We started our Character Focus series back on 3rd June with Iron Man and have since covered the first ten characters released for Marvel Champions. With The Rise of Red Skull being released soon, we thought that this would be a good time to review the series so far and also make a slight change to the format.

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Series Review

Here is our league table for the series:

Character Focus League Table			Overall
Rank	Character	Best Aspect	Wins	Losses
1st	Doctor Strange	Leadership	16	2
2nd	Captain America	Leadership	16	7
3rd	Captain Marvel	Justice	16	9
4th	Ms. Marvel	Aggression	15	6
5th	Black Widow	Leadership	14	10
6th	Black Panther	Justice	14	10
7th	Spider-Man	Leadership	14	11
8th	Iron Man	Aggression	13	14
9th	Thor	Justice	13	19
10th	She-Hulk	Leadership	12	19

Doctor Strange was the clear winner, with only Captain America and Captain Marvel also being able to clear all scenarios with all aspects.  However, this table only shows the overall results we had and shows a few characters in a bad light.

Every character had at least one aspect that was effective.  For example, my favourite character, Thor, ended up in 9th place overall, but when using Justice he was able to easily beat the scenarios with only a slight wobble against Klaw.

Here is a table showing the aspects for each character that they were able to defeat all of the scenarios with:

Character	Aggression	Justice	Leadership	Protection
Black Panther		X	X
Black Widow		X	X
Captain America	X	X	X	X
Captain Marvel	X	X	X	X
Doctor Strange	X	X	X	X
Iron Man	X
Ms. Marvel	X		X	X
She-Hulk	X		X
Spider-Man	X		X
Thor		X

Leadership was the most successful aspect (no surprises there!), with Aggression coming in second (my personal bias towards Aggression was showing there), Justice third, and finally Protection fourth.

This table looks pretty bad for Iron Man and Thor, but both of them were very close on the aspects that didn’t quite make it.  Ultimately, you can’t read too much into either of the tables presented above.

Since starting the series I have improved my skills and more cards are being released so I’d like to revisit some of these character and aspect combos.  Which leads onto the next part of this article.

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The Series Going Forwards

Hulk has been released recently and you may be wondering if we are going to cover him in this series.  The answer is yes and no.

If you’ve been following the format so far, we do two articles for each character.  In the first one we do a review of sorts for all of their cards.  In the second part we make a deck for that character with each aspect and then run them through a gauntlet of scenarios.

This has been fine so far because there are only really four scenarios worth playing (and Rhino is borderline!), but soon we’re going to have a lot more scenarios!  Therefore, to avoid having to play more games than is probably good for our sanity, we are going to change the format.

We will continue to do a Character Focus article on new characters (with a Hulk one on the way soon, I promise!), but we will no longer be doing the second part aka the gameplay article.  Instead, we are going to start a new series of gameplay articles; Villain Focus!

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Villain Focus Series

In this series we will pick a Villain and encounter module (not always the default) and fight them with a different character representing each aspect.  For example, we might choose Klaw with Legions of Hydra then face him with the following characters and aspects:

• Captain America (Aggression)
• Thor (Justice)
• Spider-Man (Leadership)
• Captain Marvel (Protection)

Doing things this way will also allow us to use characters with slightly more interesting matchups versus that Villain or more suited aspect combinations just so we’re not banging our heads against a wall with a rubbish combo all the time.  We’ll rotate the characters used so that each of them gets used on a fairly regular basis.

All of this should mean that we cover more ground that we would have before and can use the occasional quirky deck.  Anyway, that’s all for now.  If you have any feedback about the proposed format changes, please let us know as we’d love to hear it!

Cheers,

Tim