Titanfall: Taking on the Mad Titan's Shadow with Heroes old & new

It’s been a whole month since my last blog, but although I’ve not been busy writing about Marvel Champions I HAVE been busy playing Marvel Champions.

The trouble with that is I don’ t think actually playing games or the campaign makes for great blogs – the blow-by-blow of decisions made and how I responded to situations is pretty dry reading and much better suited to a Youtube video or something like that.  I’m not going to go into too much detail about individual games, but to get back into the swing of writing I want to share more of my thoughts on the Mad Titan’s Shadow campaign and my two runs through it, and the heroes & decks I’ve used along the way.

Let’s start with the heroes I’ve played, because some of these decks are my absolute favourite decks I’ve played to date.

HEROES

“Just because something works does not mean that it can not be improved”
- Shuri, Black Panther

Strength In Numbers has become my favourite card in the game – I love how it turbo-charges combo type decks and feels like you’re got loads going on – and so when I opened Mad Titan’s Shadow and saw all the fantastic Leadership cards in Spectrum’s deck I was quick to windmill-slam them into my existing Black Panther deck.  Kaluu and White Tiger in particular would help to supercharge how many cards I drew and how reliably I saw both Strength In Numbers and Wakanda Forever.

I first shared this deck as a footnote to my Spider-Woman deck and while I’ve packed Spider-Woman away for the time being I kept on tinkering with Black Panther and he’s evolved into possibly my favourite deck, especially with the new Mad Titan’s Shadows cards in, and the addition of an Avengers Assemble to spice your turns up a bit more too.

You can view these decks on MCDB HERE and HERE

For my first playthrough I partnered Black Panther with my Spider-Man Protection deck, the first time I’d really got Spidey working a way that I liked.  I’d played Spider-Man through a lot of my adventures customising villain encounters with new modules but I was pretty sure he couldn’t have handled much in Galaxy’s Most Wanted.  Throwing him in against Mad Titan’s Shadow would be the stiffest test the deck had faced and I hoped it was up to the task.

Long story short: he wasn’t.  I got through Ebony Maw and Tower Defense with Spider-Man easily enough but Thanos simply hit way too hard for Spidey to cope with – he couldn’t reliably prevent all the incoming damage and that really hammered the whole core of the deck’s plan to chip the villain’s health down over a bunch of turns.  

Spidey got benched and in came an exciting new hero I wanted to try out: Spectrum.  My ‘Living Light’ Justice deck was a blast to play, but also a big step up in power level over Spider-Man, especially in how well I managed to control and complete all the campaign side schemes.  Black Panther was still dealing the vast majority of the damage while Spectrum cleaned up the board of threats but she was doing a decent share of the work as the two heroes fought their way to the end of the campaign and defeated Loki.  

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When I came to do a second campaign playthrough I decided to leave Black Panther at home.  That Strength In Numbers deck is so powerful that it had almost trivialised every encounter and I felt like any hero I put in next to him would only ever have to carry like 30% of the load, so it wasn’t a real test for how good that hero was.  If I wanted to know how good one of my heroes was, and if they could handle the likes of Thanos and Loki, then I needed to deliberately pull my punches a bit so I dropped Black Panther in favour of my ‘Hulkbuster’ Iron Man Aggression deck, which I've blogged about before.  

I still really enjoyed Spectrum so she rejoined Iron Man for the second campaign, although with the added power buff off a few of the excellent Justice cards from Nebula’s expansion, which I’d bought in the meantime.  One Way Or Another in particular was a massive boon for Spectrum, whose only real weakness to date had been turns where she get stuck in the wrong energy form… with three new ‘draw 3 cards’ effects added to the deck that would happen far less often!

Everything went great for this pair of heroes until we got to Thanos, who once again proved a problem for my weaker hero because of how hard he hit and how focused he is on hitting you himself rather than using minions.  This time it was Iron Man who felt the rage of Thanos and after a few bruising losses I had to tinker with his deck to get a win.  

What was happening was that Thanos hit so hard Iron Man was bleeding health out faster than usual and with so few minions the plan to use Moment of Triumph to keep a steady flow of healing going wasn’t really working.  Inevitably there would be a turn where Thanos would attack one too many times and Iron Man would go down.  I fixed this by staying in Aggression but pivoting the deck away from Power of Aggression to Power of All of Us and bringing in Lockjaw as a reusable blocker who could keep Thanos at arm’s length.  

