The seeds of this article were sown when I made my first pass at a Rocket Raccoon Justice deck. I shared it on Discord and somebody immediately suggested I should try Heroic Intuition. I'd initially left Heroic Intuition out because Rocket comes with his own version in the Thruster Boots and I thought it would be overkill, and said as much.
"There's no such thing as too much thwart in Galaxy's Most Wanted" was the reply, and several people immediately agreed with that sentiment.
'Hmm', I thought to myself, 'is that right? That sounds like the sort of thing I can throw some maths at to find out'.
So I did.
WE HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THREATS ARE OUT THERE
SPOILER ALERT - This blog will contain some spoilers of the Galaxy's Most Wanted encounters and campaign. I'm going to talk in general terms about some of the maths around what we can expect from Galaxy's Most Wanted but what I'm going to try and avoid doing is giving any sort of detailed rundown of how specific cards work, or how to beat any of the encounters (I can't do that, because I've not played against them myself!)
Everyone has their own line drawn around what they do or don't want to have spoiled. I think I'm going to be pretty spoiler-light but the information will help you go into Galaxy's Most Wanted a little forewarned of the sheer scale of the dangers you'll find. Whether you want that information is up to you...
I went through each villain encounter from both the Rise of the Red Skull and Galaxy's Most Wanted campaigns, and worked out an average amount of threat that the encounters would generate. Working out something like this has an element of 'how long is a piece of string' about it because obviously the more player you have, or the more turns a game lasts for, the more threat you'll see the encounter create. To neutralise this I decided to calculate the average threat for the encounters if you had 2 players and the game lasted 10 turns. This was a consistent approach for all the encounters so what we're left with should be a pretty comparable view of how many yellow triangles the villains are spitting out.
In general terms the calculation took into account:
- Main Scheme starting threat, plus 10 turns of +2PP threat being added
- % chance that an encounter card is a Side Scheme, multiplied by 2 players being dealt encounter cards over 10 turns
- Odds of hitting an Incite effect or something like Advance, multiplied by 2 players and 10 turns.
- Any additional factors, such as Red Skull's side scheme deck, starting side schemes, Shadows of the Past and Masterplan, the players having access to the Milano in Galaxy's Most Wanted, etc.
In doing this I made a few assumptions and if you repeated this calculation you may make different assumptions and come out with slightly different answers. But I don't think it would change the overall outcome of this analysis: yes, there is more threat in Galaxy's Most Wanted.
How much more threat?
An absolute TRUCKLOAD more threat.
CROSSBONES vs DRANG
Crossbones and Drang are the two initial villains you face in their respective campaigns. Crossbones plays it relatively straight as a pretty conventional villain without too many new mechanics while Drang immediately brings the Ship Command module and the Milano into the game. It turns out that the Milano has a major role to play in the story of Galaxy's Most Wanted threat/thwarting so it's worth taking some extra time to talk about it.
The Milano attaches to the first player (so it moves around every turn) and that player can exhaust it to generate a Wild resource. That's what's written on the Milano itself but probably the most important uses of the Milano appear on various villain Main and Side Schemes in the campaign... including that you can exhaust the Milano to remove 3 Threat from a lot of schemes you'll find along the way.
Spoiler Alert: the amount of threat you're going to have thrown at you means you should probably view removing threat as your default use for the Milano and only use it for a Wild resource as a last resort. In all my scenario calculations I've assumed the Milano being used to remove threat as much as reasonably possible and it still leaves a ton more threat for you to deal with than you would have faced in Rise of the Red Skull!
In an average game Crossbones would generate 41 threat tokens over 10 turns. Over those same 10 turns Drang is going to generate 93 (NINETY THREE!) threat tokens. Even if you assume that you're going to use the Milano to remove threat every turn you're still left with facing 63 threat tokens. That's about a 50% increase on what Crossbones would kick out over the same length of game.
