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Whether delivering justice in the courtroom or doling it out with her fists, She-Hulk is a powerhouse. As Jennifer Walters, your “I Object!” ability prevents a single threat from being placed on a scheme; a small, but sometimes critical, ability. You can also use your Superhuman Law Division support for the rare ability to remove threat while in your alter-ego. As a last resort, you have Legal Practice. While this event is less efficient than many other twarting events, it is yet again one of the few abilities in the game that allow threat removal from alter-ego. As you flip to the hero She-Hulk, you can trigger your “Do You Even Lift?” ability, dealing two damage to any enemy. If you’re looking for more widespread damage, use Ground Stomp, an event that damages every enemy in play. The more enemies around, the better it gets! In true She-Hulk form, you have access to a massive basic attack (3 ATK) which can be boosted by 2 ATK with your Superhuman Strength upgrade. While this upgrade only lasts for a single attack, it also stuns the attacked enemy! If there’s more to do, you can use One-Two Punch after using your basic attack to ready She-Hulk, giving you additional opportunities to attack. While She-Hulk’s hand size is only four, she can use her massive health pool in conjunction with her Focused Rage upgrades to deal herself some damage in exchange for extra cards. Then, give as good as you get with Gamma Slam, a massive attack that deals damage to an enemy equal to the damage you’ve sustained, up to 15! To round it out, you can use She-Hulk’s Split Personality for an additional form change, drawing up to your hand size along the way! At She-Hulk’s side is her signature ally Hellcat, an ally that provides some additional thwarting, and who features the ability to return her to hand. Deck-Building with She-Hulk To take advantage of both She-Hulk’s large ATK and Jennifer’s massive REC, use Down Time and Ready to Rumble. Aggression She-Hulk has the rare ability to remove threat in alter-ego, but the downside is all her threat removal except her basic thwart is tied to alter-ego. If you build with a focus on minions, you can shore this weakness up with cards like Chase Them Down and Into the Fray. If you want to really lean into massive damage from basic attacks, bring Hand Cannon, Skilled Strike, and Combat Training. Justice With Justice, you can be managing threat regardless of which form you’re in. You can prevent threat with cards like Counterintelligence and Foiled! This will let you spend a few extra turns in alter-ego, building up for a larger hero turn. You can also focus on straight threat removal, taking advantage of Justice’s strong events. Try out Lay Down the Law and For Justice! Leadership While She-Hulk does have two upgrades that draw cards, she can still struggle with resources while in hero form. You can supplement her natural draw with an assortment of inexpensive allies and Strength in Numbers. If you want to focus more on boosting your stats for even bigger attacks, try out Moxie and Morale Boost. Protection She-Hulk can make some large basic attacks, and her cards that ready her require you attack first. To really leverage her ATK stat, use Counter-Punch to deal damage to an attacking enemy equal to your damage. Keep in mind that this will even trigger Superhuman Strength, stunning the enemy! It does require defending though, so try it out with Side Step, Pre-emptive Strike, or Defiance. To take full advantage of both attacking and taking defensive measures, try out Indomitable, Armored Vest, and Desperate Defense. Use Energy Barrier to clean up any little damage that sneaks through in either build.

Protection is the support aspect. There are two avenues of support: selfless (support your teammates) or selfish (support your hero kit). While the lines may blur as time progresses, this delineation helps refine the goal of your deck. Selfless: Support Your Teammates When most players think of Protection, this is the type of deck that comes to mind. Your primary goal is to ensure your teammates are healthy and can stay in hero form longer. This reduces the amount of threat that needs to be handled and prevents the Player Defeat loss condition. Decks focusing on defense fall into this category. The primary build for defense Protection is Take No Damage. This build focuses on card effects that give bonuses when you defend and (surprise twist!) take no damage. Aside: I’m going to be using the phrase “take no damage” a borderline unreasonable amount over the next bit, so let’s just abbreviate it to TND. Unflappable is the keystone card for a TND build. Once per turn, Unflappable will draw you a card if you defend and TND. Hard to Ignore is a stack-able upgrade that gives TND threat removal. Along with this, you have a suite of events that boost your DEF and give you a TND bonus. Desperate Defense: TND ready Never Back Down: TND stun Not Today!: TND threat removal There are a couple ways to build toward TND. First, you can strengthen your basic defense by boosting your DEF stat with cards like Armored Vest and the events mentioned above. Heroes with a naturally high DEF stat (DEF = 3) are great targets for this build. The second way is through ATK reduction abilities. These will be cards like Judoka Skill, Subdue, and Pinned Down (for minions) that directly reduce the enemy’s ATK stat. A couple tangentially related cards would be Preemptive Strike (changes boost icons into damage on the villain) and Defiance (discard a boost card before it is flipped). These effects all take place before damage is calculated, preventing the damage from ever existing. This is important for things like protecting a Tough status card on your hero. A similar but distinct way to build toward TND is by including damage prevention cards. This would include cards like Jump Flip (prevent damage and remove threat), Side Step (prevent damage and deal 1 back), Energy Barrier (prevent 1, deal 1), and Forcefield Generator (prevent 6 total damage). Damage prevention abilities will mitigate incoming damage. However, Tough has timing precedence over interrupts, so you cannot save a Tough status with damage prevention. This should by no means preclude you from running damage prevention cards. It is just worth highlighting that Tough generation and damage prevention are at odds. If you are planning to support your team through defense, you will want to ensure you can pull the villain's attack to you. The easiest and most common way to do this is by using your basic defense. However, you will want to bring ready effects like Indomitable and Desperate Defense if you want to use your basic defense more than once. Another way is to use defense cards that don't require you to already be the target. Cards like Preemptive Strike and Powerful Punch let you become the defender of an attack, even if you're already exhausted. Take No Damage is the epitome of defense Protection. You can certainly build for defense without committing to the TND build, but there is less overall synergy between the cards. More than likely, you would want to make a hybrid build leveraging some mix of the archetypes mentioned here. If you like a bit of offense with your defense, there are “porcupine” cards that allow you to return damage while defending. Some I’ve mentioned, like Energy Barrier, Preemptive Strike, and Side Step. In addition, you can increase your damage output with cards like Counter-Punch (deal damage equal to your ATK), Electrostatic Armor (deal 1 damage after defending), Flow Like Water (deal 1 damage with each defense card played), and Dauntless (gain retaliate 1 if above starting hp). Most of these have triggers tied directly to defending, which make them a natural fit in defense Protection builds. Another way to support your teammates is through encounter deck control. Protection's access to encounter deck control is rivaled only by Justice. Get Behind Me! cancels a treachery card in exchange for the villain attacking you. Black Widow lets you spend a resource to redraw an encounter card. Silk preemptively discards nasty treacheries. For encounter cards you reveal yourself, Spider-Tingle lets you tap into a Web-Warrior’s hp to cancel the When Revealed effects, and Spider-Man Noir boosts his stats by locking treacheries you’ve just resolved out of the discard pile. As a final note for the team support builds, a small but growing archetype for Protection is Healing. Cards like Med Team, Second Wind, and The Night Nurse can help heal other characters, keeping them in play or in hero mode longer. The Night Nurse is such a strong card, that regardless of archetype, you'll need a reason not to include it. The Angel hero pack will be bringing another fantastic healing option with the Render Medical Aid player side scheme. Selfish: Support Your Hero Kit On the flip-side, Protection can be built to support your hero’s natural strengths. While you may use some defense cards, you’re mostly looking to help yourself. For that reason, this style of build is a good fit for solo play. The build is highly dependent on the hero and their kit, so the overall archetype will feel looser. Protection can help a hero get full use out of a high THW or ATK stat. It sports more cards with ready effects than any other aspect. For a Ready build, you have options like What Doesn’t Kill Me (heal and ready), Repurpose (ready and boost a stat), Ever Vigilant (aerial-locked ready and threat removal), and Leading Blow (risk ATK reduction with a ready for payout). The higher the hero stat, the more value each ready gives. If you are in need of more damage in your deck, Protection offers First Hit (attack a minion before they activate), Hard Knocks (deal damage with a Tough on defeat), Momentum Shift (heal 2 damage, deal 2 damage), Powerful Punch (hit them first), and Repurpose (for that juicy stat boost). While less conventional than damage you might see in hero kits or Aggression builds, each of these offers a unique way for Protection to increase the damage available to you. With these “fend for yourself” builds, you can also lean into non-defense Protection by leveraging status effects. As mentioned, Hard Knocks can generate a Tough. Perseverance gives you a Tough for flipping into hero form. Additionally, many teams have Tough access. Muster Courage offers Tough for Avengers, Shake It Off for Guardians, and Polaris for X-Men. Tackle and Iron Fist can generate Stuns, and Thwip Thwip! will do the same if you have Web-Warriors around. Using Protection's stun effects alongside stuns available within certain hero kits can have a huge impact on controlling the villain, especially at low player counts. This build is called Stun-Lock, as you lock the villain out of activating each round. Note that a Stun-Lock build can also be a Take No Damage build, taking advantage of Never Back Down as a source of stuns. Examples Spider-Man: Peter Parker is the classic example for a defense build. He has 3 DEF naturally, and he has a defense card that prevents all damage. These synergize perfectly with Take No Damage builds. Ghost-Spider is another great hero for a defense build. She has 3 DEF, and her hero ability can ready her after playing any one of the many of the defense events mentioned above. Rocket Racoon is an example of a hero who wants to run a kit-support build. He sports a strong THW stat and a plethora of Tech cards in his kit. Those alongside Repurpose make him an incredibly versatile Protection hero, but he won't be defending for anyone. Another kit-support hero would be Thor. While not a traditional Protection hero, he has high ATK, aerial, and a large hp pool. A Ready build can help leverage that high ATK. What Doesn’t Kill Me gives him more access to his basic attack while also healing. Ever Vigilant readies him and shores up his weakness with thwarting. Captain America is the quintessential example of a Stun-Lock build. I'll simply link to Brian-V's Stun Lock deck on MarvelCDB, because his write-up explains it really well. Conclusion This debrief is aimed at highlighting strong synergies and archetypes in Protection. As you become more comfortable and experienced with Protection, you will find plenty of ways to break out of the molds I outlined here. There are plenty of powerful builds that are hybrids of the above. Hopefully this serves as a jumping off point for building your own Protection decks and exploring everything Protection has to offer. Acknowledgements: Thanks to jarrett on the Solo Champions Discord for the pithy names (Selfless/Selfish). It perfectly encapsulates the types of support you build with Protection.