That change worked immediatel, and Iron Man’s modified suit carried him and Spectrum through the remaining encounters to another campaign victory.  Lockjaw FTW!

You can see the latest versions of my champion Spectrum and Iron Man decks HERE and HERE.

ENCOUNTERS

Ebony Maw

In my spoiler-free review of Mad Titan’s Shadow I praised the design of Ebony Maw for how it organically creates turns where the villain does lots of things at once and threatens to overwhelm the hero.  I still believe that’s true but it also gives heroes plenty of time to prepare for bad things happening, so with the weak modules that you use as his default setting I find Ebony Maw to be on of the easiest villains to play against as there’s so few surprises to catch you out.  Armies of Titan is a very weak module that puts the heroes under very little pressure, and Black Order isn’t much more dangerous.  With so little offense coming at you you’ve almost always got lots of opportunity to take cover and build your health hup before a big Fireball or Rubblestorm would wipe you out, and if Fireball’s not going to kill then almost nothing else in Ebony Maw’s arsenal is going to do the job.

Both times through the campaign I found Ebony Maw incredibly easy to defeat.  I’ve played him outside the campaign using a slightly tough setup – Band of Badoon, with Hack Sanctuary’s Computer starting in play as a Crisis – and that does make him a tougher opponent.  You just really need the modules you put in to really put the heroes onto the back foot so they struggle to cope with the board state AND survive incoming Fireballs and Rubblestorms.

Tower Defense

Tower Defense is definitely a tougher encounter than Ebony Maw but it’s another one that I think is hamstrung by how weak the Armies of Titan module is.  When I played through this with Spider-Man and Black Panther I really enjoyed how much Spidey was being pulled to keep defending Avengers Tower and on the first playthrough the villains managed to flip the tower to its damaged form on the last turn before I won, which was annoying and made the fight against Thanos that much tougher.  I thought I had a win and hurled everything at the villains to finish them off with a big Strength In Numbers/Wakanda Forever turn but came up 1 damage short.  Proxima Midnight took the opportunity to attack and Advance and finish her main scheme to smash the tower up, damn her!

On the second playthrough Spectrum just had the whole thing under much better control.  We saved the Shawarma joint really early on and dealt with Black Swan immediately thanks to a Gamma Blast, and keeping the two main schemes pinned down was so much easier with a Justice hero than it had been with a Hard To Ignore Spider-Man.  Avenger’s Tower took a couple of hits but once Iron Man was up and running we Repulsor Blasted the two villains off the map in double-quick time.  The whole thing had gone much more easily second time around and we even had time to sit back and take some recover actions before dealing the last bit of damage so we made it through to Thanos with an undamaged tower, full health heroes AND some tasty Shawarma in our decks.  

Thanos

Right off: Thanos is a tough cookie.  He’s the only villain in Mad Titan’s Shadow that I’ve lost a game to, and in fact I’ve lost several.  I think there’s three key challenges:

1) There’s a lot of hoops to jump through before you can really start laying into Thanos.  He starts with the Hack Sanctuary’s Computer side scheme as a Crisis, so in order to start hitting his main scheme you need to deal with both the Crisis and the Defensive Protocols on the flip side of Hack Sanctuary’s Computer.  If you want to actually start dealing damage to Thanos then he also starts with Sanctuary in play which says Thanos can’t take any damage at all, and once you’ve dealt with Sanctuary he’s also wearing Thanos’ Armor and reducing all incoming damage by 1, so you’ll need to rip that off him too. 

2) The Infinity Gauntlet itself acts as like a ‘Heroic 0.5’ upgrade, spitting out a powerful new card effect for every alternate activation that Thanos gets.  Most of the Infinity Gauntlet effects aren’t that bad on their own but they’re a steady flow of new cards and new pressure.  The Reality Stone may be the most annoying if you’re depending on particular upgrades for your economy and don’t have some other chaff to discard instead, but in Thanos’ deck there’s so few minions that the Space Stone is also a major threat because it speeds Thanos through a chunk of his deck as he discards cards, so he can quickly land an acceleration token if you’re unlucky.  I also think Thanos is a bit more dangerous with the Infinity Gauntlet than Loki is, his card pools seems to feed back into more stones being seen which in turns means the Infinity Stone deck gets emptied faster which means Thanos sees more boost cards and speeds through his own deck faster.

