Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few days, you will almost have certainly heard about or seen some of the spoilers for upcoming hero packs and The Galaxy’s Most Wanted. In this article I am going to take a look at those spoilers and give you my first impressions.
First off, thanks go to Hall of Heroes for compiling all of the spoilers! That website is a great resource and you should definitely visit it if you need some Marvel Champions information. Anyway, on with the spoilers, starting with the many forms of Ant-Man!
For starters, there are three forms! One is an Alter Ego form and the other two are Hero forms.
FFG have also stated that all three of these forms are on one card! The Ant-Man in his Giant form is actually a double-sized card. This is going to work in a similar manner to the cards in the Transformers TCG that have three forms.
I’ve seen a lot of discussion concerning the durability of these cards (I’m not going to weigh in on whether or not people are right to be worried), but I will say that if they are made like the Transformers ones are, they’ll be fine.
As for Ant-Man/Scott Lang, he looks to be quite powerful, and probably pretty good for solo play as he can change form to suit what is needed at the time. Since all three of his forms have a response when you change to that form, you’ll likely be changing every round.
In Giant form he has 3 Attack and 3 Defence which would make him 4 Defence with Armored Vest and also make Counter-Punch pretty good value. Overall, his character card seems quite flexible and it looks like he’ll be a lot of fun to play!
This card could be a sign of things to come, as previously resource cards have only provided resources (well, duh!).
Pym Particles provides a wild resource but with an additional effect if you are in any of your Hero forms, either healing two damage from you or drawing you a card. Both of those effects are likely to be quite welcome, and I think this is much more interesting than the Power of <insert> cards.
Hopefully, they continue this kind of effect into other resource cards, not just Ant-Man’s.
This is a card that I predict will appear in a LOT of decks, mainly because nearly all of the characters have the Avenger trait. This will help you play a lot of your allies, but also support cards like Avengers Mansion or Quincarrier.
Thor will likely be able to benefit greatly from this, as a lot of his cards also have the Asgard trait.
Team-Building Exercise isn’t unique either, so you’ll be able to have multiple copies in play if you wish to do so.
In nearly any card game that I’ve played, at some point I’ve always tried to build a tribal deck and this card will help with that in Champions!
Another character with three forms!
Her Alter Ego encourages the use of cards with mental resources printed on them. An event like Melee would also synergise with her ability in Tiny Hero form, Small but Mighty. This ability also works for events that cause side schemes to be defeated, meaning that she is probably going to be fairly solid in the Justice aspect.
Her Giant form is ridiculously efficient, allowing you to take precisely the amount of threat off or deal the exact amount of damage needed. Any cards that boost her Thwart or Attack will be even better than they normally would.
Overall, I think she’ll want a deck with a decent amount of events that remove threat or deal damage and a few stat boosts if possible. Another solid character!
This was the first of the Team-Up cards that we’ve seen. Team-Up is going to be a keyword that only functions if both characters are in play. The designers have said/heavily-hinted that characters that can benefit from Team-Up are going to have their partner as their personal ally. This will definitely make it a lot easier to Team-Up, and also means that true solo players aren’t missing out!
Since you can normally only change forms once per round, this will help you get the most out of your Hero abilities. I think that Ant-Man is probably going to get the most out of this since he has a response to trigger every time he changes form, but there will be sequences of actions where it benefits Wasp as well.
It seems sensible that they’ve made this a basic card so that characters are not tied into an aspect if they want to play their Team-Up card.
I think that a lot of people forget that Quicksilver is actually part of the MCU, mostly because he died in his first film saving the least-important of the Avengers!
Superpowered Siblings seems handy for digging for the cards you need and is improved if Wanda Maximoff is in play. As hinted, it seems likely that Quicksilver’s ally is Wanda, so you should be able to get the improved effect reasonably often in solo.
Super Speed seems powerful even without any stat boosts, and will become daft when combined with things like Morale Boost or the usual +1 to a main stat upgrades. One thing to note is that this ability can be used once per phase, meaning that it can be used in the Villain phase as well, effectively giving you a free defend! I think that Quicksilver is going to be very good.
Simple, no-nonsense, ready Quicksilver for one resource. When combined with any of the stat boosts that you will almost certainly be including in his deck, this seems pretty good value.
Another use for it is if you have been exhausted in the previous Villain phase. This then gets you ready so that you can use Super Speed. It’ll be interesting to see how many copies of this he has.
I’ve never heard of this character before but he seemed to provoke a positive reaction from people. In my opinion it might have overtaken Winter Soldier for the worst art so far.