Since the game's genesis there has been an ongoing conversation in which the community evaluates and discusses cards and effects, comparing them one to another. This conversation can be overwhelming to join, as it not only builds on everything released since the Core Set, but also pulls jargon, mathematical proofs, philosophies, and more from older gaming behemoths like Magic the Gathering. You’ll hear values quoted for what rates are good for damage or bad for threat removal. Players will make vehement declarations that 40 card decks are the only correct choice. You’ll see reviewers and content creators break down hero packs, passing judgement card by card. And in some very dark corners of the discord community, leaked cards will be lamented before they even have a chance to be released. (I say that last bit lovingly. We're an incredibly passionate bunch.) Premise The point of this article is to lower the hurdle of joining the Great Marvel Champions Conversation by bringing players up to speed on the discussions involving efficiency. The goal is to give players a point of reference for the values used throughout the community, as well as give them the tools needed to understand how and when those values are applicable. A lot of the evaluation of efficiency is not something that needs to be done constantly. However, it is a part of learning the value of a card and how it fits into the wider card pool. It is not the sole measure of a card, but a valuable gauge nonetheless. These efficiency benchmarks matter more for out-of-game discussions as opposed to in-game decision making, as the in-game evaluation is entirely board dependent. If the main scheme is only one threat away from you losing the game, almost* any thwarting is efficient (*see below). In this article we want to establish some rough benchmarks for what is currently an efficient use of resources for a variety of effects. Benchmarks For some players this article will feel like a math lesson. If you’re interested in the results, but don’t care to see how the sausage is made, feel free to skip to the end. I have all the benchmarks outlined there. That said, there are a lot of caveats that a list can’t contain, so I highly suggest diving into the article if you want a wider picture. Point in fact, we’re going to start with a massive caveat. We are working with small, whole numbers. Decimals are meaningless in the game, because there is no way to remove half a threat or deal partial damage (unless you’re talking about the partial damage dealt to my soul every time I draw Advance). Because of this, there is a lot of wiggle room on how ratios get rounded or on what constitutes efficiency. I find the following rule of thumb valuable: Any benchmark can have both its resource and expected value increased or decreased by one and still be on par with the original benchmark. By that I mean 2 resources for 3 threat is on par with both 1 for 2 and 3 for 4. The difference in rounding is essentially accounted for within the conditions and restrictions placed on the card. Effective Resources To evaluate cards against each other, we need an indication of the true value of a card. It points to how well designed the game is that it is so difficult to compare the true costs of abilities and effects. One difficulty in comparing different abilities derives from their different types of costs. One may require an additional cost of exhausting your hero, while another may require dealing damage to your identity. How do you compare the value of the exhaust to the value of the damage you took? Another hurdle is that some non-resource costs come with an opportunity cost. For example, if you have to exhaust your hero for a card ability, you’re giving up the opportunity to use their stats with a basic activation. Despite these hurdles, we can still get to a rough baseline comparison point by simplifying the value of each effect to something called “effective resources” (ER). This is an estimation of the resources needed to get a particular effect. First, let’s discuss playing a card with no additional costs in the ability. When playing a card from hand, you lose both the cards spent to cover the cost and the card you just played. If you start the game with 6 cards, you will only have 3 cards in hand after playing a 2 cost card. The effective cost of playing the card was 3, as you are now down 3 resources. When playing a card from hand, its effective cost is one higher than its resource cost. This will be a foundational part of the ensuing points. Damage Next, let’s hit the two fundamental pieces of the game: damage and thwart. Swinging Web Kick is essentially the center for all damage discussions. It has a cost of 3 and deals 8 damage. Since it is an event you’re playing from hand, you have 4 ER for 8 damage, which reduces to 1 ER for 2 damage. A good benchmark for efficient damage is 1 ER for 2 damage. We can see this value show up across a number of abilities like Jarnbjorn and Plan B. However, these are not only more conditional than Swinging Web Kick, they also have upfront costs to put them into play. This conditionality must be factored into the wider conversation regarding the value of a card, but the examples given do well enough to point out our benchmark. A more realistic rate you can expect for low or non-conditional damage outside of hero kits is something around 2 ER for 3 damage. Cards like Clobber and Uppercut point to these values. Thwart Threat removal is more expensive. It tends to be more conditional than damage, meaning there are either more modifiers through kicker abilities (like For Justice!) or there are smaller windows in which to play it (Lay Down the Law). A good benchmark for efficient threat removal is 2 ER for 3 threat removed. Some examples are Cable Arrow and Crisis Averted. As a reminder, these small, whole numbers widen the uncertainty of our benchmark. The 3 ER for 4 threat removal on For Justice! is essentially on par with the 2 for 3. Ready Next we can visit another common and potentially valuable effect: readying your hero. A good benchmark for an efficient hero ready is 2 ER. This is based on cards like Always Be Running, Justice Served, Battle Fury, and Ready to Rumble. I really want to emphasize here that this is an efficiency benchmark for a hero ready, not a value statement for exhausting or readying your hero. The opportunity cost of exhausting your hero is the loss of the ability to use their ATK, THW, or REC with a basic activation. The value of these are inherently different based on hero, build, and game-state. As an example, Spectrum exhausting in her Photon form has a 3 threat removal opportunity cost, whereas Ms. Marvel has a 1 threat removal opportunity cost. Yet their opportunity cost for damage in this same game-state is the same at 1 damage. The value of the ready or exhaust is part of that wider conversation beyond direct card comparison. Status Effect I hope you're not confused at this point, but if you are, I likely only spent 2 ER. A good benchmark for an efficient status effect is 2 ER. There are a lot of sources here, so to make things simple, I’m just going to bullet list it. I’ve broken out the status effects from the rest of the abilities to show that we are left with effects that match our other efficiency benchmarks. Sonic Rifle (4 ER for 2 Confuse) Wrist Gauntlets (2 ER each status) “Think Fast!” (2 ER and a damage for 1 Confuse) Concussive Blow (2 ER for 1 Confuse, 2 ER for 3 villain damage) Electric Arrow (2 ER for Stun, 1 ER for 3 damage) Tackle (2 ER for Stun, 2 ER for 3 villain damage) Hard Knocks (2 ER for Tough, 2 ER for 4 damage) Perseverance (2 ER for a Tough) These are all either conditional, have additional effects, or are restricted in some way. However, they all point to a rough benchmark of 2 ER for a status effect. Again, it is worth noting that the value of the status effect is entirely separate from the efficiency benchmark of the status effect. A Confuse is often more valuable than a Stun due to the ability to access alter-ego’s larger hand size and alter-ego effects. However, that is again something that will be scenario and hero dependent. Healing Healing is surprisingly hard to evaluate in Marvel Champions. Much of identity healing is tied to alter-ego Support cards that have no additional costs beyond exhausting them once they are in play. However, a few of the cards we can look at here are First Aid (2 ER for 2 damage), Med Team (4 ER for 6 damage), Second Wind (4 ER for 5 damage), and Momentum Shift (3 ER for healing 2 and dealing 2 damage). These are a bit harder to nail down, but they show us we should be looking roughly around 2 ER to heal 2-3 damage. A good benchmark for efficient identity healing is 2 ER for 3 health. Allies I will note that ally health is more expensive at 1 ER to heal 1 damage. Inspiring Presence, First Aid, and Reboot point us to this rate. A good benchmark for efficient ally healing is 1 ER for 1 damage. It is the same rate to ready an ally. Get Ready and Command Team both point this rate. A good benchmark for an efficient ally ready is 1 ER. General Trends In addition to the benchmarks listed above, there are some trends regarding efficiency that are worth pointing out. Hero cards tend to be the most efficient and least restricted cards. Aspect and Basic cards tend to be balanced against the benchmark by either locking the efficiency behind some condition (a la Multitasking), being more restrictive on who can use it or how it can be used (such as "Thinking Fast!"), or by reducing the overall efficiency (like with Uppercut). In addition to the impact of a card's classification, the card's efficiency will be impacted by how general the ability is. The more general it is, the less efficient it is expected to be. The more conditional or restricted the ability is, the more it is expected to have higher efficiency. As an example, Always Be Running is a hero event. It is exactly 2 ER to ready your hero, and it can be played any time you can play an Action ability. Ready to Rumble is a Basic upgrade that also readies your hero for only 2 ER, hitting our benchmark. However, you can only trigger it immediately after changing to hero form, meaning the ability to trigger it is more conditional. With that said, the above ratios are effectively the benchmarks that are referenced when comparing and evaluating cards. Now that you know them, throw them away. Context Matters These are not the end-all-be-all values for what makes an effect efficient. In fact, these benchmarks have extremely limited use regarding actual gameplay. While they give us a comparison point when evaluating cards, they are being compared in a vacuum. When building your decks, your hero and deck strategy will inform you on if a conditional effect will be useful or not. Lay Down the Law has great efficiency that is conditional on changing form. If you’re not changing form often, it’s not a good fit for your deck despite its efficiency. Crisis Averted is a poster-child for efficient thwart removal in an aspect, but if you are playing solo, you will rarely need 6 threat removed from a scheme all at once. Multitasking and Clear the Area have the same efficiency when their full effects are realized. Yet one requires two schemes and benefits more from boosting effects (like Shrink!), while the other cycles your deck, giving you access to more of your cards sooner. Which of these is better? (It's Multitasking, because you should be playing more Ms. Marvel). Conclusion In a future article we'll dive deeper into card and ability evaluations. We'll look at the wider picture of what makes a card valuable beyond its efficiency. For now, I hope this article helps give you a strong basis to begin evaluating cards as well as give you a foundation for joining discussions in the community. I look forward to seeing you out there! . Summary Here is a quick summary of the benchmarks established above. It is important to remember that these are a small part of the picture when it comes to evaluating cards. It is worth glancing above to see some of the caveats. These are loose benchmarks. Efficiency Benchmarks 1 ER to deal 2 damage 2 ER to remove 3 threat 2 ER to ready your hero 2 ER to heal 3 identity damage 1 ER to heal 1 ally damage 1 ER to ready an ally Efficiency Caveats ±1 ER and ±1 statistic is on par with the benchmark Efficiency is expected to go up as restrictions and conditionality go up Hero kits tend to be the most efficient and least restricted. Aspect and Basic cards tend to maintain balance relative to the benchmark by one of the following: Increasing conditionality Increasing restrictions Reducing overall efficiency Thanks Thank you to the discord brain trust and everyone who helped to poke and prod at the assumptions here. In particular, thank you to Fernafalej, Josseroo, journeyman2, MegiDolaDyne, Schmendrix, Theorel, and VJakson. Thank you to Unicorn for allowing me to use the scans from his Cerebro project.