3) With so few minions there aren’t really any soft targets in Thanos’ deck.  The only minions you do see are the chunky Children of Thanos and none of them are an easy target so they drain a lot of resources to deal with.  Instead of minions you see more cards that make Thanos himself a bigger threat or which push more Infinity Stones at you.  You wind up being bludgeoned by big attacks and thwarts, or powerful control effects from the gauntlet.  Almost nothing that comes out of his deck is trivial to deal with so if your heroes don’t have a well developed economy it’s hard to trade efficiently with what Thanos is doing to you and he’ll just wear you down over time.

There are a couple of good reasons why Thanos isn’t just another Ronan, though, with weaknesses that you can exploit.  The first is that although he starts with a Crisis side scheme to prevent you from getting to the main scheme his main scheme is a whopping 12 threat per player so the danger of him finger clicking too quickly is pretty remote and you get some time to breathe.  The second is that, unlike Ronan, Thanos doesn’t Overkill all the time with anything quite so egregious as Fanaticism so hurling allies at him all day long is actually going to work as a defence.  Any hero that can build their economy to the point where they can have a useful turn AND throw down an ally is going to be able to hold Thanos off and get the win, which probably wouldn’t have worked against Ronan.

Thanos broke a couple of my heroes – Spider-Man couldn’t cope with his base 4 ATK, Iron Man couldn’t eat the hits to the face without minions to beat up with Moment Of Triumph – but ultimately he proved very beatable by anybody who could keep warm bodies between themselves and the Mad Titan.

Hela

Of all the encounters in Mad Titan’s Shadow, Hela is the one where my experience swung most of all between the two plays.  Each time my heroes made it to Niffleheim bruised and battered from their encounter with Thanos but my response to that crisis was different and dramatically transformed the scenario.

First time through I decided I had to give Hela and acceleration token to heal Spectrum while Black Panther would take a recover action on the first turn.  But I now had an acceleration token on the main scheme AND one on Gnipahellir AND one on Find The Norn Stones!  My response was to try and blast through Gnipahellir and cross the Gjallerbru as quickly as I possibly could in order to get rid of the Acceleration and Amplify icons and slow her down.  I succeeded in getting to the Halls of Nastrond in the first few turns thanks to Spectrum’s amazing thwarting abilities, then with the acceleration under control I could take time to build up and start fighting Hela herself.  The problem without doing it this way is that I’d sent two Side Schemes into the victory pile so Hela was now hitting harder and encounter cards like The Wastes of Niffleheim and Hela’s Domain were just brutal.  We won, thanks solely to Black Panther being an absolute superboss and dragging us over the finish line, but it was a gruelling and difficult fight that had pushed my heroes to the max.

Before my second run I had shared my experience of how tough Hela was and been advised that my strategy was flawed.  Again we arrived on Niffleheim in rough shape but this time I responded by slowing both my heroes down and taking time to recover and build up my economy.  We stayed in Gnipahellir for most of the game.  Yes, Hela dumped a lot of threat on her main scheme each turn but it was nothing we couldn’t clear, and then we could absorb her much weaker encounter cards while we built up all of the economy upgrades we’d need and Iron Man assembled his full suit.  When we finally unleashed our offense on Hela we ploughed through the Side Schemes very quickly then Repulsor Blasted her wickedness back to the stone age before she had too many turns in her powered up state.

I still really admire the storytelling construction of the Hela scenario and the journey to rescue Odin, but unfortunately I think it’s an encounter that’s very gameable once you work out what to do.

Loki

Loki may be the final villain in the encounter, and he may have the infinity gauntlet, but in my experience he’s no match for Thanos in terms of difficulty and being a tricky opponent, although it’s possible that my hero selection was particularly well-suited to coping with him both times.

My overriding memory of the first playthrough against Loki was looking at Black Panther, who was both Frozen and Seduced so he couldn’t ready or play attack events, and then just shouting “WAKANDA FOREVER!  WAKANDA FOREVER!  WAKANDA FOREVER!” every turn anyway because neither of those effects actually slowed me down one iota.  It didn’t matter if Black Panther was exhausted, and Wakanda Forever isn’t a basic attack or an attack event so it was all neatly sidestepped.  In the second encounter I mainly remember how quickly Loki went down once we finally stabilised and Iron Man started throwing Repulsor Blasts at him – we took down the 2nd and 3rd Loki all in one turn!

