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Marvel Champions
Gary Sax wrote: lol iconic Xmen like shadowcat.
She isn't one of the first ten characters that comes to mind when I hear the name X-Men, but Shadowcat has been in X comics for over 40 years now. I feel old.
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Then we took on Venom Goblin. He beat us with surprising speed in the first game, flipping 2/3 of Manhattan to symbiote territory. The second game went a lot better, as we nearly finished VG's first form and seemed to have good threat management on the main schemes, though one did slip into symbiote territory. But he was pounding us with attachments, and we let him keep his Advanced Glider for a turn, which gives him double activations against each of us. We both got knocked down to 1 hit point each and had to go to alter ego for healing. During that single turn, he went from 7 to 20 scheme on Upper Manhattan and defeated us. We plan to take on Venom Goblin again soon. I might tune my Captain Marvel deck again before then.
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Fortunately, all the campaign boxes have been released so I've been happily playing through them. I played GMW on Standard and then cruised into Mad Titan's Shadow, which I kept playing on Standard. I really dug that campaign but only played it once before the lure of Sinister Motives - and being able to once again rejoin the Champions conversation - proved too strong.
I shifted back up to Expert for this one and it's been a blast. The two heroes are a lot of fun, SpiderGwen's timing considerations are always interesting and I love the Shield build of Miles. So cool.
It's taken me a few runs at each scenario to beat - and my score is pretty low - but it's been fun. I've now hit the wall with Venom Goblin as I'm just using slightly tweaked pre-cons. I plan to do a deckbuild to hopefully deal with him on the weekend.
And even though I droned on about not buying the Guardians I have ended up with the whole gang, picking up Nebula at half-price just last week to complete the cycle. I'm yet to play Drax, Gamora or Nebula as I literally only picked these up in the last month, but the other Guardians have all been really fun to play. The whole cycle including the campaign box was bought at sale prices so I feel pretty good about it and have no buyer's remorse.
I hadn't planned on picking up IronHeart - or Nova - but the cards they come with seem too good to not have in the collection so my resolve there has faltered as well. I have little interest in the wave of Spider heroes that are coming but I can see the same thing happening.
Such is the nature/reality of LCG's I guess.
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Beyond that, I definitely want certain iconic heroes that have been overlooked for too long: Daredevil, the Fantastic Four, Namor, Luke Cage, Silver Surfer, and Iron Fist. Hopefully there will be a Fantastic Four wave and a street-level wave after Mutant Geneis.
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Marvelcdb.com has a large archive of deck designs by a variety of players, and it has a nice visual layout. There is room for strategic tips for playing a given deck, plus feedback from other players. I have not spent much time at the site, though, because deck design doesn't usually interest me in this game. The card pool is still relatively shallow, plus 15 cards out of 40-50 are automatically determined by which hero you are playing. Accordingly, too many deck designs focus on the same few concepts, like stun-lock and ally swarm.
But I recently saw an amazing deck design on Marvelcdb which is a Hulkless Hulk deck. This is a Justice deck is designed for Hulk to stay in Bruce Banner form for nearly the whole game, completely subverting the obvious Hulk/Aggression slant of the starter deck. Because it is designed to be a solo deck, it runs an ally swarm (9). It does a lot of thwarting, but a player can also flip to Hulk near the end and just smash the villain. The designer bragged that he has already beaten Rhino, Klaw, Sandman, and Thanos (!) with this deck. Because I didn't want to mess up a bunch of my decks by borrowing cards, I made a proxy deck based on screenshots and scans of cards, then sleeved them.
My first game against Rhino/Bomb Threat ended quickly due to Rhino scheming out, but I easily beat him in the second game. Sandman/A Mess of Things went down easy in a single play. Klaw/Masters of Evil turned out to be really hard, especially since I drew my nemesis Abomination every_single_game. I thought that Abomination would be a joke since I was planning to stay in alter ego, but he was originally a spy in the comics, which is why he schemes for two. And his Clash of the Titans cards send him hunting down my allies. I finally won on the 4th (!) game against Klaw.
This is a swingy deck, or maybe every solo game is very swingy and I just didn't know that because I rarely play solo. In the bad games, I get up and rolling with the resources and thwarting too slowly, and the villain schemes out before I get through my deck the first time. In the good games, I get a big array of resources, allies, and supports together and completely control the game. One hard lesson that I learned is that if I am not thwarting enough, I need to Hulk out so that the villains and minions are attacking me instead of scheming. But with only 15 Hulk cards out of a deck of 50, those Hulk turns are generally less effective than the Bruce Banner turns.
Banner deck: marvelcdb.com/decklist/view/19277/hulk-s...ner-beats-thanos-1.0
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I persuaded my friend to let me swap in the Banner deck described in the previous post. In theory, we would have had two good thwarting decks slowing down Venom Goblin until we both had good arrays of cards in play, then I could Hulk out and beat Venom Goblin to a pulp. In reality, an early Venom Goblin card forced me into Hulk form for a turn, which slowed my necessary buildup time (comparable to Iron Man). We were starting to turn things around, when VG got in some vicious attacks, including a hit for 8 damage on a tapped out Adam Warlock. We lost again.
The problem with these final campaign bosses (with the possible exception of the Red Skull) is that they are so hard that even veteran players with good tactics can't win at standard difficulty without a lot of luck. And then if you get that luck and win, it feels a little cheap because it took the luck to win. We might take one more run at him, swapping out the Goblin Gear for the Goblin Gimmicks module.
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Deck 1 was a Quicksilver justice deck that abuses One Way or Another and Justive Served to draw lots of cards and thwart for 12-15 a turn.