The title is meant to get your goat, but what I want to cover in this article is how to elevate your play by leveraging... the rules. While we're not actually breaking the game itself, we are looking to break the norms of the game. Before we get going, I want to address two things. First is the fact that a decent chunk of what we discuss in this post will rub some players wrong. For some, these things can feel like "rules lawyering" or ruining the thematic side of card design. That is a totally valid complaint, and there are no hard feelings if this isn't a part of the game you want to engage with. I will note, however, that everything discussed here is in fact legal within the current rules. Second, I don't want anyone to feel weird about playing Doctor Strange or feel like they shouldn't enjoy him. He is simply the best vessel to discuss these rules, as a lot of his power derives directly from their application. Understanding why his cards function the way they do can help you apply the same concepts across the card pool to similar cards. So with those disclaimers, let's get to "breaking" the game. There are a couple "norms" that I want to address right off the bat. These are things you may hear said or alluded to colloquially, but are not rules accurate. Removing threat is thwarting. Dealing damage is attacking. Triggering the ability on an event is playing it. If an ally entered play, you played it. These are all actually quite close to the truth, but completely wrong. I want to rephrase them to accurate statements. When you thwart, you generally remove threat. When you attack, you generally deal damage. When you play an event, you trigger the ability on it. When you play an ally, it enters play. These may seem like obtuse restatements, but they are actually quite important. We can see why when we look at Doctor Strange's Invocation deck. This is a deck of cards unique to Doctor Strange that always has the top card face up. Doctor Strange can use his hero ability to exhaust himself, pay the cost of the face up card, then trigger it's special ability. The Invocation Deck Winds of Watoomb (Draw 3 cards.) For this card, I want to reinforce the value of having access to cards outside your hand. When playing a card from hand, you lose the card itself as part of the process. If you start with 5 cards and play a 2 cost card, you end with 2 cards in hand. You have effectively spent 3 resources. (I discuss effective resources in this article on efficiency!) When using a card from outside your hand, like an event grabbed by the Black Panther ally, an ally on Med Lab, or even Lockjaw being played from your discard pile, you only have to pay the resource cost. As a direct comparison for Winds of Watoomb, we can look at One Way or Another. While One Way or Another gives you 3 cards (in addition to a side scheme to deal with) you had a net gain of only 2. With Winds of Watoomb we have an ability that allows you to gain 3 cards with no disadvantage beyond the exhaust. Leveraging abilities that store playable cards outside your hand can give you a strong resource advantage, letting you do more on your turn. Images of Ikonn (Confuse the villain and remove 4 threat from a scheme.) Right off the bat, we can see this card is fantastic value. In general, threat removal is considered efficient at roughly 2 effective resources (ER) for 3 threat removed. Here you spend 1 resource and exhaust Strange for 4 threat removed and a Confused status on the villain. Since Strange could have just exhausted to thwart for 2 anyway, we essentially end up with 1 resource for 2 threat and a Confuse. Even without the Confuse, that is on or above par for threat removal. The real neat bit here? Note the absence of the (thwart) label on the ability. This is not a thwart, so it bypasses Confuse and Patrol. The only thing that stops it is a Crisis icon, and that only affects the main scheme. Cards and abilities that can remove threat without thwarting can be helpful for high Confuse/Patrol scenarios. Just keep in mind that these cards won't combo with cards like Overwatch, which require a thwart. Crimson Bands of Cyttorak (Stun an enemy and deal 7 damage to it.) While these bands won't give you the power of Juggernaut, they will stun an enemy and deal 7 damage to it, all for a measly 2 resources and an exhaust. Doctor Strange could have attacked for 1 damage, so we're really looking at 2 resources for a Stun and 6 damage. Damage is generally considered efficient at 2 damage for 1 effective resource. As with Images of Ikonn, this is efficient even before the status effect. Again I will point out the missing label. Without the (attack) label on the ability, this damage bypasses Guard, Retaliate, and Stun. You can leverage other non-attack damage dealing abilities in your own decks to similarly bypass these keywords. Seven Rings of Raggardorr (Give up to 3 characters each a tough status card.) Tough status reigns supreme. For 2 resources and an exhaust, you get 6 effective resources worth of Toughs. That's a whole lot more defense than Strange would have gotten with his 2 DEF, and it doesn't care if the villain is Steady or Stalwart. This one doesn't really have any wider picture notes. It's just a bonkers card. If you want a take-away, find ways of incorporating Tough access into your builds. Vapors of Valtorr (Choose a status card in play. Replace that status with a different status card.) Very few abilities in the game let you manipulate status cards on an enemy, and most of the ones that do aren't working in your favor. The ability to swap a Tough for a Confuse or Stun is huge. You could have exhausted Strange to deal one damage and clear the Tough, so this is effectively a free status of your choice if they already have one on them. It's also a great way to help a teammate (or yourself) by turning an annoying Stun or Confuse into a free block the next villain phase. Now you do have a hiccup here is when you have a Stalwart villain, as you can't change the Tough. However, the ability to manipulate existing status effects is quite strong. This is another card that doesn't have much of a wider picture, but it is far more valuable than many see. Spell Mastery (Playing vs Triggering) There are a couple things to touch on with Spell Mastery. First, it is an Action, meaning you can use it on other players' turns. While this is not unique to this ability, it is extremely powerful when at any given moment you have access to one of your seven best cards. A few cards worth mentioning that let you break norms for what you do off turn are Team-Building Exercise and Meditation. Both of these allow you to play something to the board that you would usually have to wait to play until your turn. This can even let you sneak in an ally off turn! Jumping back to Spell Mastery, we want to take a look at the verbiage. Doctor Strange doesn't ever play the invocations. They are all events, but you are simply resolving their special ability. It's for this reason that Strange's obligation and nemesis set are so lackluster. Physical Toll (his obligation) does not impact the Invocations, meaning you will not have to deal with the additional cost for them specifically. Counterspell also doesn't impact you triggering the invocations at all, as you aren't playing them. Play vs Put into Play As a follow up to 'playing vs triggering,' I want to touch on a powerful card available only to Mystics. Summoning Spell allows a Mystic hero to discard cards from the top of the deck until an ally is discarded. Then put that ally into play. Let's back up a bit and look at Summoning Spell's restriction. It is only playable by identities with the Mystic trait. This kind of play restriction is fairly common in the game, and in general the restrictions lock some heroes/alter-egos out of using certain cards. If you do not meet the play restrictions, you simply cannot play the card. However, putting a card into play is not playing the card. Instead, it is simply making it enter the in-play area. This means you can get allies and cards that you normally couldn't use into play and under your control. There are a number of cards that allow you to do this, such as Make the Call or Call for Backup. Player side schemes like Build Support can even help you get trait-locked supports like Weapon X into play for non-mutants. Not only does this bypass traited play restrictions, this will also bypass things like Requirement. These restrictions only care whether or not you are playing the card, so utilizing 'put into play' abilities can help you make non-traditional plays. As an added bonus, this applies to encounter cards as well. If an ability causes you to put a minion into play, you don't need to trigger Surge, Incite, or any When Revealed abilities. Double the Resources, Double the Fun A final point worth bringing up is how The Power in All of Us works regarding cards like C.I.T.T. and Across the Spider-Verse. This isn't specifically related to Doctor Strange, but it will be important for my next section. Directly from the FFG Rules Specialist, Alex, we have: "Yes, the resources generated by The Power in All of Us can be applied to an ability cost on a basic card like C.I.T.T." This also applies to the second part of Across the Spider-Verse. Not only can you use The Power in All of Us as a double resource for playing the card, you (or another player) can use The Power in All of Us as a double resource for the ability cost to repeat the ability. Prove It Now that we have access to all this power, we might as well use it. To prove how powerful Doctor Strange and these "cheats" are, I built a Doctor Strange Leadership deck that utilizes all of these principles. Here it is on MarvelCDB.com This is a bit of a silly deck as many of the allies you can't actually play outright. However, a lot of power is packed away by leveraging the rules we covered above. First and foremost, you have all the Invocations. Then, we've got Make the Call, Call for Backup, and Summoning Spell to cheat in allies. Rapid Response puts these allies back into play from the discard pile, again avoiding the restrictions. Black Panther can grab Summoning Spell or Make the Call so you have a freebie card outside your hand. The Power in All of Us can be used alongside Make the Call for the Basic allies in addition to being used for Across the Spider-Verse, Web of Life and Destiny, and The Sorcerer Supreme. Build Support will help you skip the cost of Web of Life and Destiny if you don't have a Web-Warrior ally yet. Last but not least, we have Vivian, the queen of breaking things. I won't go into a full list here, but watch for ways that she can mute an ability or effect in order for you to bypass any play restrictions (like ignoring a Crisis Icon, Guard, or Patrol). Feel free to give the deck above a run to see if you can master these norm-breaking abilities. Or, feel free to check out this list of all the player cards that are non-thwarting threat removal, non-attack damage, or put into play abilities. Thanks Thanks to Chocobo, Journeyman2, josseroo, and theromeo3517 for suggestions and discussions on the deck!

