Marvel Champions

When I get a new Marvel Champions campaign, I like run the two new heroes through some familiar scenarios and do a little deck-tuning before taking on the campaign. And when I play the campaign the first time, I like to play four-handed so I really get the full experience of each scenario. I understand that many players prefer true solo, but those game tend to be swingy and relatively short, sometimes giving only a fleeting impression of the scenario.

My team for this campaign is Nick Fury/justice, Maria Hill/leadership, Black Widow/justice, and War Machine/leadership. Normally I prefer to play four-handed solo with three or four different aspects, but these four heroes all share the SHIELD trait, so I wanted them for the SHIELD campaign. Besides, the War Machine deck is functionally an Aggression deck in terms of damage output. His leadership cards are designed to temporarily bring out expensive allies with useful abilities that trigger as soon as they enter play. Then he ideally gets at least one extra activation out of an ally, then sacrifices it for a big thwart, attack, or chump block. My Black Widow deck is probably similar to most Black Widow decks because her design is so focused on preparation cards, and most preparation cards are either justice or basic aspect. None of these four decks is significantly different from the default starter version.

The first scenario is Black Widow. No, not my Black Widow, a different and villainous version with the same training. She doesn't have high hit points or a big attack value, but she is a schemer and her deck includes several cards with an acceleration symbol. The Black Widow hero likes to put preparation cards in play for various contingencies. Prep cards are cheap one-shot cards that can be discarded to counter a specific thing that the villain or a minion is attempting. The Black Widow villain also uses preparation, but it functions differently. Any time the Black Widow villain is attacked, she discards an encounter card, and that triggers any preparation abilities on the discarded encounter card. Maybe her prep cancels the attack damage, or puts a minion into play, or deals damage to the attacking player. She also has a bunch of A.I.M. (Advanced Idea Mechanics) minions, and they are a secret organization of evil scientists and goons that wear yellow beekeeper outfits.

It was a tough game. Fury functions better in his stealth suit, which makes the villain scheme instead of attack him. Hill is better off in alter ego form because it is easier to draw and play her helicarriers with a full hand-size. War Machine flips often, to reload weapons and regain toughness. As a result, Black Widow was scheming a lot. But with two justice decks plus helicarriers, my heroes could do a lot of thwarting. At one point, the threat level got up to 35 (out of 40 for the loss) and my heroes thwarted 28 in one turn. All of my decks functioned as intended, except that War Machine never got his Munitions Bunker in play, which mean a lot more flipping into alter-ego to reload.

One neat gimmick with this SHIELD campaign is the mystery involving a traitor in SHIELD. There are three cards in play that represent members of SHIELD's board of directors, and one of them is a traitor. They start with two tokens on each, and if one of them ever gets a fourth token, it flips over and becomes a permanent bonus to villain attacks or scheming for the rest of the campaign. Getting rid of tokens requires paying 2 matching resources of a specific color (different for each director) and getting a small positive effect like dealing or healing damage, or doing some thwarting. This functions like an ongoing tax on player resources. If you finish a scenario with zero tokens on a director, you can draw an evidence card. If you eventually collect all six evidence cards, you will determine the traitor via process of elimination, which will probably offer an advantage during the mysterious final scenario.