Where those extra threat tokens come from is pretty important though, because if you're using Milano to help pin the Main Scheme back then it's the Side Schemes where you're going to see the threat really ramp up for Drang. You're going to see both more Side Schemes (5 from Drang vs 3 from Crossbones) and importantly the Side Schemes are going to be much bigger - an average of 7 threat each in Drang vs 4 each from Crossbones.
Keeping all of Drang's side schemes under control is over twice as difficult as it was to keep Crossbones' schemes tidied away.
This isn't just a one-off for Drang, though, and in fact you see the same pattern playing out across all the other Galaxy's Most Wanted encounters too.
IMPORTANT: The Milano in 3 & 4 Player Games
The Milano's ability to remove 3 threat from a scheme does NOT scale with the number of players. In a four player game you're dealing out 4x as many Side Schemes as you are in a solo game and you're putting 4x as much threat onto the main scheme as in a solo game. The Milano is still only removing 3 threat regardless of how many players there are, though. This may be a pretty big design oversight and it's certainly true that for most of the Galaxy's Most Wanted encounters it gets materially harder to deal with threat in larger player games simply because the Milano's impact is reduced. You may even decide you want to house rule some scaling for how much threat the Milano removes (say: 1 plus 1 per player, maybe).
ABSORBING MAN vs COLLECTOR (INFILTRATE)
Both Absorbing Man and The Collector feature unique mechanics and I know The Collector is vexing a lot of players but ignoring all that for the time being, I want to look just at the threat generation in the two decks. You get the same picture emerging of far more threat being generated by The Collector and in this encounter the players don't even have the Milano to fall back on to help in removing the threat.
Absorbing Man created 45 threat tokens in an average 2 player/10 turns game, while Infiltrate The Museum will create 70 threat tokens - pretty much exactly the same 55% increase in threat generation that Drang had over Crossbones.
You also see it manifest in the same way, with more Side Schemes to deal with and each Side Scheme having a higher threat value.
TASKMASTER vs COLLECTOR (ESCAPE)
If you thought the threat generation was crazy already then wait until you have to Escape The Museum again after successfully infiltrating it! This encounter uses threat as the win condition instead of the villain's health pool, and it throws little yellow triangles all that much faster as a result!
Taskmaster would create 49 threat tokens (assuming you dealt yourself damage each turn instead of adding a second threat token with Hunting For Heroes) but over those same turns Escape The Museum will see 117 (!!!) threat tokens hit the table, with the Main Scheme stages both landing with a ton of threat AND adding a lot of threat per turn.
The good news is that players can use the Milano in this encounter to clear threat from Side Schemes and the final stage of the Main Scheme. The bad news is that you need to make it past the first stage of the scheme in order to find the Milano and start using it - you're on your own at first!
At least Escape The Museum marks the peak for threat generation in Galaxy's Most Wanted. The unique mechanics of this encounter mean it pushes threat to the fore more than in any other villain battle.
DR ZOLA vs NEBULA
Dr Zola was one of the toughest encounters in Rise of the Red Skull but that difficulty ramping came from his ability to hurl minions at you more than from his threat profile, with a pretty typical number of side schemes in his encounter deck.
After making it out of the Collector's museum you'll be glad to hear that Nebula offers a different challenge and isn't all about the threat tokens. But there's a hitch. Of course there's a hitch. There's always a hitch.
Nebula's threat generation is closely linked to the number of Evasion counters on her ship. Every turn she adds an Evasion token and every turn you can use the Milano and discard some resources to remove an Evasion token and put her back to the start.
If Nebula ever gets up to 2+ Evasion tokens she will very rapidly shift from "I'm not really all about the threat" to "holy hell we need to deal with all this threat she's making or we lose!" and (spoiler alert) there's a couple of Treacheries in her deck that will almost certainly push her up to 2 Evasion tokens eventually.
Even assuming you can keep Nebula pinned back to 1 Evasion token for the whole game she's going to generate 25% more threat than Zola does. But if you let her spend half the game with 2 Evasion tokens that becomes 45% more and it spirals rapidly upwards if she ever gets to 3 Evasion tokens.