In this series, I am going to highlight cards that I am currently enjoying. These are by no means the most powerful cards. They aren't even necessarily my all-time favorite cards. They are simply cards that I am really enjoying right now. At the end of the article you'll find a decklist that I've enjoyed using them in and a slideshow that displays all the cards. Call for Backup Hot off the press, it's the new player side scheme for Leadership. Defeating this side scheme will let you put one ally from your deck or discard pile into play. It's powerful... and a whole lot of fun. There is something quite cinematic about Call for Backup being completed in a larger multiplayer game. A team of three or four allies swarm the board, turning the tide of the game. The reason that I really enjoy it though, is that it has breathed some life into expensive and forgotten allies. This leads me to my next card. Beta Ray Bill Hailing from Star-Lord's hero pack, Beta Ray Bill is the hunter of minions. After he attacks and defeats a minion, you can remove two threat from the main scheme. That 5 cost is hefty, but now that Call for Backup offers alternative ways to get him into play, you can drop him in, keep him healed, and be handling multiple problems at once. E.V.A. (and Fantomex) Another set of cards from NeXt Evolution, I couldn't include one without the other. There is something fantastic about Fantomex entering play and immediately dropping another card on the board. That said, E.V.A. is the real star to me. I really like having ping damage and threat removal, because it makes it a lot easier to set up other abilities to trigger (like Beta Ray Bill's ability). It also helps you ensure you're not wasting damage or threat removal on dealing with a Tough or clearing a 1 threat side scheme with your powerful basic activation or event. As a bonus, E.V.A. doesn't thwart or attack, so you can sidestep some nasty effects. I've enjoyed both loading Fantomex up with upgrades to power him up and just keeping him around to run E.V.A. and power up cards like Band Together. Band Together While sometimes touted as a 'win-more' card, I have found Band Together to be a really strong tempo card, especially in the NeXt Evolution scenarios and campaign. The main concern with the card is that it can be unusable without allies, but in NeXt Evolution you will often have access to campaign allies that help power it up. It makes it really easy to bump it to a double or even triple resource. While it's not something that I would put in any deck, it has really been singing alongside the big allies that I've been keeping out on the board. Adam Warlock Adam Warlock might be one of the most fun allies in the game. He looks a tidge wimpy with a small 1 THW and 1 ATK, but his strength comes from his ability. If you can set it up to have a single resource type left in your hand before he activates, you can choose what effect you will get. 3 non-attack damage, 3 non-thwart threat removal, or 3 identity healing is massive and a highly efficient use of your cards. As a bonus, if you can trigger him with something like Jackpot! or Salvage, you can even trigger multiple of the effects. (Just note that it doesn't work like that for something like Strength or Genius). Try Them Out If you want a quick and easy way to try these five (technically six) cards out, I just took this Spider-Man deck through all the NeXt Evolution scenarios and had a blast! If you're taking it through NeXt Evolution, I would suggest swapping United We Stand for First Aid during the first two scenarios. This is the deck on MarvelCDB.com. Featured Cards

In this Card Highlight series, I highlight cards that I am currently enjoying. These are by no means the most powerful cards. They aren't even necessarily my all-time favorite cards. They are simply cards that I am really enjoying right now. At the end of the article you'll find a deck list that I've enjoyed using them in and a slideshow that displays all the cards. Shake and Bay...ke Groot Groot may be my all-time favorite ally. I really love his ability to defend and heal, taking massive hits and staying on the board. He can be a great ally to build survivability for Guardian heroes or anyone able to cheat him in with something like Call for Backup or Make the Call. I love taking a big hit from the villain (5 damage or less!), then healing back up by blocking a 1 ATK minion over and over. He really is one of a kind when it comes to allies. He's a unique defensive Voltron ally, so feel free to let your friends in other aspects dump upgrades on him. Each health makes it easier for him to take bigger attacks, so Honorary upgrades, Reinforced Suit, or Training upgrades are great for making him even more durable. Shake It Off Shake It Off is great for any Guardian, but it absolutely sings with the Groot ally. He can take a hit up to 5 damage, heal 2 of that, then you can put a Tough on him. This means the next time he blocks a full attack, he'll be left with only one damage on him, ready to take more hits. Shake It Off is super flexible, and works best when triggering it off a small minion attack. Hangar Bay Shake It Off and Groot have always been good, but they are a bit slow. Hangar Bay blows this wide open by letting Groot defend multiple attacks in a round, taking quick advantage of his healing or Shake It Off. Charlie-27 As much as I love him, Groot isn't always around. Charlie-27 is a nice backup. He comes with a Tough and retaliate. This means your first block is free, and he'll deal a bit of extra damage along the way. He's not my top choice, but he works well alongside Groot. Pinned Down This isn't mandatory to the above combos, but it can be helpful for harvesting minion attacks. Even if you reduce the minion's ATK to 0, it is considered to attack, meaning Groot can defend and heal or Charlie-27 can defend and retaliate. If you reduce the minion to 1 ATK (and make sure it doesn't have nasty activation abilities), you can also use it to trigger Shake It Off. Honorable Mention: Med Team What's this? A surprise entry? You've only done two of these Fabulous Fives, and both went over the limit? Yes. I am cheating again. Really this is just an honorable mention. It's super flexible, it can speed up Groot's healing, and it can keep Charlie-27 around. If you're running into some minions with rough activation abilities, I'd swap Pinned Down for this. Try It Out My favorite place for this is with Rocket Raccoon. The other Guardians can run it plenty fine as well, but Rocket and Groot are such a thematic matchup. On top of that, it sets up Flora and Fauna, a fantastic Team-Up card. Here is a deck that I enjoyed with NeXt Evolution scenarios. While it can be run solo, I prefer it with another teammate or two, because it makes hitting the Shake and Bay...ke combo easier. You can find it on MarvelCDB here! You could easily swap some things around. Moon Girl is always great with Rocket, especially when he can flip down often. You could drop Pinned Down and just rely on naturally occurring attacks. There are enough 2+ cost Protection cards to justify running The Power of Protection, but I find Rocket to be pretty resource rich as is. If you give it a run, I hope you have fun with it! Featured Cards

We've rebranded! After the first two articles in this series, I decided that keeping it locked to five cards was a little more restrictive than what I wanted to do, so I'm moving away from Fabulous Five and to Card Highlight. And what do you know? This is the first time I've actually hit five cards. In this Card Highlight series, I highlight cards that I am currently enjoying. These are by no means the most powerful cards. They aren't even necessarily my all-time favorite cards. They are simply cards that I am really enjoying right now. At the end of the article you'll find a deck list that I've enjoyed using them in and a slideshow that displays all the cards. Render Medical Aid Another fresh off the presses card from Wave 7, Render Medical Aid is a new card from the Psylocke hero pack, and it is amazing. You can toss this onto the board, and you and your friends can all get some heals. This card alone is what has really solidified the healing package for me, and I think it is a fantastic use of player side schemes. The Night Nurse A classic Protection card hailing from the Doctor Strange hero pack, The Night Nurse is a staple for any Protection deck. In addition to healing 1, you remove a status effect from the hero you're targeting. There are three important things to note here: You can only target a hero. This isn't usually a big deal, because you can call for this action off turn. However, there has been the occasion where this has mattered for me. You must remove a status card if you can. Don't throw this heal around, because if a hero only has a Tough status on them, it will be removed. Don't leave home without it. Your friends will thank you for it. Second Wind Tucked away in the back of Thor's hero pack, Second Wind is often overlooked. I really love that this is an Action, as it can be played in alter-ego. In fact, the deck that I am sharing at the end is an alter-ego focused Protection deck. I have had plenty of times when a hero was low on health, but they can't afford to use their basic activation to recover. Second Wind is a nice bulk heal that can push heroes into another round. It's particularly nice during NeXt Evolution with all the retaliate and overkill floating around. Med Team A classic from the Core Set, Med Team has been one of the most helpful cards since the game began. Use it to heal allies or heroes, and trigger it in whatever form you are in. Meditation Another back-of-pack card, this event comes from Vision's hero pack. This card isn't specific to healing builds, but it is to the one that I've been enjoying for some time. Notice that both Med Team and Second Wind are 3 cost cards. If you have an alter-ego focused build or have little use for your basic activation and will be in alter-ego a decent bit, this is a great way to get a discount on another card. Keep in mind that it is only a two resource discount, because you could have just used Meditation as part of the payment playing it normally. This is also an action, so you can use it to sneak out allies, supports, and upgrades off turn. Try It Out Below you'll find two decks. One is an updated version of a deck I ran at Con of Heroes this year that leans heavily on Basic cards, and the other is more Protection card focused. The first published deck that I remember running a variation of this was created by Schmendrix. You can find their deck here! G.I.R.L. 'n Heals If you're a big fan of working from home, you may find this support deck a lot of fun. The focus of the deck is to use Wasp's G.I.R.L. ability to recur powerful cards and support the team by healing, providing blockers, and sharing Avenger's Mansion and Helicarrier. There will certainly be times that you flip up to hero form in order to play Pinpoint Strike or other hero actions, but otherwise you can use your basic activation in alter-ego with Meditation or to heal overkill damage from blocking with your allies. Just ensure that you are providing enough benefit to make up for the scheming threat you're generating! G.I.R.L. 'n Grey Heals Here it is on MarvelCDB! G.I.R.L. 'n Green Heals Here it is on MarvelCDB! Really this G.I.R.L. 'n Heals framework is easily customizable. Just toss in the package from the article, pick out which allies you want to run, then grab the Power Of cards that best suit your ally choice. There are a lot of fun combinations. Featured Cards

In this series, I highlight cards that I am currently enjoying. These are by no means the most powerful cards. They aren't even necessarily my all-time favorite cards. They are simply cards that I am really enjoying right now. At the end of the article you'll find a decklist that I've enjoyed using them in and a slideshow that displays all the cards. This card highlight isn't as cohesive as some of the others, but each of these cards are making for a lot of fun at my table. Let's dive-in! Foiled! I have been a sucker for this card since I started playing Marvel Champions. Back in the day, I loved running this with Iron Man to give some space for early building. If you're running a deck low on status cards or are up against Stalwart villains, Foiled! can really open up the ability to flip down. It is not a Hero Interrupt, so you can use it in both alter-ego and hero form. While it feels best drawing into it at just the right time, don't be afraid to strategically hold it from one turn to another if you know the villain will be scheming. I generally run three copies to improve the odds of having it when I need it, but I generally also run it alongside other non-status threat prevention like Counterintelligence. Personally I prefer it in multiplayer games where there is more opportunity to use it. Making an Entrance A boosted thwart with healing potential is nothing to scoff at. Healing two damage is really helpful for staying in hero form, and this 2 THW boost can help clean up schemes in order to trigger other cards like Skilled Investigator and Turn the Tide. This card does require you make a basic thwart, so keep that in mind when considering it for your decks. It's great alongside heroes like Captain America or SP//dr who have easy access to ready effects. Spider-Man: Pavitr Prahbakar The Protection Web-Warrior suite is so strong that I think the Justice suite is often overlooked. I love dropping Pavitr into play for some bulk threat removal. He's still great if you're low on Web-Warrior cards, but having him clean up 4-5 threat in the late game is a huge momentum swing. His Avenger counterpart Peter Parker is far more limited due to cost, the play from hand restriction, and less overall synergy for his trait available. Pavitr hits a really sweet spot for this ability. Great Responsibility Oh no! Avert your gaze! Surely it is criminal