His stats are a bit weak for his cost, but that’s probably because you’ll be able to keep him in play almost indefinitely as long as you have occasional access to a mental resource. Something like Quincarrier should do the trick.
I think that Warlock is going to be a very useful ally for Protection decks.
Wanda Maximoff has the same Alter Ego ability as Pietro Maximoff, so I won’t talk about that again.
Scarlet Witch has Chaos Control which is a very interesting ability. She can use it during the Villain phase as you’d expect; to try and alter the amount of damage or threat incoming. But she can also use it in the Hero phase for the card below (Hex Bolt). The ability to influence the number of boost icons in either manner seems very strong. We’ve all had those moments where you say “I win next round unless the Villain gets X number of boost icons”. Well, Scarlet Witch lets you spin that wheel one more time!
While you may not know exactly what this is going to do before you use it, pretty much all of the results are going to be beneficial, and Scarlet Witch can use her Chaos Control to exert at least a small amount of influence over the outcome.
I really like this card and I hope it is an indication of the kind of cards that Scarlet Witch has in her set. The downside to this card is that it will make you go through the encounter deck a little bit quicker, but I don’t think that’s too much of an issue for the rewards.
Another Team-Up card, this time for Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver.
Order and Chaos cancels a treachery card’s reveal effect and damages the villain for two. I think that this can help in key situations, but it might just be a bit too situational. What I mean is that you need to have both characters in play and a treachery card that’s worth cancelling.
Since you can only have one per deck I don’t see any reason why you wouldn’t include it though, particularly if you are playing with two or more characters and Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver are both present.
Groot is the first of two heroes in The Galaxy’s Most Wanted (the other being Rocket Raccoon). The first thing to note is that he has the same character name in both forms. This will make using the Team-Up card slightly easier in multiplayer, but I’m not sure yet if it’ll have any other effects.
Groot is all about growth counters, which he uses in Hero form to reduce incoming damage (it’s a forced ability as well), but also seems to be able to use them for other effects (see “I.Am.Groot!” below). He looks like he’s going to be an absolute tank, especially with 3 Defence. In multiplayer games I expect that saying “I am Groot” all the time will be compulsory. You could do that in solo games, but then who would you annoy all game?
To be better than something like Haymaker you are going to want to have four or more growth counters on Groot. You can do this if you used his Growth Spurt ability on the previous round and started this round in Alter Ego.
Presumably, there are going to be ways other than his Alter Ego ability to add growth counters to him. In which case, I’m optimistic that this is going to be a good value event.
The designers also said that all of his events except for one (“We are Groot”) will be called “I am Groot”. So there’s that.
Rocket Raccoon has been revealed and he likes building things and then using those things to murder other things. Seems like they have captured him perfectly!
Tinkering is a nice ability to recycle your used up or nearly-depleted Tech upgrades into two cards. Examples include Energy Barrier with at least one reflection counter remaining, or his Particle Cannon (see further down) after he has used both charges. Presumably, Rocket will have more Tech upgrades in his hero cards so that he can make good use of this ability.
His ability in Hero form, “Murdered You!”, isn’t very clear at the moment. I think that it’s reasonable to assume that ‘excess damage’ literally means more damage than you needed to defeat them, for example, hitting a Weapons Runner with a Haymaker.
However, the only mention of ‘excess damage’ I could find in the Rules Reference was under the Overkill keyword, but I’m fairly confident that it’s not going to be strictly tied into just Overkill (even though Rocket’s Particle Cannon gives Overkill…).
Also, it may seem a bit daft, but the definition of ‘You’ is likely to be changing in the next update to meaning only your identity card (scroll down to “You” Clarification as of May 2020). This would make Rocket’s ability significantly less powerful, as it wouldn’t work with his Particle Cannon (d’oh!) or things like Tac Team. Hopefully they’ll clear things up in the rules update!
EDIT: Facebook user Nic M to the rescue again! It turns out that if you scroll a bit further down on that link to the rulings on Hall of Heroes, the very last question regarding “You” states that “Upgrades are things your hero wears and wields, so when you use an upgrade to defeat a minion that counts as your hero (or you) defeating that minion.”, so Particle Cannon WILL work with “Murdered You!”.
This is a great little card, especially for Rocket who can scrap it for two cards once its run out of charges.
Four damage, Overkill, and Ranged isn’t even too bad for three resources, but you can use it twice!
You can then even use it to bash someone’s skull in with Mean Swing!
Phew, that was a lot of spoilers! I’m actually looking forward to ALL of the characters, but if I had to pick the one I was most excited to use, it would probably be Ant-Man. Luckily, he’s the first one to be released, so I don’t have to wait too long! Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this look at the spoilers.
Cheers,
Tim
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