In theory Nebula isn't an enormous threat problem, but she can quickly become one.
RED SKULL vs RONAN THE ACCUSER
This is the one encounter that goes the other way and GMW has less threat than RORS. Red Skull's whole schtick was Side Schemes and he had a special deck that threw one at you every turn instead of waiting for you to fish one out of the encounter deck.
By contrast Ronan The Accuser doesn't really care about scheming. Ronan cares about crushing your skull like an egg and walking away with the Power Stone.
Even so, it's a testament to just how much Galaxy's Most Wanted ramps up the threat that even without trying too hard Ronan almost incidentally creates 90% of the threat (80 for Ronan vs 91 for Red Skull) that the Red Skull created as his whole purpose for living.
This analysis for the Ronan encounter has included that players have the Milano available, although it's more complicated in this final encounter with Ronan as you can't always use the Milano to remove threat from the Main Scheme (only in the first stage of the Main Scheme), and it now has a more powerful extra ability to cancel Treacheries so I think you'll use it to thwart a lot less than you would in other scenarios. If I'm right and the Milano doesn't actually get to contribute much threat removal then Ronan could well turn out worse than Red Skull for threat with even trying!
THAT ALL SOUNDS AWFUL
It's definitely not not-awful. Galaxy's Most Wanted is certainly playing a whole new ball game when it comes to the amount of threat tokens you'll face.
If you remove Red Skull from the comparison because his Side Schemes warp the numbers you get this:
You're going to need to increase your Thwarting by 20% just to avoid losing to the Main Scheme. But if you also want to kill every Side Scheme that you see you're going to need to more than DOUBLE your thwarting capacity.
WHAT THE HELL ARE WE SUPPOSED TO DO ABOUT IT?
It's a great question, and I think there are four routes to explore...
Bring more thwarters. If you're playing a four player game it's not reasonable to expect one player to carry the load for everyone on thwarting, people need to be able to chip in more than the odd bit of thwarting here and there. If you're really serious about handling all this extra threat you may even need multiple Justice players in your team.
Change your thwart events. I expect one big casualty of this to be Clear The Area, which until now has been the go-to Thwart event for most players. With Side Schemes now averaging 7 threat instead of 4 threat it's that much harder to line them up to the point where Clear The Area than quickly and efficiently remove all threat and draw you a replacement card. You may need more powerful thwarting from cards like Multitasking or Lay Down The Law (each removing 4 threat for 1 cost) instead of a small amount of thwart that draws a non-thwart card to play as well. The Spider-Man (Peter Parker) ally may no longer be an expensive indulgence, Speed may demand to be played ahead of Daredevil etc...
Bring different heroes. Similar to number 2 we may also see the 'best' Justice heroes move around - Ms Marvel remains the best place to play both Clear The Area and Multitasking thanks to Shrink, but nobody can really make use of Lay Down The Law like Ant-Man, and with Heroic Intuition the fact that Captain America can ready himself to perform two big basic Thwart actions may be really important, even better with Fearless Determination.
- Let it slide. If you have to DOUBLE your thwarting output to control every side scheme then it really begs the question of whether that's actually what you want to be doing. There's always a tipping point where it's going to expend more energy to remove a Side Scheme than it will to cope with the consequence of allowing that Side Scheme to sit in play. Players have been used to whack-a-moling Side Schemes the second they appear, much like that do with minions, but in Galaxy's Most Wanted that approach may need to become a thing of the past, with tough decisions to be made about what can stay and what needs to go.
I also have a final recommendation for some further reading. Alex Marsden wrote about making these sorts of difficult decisions about leaving villain cards in play on his blog Ghastly Boss not long before Galaxy's Most Wanted was released. In light of just how much harder it is to keep up with the threat in Galaxy's Most Wanted I think it becomes an even more important read.
Hit or Miss on the Ghastly Boss blog, by Alex Marsden
Good luck everyone... and try to stay away from yellow triangles!
