THE NIFE AND ACCURATE TIER LIST OF DAVID SUTCLIFFE

December is nearly upon us and it's been a whole month or more since my last Marvel Champions blog, and the truth is that I've just gotten a bit distracted.  Marvel Champions isn't the only game I play and in the last month I've not only been tag-teaming it with the X-Wing Miniatures Game but I've also been sucked into playing Star Wars Legion as well.  I, too, now know the joy of painting an entire army of white Stormtrooper armour.

I've not been completely ignoring Marvel Champions, indeed I've got a couple of decks I really like that I want to share with you at some point, but that won't be today.  Today I want to share you with you The Most Important Marvel Champions Tier List In The World.  You heard me right, and that means it can only be...

THE NIFE AND ACCURATE TIER LIST OF DAVID SUTCLIFFE

You see, lots of people have done tier lists of heroes and which they think are the best heroes or the worst heroes, or the nearly-best or nearly-worst, and the trouble with all of those tier lists is twofold, really:

1. Tier order depends a lot on loads of factors that might change for different players - how many heroes are in a group, is it a solo tier list or a 4-man vs Thanos tier list?  Is it a tier list against particular villains?  Is it a tier list for Standard, or Heroic, or for Preconstructed decks, or what?  It's all a bit subjective even if it might appear to be objective.
   
   
2. None of this tells me the most important thing about the hero: am I having fun with them?

So yeah, lots of people have done tier lists.  Over on The Side Scheme BananaCrapshoot keeps his updated pretty regularly, for instance.  And that's fine, better than fine it's great, but it's not my tier list... because my tier list is for me and me alone.

These aren't the heroes who are the most powerful, because to be honest I find the most powerful heroes are also mostly a bit boring and shitty to play with.  These are the heroes that I like, and because I'm the one writing this list I can guarantee that this tier list of my own opinions is 100% accurate.  For now.  Until I change my mind about something.

Let's get started!

My tongue has been pretty close to my cheek so far, but to be serious for a minute I think making this tier list has actually been pretty helpful for me.  The list has evolved a bit from my first version and that's largely because laying my preferences out like that helped me to see where there were similarities between things I liked/didn't like.  That new awarneess in turn then guided me in which heroes or strategy I might want to try next.

There was originally a lot more heroes in the "I Don't Get The Appeal" box and I was treating it kind of like a holding pen for heroes that I didn't want to condemn without giving them a proper try first.  This tier list helped me to understand what I might be able to do with them in order to shuffle those heroes higher and find a reason to like them, but it also helped me to be clear that I probably wasn't going to be able to find a way to enjoy them so I could stop killing myself trying loads of options and hoping for them to click.

I'll go through each hero a bit in more detail, but what I learned about my preferences in general was this:

• I LIKE being proactive, doing lots of stuff and drawing lots of cards
• I DISLIKE being too passive, waiting to respond and counter the villain's moves 

• I LIKE having heroes whose abilities are unusual or unpredictable
• I DISLIKE heroes whose abilities are pretty vanilla like "do an attack" or "do a thwart"

• I LIKE beating the villain as quickly and effectively as possible
• I DISLIKE playing with my food or dragging the game out just to make something cool happen

That self-reflection was brought into focus by making this tier list, and it became quite a clear guide to how I could sort potential future heroes and strategies to find things I would be likely to enjoy playing.

Let's have a look at each hero in turn, though, and let's go right to where I feel like you might be grabbing your torches and pitchforks and tackle the heroes that I DON'T like first...

I ACTIVELY DISLIKE THEM

This is a group for heroes that I've borderline given up on because I just don't think they're for me.  I could spend hours trying to hone a new deck for these guys (and in the past I have done exactly that on many occasions) only to find that in the end I still don't like themv and the time was wasted.  So now I try to save myself the bother of even looking at them.

Adam Warlock - one of the newest heroes and one with a unique deckbuilding ability... that I hate.  It seems difficult to form a coherent strategy from Adam Warlock that isn't just 'put some good things in a deck and hope you draw the right one at the right time'.  And if there IS a coherent strategy it's probably a 'Voltron' one of finding a big ally and stacking loads of attachments onto them to make them a supercharged hitting stick.  I hate Voltron, I simply can't shake all the lessons about Creature Enchantments being crap that I learned from Magic The Gathering in 1995... I didn't want to play Rabid Wombat then and I don't want to play Yondu now.

Thor - I've tried so, so hard to get a Thor deck that I like because he *should* be proactive and smiting people with a big hammer, which is my kind of thing, but I can never shake the fact that Thor's hero pool is full of cards I have to draw and put into play just to get to the normal starting base of Hand Size and resources that other heroes start at anyway.  Asgard, the Helmet, the Hammer, the God of Thunders... it all slows you down from getting to the good bits.  And you never hit a minion when you need one, either.

