemes representing prototype scientific gadgets. Finally I settled on a two-handed solo game with Iron Man/justice and Captain America/leadership. I was expecting pure mayhem from Doom and these are two solid hero decks.

The Dr. Doom scenario is a sprawling beast with a lot of replay value. It has a new loss condition: if four or more portals come into play, the players lose. Doom has a side deck of 9 portal cards. Each one functions like an environment, and brings in a matching new main scheme. The first portal enters play after Doom completes his starting main scheme, Mystic Portals. So players will effectively be facing a series of up to 4 main schemes, and everything after the original main scheme will be a random selection.

Each new main scheme also comes with a modular set that immediately gets shuffled into the main deck. Four of these portal main schemes come with new modular sets that are part of this Doom scenario. The other five give you a choice from a list of three modular sets published with various existing scenarios for the game. For example, Unleash Hydra gives you a choice between Hydra Assault, Hydra Patrol, and Legions of Hydra.

Doom's main deck features a mixture of Doom Bots and magic spells. The Doom Bots are 1/* minions with Toughness and just one hit point, but the * means that their ATK is equal to the number of Doom Bots in play. They are also ignore piercing. Doom also starts with an environment card that increases the cost of all thwart events by 1.

This game turned out to be moderately easy. Cap got Hawkeye out early, so he knocked the toughness off the next four Doom Bots that entered play. Iron Man got Under Surveillance out just after the original main scheme completed and we drew the Space Portal. The matching Space Invaders main scheme brought in the Armies of Titan modular set. Any time any ally got defeated, the Space Portal made us put 1/player scheme on the Space Invaders main scheme, so I only did a little chump blocking. There was a lot of back and forth, but Doom never got a second portal out before he was defeated. Maybe the scenario is a little easy, or maybe I need to be playing it on Expert level.

Friend came over, so we tried both of my new custom scenarios. First we took on Justin Hammer and his horde of lackeys. My friend played his slightly tuned Domino/justice deck and I played a moderately well-tuned Thor/aggression deck. Although Thor is reasonably good at clearing minions, they kept piling on Domino instead. Even so, we won relatively easily. I like the concept of this scenario, but the lack of strong attacks from the villain leaves it lacking in difficulty.

Then we played Dr. Doom, and we played on Expert level, which I rarely choose. I continued with the same Thor deck, while my friend switched to Cable/leadership. That was an excellent choice, because thwarting events cost one extra in the Doom scenario, but Cable does heavy thwarting via his allies instead of events.

Doom blew the first stage of his main scheme quickly, and we drew the Space Portal. Doom steadily dealt out strong attacks, and the Doom Bots were an ongoing problem. We occasionally got some good attacks in on Doom, then he got another portal, Limitless Library, which got him a bunch of attachment cards to shuffle into his deck. We battled on, and Doom soon got out the Hydra portal, which added a bunch of goons to the deck. But we already had Doom down to 21 hit points. I managed to pull off the win with help from a wave of allies: Hercules, Sif, and Valkyrie.

I feel much better about the Dr. Doom scenario now. He is a very worthy opponent, and his portal deck offers a great deal of replay value to his scenario.

Ever since the Crowdstrike fiasco last week, I have had trouble accessing the Google doc spreadsheet with all the custom content links via the Hall of Heroes site. I see a brief glimpse of the Google doc and then the screen changes to an error message. Today I found that there is a new link at Hall of Heroes that does work. Here it is:

drive.google.com/file/d/1eHccTenN79uWBqWie1oV8M1Bh3_Rh_yu/view

Gave the Doom/expert scenario another try, this time in three-handed solo game with Captain Marvel/aggression, Spectrum/leadership, and Ms. Marvel/justice. I haven't player either Captain Marvel or Spectrum in quite a while, though I have lightly tuned both decks in recent months. The Spectrum deck worked well once I decided to prioritize the leadership combo of Mass Attack/Band Together. In the past, it seemed like the combo was too much effort (needs three untapped Avenger allies in play at once), but it is well worth if you can pull off two or three Mass Attacks on consecutive turns, because your allies don't take any consequential damage. The Captain Marvel deck needs some work, because she has a strong incentive to tap to defend herself (DEF 3), but lacks inherent untap tech and the aggression cards that I included are a bit expensive. Ms. Marvel did well, but I did quite a bit of tuning of her deck and have been playing her recently. Doom won a solid victory, though at least my heroes defeated his initial villain stage.

The slowing pace of new releases has given custom deck makers a chance to finish some of their projects lately, so I am looking forward to printing off hero decks for Hercules, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, Jack of Hearts, Ka-Zar (!), Shang-Chi, and um, non-Marvel anti-hero John Constantine. Hercules has a hand size of just 3 (!), but can take a stunned card in exchange for another 3 cards. His design makes him a moderately powerful combatant with access to some magic items and divine enhancements. Luke Cage is subtracts one from all damage that he takes but can only heal with his REC stat. Iron Fist gets extra benefits if he pays for certain event cards with a specific set of resources. Jack of Hearts gains and spends power tokens and can launch big energy blasts. Shang-Chi can put some attack cards from every aspect in his deck and gains extra cards or attacks if he pays for his own attack cards with specified resources. Ka-Zar gains and spends tokens, and his cards have a very pleasing jungle color scheme. John Constantine makes dark pacts that help him but make the scenario harder, in a way that reminds me a bit of the Deadpool hero deck. It is true that most of the custom decks that I download and print are for male characters, but that is partly because Marvel has really made an effort to publish most of the major female characters, nearly half of all the official hero decks released so far.

