When you got your hands on Galaxy's Most Wanted what did you do first? Did you immediately plunge into the campaign with your favourite heroes? Did you sit down and start customising the perfect Rocket Raccoon and Groot decks? Did you grab the preconstructed decks and pile into a game to see what they could do?
I've seen people talking about doing all of the above so there's no 'wrong' way to do it, but also none of those things are what I did first. As a deckbuilder first and foremost the first thing that I did was strip the preconstructed decks down for parts and shove Rocket and Groot into storage. The main thing that I wanted to know was what Galaxy's Most Wanted was going to do to boost some of my favourite decks with new cards, then we would be blasting off into space to fight evil and take on the campaign.
It may not be quite as thematic as using the Guardians of the Galaxy characters, but somehow in my version of the co-opera-verse Ant-Man and the Scarlet Witch were about to commandeer a spaceship and go jetting across the galaxy!
But first, I wanted to see if I could upgrade their decks with some new cards...
ANT-MAN /// PROTECTION
One of the most eye-catching new cards in Galaxy's Most Wanted is surely Hard To Ignore, which adds another layer to the ultra-defensive Protection decks that already build around avoiding all incoming damage from an attack. Excitingly, Hard To Ignore isn't limited to max one per player, which I would have expected, meaning I can stack multiple copies and remove 3 threat per turn from the main scheme just as a side-effect of defending!
This was what my Ant-Man deck looked like that defeated Red Skull alongside Captain America...
I felt like Hard To Ignore was a perfect fit for this deck and I'd already recognised I had a problem with thwarting that was bad enough to mean I played a couple of copies of To The Rescue for my run through the Rise of the Red Skull campaign. What I thought would be a relatively low impact change to my deck (thwart cards out, thwart cards in) turned out to create a lot of ripples and saw me make some big changes to the deck.
At first I made just a couple of changes, mostly taking out To The Rescue to play Hard To Ignore instead as an almost like-for-like swap. I played a couple of games with my deck like this and doing so told me two things: firstly that Hard To Ignore was really good and worth using, and secondly that I wasn't fully embracing it because I was still using Multiple Man.
I think Multiple Man is an incredible card and it was the MVP on my Rise of the Red Skull campaign run with Ant-Man, but his main purpose is to block three incoming villain attacks and that was now three turns that I couldn't use Hard To Ignore. It hurt, but Multiple Man had to go and that was a big repositioning of roles in my deck, I was now expecting to spend more of my time with Ant-Man exhausted after defending, but that meant I now needed my allies to pick up more of the slack in attacking/thwarting than Multiple Man had previously given me.
- -3 Multiple Man
- -1 Brother Voodoo
- +1 Luke Cage
- +1 Starhawk
- +1 Spider-Man (Miles Morales)
Events
- -2 To The Rescue
- +1 Desperate Defense
- +2 Never Back Down
Resource
- -1 The Power in All of Us
Supports
- -1 Team-Building Exercise
- -1 Helicarrier
- -1 The Night Nurse
- +1 Avenger's Mansion
Upgrades
- -1 Indomitable
- + 1 Energy Barrier
- +3 Hard To Ignore
These changes also allowed me to shift my economy cards a little bit. Moving from Multiple Man to Hard To Ignore had made my deck cheaper throughout and I no longer felt like I needed so much help from cards like Helicarrier or Team-Building Exercise, while Avenger's Mansion could now fit in at 4-cost and help offset my low hand size in Giant form.
My new Galaxy's Most Wanted version of Ant-Man looked like this:
I'm much more dedicated to the defending plan to trigger Unflappable and Hard To Ignore. Desperate Defense and Never Back Down both help me to prevent all the incoming damage even if it's big hits while also putting me onto the offensive by readying to use Ant-Man's great stat line or stunning the villain so I get a turn off from having to defend. I'm weak against side schemes, but Hard To Ignore should be able to keep the main scheme under control long enough for me to whittle the villain down with angry ants!
SCARLET WITCH /// AGGRESSION
Adding Hard To Ignore to my Protection deck had caused a few headaches but there were no such concerns with how I changed my Scarlet Witch Aggression deck after Galaxy's Most Wanted came out and it all went very smoothly.