to enjoy such a card as this. While I wouldn't toss Great Responsibility into any deck, it is a neat tool for threat management. There are few ways to interact with threat during the villain phase, and this is one of them. If you want to get particularly cheeky, you can run it alongside some Tough generation to block some massive threat placements. Who needs to thwart Stryfe's Grasp when you can simply defeat Stryfe and Great Responsibility away all the threat that started on it? Thanks to MCGamora and royal7 for bringing that interaction up in the Solo Champions League discord. It inspired me to toss it into my deck! Assess the Situation I love this card so much that it is sneaking into a Justice list. To me, this is the perfect Basic card. Some heroes can really leverage it (see below), while for others it is simply a great tool for smoothing hands and avoiding leftover resources. I try to keep Assess as the last card in my hand each round. If I need to spend it, no worries. However, if it looks like I'll have a card leftover, there's no reason not to pass it to my next turn. Try It Out Below is a Ghost-Spider deck that I took through NeXt Evolution in two player games. With George Stacey being able to store cards and Ghost-Spider's ability to ready off interrupts and responses, Foiled! and Great Responsibility gain huge value. You can tuck them away and use them when you need them. Assess the Situation is also great here, as early in the game it helps smooth your hands, and late in the game it can be used in conjunction with Ticket to the Multiverse to help Ghost-Spider with a massive turn. Here it is on MarvelCDB! You could easily make some swaps in this deck to tune it to your preferences. If you're not going to be attacking much, swap Turn the Tide for some more thwarting events. If you can't justify The Power in All of Us for limited targets, drop them. Though note that SP//dr and Across the Spider-Verse make for many more targets than it seems at first glance. If you feel you're not seeing your Web-Warrior allies enough, toss in Chance Encounter to help grab them sooner. I have been having a blast with these cards, and I hope that this encourages you to look at some of them as well! Featured Cards

In the previous article from this series I took a look at efficiency and pulled out some loose efficiency benchmarks for a variety of effects. However, efficiency is merely one tool with which we evaluate cards. In that article, I pointed out a number of cards that reflected these benchmarks, but many came with some pretty massive caveats. Taking a look at these caveats or conditions is the next step in evaluating cards. It will be another tool we add to our evaluation toolbox. Many of the abilities we see in aspect and Basic cards hit the efficiency benchmarks, but they are locked behind conditionals such as needing two side schemes or needing to remove the last threat on a scheme. Evaluating these conditionals will inform us on if they are a good fit for our deck. However, you will first need to know the goal of your deck. I’ll cover that more fully in a separate article, but your deck’s focus or goal is the primary driver behind what cards you’ll add to your deck. And to be clear, I don’t mean “My deck’s goal is to help me win the game.” How do you want it to help you win the game? Are you going to be the threat manager in a multiplayer game? Is your deck helping you win by covering your weaknesses or building your strengths? Once you know what you want your deck to do, you will have something to measure these conditionals against. With that said, let’s take a look at the common conditionals that we find in card abilities. If you want to skip to a particular section, just click the link below. Common Conditionals resource reliant target reliant form reliant attack \ thwart \ defense reliant take damage reliant trait reliant Resource Reliant Do you have the right resource types to pay for Requirement and kicker abilities? These conditionals are going to depend on having the right resources available at the right time. Let’s start with Requirement’s definition: A card with the requirement keyword cannot be played unless each resource of the specified type is spent while paying for that card’s cost. This is pretty straight forward. You are completely locked out of playing it without the right resources. You either need a plan to meet the Requirement or a plan to skirt around it. Cards like Make the Call, Build Support, and Call for Backup all help you bypass Requirement by using “put into play” abilities which ignore play restrictions like Requirement and trait-locks. Keep in mind that anything that plays the card while ignoring the resource cost cannot be used here. For example, you cannot use Team-Building Exercise to play Spider-Man: Peter Parker, because you haven’t paid all the Requirement resources. For conditionals with kickers (boosted effects), you can play the card regardless of what resources you spend, but the extra benefits require you spend some specific resource for them to activate. Most conditionals only need one specific resource type, making it easier to ensure you have it when you need it. Non-Leadership aspects each have a favored trait and a resource type that is commonly the trigger for kickers. Each also has a resource generator that generates the aspect’s favored resource for their favored trait. Check out the chart below for more information. Regardless of which aspect you are in, there are always the Basic Enhanced resource upgrades available (Awareness, Physique, Reflexes) that offer a specific resource type. If you think you’ll need more than one kicker or more than one resource type for kickers, it is worth looking at more flexible resource sources with wild resources. You can run the ‘Power Of’ resource cards to boost the likelihood of having wilds available to hit kickers and requirements. For example, I tend to run Power of Protection alongside What Doesn’t Kill Me. It neatly pays for the event and covers the Requirement resource. There are also flexible (but more expensive) resource generators like Quincarrier or X-Jet. We’re going to do a quick aside here, because a comparison between Quincarrier and the Enhanced resource upgrades is fantastic for highlighting how efficiency is just a tool of evaluation. Let’s set aside the type of resource generated for a moment. Now, step away from the pitchforks and torches until you’ve finished reading. Ready? Quincarrier has the same or worse efficiency than an Enhanced resource upgrade up until its fifth use. The Enhanced card takes 3 resources (2 cost, plus the card itself) and gives back 3 resources. This means it pays itself back on the third use. Quincarrier takes 4 resources (3 cost, plus the card itself), and gives back infinite resources (over infinite turns). Quincarrier seems *way* more efficient. However, it hasn’t even paid itself back until the fourth use. Additionally it has a higher hit on your tempo due to the higher cost. This means that if your game is lasting anywhere around 4 turns (pretty fast, to be sure), you overpaid for resources. If your game is lasting anywhere around 8 turns (surprisingly common), but you often pass over or don’t see your Quincarrier during the first couple of turns, you may have been better off with the Enhanced resource upgrades, despite them having worse efficiency overall. The scenario’s pressure, the quickness of the game, and the cost curve or tempo of your deck can overshadow pure efficiency. Now to shine Quincarrier back up a bit, cards like Build Support change the math somewhat. In addition, the Enhanced resource upgrades limit you to one specific resource type. That may be fine or it may not. Only your deck will know. Okay, back to our regular programming! When it comes to what resource types you’ll have available for kickers, you’ll want to keep your hero kit in mind. Captain America has resource generators that generate physical resources, so they will be more helpful in Aggression than in Justice. Venom has a built-in Wild generator, so he can easily hit kickers. Another important card to highlight is Honed Technique. It gives every Aggression attack event a kicker, but muddies the water by requiring a mental resource to get the boost. This can become restrictive when looking at cards like No Quarter which already have a different resource requirement. The biggest thing here is that you will want to make sure you have a source or answer to the resource restrictions. Target Reliant Will you have access to an appropriate target? This covers a variety of different targets, but most commonly minions, side schemes, and allies are the targets we’ll need. Multitarget For multitarget conditionals, you will need more than one target to get full value of the effect. First and foremost this is impacted by player count. At high player counts, it is far more likely for minions and side schemes to come out naturally. However, in low player counts that is far less reliable, purely because you’ll be seeing fewer encounter cards. If you want to use an ability that requires a specific target at low player counts, you will want to bring along some summoning effects to ensure your target is available. One Way or Another will ensure you get side schemes, while Looking for Trouble will grab minions. Regarding allies, more players generally means more allies. More than likely, in a multiplayer game you will have more targets for abilities targeting friendly characters like allies. A few examples of multi-target conditionals would be Multi-tasking requiring two schemes, Melee needing two enemies, and United We Stand needing two or three allies to get full value from them. As player count goes up, the likelihood of having a side scheme, minion, or ally available to target will also go up. Attach to X As with the multitarget discussion above, you will have to look at how likely you are to naturally have your target. Side Schemes are easier than ever, as player side schemes count for upgrades like Followed and Chance Encounter. Allies are another thing that are more in the players’ control. In multiplayer you are more likely to have a target for ally upgrades, while in solo you will be solely responsible for providing allies. Remember that in solo or two player games, you may want summoning effects to ensure you have the target available when you need one. This trend follows the same as above. As player count goes up, the likelihood of having a side scheme, minion, or ally available to target will also go up. Some examples of Attach to X cards would be Overwatch for side schemes, Pinned Down for minions, and Sidearm for allies. Defeat X Defeat X (or similarly “remove the last threat”) is a conditional that has to look a bit further than just availability. If you are required to defeat the side scheme or minion, you’ll want to address how easy that will be. Side schemes at high player counts have high amounts of threat, meaning you are far less likely to trigger “remove the last threat” abilities on cards like Clear the Area. However, three to four starting threat is pretty common in solo play. You can have a character you control thwart, then easily hit Clear the Area’s trigger in solo. Additionally, if you’re keeping the main scheme at 0 threat, you will commonly only have a couple threat on it in solo play, making Clear the Area really easy to trigger. For threat and side schemes, as player count goes up, the likelihood of clearing or defeating schemes goes down. Minions on the other hand don’t scale at all (with notable exceptions). This means that you’re more likely to have a target you can defeat in multiplayer. As player count goes up, the likelihood of defeating an enemy also goes up. Now we’ll add a big caveat to that. This is scenario and modular set dependent. As the minion size goes up, your likelihood of defeating them goes down. If you have conditionals like Hard Knocks, you’ll be far more likely to get the kicker in a scenario that features a lot of small minions. As an aside (I know, asides are becoming a problem), scenarios are varied enough now that if you’re building a deck to use across many scenarios, it’s worth creating a side board for the deck. This is a small collection of cards that you can easily swap into your deck. Side boards can help you adjust for things like beefy minions. Exhaust X Many abilities require that you exhaust your hero, ally, weapon, or whatever else. You’ll want to ensure you have targets available to you. This one is a little tricky, because it can be impacted by encounter cards and enemy abilities very easily. For example, if you require a basic activation to trigger an ability, Exhaustion can cause your identity to be exhausted before the phase even begins. Knowing the kinds of exhaust effects on encounter cards as well as having access to readying effects can help make these abilities more reliable. These are also generally part of the costs, rather than the ability. This means that you can only use cards you control to pay those costs. There is no substantial difference across player count for your likelihood of having targets to exhaust available. The standout from this are Alliance cards that allow other players to help pay the costs. I've included a couple examples below. Others There are still some more specific interactions that are looking for targets that don’t fit into the categories above. For example, Float Like a Butterfly and Press the Advantage are looking for enemies that have status effects on them. A lot of those can come from your own deck, but in multiplayer you can also rely on other players to produce the status effects. The chances for a target are higher as player count increases. Lie in Wait and Anticipation are specifically looking to trigger off a minion engaging you. While this doesn’t specifically change based on player count, Aggression and a few heroes have access to minion summoning. The usefulness of these