Marvel Champions: Into The Co-opera-verse

If you locked 100 Magic: The Gathering players in a room with a brand new expansion they'd never seen before you'd probably have ~100 different ideas about what's good or what's not.  But after a day or two of hurling decks at each other in tournaments those 100 players who probably be pretty much in agreement because ultimately, they played it all out and some stuff was clearly better and kept winning and other stuff didn't live up to the hype.

As I'm finding out, co-operative games don't work that way.

Stop me if you've heard this one.  Six Spider-Man players walk into a bar...

If you locked 100 Marvel Champions players in a room for a couple of days I think you'd still come out the other side with plenty of conflicting opinions and disagreements... and often they'd be disagreements where both sides were right and just had different frames of reference for what was being discussed.  While the 100 Magic players all agreed to play the same competitive format so they could hammer it out, the sheer diversity of the Marvel Champions playing experience fragments the discussions between players, leading to some very real disconnects.  

• Some of the players will be playing multiplayer games, with 4 heroes against the villain, 
• Some will be running the game solo. 
• Some of the players will be playing basic difficulty, 
• Some of the players will be playing Expert
• Spme of the players will be playing 'Heroic' and dealing themselves extra encounter cards.  
• Some playes are building toolbox decks to take on any scenario, 
• Other players are tailoring for the villain they know they have to face.
• Some are trying to beat a scenario for the first time
• Some have beaten it many times and are trying to win by making cool new things happen

It's all speaking to the wonderful diversity of Marvel Champions, but it's also splintering the common experience.

The Value of Competition

I've been playing games for a long time.  My dad was a founding member of the local historical wargames society so I got started young and by my reckoning I'm not far off my 40th year of tabletop gaming.  My first White Dwarf was #105 (which was also possibly the greatest White Dwarf of all time, with the first ever army lists for both Space Marines and Eldar Harlequins in) then I swapped Orks for Swamps when I picked up Magic: The Gathering in 1994. I've been gaming competitively almost constantly ever since, from kitchen table to Pro Tour and back again.

In all that time there's not one game that has had me quite so immediately stumped for getting the feel of it as the Marvel Champions LCG and I think I've worked out why it is: it's not competitive.  

There's no tournaments.

Most important website in gaming history?  Almost certainly.  

Since I first hooked onto the internet in the computer rooms at my university in the mid-90s and typed www.thedojo.com into Netscape Navigator I've been piggy-backing my understanding of how games work from sinking into that game's online community.  Through that community I can learn about the predominant strategic theories in the game, hone in on the best decks or cards or miniatures, and ultimately learn the key concepts that are driving how the game works under the surface architecture.

Tournaments are the whetstone for this type of thing - they're what strategies and concepts are tested against, and through that process either proven or discarded.  It's the Mad Max Thunderdome for game theory; two strategies enter, one strategy leaves.

Tournaments give everyone a shared experience.  Same rules, same objectives, same pool of opponents, same scoring structure.  People may come together from lots of different starting points but they'll usually be heading towards the same place, and thus can agree on whose way of getting there was best.

The Co-opera-verse Conundrum

Without a common goal of trying to beat each other in a competition, who is going to teach me to be a superhero?

In Marvel Champions there's currently 76 possible combinations of individual Hero & Aspect to attempt those scenarios with (19 heroes x 4 aspects).  By my calculation that means there's also well over ONE MILLION possible combinations of four Heroes/Aspects attempting a scenario in multiplayer!  And as a final kicker there's currently over a dozen villain scenarios to play against, each in Standard/Expert/Heroic modes with a dozen optional modules you can add add in and change things up even further.  

Hulk players: choose your aspect!

Success in competition has always been my magnetic north to measure opinions against, but without that shared experience of format/goal it means trying to find a Marvel Champions player who is having the exact same experience of the game as yourself is akin to punching random digits into a telephone and finding it's your closest pizza restaurant picking up the phone, ready to take your order.  It makes it difficult to know whether the advice and opinions you're reading are really going to apply to your experience with the game.

