Marvel Champions Playtesting V.1
I have a regular group who all play Marvel Champions, a LCG (or living card game) from Fantasy Flight Games (FFG), whom I’ve mentioned in the posts about Arkham Horror. I’ve been playing since 2020 myself, which is shortly after the game came out, and I’ve played every scenario and most Heroes so far.
Today, we were testing out some new decks, and in this series, I mostly want to talk about what we played and how the games went.
Game 1 - Peni Parker/SP-dr & Ironheart
Game 1 was against M.O.D.O.K. from the new Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. campaign box. We are in the midst of a full campaign through the box, which I will discuss in a separate post. But we weren’t sure we all could meet tonight, so we did some testing instead.
M.O.D.O.K. is pretty easy to handle as long as you can get rid of the minions or find a way to block them. Both of these Heroes have to build, so we did take a bit of a beating at the very beginning. We had 3 of the Adaptoid Environments out at the start, but we held firm, and both of us got what we needed. SP-dr got her upgrades, and I, controlling Ironheart, was able to get to Version 3.
SP-dr was playing with a custom aspect, but she was handling most of the threat without much issue. The main reason we got to the 3rd Environment was due to having +3 Scheme on M.O.D.O.K. early on. After that, however, we were able to take control of the situation, and Ironheart Aggression was able to keep the board clear and fight M.O.D.O.K. down.
Game 2 - Thunderbolts
We played a short game against the Thunderbolts scenario with a custom Scarlet Spider deck and Ghost-Spider Protection. We abandoned it midway because a third-party member joined us, so we wanted to start over. However, despite the lack of a heavy thwarting character, we were doing okay. Almost all of the Thunderbolt minions had been defeated.
Game 3 - Rogue, Storm & Captain Marvel
We went back to M.O.D.O.K. for this one, and it was actually quite laughable. The combination of these three women had him handled fast, and Storm didn’t even find her cape and Captain Marvel never got her Cosmic Flight (in an Aerial Honed Technique deck). None of us made it through our decks, and one strong Energy Channel was really all we needed.
It was unfortunate that we didn’t get to see the team-up’s true potential, but the combos that were able to exist even as it was were strong and we likely would have beaten most scenarios with what we were running.
Game 4 - Thor & Peni Parker/SP-dr
Back to Peni and paired with another small hand size, we decided to take on Ultron to the ultimate extreme. This time I was driving Peni in what I call cheap Justice, while Thor was on Aggression with some of the new cards that were recently revealed in FFG’s announcement for Bucky.
Neither of us ever really felt the small hand size. Thor consistently had 8 - 12 cards in hand, and I had the two most important Tech cards out fairly quickly. We stayed on the first scheme for 90% of the game, only going to the second one when Ultron was on his II side. He was around 35 HP going into the second to last round, and we had the Main Scheme at 0. I didn’t have any attack cards in hand, so I just hit him 3x and let my horde of drones stay on the table. Thor did about 20 more damage, leaving him at around 8-9 HP going into the final round.
The scheme did flip to the final one because I was forced to flip down. There were about 8-9 drones on each of us. It was the wildest board state I have ever seen, and we just ate whatever Ultron did. Then it was our turn, and Thor just finished him off like it was nothing. It was one of the craziest rounds of MC that I’ve played in a while, but I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I think the new Bucky cards are going to shift a lot of the Aggro-focused characters up.