- -2 Relentless Assault
- -1 Down Time
- +2 Hand Cannon
- +1 Deft Focus
My Scarlet Witch deck leans heavily on the Basic cards for economy, like Sorceror Supreme, Helicarrier, Quincarrier etc. Cheap Aggression cards like Skilled Strike to help Wanda deal more damage, while I was using a couple of copies of Relentless Assault because it helped me to remove bigger Minions without wasting Molecular Decay on them. Hand Cannons went in to do much of the same work as Relentless Assault.
A word on Deft Focus, even though I've only got 4 targets for it (the Hex Bolts) you cycle your deck so quickly with Wanda that you'll wind up using it almost every turn anyway. Having 4 copies of a card in a Scarlet Witch deck is like having 8-10 copies of that card in a normal deck!
Having played this deck several times now I really like it, and I really appreciate the Hand Cannons. Wanda deals in uncertainty and chaos a lot of the time and I've found having a Hand Cannon on the table really helps you to finish targets off when you don't quite get the Hex Bolt results you wanted. That was the theory when I put them in and it worked perfectly, but what I hadn't bargained for is just how much the Hand Cannons also played into big endgame strikes. It took just one turn of smashing Klaw down with two Molecular Decay and a Basic attack for 11 damage (two Hand Cannons and three Skilled Strike) to find that out!
It doesn't really work for the aesthetics to have Wanda running around with a John Woo style pair of Desert Eagles, but it definitely seems to work in the game!
AN EFFECTIVE TEAM
With his army of ants and a stack of Hard To Ignore out in play Ant-Man is tremendous at controlling the board and chipping away at the villain until he draws a Giant Stomp.
Across the table Wanda's slew of economy cards (Sorceror Supreme, Avenger's Mansion, Helicarrier, Quincarrier, Deft Focus) mean she can get up to playing as though she had 10 cards in hand, and then she starts chaining Hex Bolts and Molecular Decay's together for some really big turns.
And a really nice bonus is how much they both sidestep a lot of status effects. I've played several games where I get Stunned or Confused and just ignore it because I can deal damage and clear threat from schemes anyway thanks to cards like Army of Ants, Hard To Ignore, Ant-Man's flip effects and all of Wanda's Hex Bolts.
As I prepared to start my.attack run at the Galaxy's Most Wanted campaign I was confident that I had two good decks to play against it. But I also knew that the difficulty level was going to ramp up a lot from Rise of the Red Skull... how would my pair of heroes fare?
===== BONUS ROUND =====
I may have focused on Ant-Man and Scarlet Witch but I didn't ignore the new heroes completely. I've not got a handle on Groot yet but I do like Rocket Raccoon a whole lot...
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ROCKET RACCOON /// JUSTICE
Small in stature but big in offensive verbiage, in the Marvel Champions LCG I think that Rocket Raccoon is actually a pretty straightforward hero. Looking at his abilities, stats and card set I think he fits pretty neatly into the 'Team Player' archetype for a hero that I outlined in my Five Hero Types. Rocket's got some good economy support in Salvage and both his Hero and Alter-Ego abilities, and he's also got an incredibly cheap cost for his 15 hero cards with most of them only costing 1 to play. That's the precise description for a Team Player hero and it means that Rocket is good at showing off what an Aspect can do, so in deckbuilding for Rocket I was looking at including some high impact cards.
I've already seen some strong Rocket Raccoon decks in Leadership and Aggression so I decided to try my hand at a Justice version of Rocket.
With lots of in-built Thwarting capability Rocket is already well-suited for playing in Justice. He starts with a natural 2 THW, then can boost that to 3 THW with his Thruster Boots. He also has the thwarting equivalent of She-Hulk's One-Two Punch thanks to I've Got A Plan. All I really did was layer on top a pretty typical selection of Justice cards (Clear The Area, Under Surveillance, Wiccan, Quake etc) and then be sure to drop in more of the higher impact cards, like Spider-Man and Nick Fury to give you that bigger power boost that's missing with Rocket having such a cheap and flexible kit of his own.
The one card that I think really plays especially well into Rocket is Stealth Strike, which can be used to trigger Rocket's hero ability as well as clearing out minions and removing threat. Everyone has those cards that they seem to like more than everyone else and Stealth Strike is one of mine so I'd be playing it in most of my Justice decks anyway, it's just a happy coincidence that it also plays into Rocket's desire to murderise people.
One last note: I've gone with Groot ally here, but if you're playing with Groot as a hero you could easily switch this ally out for Spider-Man and it would work fine.
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