I also look forward to trying custom scenarios featuring the villain Purple Man and the vigilante Punisher. Somebody did an okayish Punisher hero deck a while back, but decided to take it down because that character is excessively popular with right-wing extremists.

Dr Doom's portals sound very cool and like they add great replayability. I enjoy scenarios with that randomness to keep you guessing no matter how many times you play. I'll have to print this one out.

One of the few decks I printed out was a Punisher one. It's been a while so I don't know which one it was, sorry. I read the comics back in the day so was keen to get Punisher in the game. I remember liking it but no actual details why and nothing about how he mechanically played so this is a fairly useless comment really... lol. There was some glitch with the deck that I believe the designer addressed it in a revision. But again my details are scant.

However, the guy had chosen good art so it had that going for it.

When FFG finally gets to street hero I hope they don't shy away from The Punisher. That's how the bastards win.

The long-awaited street level wave(s) might not be anytime soon. With the new Fantastic Four movie scheduled for release in 2025, we will likely get the Fantastic Four wave. Meanwhile, the next wave that was just announced at GenCon is going to be focused on the agents of SHIELD and their enemies. I like SHIELD, but it was only really great during the legendary Steranko run in the late '60s. I dislike the side mission mechanic introduced in Age of Apocalypse, as it clutters up the table and has slightly fiddly rules, so I hope they don't include side mission in the SHIELD campaign box. However, the side missions seem particularly appropriate for SHIELD from a thematic standpoint, so we will probably get them.

Tried out the Hercules custom deck recently and it's great fun. He doesn't hit as hard as you might expect, but his signature attack card costs 2 and hits for 4, and stuns the target if you only pay for it with physical (red) resources. His hand size is bad (3 in hero form, 4 in alter ego), but he can refill his hand once per turn in hero form if he either takes a stun card or takes 2 damage. He also has several Olympian magic items, though most have a limited number of uses. I built him with an aggression hit focused on cards that cost two or less, to help with the hand size issue. I only put 2 allies in the deck (like Hulk, Hercules doesn't have a signature ally): Wasp and Hulk. Wasp is free, but her hit points are based on how many energy (yellow) resources used to pay for her. Hulk is also cheap, and he is a good value in this deck because I put a lot of physical resources in the deck. However, that is slightly detrimental for the Wasp, so sometimes I just can't play her when I get her.

Then I tried Hercules out in true solo mode against Rhino and Sandman. I don't often play true solo because the games are too short and swingy, especially with single-stage villain schemes like in the Rhino and Sandman scenarios. It took me three tries to beat Rhino, mainly because I was playing a little too fast and reckless to just rush him down to zero hit points. Sandman was a similar hassle, but I learned to use Hulk only to scoop sand, and finally beat Sandman on the third try.

My friend came over yesterday, and I persuaded him to try Hercules. To compensate for Herc's general lack of thwarting cards, I played my Black Widow/justice deck that I haven't played in quite a while. Then we tackled the Purple Man custom scenario. Purple Man doesn't have a lot of hit points and doesn't even directly attack until his third stage. Instead, he cranks out a lot of minions, either mercenaries or people that he is mind controlling. The innocent bystander minions are a bit rough because you are not allowed to attack them, and can only get rid of them by doing a healing effect (like a basic REC) and ignore the healing in favor of discarding an innocent bystander. Purple Man also like to turn your allies against you, and can even force you to discard a persona. With a fair amount of difficulty, we managed to defeat him. Black Widow is fairly effective at thwarting even while in alter ego, so she spent more than half the game in alter ego (I jokingly called it "working from home.") so she could also dismiss an Innocent Bystander minion nearly every turn. We got off to a slightly slow start because my friend almost never plays aggression decks and I don't often play justice decks.

Then we pitted Hercules and Black Widow against the custom Doctor Doom scenario. Those Doombots can be quite vexing, but we were having a pretty good game, holding him at the first portal (The Limitless Library) for a long time. Doom is a hard hitter, typically attacking for 4 damage, but occasionally as much as 8, so we gradually got worn down. He was even sometimes hitting Black Widow in alter ego with indirect damage effects. He quickly blew past the Wakanda portal and upgraded his armor with vibranium (giving him Stalwart), and was a genuine threat to clear the third portal (Hydra Base) for his win when we finally stopped him. Great game.

Agents of Shield announcement is like full antihype. I'm sure the cards will be fun but oof.

Jubilee and Iceman are both really fun, I've been running them through a bunch of scenarios together. Not like particularly powerful heroes on the scale of this game, but just solid designs that are fun.

Edit: I've got my x23 sidekick deck still built, might swap Iceman out for that and run her and jubilee against some tougher villains. That sounds fun.

That pre-built Iceman deck is pretty strong. I haven't even bothered to re-work it yet. Now that I have Iceman, Angel, Black Widow, and a custom Hercules deck, I can really play some original Champions in a big four-handed solo game. The original Champions comic only lasted 17 issues, but they did battle both Magneto and Dr. Doom near the end. Now I just need an old-school Johnny Blaze Ghost Rider deck to complete that team.

While I am disappointed that the Fantastic Four wave has been delayed again, SHIELD is an okay replacement. The delay is probably strategic, in order to synch up with the release of the next Fantastic Four movie reboot. I would hate to think that FFG is cynically delaying both the FF and the inevitable street level wave because they are afraid that fans will bail after those two waves.