abilities will be informed by your hero and aspect choice almost exclusively. Form Reliant This is a replacement gif. I was going to insert a Dragon Ball Z "This isn't even my final form!" gif, but I just learned no one actually says that in the series. Now you know, too. Will you be in the correct form? You’ll want a good gauge of your hero and deck goals for form reliant abilities. Many cards have alter-ego abilities, and if you won’t be going to alter-ego often, you’ll want to avoid most of them. If you will be spending a decent amount of time in alter-ego (meaning somewhere between every turn to multiple turns in a game), you can really lean into more alter-ego focused or non-form specific cards. When doing this, you’ll also want to look at scaling back some event cards with hero abilities. Case in point, defense events aren’t particularly useful in alter-ego, so you’ll want to avoid including many if you’re spending much time there. You’ll also want to ensure your deck has ways to use resources in alter-ego, especially if you have a lot of card draw available. Allies, upgrades, and supports are great to help reduce resource waste. It also doesn't hurt to have some resource sinks (places to spend unused resources) like Machine Man, Lockjaw, or Assess the Situation. Alongside which form you are in, there are many conditionals that rely on you changing forms. Cards like Surprise Attack and Ready to Rumble can only trigger when changing into hero form. For most heroes, this is equivalent to what is stated above. If you're not visiting home often, leave the form changing cards in the box. However, there are a number of heroes with multiple hero forms, and they will have greater access to form changing. Ant-Man, Wasp, Angel, Vision, and Shadowcat will all have more opportunities to trigger abilities requiring a form change. Attack / Defend / Thwart Reliant There are a number of abilities that require you attack, defend, or thwart before you trigger them. You’re going to want to look at what your build is focusing on before adding these cards. Thor Aggression in a 4 player game will have a multitude of attack opportunities. This is perfect for “after you attack” conditionals. Conversely, in solo, Captain America Aggression will likely split his actions between attacking and thwarting. His “after you attack” triggering opportunities will be much more limited. Defense tends to have the biggest limiting factor, as many times you will go all-or-nothing on defending. If your deck’s goal isn’t to defend, you’ll want to skip the “when you defend” cards. Expanding on this, the more specific “after you defend and take no damage” conditionals are much harder to hit if you aren’t building specifically to handle it. Whether or not defending is something you want to build into can be informed by your hero choice. Many of the 3 DEF heroes are good fits for the “take no damage” archetype. The big takeaway here is that how focused or generalist your deck is will be informing your attack/defend/thwart reliant choices. The more focused your deck is, the easier it will be to trigger attack/defend/thwart reliant abilities. Take-Damage Reliant Can you take extra damage? Some abilities require you take damage to trigger them (from enemy attacks, the ability itself, or other outside sources) or cause you damage once triggered. Considerations for these cards will be your overall health, access to healing, and Tough access. You can lock yourself out of using an ability if you have Tough, but are required to take damage. On the flip side, you can waste an entire Tough on one damage from triggering an ability. For example, you will take one damage as part of “Think Fast”, so you would lose your Tough in order to Confuse the villain. However, with Weapon X, you simply couldn’t trigger the ability at all if you have a Tough, because taking one damage is part of the cost. Keep in mind that some of these abilities will be triggering off taking damage from an attack. This is at direct odds with things like keeping the villain stunned or blocking with allies. Trait Reliant Do you have the correct trait or access to it? Many cards are going to be play-restricted by what traits you have. This has a lot of overlap with form reliant conditions, as many times your traits are different between your alter-ego and hero forms. For example, in alter-ego, Guardians don’t have the Guardian trait. In order to play a Guardian trait-locked ally like Groot, they have to either be in hero form or acquire the Guardian trait in alter-ego through Honorary Guardian. The Mutant trait is tied to alter-ego, and it has a number of abilities and triggers available on various cards. You’ll want to ensure that you have a plan for flipping down if you want access to these Mutant-locked traits. The alternative to the above is the same as bypassing Requirement. If you have a way to “cheat” the card in through a “put into play” ability, you can avoid the reliance on a given trait. Just keep in mind that this often reduces the reliability and consistency of the play, as you must first have access to the “cheat” card. Conclusion The above covers most of the conditionals you’ll run into across the deck-building pool. While efficiency is going to be a tool that you use to evaluate a card (particularly in vacuum), these conditional evaluations are going to be far more impactful on your actual deck-building decisions. Your hero, aspect, archetype, and player count will all be informing which conditionals you’ll be likely to meet. Hopefully this is helpful for players that are new to deck-building. Learning to process and evaluate these conditionals is a foundational part of getting quick and effective at deck-building. I want to end this by noting that these evaluations aren’t just for power gamers and min-maxers. If you love building toward whatever combos you find fun, these considerations can both help smooth the path toward hitting you combos and help you make informed decisions regarding the likelihood of your combos. Don’t let a low likelihood keep you from a combo. Instead, use these considerations to help improve that likelihood by including cards that cover weaknesses or smooth hiccups. Thanks Thanks again to the discord hivemind. In particular, thank you to Gondo, josseroo, and SCOE for giving some feedback on my early breakdowns of the topic. As always, thanks to Unicorn and the Cerebro project for providing card images.

As I use terms in articles or come across them in the community, I will add them here. These are colloquially used terms and jargon. For rules terms, refer to the latest Rules Reference Guide. build card / ramp card : a card that increases a hero's power, but isn't a card that the deck hinges on alone. chump blocking : using an ally to block an enemy's attack control : a strategy that relies on managing the board state and building their own board while ignoring the villain until they are ready to defeat the villain in a short burst effective resources (ER) : the full cost of playing a card, generally consisting of the card's cost and the card itself. For example, if you play Helicarrier using only cards in hand, the cost is 3, but you have 4 cards fewer. The effective resource of playing Helicarrier is 4. hard mulligan : discarding all or most of your hand during your mulligan keystone card : a singular card that is fundamental to a hero kit or strategy precon : short for preconstructed deck, the deck with which the hero was originally packaged recursion : this is a deck style where you focus on replaying or returning to play some particular card or card type, usually allies. For example, using Make the Call and Rapid Response in Leadership, you can recur Maria Hill to get multiple card draws in a round. rush : a strategy that relies on ignoring everything it can in favor of defeating the villain as quickly as possible tutor : a term carrying over from Magic the Gathering, it means to search for a specific card or card type voltron : a deck type that focuses on boosting one or more allies by attaching multiple upgrades to them

Note: I (Darren) did my best to transcribe the podcast interview into a readable form. While I did my best to keep the meaning exact, It is not an exact transcription. I edited it to do things like remove filler or repeated words. You can listen to the Marvel Champions Monthly Podcast Episode here! You can read the interview below, or you can download the PDF, which includes timestamps. Introduction and Ice Breaker Introduction Hey, you heroes! Welcome to Marvel Champions Monthly, a fan-cast about the card game, Marvel Champions by Fantasy Flight Games. Thanks for joining us as we complete heroic deeds and thwart the villain’s evil schemes. KennedyHawk Hey, everybody! Welcome to Marvel Champions Monthly, a fan podcast about our favorite card game, Marvel Champions. We've got a really special episode today. I'm joined with Darren from the Marvel Champions subreddit. How's it going, Darren? Darren It's going pretty well! I just enjoyed a lovely 4th of July holiday, and I'm geared up and ready to go. KennedyHawk Well, we'll have fireworks in today's episode too, because I think we're doing something pretty cool, right? Reddit often has these things called Ask Me Anythings, and in lieu of one of those, what we're going to do is a sort of Reddit Ask Me Anything interview. We've got two really special hosts with us. We have Tony and Caleb from FFG. So, how's it going, Caleb? Caleb Pretty good. Happy to be here. KennedyHawk We're stoked to have you here, and we've got Tony who is designing the wave that's being spoiled right now, right. The NeXt Evolution wave. How's it going? Tony That's right, yeah. KennedyHawk So, Darren did a lot of the legwork for this episode and gathered a bunch of questions from different fans of the card game all over Reddit. We're going to give him the chance to ask you a bunch of those questions, and I'll try to help along the way. This is really an episode sort of special for everybody, but really special for that Reddit community that's been thriving and growing around this awesome game. So, to kick things off, Darren, did you want to ask any ice breaker questions or anything like that? Darren Oh man, good question. So, before we hopped on, we were just talking about Idaho, because that's where I went for my vacation. So maybe just a light ice breaker. If you're just going anywhere for vacation, where would you go? Caleb Well, that's so funny that you're asking that because I am honestly stuck with that question in real life at the moment. I've got my sabbatical coming up at the end of this summer. For people who don't know, FFG employees who have been at the studio for 10 years earn a one month paid sabbatical. And I'm cashing in. My wife and I were trying to figure out where to go. I'm kind of eyeballing Seattle right now, the Emerald City. I'm a big, big fan of the music that came from Seattle in the 90s, and I like nature. So that's near the top of my list. Darren Seattle is great. I visited there, ah... it’s probably been like a decade now, but I loved it out there. Caleb Cool. What's the number one thing to do in Seattle? Darren Oh, I was out there for work, and so I think for me, what I loved doing was just hitting up the coast. It’s way colder than anything on the East, but it was still just awesome popping out to go see the coast and then in Seattle itself just grabbing so much good food. Caleb Awesome. Tony Taking a ferry ride is another good one. Caleb Oh, you've been out there, Tony? Tony Yeah, I've been out there some number of years ago, just on a short trip. It's a cool place. Caleb I'll have to talk with you more later then, since we're talking Marvel Champions and not Seattle today. Tony For me, something that probably people don't know about me is that my wife and I are something of globetrotters. Last year we managed to hit the final continent that we hadn't visited, and so now we've been to every continent on the globe. So it's left us with a little bit of a question of what do we do now that we've achieved this goal. We have plans to go to Costa Rica next year, and after that we don't really know. Caleb The moon. Tony, go to the moon. Tony Yeah, man, I wish! I would love that. Heck, I'd even enjoy going up into orbit. Caleb There you go. Tony But unfortunately, I don't have a billion dollar company. Darren How about you, Dan? KennedyHawk That's a good question. I studied abroad for a year in Japan with a home-stay family in high school, so I'd probably go back and visit my home-stay family in Japan. We've gone a couple of times, and every time we go, we tend to meet up. But it's [a] once a decade trip, so it's been ten years. It's about time now. Darren Oh man, I was raised on Japanese curry, and I've always wanted to go out to Japan and just have authentic Japanese food. KennedyHawk Next interview we’ll do there. Questions Darren Perfect. Well, with the little ice breaker out of the way, why don't we kick things off? We'll get started on our questions. First, I'll say there were a lot of similar questions, so I combined a bunch from the Reddit post to try and consolidate things. But there were a lot of people who were asking “Where is X hero or Y villain?” I know you guys can't share specifics on unannounced products, but with such a vast pool of popular heroes and teams in the Marvel Universe, what does the process look like to actually pick which teams and heroes are used and when? Caleb Well, we have a document that I started working on pretty much as soon as we started working on the line. It's a multi-year plan that sort of outlines where we'd like to go. Now with that, it's sort of a living document as it's a living card game, and it's malleable. It has grown and changed quite a bit over the years. But yeah, you know the answer I always give is we hope that the game continues to be as successful as it is so that we can eventually get to everything. Darren I know that's