 

Black Widow - prime candidate for the 'being too passive and waiting to counter the villain' playstyle.  Black Widow has a lot of fans and I can understand why, but she's not for me.  See also: Nebula.

Groot - when I first tried out Groot I fell into the trap of making a defensive and passive deck and I hated him.  Once I learned that I didn't like defensive and passive decks I returned with new eyes and tried to make an aggressive deck that traded on Groot's toughness to keep allies alive and let them do the work for you.  Which was a Voltron deck.  Which I don't like.  And then when I looked at everything else in his card pool I realised it was among the most boring "do an attack" and "do a thwart" effects you could possibly have.  Groot is a triple nope from me: I Am Not Groot.

Rocket Raccoon - just, really boring.  And he shouldn't be, Rocket should be exciting and tinkering and experimenting and getting into everything and playing tricks and stuff... instead he's squishy and has boring cards that are just 'do an attack' or 'do a slightly different attack unless you don't have any batteries left' or 'do a thwart after you do a thwart'.  The wasted potential in Rocket being a mad inventor of gadgets and gizmos makes me sad.

Quicksilver - in the Venn diagram of things I don't like I think Quicksilver commits two sins: he's guilty of having a card pool almost entirely dedicated to saying "do an attack" or "do a thwart" multiple times in a turn, and he seems to be mostly loved by players who enjoy spending an hour revving up their engines to try and do 80 damage in one turn, or something like that.  That's what I class as playing with my food and means Quicksilver isn't for me.

Drax - I think Drax sits a bit uncomfortably between Thor and Black Widow for me, as his card pool is both quite reactive (you need the villain to be hitting you to power up) and you need a few key upgrades in play to really start being able to motor through your deck and make things happen - most notably his Dwi Thweet Mastery.  He just seemed like a guy I would have to work really hard to turn into a style I would want to play so I haven't actually even tried him very much, I bounced off him pretty hard after just a couple of attempts at making a deck I liked and haven't wanted to go back.

I DON'T SEE THE APPEAL

This is where I stick the heroes that I just... like... meh.  You know?  Like, I don't hate them or want to avoid playing them, but I also don't really have any compelling reasons TO play them.  Most of the time I feel like I've given them plenty of opportunities to win me round and it just hasn't clicked.

Ms Marvel - in theory I should like Ms Marvel more than I do because she's all about flipping each turn and I like that mechanic and she can recur cards back into your hand which should be good for shenanigans.  And, somehow, I'm still just a bit bored whenever I play her.  I think it's that she's so hooked into her "do an attack but with +2" or "do a thwart but with +2" playstyle.  Gamora hits a similar problem for me, I think - a mechanic based around Attack and Thwart events is less fun than I want it to be because the Attack and Thwart events themselves aren't doing very much that's interesting.

Captain Marvel - Captain Marvel is more like Captain Vanilla, to me.  Aside from Energy Channel her hero pool is pretty underwhelming because it doesn't actually *do* much.  With all her card drawing and resource generation Captain Marvel is so good at being unobtrusrive and getting out of the way of the other 25 cards in your deck that I feel like she becomes almost invisible herself.  If heroes were potato chips she'd be Lightly Salted.

Hawkeye - Hawkeye is a really great proactive hero who deals loads of damage and has some cool arrows, and to be honest this group's title doesn't really suit him because in Hawkeye's case I *do* see the appeal.  It's just that his flaws are also very apparent and mean I can't really enjoy playing him as much as I'd like to because I always feel like I'm battling uphill just to keep Barton from getting squished flat.  And, ultimately, even if you do make him work his arrows are really just another form of 'do an attack' or 'do a thwart'.

Wasp - like Captain Marvel another super-vanilla hero whose abilities are very dull attacks and thwarts.  The only thing keeping Wasp from dropping into the 'active dislike' category is that she flips form from Giant to Tiny and I like that mechanic a lot.  But why play her at all when Ant-Man and Spectrum exist?  Answer: you don't.

THEY'RE GOOD BUT NOT FUN

An interesting category - in here are basically two different types of hero: on the one hand there's heroes who might be exciting or interesting but I think are so overpowered that they basically devalue the game (Dr Strange, Star-Lord) and there's other heroes who aren't quite so bonkers overpowered but their abilities are just really about being mathematical and efficient (Venom, Gamora) rather than doing anything unusual.

Venom - I feel like Venom merges a couple of things I dislike from other heroes in this category.  The ultra-efficient events in his pool like Grasping Tendrils and Behind Enemy Lines are incredibly good, but I don't personally like having too many effects that strip villains of their activations and Venom strays a bit close to the Captain America stunlock style.  On the other hand, with his Venom's Pistols and Multi-Gun I think Venom takes on a lot of Gamora's ability to just generate numbers and throw them at other numbers.  It feesls to me like you do a lot of scorekeeping when you play with Venom, rather than actually doing anything very exciting.