Across both plays of the encounter Spectrum’s s-tier thwarting abilities made light work of all the many side schemes of the God of Mischief.  It’s possible that I just lucky in my hero selections but I suspect that, ultimately, if you’ve beaten Thanos I don’t think Loki throws anything particularly new or difficult at you that you haven’t beaten before.

Overall I see Loki as a good encounter that missed some clear design opportunities that could have made it a great encounter.  One of my bugbears in Marvel Champions design is that we’ve still never had a villain whose own villain abilities transform the game as much as Ultron did in the core set when he switched from creating drones to not taking damage.  Loki’s form switching was an ideal opportunity to bring something like that in, but only one of his 5 forms really does anything special and the rest just juggle stats and a couple of keywords around.  There’s so many cards dedicated to switching Loki forms but they don’t really DO anything because his forms aren’t radically different to one another.  I also think it’s really odd that with Open The Dungeons/Jormungand there’s actually some reverse development in the encounter and the first Loki you defeat will usually be the hardest as he’s got extra health and a Hazard icon on Jormungand.  It’s a bit of an anticlimax at the end of the whole campaign.

WRAPPING UP

So that's what I've been up to.  Of all the decks I've played if I can point you to any in particular it would be my Black Panther and my Spectrum decks, which are really strong and really fun to play.  My focus now is on taking the Mad Titan's Shadow villains out of their campaign setting to see if I can change them up with new modules and breathe new life into them.  

If I come up with anything good I'll be sure to share it!

Mad Titan's Shadow: Spoiler-Free Review

It feels like there are not many advantages to being a post-Brexit Brit, but one crumb of comfort in our HGV drought-stricken wasteland is that we've been among the first people to get Mad Titan's Shadow released into stores.  We might not be able to get fruit and vegetables in the supermarket, or have our bins collected on time, but at least we can entertain ourselves by saving the universe while we wallow in our self-inflicted crapulence.

What I'm going to attempt to do today is give you my thoughts and impressions of the Mad Titan's Shadow box but WITHOUT giving the game away and spoiling any of the surprises.  I'm going to talk in general about how the encounters feel and how they're structured - the way they challenge the players and the overall experience of playing them - and hopefully you'll agree that I've succeeded in doing that without talking about any specific cards or effects you have to watch out for.  Other sites have got detailed spoilers if you want to find them, but I'm going to try not to spoil anything myself.

If you're worried about having even the slightest tiny little thing spoiled for you and you want to go into Mad Titan's Shadow completely blind then you can stop reading right after this...

I gave Galaxy's Most Wanted plenty of tries before ultimately deciding that I pretty much hated it.  Mad Titan's Shadow is so creative and enjoyable I find it hard to believe it came out of the same company.

If that's all you needed to know about Mad Titan's Shadow then you can stop reading right here.  Everyone else who wants to know (a little) more... follow me!

NEW HEROES

We get two new heroes in Mad Titan's Shadow, Adam Warlock and Spectrum (the latest name for Monica Rambeau).

Adam Warlock is another Mystic like Dr Strange and Scarlet Witch and brings a new set of spells for those heroes, but Adam's biggest draw is his unique deckbuilding restriction.  A bit like a 'Spider-Woman 2.0', Adam Warlock lets you bring in cards from all four aspects, it means that any Adam Warlock deck you make was something that was impossible to make up to now, and also that any deck you made up to now is impossible to make with Adam Warlock.  If you're a player who loves exploring new deckbuilding opportunities then that alone makes him a really good addition to your heroes.

Spectrum is less revolutionary and more like an evolution on heroes we've already seen.  Her ability to take on different energy forms lets her pivot between different strength in a similar way to Ant-Man or Wasp but unlike the two existing heroes Spectrum can't change energy form as her '1 per turn' form change she has to wait to play an event that will put her into the form you want.  I've played Spectrum a little bit as I go through the Mad Titan's Shadow scenarios and she has a lot of raw power to unlock but she can also be a frustrating hero if she gets locked in the wrong form and can't do what you need her to do.  She's fun and undeniably satisfying when it all flows the way you want, but I'm not sure she's one of the strongest heroes we've had.