a big ask to get to everything, because Marvel... their roster goes deep. I'm sure it's impossible to get to everyone's favorite hero, but as long as the game keeps trucking, I'm excited to see what comes out. KennedyHawk You mentioned having a plan ahead of time. How far ahead do you plan what heroes are going to become characters, and does the release schedule ever aim to line up with other Marvel properties like crossover comics or movies or something like that? Caleb We've tried that. We've tried that in the past. It rarely ever works out, because we don't have a ton of insider knowledge to what Marvel is doing. The MCU, they like to keep things pretty tight. They don't like a lot of leaks, so they're not sharing a ton of that information. So, we tend to learn about what's upcoming at the same time as everyone else. And due to the nature of our development process and the inevitable delays that spring up throughout that process, trying to line things up like that is just very difficult. So instead, we tend to just look at what we're excited about and what we think players will be excited about and come up with an order that makes a lot of sense to us. Tony Yeah, Caleb has had a great track record of kind of predicting where Marvel's going to go with things without any insider information. A number of our releases seem like we knew what was coming, when in actuality we didn't. Darren I was going to say... My intro to the game was a bit serendipitous, because I had literally got done watching WandaVision, and then went over to the game shop. And there was the newly released Scarlet Witch pack, [released] the same day as the last episode of WandaVision. So, I was certain you guys were in on everything. But that's when I started the game, and it was a great intro to it. Caleb Ah, that's great. That's cool to hear. Yeah, we have gotten lucky a few times. Kind of like Tony said, I'm pretty current with the books. I kind of know what characters are popular. Like we put She-Hulk in the Core Set. I did not know at the time she was eventually going to get her own show. I just knew that She-Hulk was a mainstay of the comics, and a really fun character. Similarly, we put Miss Marvel in that first wave of Avengers heroes. I had no idea she'd be getting her own show eventually. I just again knew that she's a really popular character in the comic books. Darren That's really cool to get that perspective. You've gotten good at guessing. Knowing how you look ahead to planned product, do you have any plans to revisit or rework the existing content through alternate versions of cards, print-and-play, errata, or anything [else]? I know we have 38 expansions now since the Core. Caleb No. I don't know that we have any plans to go backwards. I feel like the game is very forward-looking. I think we mentioned earlier, there's a lot of characters we're still trying to get to, you know. A lot of really popular characters, fan favorites. So, our focus for the most part is on getting to those characters. Tony And to that point, a lot of Marvel characters have very similar power sets. Every time we do a new character who has similar powers to what we've done in the past, it kind of gives us that opportunity to take a new approach to that power set and figure out a different way to represent it in the game. Darren I think you guys have nailed that. That's really interesting to see that approach, because we have a lot of heroes, starting with Iron Man in the Core and running through all those suit-building type characters. And they've all been very unique between Iron Man, War Machine, Ironheart, and SP//dr. It's just really cool to see the different approaches to similar power sets. Tony Yeah, numerous spider people as well. Caleb It helps to have multiple designers on the line, because I think there's already sort of a built-in difference there that Tony, Boggs, and I are likely to design the same character three different ways, you know. And then MJ came and guest designed for us on SP//dr. That was a real treat too. It helps that each character is really well defined in the lore, and then also having different talent available at the studio. KennedyHawk Speaking of revisiting old work, if there was a change you could make to an existing hero’s kit or an aspect, what hero or aspect would you make changes to and why? Caleb That's a tough question for me to answer, because I think in reality, we put so much thought and time and effort into everything that we do, from the vision step to the design to the play testing to all the finishing touches, that I'm really proud of everything we've done. Which is not to say that it couldn't be better, because obviously I'm not a perfect designer. Things could always be improved. But in general, I don't like to dwell on that, you know. I like to think we put 100% into everything we do. We haven't ever phoned in a single hero pack, a single scenario. Everything that we do, we're really invested in it. So, in general, I'm just really happy with the game. Again, I'm sure there's things that if I thought about it, I could think “Yeah, I might do that different now,” but I don't personally care to dwell on that. Tony And occasionally we will put out an aspect card or something that might help a particular subset of heroes that we feel could use a little bit of a buff. I know the SP//dr pack came with a number of those that target heroes with high health pools, who will also tend to have lower hand size, and so I think doing things that way is probably our preferred way of trying to give older heroes a bit of a boost. Caleb Yeah, absolutely. That's the beauty of a living card game, right? As the game matures, you can see, “Okay, this hero that we were really happy with at the time feels like they're underperforming now compared to other heroes. What can we introduce into the card pool now that might help bring them up to par?” I think Tony nailed it with that answer. That's a really fun way to do it. I think it's moving from positive to positive rather than going “Oh boy, we really dropped the ball” or something, and then lamenting it. I think instead it's just staying focused on positive and saying “Well, how can we take this thing that we were really excited about that felt like it came up a little short,” and then bring it back to where we wanted it to be without moving backwards, so to speak. Anyway, I don't know. Maybe it sounds like a lot of like political, you know, trying to put a spin on it or something. I'm sorry if it does. I genuinely mean it. I really like moving forward with this game, and I hope players continue to join us for the ride because it's a lot of fun. Darren I love it, because of the cards that you mentioned to buff the higher health heroes. Thor has been one of my favorites through the game, and he is a lot more of a build hero. So, it's great seeing [when] some of the new scenarios introduce new keywords and stuff, these new aspect cards come in and give him a place to stay level with everything. I've really enjoyed the way that that's been handled. So, you're using these aspect cards and new packs to help heroes, but we did also see some of our first non-technical errata changes to aspect cards with a rules Reference Guide 1.5 that was just released. Cosmo and Go for Champions! got errata for power or how they're limiting the design space. Are there plans to errata more heavily in the future? Caleb Oh, I hope not. Tony No, I don't think so. Both Caleb and I are of the opinion that errata are very rare occasions. We really will only look at hitting something with an errata if we feel like it's just completely warping the play of the game. Speaking for myself, I feel like given that this is a cooperative game, there's no head-to-head play, there's no tournaments that we have to worry about balancing for. Players can choose to use cards they think are overpowered or choose not to use them. It's just when something like Cosmo really limits what we can do with our design, or something like Go for Champions just trivializes the game that we feel like we need to make some kind of change. KennedyHawk Okay, that seems pretty fair. I think that's a good way to go in my opinion. One of the things that the communities really liked were the print-and-play cards, whether they were the alternate resources or the Ronan modular set that came out early in the life of the game. Are there plans to do further print-and-play content or alternate content like that? Caleb I don't know that we have any plans we could share. Well, go ahead Tony. Tony Yeah, I was just going to say we can't really talk about future plans. But we're aware of how popular that Ronan set is. It's always something we've got in the back of our minds. Caleb Yeah, I certainly thought that was a fun exercise. I'd definitely like to do more. Darren [Regarding] the Ronan set, if I remember right on other podcasts, you've said that was a pretty quick turnaround. And that was in the middle of doing all the other designs. Since release, there's been 39 products in 44 months. That's since the game released. On top of that you did the Ronan modular set, and Caleb you did a whole other game during that time. Is that release schedule and the pressure from maintaining the release schedule and from the communities demanding new content... Is that something you guys have ever struggled with? Caleb We struggled a lot at the beginning of the game. I think I might have talked about that in other places. It's just that, it was Michael Boggs, Nate French, and myself that did the original design, so you had three people working on the line. Then Nate was promoted to the executive game designer at FFG, and that left just me and Boggs on the line. What was a three-person job was kind of being managed by two people, and we were still figuring out the right development rhythm for the game. So, at first it was a lot to keep up with. Boggs and I had a lot of talks about how we felt like [we were] kind of laying track for an oncoming train, but thankfully since then we've been able to update the release schedule, the development cycle. And when Tony joined the team, that was kind of fun too, because Tony came... I think Tony is the very first person to join the card game team from the board game department. Pretty much everyone else who's ever joined the card game team was a direct hire to the team, so Tony brought this interesting perspective of, “Wow, this is an aggressive schedule.” I think that helped people to kind of get it, you know. Where Boggs and I were saying it all along, but it was kind of like, “We know that's how you feel, but we're not sure.” Then Tony comes in with this different experience. They're like, “Oh, oh, Tony is saying it too. Okay. You know, like maybe there's something here.” So, it's been a good process of getting it to a place now where I think we've settled into a really comfortable rhythm. Tony And certainly, there are periods of stress as you're coming up on deadlines and stuff, but working on this game is just great fun. I still enjoy playing it, even having play-tested it since the Core Set. I love designing for it. I love working with my play-testers to refine the ideas. It's just a great feeling to be able to work on this game and contribute to its success. Caleb Yeah, the fun of the game is definitely what gets you through when you're up against those deadlines and feeling a lot of pressure. Just going, “Wow, this game is just a real treasure.” That definitely helps. KennedyHawk And I mean the statistic you just put out is pretty amazing actually, right? Every other card game I've ever played always has these monthly release schedule plans, and there's gaps. Don't get me wrong... There are gaps in the Marvel schedule that's been released, and we've got this new dual pack method that I really like. But getting out almost a product every month on average is really, really hard to do. I don't think I've ever seen it happen as closely as it has to this before, so I think it's actually pretty cool. Maybe the Marvel demand is that much higher that the pressure still really gets to you, but as far as from a customer end, I'm super happy with it so far. Caleb Well, that's great to hear. I do think that was a factor early on. We really wanted Marvel Champions to be that game where we finally hit all those releases on time. It just seems like there's been one issue or another that sort of plagues a lot of our releases, where we start with all the best intentions, and then inevitably something comes up. So, it's just like everybody involved, including me and Boggs, you know, on the design side, we all wanted to get it done on time and get that product out. So, it's great to hear that people noticed that, and it made a difference. KennedyHawk All right. You talked about enjoyment in the game. The next question is about rules. And I'm the rule book reader for my group, so I find rules super fun. How do you approach rulings when there is a card that functions differently strictly as per rules than was intended? Maybe in testing or in design? Tony It really comes down to how differently it's working. We make a judgment call about whether it's significantly different enough that we want to issue an errata for it or whether we're okay just ruling it as written and allowing the card to be played that way. We try not to make rulings where you need to intuit what the intention of the card is. We want to try to stick as closely as we can to the way the card is written and the way it functions within the rules as they are written. So, if we feel like a card is being played significantly different than its intention and it's to the detriment of a scenario or a hero or something, that's when we will issue a technical errata to it to get it back into line with what we intended for it to do. Darren I know that in the discord in particular there are whole channels dedicated to diving deep into the rules and digging through it. I