Gamora - ah Gamora, my beautiful green calculator.  Do 1 to this then 1 to that.  Do 3 to that then 1 to this.  Then prevent 3 of that and do 1 to that and 1 to the other thing, and then you can also do another 1 to this thing and 1 more to something else.  Jesus fucking christ, playing Gamora just feels like you're standing on a big hill throwing numbers at anything that walks past.  She's undeniably efficient and undeniably effective (she was in the first team that I ever took Ronan down with) but she's also SO FUCKING DULL.  She's just an exercise in moving counters around and in the end you win because you moved more counters around than you could with almost any other hero.  Yay.

Star-Lord - I've written about Star-Lord at length.  I think if you play Star-Lord 'properly' he devalues the entire concept of Marvel Champions and reduces even the toughest villains to just a modest speedbump.  Roadrunner doesn't care what devious tricks Wile E Coyote has this week because he's Roadrunner and he beats all of them by just running really, really quickly.  Same energy.

Doctor Strange - confession time: Doctor Strange is the only hero on this list that I've never played even once.  I didn't need to - everyone told me he was broken and I looked at his card pool and saw that they were clearly right about him.  It's not fun to play the game when the deck is stacked so heavily in your favour.

Captain America - it pains me to put Cap in this category because he's my boy.  I love the character, I love him in the MCU, he was one of the very first heroes I played in Marvel Champions, he was the hero I first ran through the Red Skull campaign with and then moved onto into Galaxy's Most Wanted with him.  He's really good... but is he fun?  I don't like stunning things a lot, I don't like "just do an attack" or "just do a thwart" which is basically what his hero ability does, and I don't like passive defensive decks.  I've feeling Cap may move out of here at some point if I find a deck that does something exciting with him, but for now I have to admit that he's fallen out of favour for good reason... other heroes are more fun.

IT'S THE FLAWS THAT KEEP A GUY INTERESTED

In a lot of ways this category is the antithesis of 'Good But Not Fun' - this is heroes who I know have problems but the challenge of trying to think and design my way around those problems sees me keeping coming back to play them anyway.  A lot of these heroes could easily have wound up in the 'I Actively Dislike Them' category, too, if it weren't for there being something in their card pool that is interesting and/or exciting to play with.  

She-Hulk - one of the heroes for whom flipping between Hero and Alter-Ego is a regular occurence, She-Hulk is a hero I rarely actually play but often *think* about playing.  A lot of her card pool is garbage but in Split Personality and Gamma Slam there's two of the most satisfying events in the game to play, and I like the challenge of keeping your head above water with bouncing from Superhuman Law Division to Do You Even Lift?

Iron Man - it took me many false starts to finally get an Iron Man deck I liked, the Hulkbuster, but now that I know Iron Man's key attribute isn't that he slowly develops his Tech but the opposite - he has to draw lots of cards to *quickly* develop his Tech - I find him an exciting hero to play with.  Iron Man always has to hit the ground running, and once you're drawing lots of cards and shooting seven things a turn... yeah that feels pretty good.

Hulk - without a doubt the worst hero in the game, but that itself is part of the challenge and the appeal of Hulk.  And also, when you do finally get him to work, he's really proactive and just runs about smashing stuff and taking loads of damage and creating big splashy effects on the board state.  He's big and dumb and not very good, but he's also fun.

Spider-Woman - where Adam Warlock's unique deckbuilding ability winds up cutting off possible strategies and lines of play I think Spider-Woman still sits in a sweet spot where she's often the only hero capable of putting a lot of unusual and unexpected combinations of cards together in one deck.  She's a deckbuilder's hero in most ways and a fun one to return to whenever a few new heroes have dropped into the card pool to see just what new things you can make.  Her own card pool abilities are about as vanilla as they come, but it's really about the joy of what you can do from two aspects.

Spider-Man - if Captain America is unlucky to find himself down in the 'good but not fun' bracket then Spidey should be counting his blessings that I hauled him out of 'I Actively Dislike Them' at the 11th hour.  I've been a Spider-Man fan since I was five years old and there's no hero in this game that I've tried harder to enjoy... and pretty much entirely failed because he always fell back into being really defensive and reactive.  Then about two weeks ago I finally cracked it and I have a Spider-Man deck I like and enjoy, so I've shoved him up the table a bunch of places.

FAVE CHARACTERS

And now, the end is near...