Deck 2 was Nebula aggression, tuned to get multiple copies of Follow Through on the board and do stupid stuff with Into the Fray while she had her technique out that gives piercing and overkill. Surprisingly easily to set up, and by turn three I had a play that smashed a minion, did 6 damage to the villain, removed 6 threat, and healed for 6.
It was fun, and felt like a comic story. Quicksilver was racing around the museum, discovering all kinds of artifacts until they finally found the ship....Nebula ran interference, slipping in and out of the shadows, ambushing minions and distracting the Collector with stuns and confuses and knocking him down. The last turn was glorious ...Quicksilver burst out 20 thwart, blowing us into the third stage, and Nebula finished it off by playing Into the Fray for 6 threat removal plus a knockout on the villain to clear the rest of the threat.
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Risky Business was going very smoothly for us, with Norman held to the first stage of his main scheme for the entire game. But a turn or so after we defeated his first villain stage, my friend made an error and let his hit points get too low just before I kicked over Criminal Enterprise back into State of Madness. The resulting indirect damage took Miles completely out of the game. But I was set up pretty well, with a couple of good arrows in the quiver, plus Mockingbird, War Machine, and US Agent all in play for a West Coast Avengers reunion. On the final turn of the game, I played a leadership card that gave all of my allies +1 ATK (plus War Machine had a Sidearm for +1 ATK). I tapped them all for attacks, shot Green Goblin with an arrow, and then hit him with my bow for the final 3 points of damage for the win.
Then we took on the notorious Mutagen Formula, and that game went even smoother. Green Goblin never got to the second stage of his main scheme. Neither of our heroes got eliminated. The big threat in this scenario is getting swarmed by minions, so I was careful about when I used my Explosive Arrows. Miles and SHIELD did a great job with the thwarting, though we did have one turn near the end where Goblin managed to scheme from 0 to 13 threat in a single turn. Hawkeye finished off Goblin with two Vibranium Arrows in one turn.
We did so well that I am wondering if these two decks could handle Venom Goblin. Probably not.
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Expert Venom Goblin seems just as fun but maybe tuned a little too hard to play as often. Probably would hit the sweet spot if you swapped out Goblin Gear for Goblin Gimmicks.
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Maestro is an evil genius version of the Hulk from a dark potential future. In this scenario, he is time travelling back to the present detonate some nuclear weapons in an attempt to kick off World War III. This would generate enough radioactivity to mutate the Hulk into Maestro and ensure the dark future from which Maestro comes. His minions include Hulk-like terrorists and the Dogs of War, big robot dogs that grant themselves and Maestro both Piercing and Overkill on their attacks.
Maestro's other big gimmick is that he dishes out a new status card called Dazed. When a character is Dazed, its next attempt to defend or play a defense event fails and then Dazed is discarded. There are multiple ways in this scenario to get Dazed, but the most common is that a character is Dazed by taking damage from an undefended attack by Maestro. So characters who get Dazed tend to stay Dazed or else get knocked out of the game.
All of my heroes fared well early on and each got an impressive array of cards into play. Banner had multiple resource supports/upgrades and also some SHIELD cards. Strange got his usual good stuff out, especially the Cloak and the Eye. Even Wolverine got some nice upgrades in play, giving him +1 ATK, +1 DEF, +2 REC, and +3 hit points, plus his deadly claws.
For a long time, the heroes held the line. Banner and Strange did a lot of thwarting, while Wolverine did most of the fighting. Strange's friend Night Nurse helped get rid of the annoying Dazed cards, and sometimes he would change a Dazed into a Tough card. Together, they managed to beat Maestro's first villain stage, which had 54 hit points.
But the side schemes were going untended, and Maestro's side schemes tend to feature more than one icon, usually acceleration or extra card icons. Then some bad stuff happened. Baron Mordo entered the game, and his side scheme took away Strange's thwarting invocation. Another Mordo card caused one of Strange's spell events to fail, plus Strange's own obligation card forced him to massively overpay for a couple of events. Wolverine got Dazed and stayed that way for a couple of turns. Banner got forced into Hulk form twice, though at least he got in a couple of good hits that way, including a 13-point punch to Maestro. But all those acceleration tokens began to add up, and the extra encounter cards were getting to be a slog. Maestro schemed his way to victory.
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Then I let the randomizer pick two random heros to build - I ended up with War Machine justice and Rocket leadership - This is where deck building can be story telling. I knew what I wanted to do with WM right away, with all the new SHIELD stuff. Sonic Rifles, flipping every turn and managing threat with the static SHIELD stuff and blazing away with guns. Then I started going through all the Rocket stuff....there's kind of a generic guardians plug and play leadership build that can be used for all of them...Blaze of Glory, Power in all of us to power CITT and the grey guardians, mostly a good stuff deck to go with your hero kit. I'm flipping through the grey stuff, and Two Against the World catches my eye...I fondly remember my Call for Aid War Machine deck that pulled Iron Man to set up your kit. And then I got to thinking, Rocket could run Call for Aid for Iron Man, and they both could run Two Against the World and Rocket would love dropping free tech.
I start going through some more cards, and the Guardians leadership card that lets you draw a card for playing upgrades on allies....hrmmmm Iron Man gets free upgrades...salvage can pull Reinforced Suit back from trash......Ohhh Yondu like upgrades too!!!!!! Gimme Cosmo.
And there was this pile of cards that I never would have built, but for the moment that I had this funny thought of Rocket working as the armorer for a SHIELD facility, The deck totally needs the War Machine deck to work. But basically Rocket pulls Iron Man, and loads him up with with upgrades (honorary guardian) and gets to draw cards for it to boot - And play Two against the World to put tech into play from the deck and ready your buffed Iron Man and your partner, War Machine.
Tried them out last night and blasted through Ebony Maw expert. I'm still tweaking Rocket a little bit but the concept was proofed and was fun.
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