On the Marvel Champions Discord there have been several times where I've been talking things through when I was struggling to get a deck to work and had conflicting advice from two experienced players at the same time.

Player A: "Make sure you get Tactical Genius out early, that's the most important one while you take time to set up"

Me: "Ok"

...later.... 

Player B: "Wait, why did you have Tactical Genius out that's the worst one?"

Me: "I dunno... I was just doing what I was told!"

I'm so used to there being a right answer (accepting the definition that 'the right answer' is 'the answer that's most right most often').  But the more I get my own eye in on Marvel Champions the more I understand that the idea of a right and wrong answer is a tough one to definitively pin down.

You could be talking about a card that's a staple for its aspect, but which you don't want when you play that Aspect with a particular hero (Moment of Triumph is a common Aggression event that heals your hero, but Black Panther has his Vibranium Suit).  

It might be a card that's incredible in some scenarios but wasted in others, like bringing a lot of minion-focused attacks because you're used to battling Ultron won't get you much against Absorbing Man or the Wrecking Crew.  Or you could be basing your Protection setup around defending attacks without taking damage, then come up against a villain who hits a little too hard to reliably avoid damage.

It might even be that your whole deck concept has a gaping flaw in solo play (eg. having very little Thwart) but which isn't exposed at all in multiplayer when another hero can cover that weakness.  Protection players love the new Bait & Switch card for finally giving their aspect a strong way to clear threat from the main scheme, before which Protection would have struggled much more in solo play and a lot of Justice players feel the same way about the new Turn The Tide as cheap way to piggyback damage off their powerful thwarting.

Everything you learn about heroes and card and decks has to have asterisks next to it.  They might be "* except in solo" or "* only if you're Spider-Man" or "* awful vs Mutagen Formula".  That's wonderful for feeling the freedom to explore, but it's also a bit unsettling when you're new to the game and could really do with some stable reference points so you can get your bearings.

If The Suit Fits

I've been through this myself recently.  I started out playing Marvel Champions by pitting two heroes against the villain.  That's what the starting scenario in the Learn To Play had me doing with Spider-Man and Captain Marvel and I just kept on doing it, even though I was the player behind both heroes.  At some point I switched down to playing solo heroes against the villains and I liked it because the games were much faster, I felt like I could test ideas out that much more rapidly and see what worked and what didn't.

I had a lot of fun creating new (to me) decks that would destroy Expert Rhino and Expert Klaw with ease, but all my decks would hit a brick wall when I played against Ultron.  And I started to get really down about myself and that my decks weren't good enough - there was always something that I couldn't control quickly enough.  The drone spam, the side schemes, the surge in threat levels when I stepped up to Ultron III.  My She-Hulk Aggression deck blasted through Ultron II like in two turns like he was made out of paper but never so much as smudged the shine from Ultron III.

Turn Two...

...Turn Four

I got so frequently flummoxed that I started to worry: was I just bad at Marvel Champions?  Was this game not for me?

Then I remembered that I used to play with two heroes, not one.  That's how I'd beaten Ultron in the past.  

And blow me down if my decks didn't DESTROY Ultron.  Those same decks that had been failing solo were incredibly good as a duo.  Ant-Man and Captain America had Ultron on the ropes from turn one, and thanks to Under Surveillance I was winning games without him even getting past his first main scheme, The Crimson Cowl.

I'd switched down to solo play so that I could play faster games, so I'd learn what was good and what was bad twice as quickly.  The trouble was in doing so I'd also changed what I was learning - something being good or bad in solo isn't necessarily the same as it being good or bad when there's multiple heroes around... but I'd not realised that at the time.  I just thought learning was learning, because that's been how every other game I played worked.

So... are my decks not good enough, or are they great?  I think they're both.  And, as confusing as that is, I think it's also perfectly normal.  

Maybe I already am Spider-Man, at least for my little corner of the Co-opera-verse...