These are the characters who I *want* to play.  The ones who I sit down with an hour left in an evening and just think "hell yeah, let's try and beat up Loki with Nebula and... uh... Black Panther, that'll be fun!"  And it invariably is fun.  Most of the time these heroes embody most or all of the things that I like in a Marvel Champions hero:

• I LIKEbeing proactive, doing lots of stuff and drawing lots of cards
• I LIKE having heroes whose abilities are unusual or unpredictable
• I LIKE beating the villain as quickly and effectively as possible

Spectrum - is there a hero in the game who is more proactive and does more stuff than Spectrum?  My 'Living Light' deck, with it's 3 copies of One Way Or Another just BLAZES through its 40 cards with multiple form changes every turn, blasting out attacks and thwarts in every direction.  Spectrum ticks all three of my boxes - proactive and draws lots of cards, with her form-shifting reliant on events she has abilities that are unusual AND unpredictable, and she's completely capable of beating villains without wasting too much energy on setting up.  I don't want to have to pick a favourite from my favourites, but if I did it might well be Spectrum.

Black Panther - long ago there was a time when I didn't like Black Panther at all.  You always seemed to either draw Black Panther suit pieces or Wakanda Forever, but never both.  Strength In Numbers showed me the error of my ways - I simply wasn't drawing cards fast enough - and ever since then Black Panther has gone from strength to strength in my eyes.  It certainly helps that Strength In Numbers is an archetype that has received lots of great cards recently and now if Black Panther faces any dangers at all in my tier list it's that he's close to overstepping the mark into being too powerful for his own good.  But for now I still just love spamming out Wakanda Forever multiple times each turn!

Ant-Man - back when I really started to get to grips with Marvel Champions deckbuilding it was Ant-Man who defeated the Red Skull campaign alongside Captain America and even though I don't play Ant-Man much any more he's still one of my favourites.  I love the flipping mechanic between Tiny and Giant form, I love that his gear gives you great ulitity and more cards to draw, I love the long term effectiveness of Army of Ants.  I think if he didn't have the Tiny/Giant mechanic then I'd feel very differently about Ant-Man, but as it is he does just enough to keep me thinking each turn instead of just mindlessly throwing numbers around like it feels I do with Venom or Gamora.

Scarlet Witch - proactive, do lots of stuff, draw lots of cards with unusual and unpredictable effects.  Sound like anyone you know?  Scarlet Witch's chaos magic sits right in my wheelhouse and I love virtually all of her card pool, from spamming Hex Blasts to countering cards with Warp Reality or cheating big allies into play with Chaos Magic.  That she also powers through her own deck super-fast AND churns the villain's deck to raise the stakes with acceleration tokens and extra encounter cards is just icing on the cake.

Nebula - the most recent entrant to my fave characters list, for me I think Nebula is the antidote to Black Widow's passive playstyle and I'm hooked on her techniques.  Nebula is a hero who flips between Hero and Alter-Ego all the time, she draws lots of cards, virtually all her Techniques produce unique or interesting effects, and she wastes little time in bringing the villain to their knees.  In short she's almost the perfect hero for me and since I created my Aggression deck for her I think she's been pretty much ever-present in every game I play, it's just a question of which hero I play alongside her.

So that's my Tier list - the heroes I like and don't like.  If you've made it this far through one person's opinions then you have my sincere thanks for staying with me this far, and you deserve a reward.  Here's my Nebula deck that I'm enjoying so much... 

View this deck on MCDB

I think Nebula is one of those heroes whose core 15 cards is so good and interesting that whatever aspect you put her in is always likely to take a back seat to just letting you draw and play more Technique upgrades. Here I've gone for Aggression but it's only a handful of red cards, mainly dedicated to making her basic attacks much more dangerous.

If all the stars align Nebula can basic attack for 8 damage!
2 basic ATK + Combat Training + Unyielding Persistence + Hand Cannon + Godslayer

Most of the rest of the deck is dedicated to helping you draw and play Techniques and in showcasing the fantastic Guardian allies.

The cost curve in this deck is extremely low - the only 4-cost card in Nick Fury and there's very little 3-cost cards. This has made me think about the gearing of my economy a bit and it became one of the hardest parts to get right. The Power in All of Us is a great addition when you're running all the basic Guardian allies and Knowhere, but with most of the rest of the deck costing only 1 resource it could be tricky to get maximum value from TPIAOU, and it was only when I added in the Helicarrier and Enhanced Physiques as ways of converting that 2-resource burst from TPIAOU into multiple benefits of 1 resource that it really clicked properly. Enhanced Physique is also useful as a resource for the Surprise Attacks.

It does all fit together around the edges, but the core is just being a really strong hero with incredible effects in her hero pool. Right now I'd say this deck is up there as both one of the strongest I've got but also... more importantly... one of the ones I have the most fun with.

And that's what we're all here for, right?

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!