As well as the two heroes we get a bunch of new player cards, a bit for every faction but mainly for Leadership.  There's some really nice cycles of cards in Adam Warlock's deck that function differently to anything we've seen before and open up new strategies, while in Spectrum's deck there's some fantastic new allies that give Leadership decks an even bigger buff than they already had.  It definitely sent my Black Panther deck to a new level!

EBONY MAW
Most Like: Mutagen Formula

The first villain you face in Mad Titan's Shadow is Ebony Maw, the evil sorceror who is leading an invasion force of Thanos' armies.  I've said that this fight is most like Mutagen Formula and what I mean by that is in Mutagen Formula the times you reveal the Green Goblin you get a wave of encounter cards thrown at you and the game is really about weathering those turns when you're dealing with a big spike in danger and threats being thrown at you.  Ebony Maw's key mechanic is that he's a spellcaster but his spells take time to resolve so they sit out in play as Environment cards with a ticking timer on them for when they'll resolve.

The dangerous moments in fighting Ebony Maw come when several of those spells are going to resolve at the time same so it's a bit like he's organically creating those big spikes of offense that Green Goblin created when his villain forms were revealed.

The rest of the time I don't think Ebony Maw really offers too many problems and I think he's much easier than anything we saw in Galaxy's Most Wanted.  His spells are the danger so he doesn't really attack for lots of damage and he doesn't really have any massively problematic minions to call on, he just delays and delays and waits for his spell packages to unload and push you back.  But I do think that if you face him outside of the Mad Titan's Shadow campaign he could be scaled up in difficulty very easily by switching a tougher module of minions in - his core mechanic of creating spikes in encounter cards hitting you at once is inherently dangerous and if his other cards were just a little bit stronger I think he'd start putting you on the ropes more frequently.

TOWER DEFENSE
Most Like: Wrecking Crew

With Ebony Maw behind you the next fight you face is not against one member of the Black Order, but two of them at once: Proxima Midnight and Corvus Glaive!

I hands-down love how this encounter plays out, both mechanically and thematically.  Mechanically this is the second time FFG have given us the challenge of facing multiple villains at once and it seems like a lot of lessons from Wrecking Crew have been learned so this plays out much more satisfyingly.  What's changed, primarily, is that you no longer have control over which of the villains is active (it ping-pongs back and forth each turn) and there's also events that specify that the other villain will activate against you, so you can't isolate the villain you want to deal with and pick them off one-by-one.  Like in the Wrecking Crew encounter their main schemes don't end the game when completed but trigger seconary effects towards a shared objective, and that shared objective is where the theme for this encounter really shines...

In Wrecking Crew the villains were working towards breaking out of prison and the heroes were attacking them, trying to break up their plans.  And if you think about it that's how pretty much every scenario runs - the villain is the defender trying to complete their plans and the heroes are the protagonists trying to attack the villain's position.  Tower Defense is the first scenario that decisively flips that on its head and it feels very different - the villains are assaulting Avengers Tower and the heroes have to defend it.  The way that plays out in the game is that a lot of the time you're being asked to put yourself in harm's way or let Avengers Tower take damage and that element of self-sacrifice feels very different... right down to the campaign side quest of having to save the nearby Shawarma place!

I can't overstate how emotionally different this scenario feels.  Somehow it's evoking that feeling of being a hero and protecting innocents (even if it's just innocent real estate) that has been missing from all the scenarios we've had so far.  For the first time you've got a scenario that's about being Spider-Man stopping a runaway train, or the Avengers safely evacuating as many people as possible from Sokovia, rather than everything being assaulting the villain's secret lair and don't worry about the collateral damage.

THANOS
Most Like: Red Skull

It's the big guy, and make no bones about it: the difficulty takes a big step upwards as soon as Thanos walks onto the scene.  Ebony Maw was pretty easy, Tower Defense was a thematic masterstroke but not especially difficult, but Thanos is hard.  Not Ronan The Accuster hard, but hard... maybe the second most difficult encounter after Ronan.

Somehow, though, it's hard in a much more crowd-pleasing way than Ronan was.  You've got a lot more agency in the matchup than Ronan gave you and Thanos is much more focused on wearing your position down by pummeling you steadily and relentlessly, where Ronan was always looking for the chance to kill you on the spot.  And, thankfully, there's nothing even close to being as completely unpleasant as Fanaticism!

The threats are twofold - firstly, Thanos himself is a titan after all so every attack is powerful and demands to be treated with respect, and as he comes with the Stalwart keyword you can't control him with Stun or Confuse effects to reduce how many blows he's flinging your way.  Every turn is another big blow that drains something from your resources and if you're ever left unable to defend yourself its really going to hurt.

Secondly, he's wielding the Infinity Gauntlet and this is where the scenario takes on elements of Red Skull.  Just as Red Skull has a side scheme deck that reveals a new card every turn Thanos has an Infinity Stone deck that keeps firing nasty control effects at you, wearing you down and trying to open cracks in your defenses for Thanos to exploit.  It takes powerful hero decks to weather than storm of Thanos' fury and get onto the front foot.

Oh, and yes, the 'finger snap' is in the game and it's a shocking moment when it happens.

HELA
Most Like: The Lord of the Rings

After defeating Thanos the story takes a left turn and you have to embark on an epic quest across Nifflehim, the realm ruled by Hela the Goddess of Death.  It's a really different style of encounter to anything we've had before with a string of challenges to pass on your journey before you even really make it to the point where fighting Hela herself really matters.

It's such a different encounter that I found the setup for this scenario very confusing first time I played it, and it was really only as I finished my first play through that I appreciated the shape of it properly.  Spoiler-free, I'm going to lay out the structure for you here in hope it makes a bit more sense to you first time you play it.

Firstly, defeating Hela herself is not your primary objective in this fight.  Instead your first task is rescuing Odin, who has been stripped of his throne and armor and is languishing in a dungeon looking like the world's saddest Santa Claus impersonator.  You need to get to Odin before Hela decides she's had enough fun torturing her father and kills him.

However to reach Odin you first have to trek across Hela's realm, and at each stage you'll need to defeat a powerful minion who is guarding the way, which in the game is represented by a see-sawing focus on beating minions and side schemes.  To make it through the caves of Gnipahellir you'll need to defeat the guard dog Garm, to cross the Gjallerbru bridge you must defeat Skurge, then finally to make it through the Halls of Nastrond to Odin's cell you'll need to survive Nidhogg.

       

Once you've done all that you can finally free Odin, and only then do you move on to defeating Hela and winning the game.  It's an epic journey, and although it's initially confusing to have the villain held so remote from you for so long it does make it feel unlike any of the other scenarios we've had so far.

During the campaign there's also the addition of a nice little side quest called Find the Norn Stones which does mean that you can't ignore Hela entirely while you Hobbit your way across Niffleheim.  Leaving that side scheme in play makes your life a lot harder, but you can't tackle it without dealing with Hera first and spending energy on something that doesn't help you finish the game.  Are the Norn Stones an unnecessary distraction or is the prize worth the extra effort?  In such a sprawling story and encounter finding a clear best route to victory is part of the challenge!

LOKI
Most Like: Kang

And then finally, there's Loki.  And I'm not going to spoil anything at all... you'll have to find that one out for yourself!

CONCLUSIONS

Galaxy's Most Wanted was hard.  It was set up to really hate players and try to punish them - if you had a strategy you liked that worked than Galaxy's Most Wanted had something that was specifically designed to wreck that strategy.  If you were an experienced deckbuilder and you loved rising to a challenge then Galaxy's Most Wanted gave you something to really set yourself against.  But if you weren't one of those types of players then Galaxy's Most Wanted was mostly a brutal and unpleasant experience.  It felt like a design exercise in cranking up the difficulty rather than one in reinventing the game experience.

Mad Titan's Shadow is not like that at all.  Pretty much every scenario feels like a callback to a favourite villain of the past, but also they're an evolution and improvement on them instead of a carbon copy.  I come away from games against Mad Titan's Shadow having enjoyed the experience of being part of that story rather than worrying about how I'm possibly going to change things to give myself a better chance of winning.  Players who thrive on pushing the envelope of the best heroes, best decks, toughest opponents may find Mad Titan's Shadow a bit of a letdown, but I think for anyone else it's a home run of villains and encounters that you're going to be happy to play again and again.

It's a massive thumbs-up from me!