know for a while there were a lot of rules answers that were just kind of floating, and everyone was wondering how that impacted other cards and how you can interpret it. So, I loved seeing 1.5 come out and just really solidify a lot of that and incorporate it into the actual rules. That has been a joy since that released. Tony Glad to hear that. We really put a lot of work into that. Our primary goal was just to codify a lot of rulings that we had started making since Alex Werner, our Games Rule Specialist, had joined our little team in answering rules questions. And certainly, there will be cases where we will potentially change our minds on an answer based on some new information presented. But we try to be as consistent as we can and not change answers as much as we can. But if there's ever any question about whether a ruling it stands, I would say if it happened before the 1.5 update or whatever the latest update is, there's maybe a chance that the update changed it. But if the ruling has come out since the update dropped, then that ruling is probably still good. Darren Okay, that's good to know. I know that on Hall of Heroes, he does a really good job about collecting all of the rules answers that people have gotten. And so, it's been nice having that hard line of like “[RRG] 1.5 is out. Here's everything codified.” Then we get some updates. Although I'm surprised... I met Alex at Con of Heroes, and I'm surprised she didn't quit within the first couple weeks from all of us submitting questions. Caleb Alex is great. Tony There was a huge backlog and I think we've gone through every question that was submitted since Alex started looking at them. There are some questions that are years old that are probably no longer relevant, and I don't think we'll probably address them. But if you submitted a question years ago and still haven't gotten an answer back, feel free to submit again. Darren Sounds good. I'm glad that Alex was added to the team. That's been nice having that avenue reopened to be able to ask those questions. Tony Yeah, totally. Darren Kind of changing direction a little bit from rulings to art, a lot of the art pulls from a variety of sources, like different comic runs or whatever. I love it, because it feels when you're playing like you're doing all these different comic books, all the different styles. But it does seem like most of the art in the game is pretty modern. Is there a particular reason that the art in the game is so modern? Caleb Yeah, we want the overall look of the game to feel cohesive. That's a huge part of what our art directors do. [They] make sure that there can be a variety of art styles in the game, but none of them should feel too jarring when sitting on the table next to each other. I do remember very early on there was a conversation in the studio about, you know, we have access to this huge catalog of art, but there needs to be some kind of guiding principle of what art we use. I'm a big comic reader, and so I recognize that there are a lot of different art styles. And it is a visual medium, so sometimes art just doesn't appeal to somebody. There are books that I was collecting that I was really into because I felt like the writer and the artists were just firing on all cylinders. And then that artist was moved to a different book, and they brought in a new artist and so it’s in a very different style. And I just quit the book, because I didn't... It was the same writer, same characters... The story was probably fine, but I just didn't like the art style. We don't want that to happen to the people playing our game. You know, where maybe they're really looking forward to a certain hero, and then that hero comes out and has a totally different art style from everything else they've seen. And that could be very frustrating. So, in that conversation we had forever ago, we basically chose a point in time in Marvel Comics, and we said anything prior to this date we're not even going to consider. Because certain production styles have changed too, where like in the 90s when I started collecting, they used to actually draw everything on paper and Xerox copies off to Marvel. And of course, everything now is done digitally, and you can really tell the difference. So that was a factor as well at the end of the day, we have a really talented art department. That’s their job, right? It is to help us to maintain that visual style and that cohesiveness. Tony Yeah, something I didn't really realize about comics until I joined the Marvel Champions team and started doing lots and lots of research, reading lots of back comics, is just how noticeable the change in art style has been over the decades. Which is to be expected; things change over time, and tastes change as well. But like even going back to the 90s, when I was in high school and collecting comic books, it's just a real night and day difference. You can really tell something [is] from the 90s when comparing it to something from the 2010s or later, and so we try to avoid cases where particular cards stick out in their art style significantly from other ones. Darren That makes a lot of sense. My first introduction to comics came a lot later. I was introduced to the MCU first, and so when I started reading comics, it was the annihilation event for Guardians of the Galaxy. Caleb Oh, that's so good! Darren And oh, it is. It's wonderful. But the first time I saw Star-Lord, I was like, “What? That’s not Star-Lord!” It was interesting to see that process of how that art changed as I caught up in the comics. But I have to say it is always fun finding Hawkeye in his old H costume and everything occasionally in the art. But I think as a whole, the art has been really great. It really hits that comic book feel. With that being said, you talked about how there's this overarching kind of vision [where] you want the art to feel the same and everything like that. Does Marvel or Disney have any influence over that creative process through the licensing agreement, directly through feedback, or anything like that? Caleb Yeah, they're the license holders, so everything that we do goes through an approval process where they need to look at it, sign off on it, and then say they're happy with it. I think the art actually kind of gets reviewed twice at least, because they get to see art pieces individually before they're even on the cards so that they can approve the art. Then they'll see it again later when we submit the set with the art on the cards and everything packaged as it will be printed. And they get to review it again at that point. So, there might be more to it than that, but that's the part that I'm aware of. Darren Nice. Okay. Do they just have a pool of art that you guys can draw from that they have pre-approved? And then you send in the designed stuff, and they approve it again in that form? Caleb Our art is a mix of commissioned pieces and what we call ‘pick up.’ So, there is a pool of art that we have access to through our arrangement with Marvel. They are very gracious to give us access to this where we can search up comic books and find art that we like from the books. And then there is a submission process where we can request the originals with no text on them and get high-res files to use in the game. And then there is the commissioned art, where we actually write art briefs. We describe the image that we want to see and put it in context, then we give that to our art directors who hire the artists to draw it. And then that goes through kind of a different approvals process, right? Because the stuff coming from Marvel is typically pre-approved, whereas the stuff that we're commissioning, that's something that they are going to want to see and sign off on. Darren That makes sense. So, kind of changing track again a little bit in terms of the actual design of cards and of heroes. Do you keep a list of mechanics or assumptions in the game to track where you have room for innovation? Caleb No, I don't think I do. Tony In terms of like a list, not really. But obviously Caleb and I are well versed in what has come before. We always try to play-test together [with] each other's stuff as much as possible, so we know what each other is working on. That way we know where there might be potential for crossover, [or] where there might be things that are a little too similar that we will revisit in one way or another. But in terms of any formal plan or bookkeeping, not really. I personally have some files. Like [I have] a spreadsheet of card ideas that maybe didn't pan out or didn't make a good fit for a particular hero or something that I might revisit in the future. [They are] what I call slush designs, or what the studio called slush designs. Which are basically things that we tried out and for one reason or another [they] just didn't make it into a current product, but maybe it's waiting for another product where it might make a better fit. There is that kind of stuff, but other than that, nothing real formal. Caleb Yeah, I think the design process is always so ground up. We choose the characters we want, and then the characters themselves really inform the design. I think that's how you end up with heroes who feel like the characters that they are in the books, right? I don't have a list of mechanics of like “I really want to do a hero who does X or Y,” and then we go through the characters and go “Oh, that character kind of fits this mechanic.” I'm not saying you couldn't do it that way. I'm sure there are examples where you could, and it would work brilliantly. But it feels to me much more natural to choose the character I want to do, and then say “Okay, now how do I represent this character's power in the game?” Darren I like that. That seems like it kind of wraps thematics a little more tightly when you're starting with the character itself versus with the mechanic and putting a character on top of it. Kind of along those same lines, there are a lot of reused mechanics throughout the game, but there are also a lot of card traits that show up. Like there's a large list of traits now, but there are a few of them that are largely limited to just one hero, something like ARROW with Hawkeye or TECHNIQUE with Nebula. Are these traits meant to be more singular in their use, or are they considered when designing aspect cards? Caleb The traits themselves are kind of dual purpose. One is for mechanics, but the other one is just for flavor. There are certain traits within the game that I think are very important to the game at large. Traits like AVENGER, X-MEN, you know, that kind of stuff. And then there are some traits like the ones you mentioned that are just much more narrow, like ARROW and TECHNIQUE. Not all traits are equal in terms of design consideration. But what is fun about the traits is that you can do a trait initially that seems kind of innocuous, like TACTIC, and then later on releasing a hero like Cyclops who suddenly cares about the TACTIC trait. And that reinvigorates the card pool. Now people are going, “Oh my gosh, I've been sleeping on all these cards, and they suddenly have great values.” Who knows? Somewhere down the line there could be another hero who cares about TECHNIQUES or PREPARATION or something like that, right? Like any of these things that felt like previously they belong to one character, but now there's another character who cares about them. That's one of the fun things about working on a living card game like that. Darren Nice. I have to say Black Widow is one of my favorite heroes of all time, so any time you guys feel like releasing more PREPARATIONs, I am for it. On that same note for traits, when you're giving a character a trait what kind of considerations or limitations do you have on that? Some seem to be more theme focused... like you were saying more flavor based. [For example] something like Space Knight on Venom. While others seem to be missing. I'm sure you have heard plenty of “Why doesn't Spiderman have the Web-Warrior trait?” Do you have any limitations or considerations that you take when you are putting those traits in there? Caleb The first real serious limitation is just space and bandwidth. You don't want to crowd the card with 100 traits, because the reality is, if we were going to give Spiderman, for example, every trait that he needed to be accurate to the comic book, there wouldn't be any room for card text. It would say Avenger, Fantastic Four, Web-Warrior... it would just go on and on and on, all these things. So, what's important to understand is that when we make a version of a hero, what you're really getting is like a snapshot of this hero. We're saying this is the point in time that we are looking at this hero. So, the Spiderman that we have is the Avenger Spiderman. It's not the Fantastic Four Spiderman. Because you know real die-hard fans of the comics will know that he was part of the FF for a while with the Future Foundation and all that. That would be a different version of Spiderman, [as is] a Web-Warrior Spiderman. So that's kind of a key thing there. We are leaving room open. Maybe one day we will do a Web-Warrior Spiderman. [We] can't say for sure, but in the meantime, we know it's important to people that he should be allowed to be a Web-Warrior. So, we made the upgrade that you can play on him. Tony Yeah, kind of a rule of thumb that I take with traits is I try not to go above two, at max three, traits on a card if it really has a mechanical reason to have that many. But otherwise, I try to limit myself to one or two. Caleb Yeah, I think we've all done that. I think that's where the question comes up often too. Like I think when Storm was announced or released, people were like “Why doesn't Storm just have the AERIAL trait? Like [how] she can fly is a huge part of who she is.” But it's like, well, she already has these other traits, and it gives us room then to add text to cards in her kit. I think if you put her cape on her, then she gains the AERIAL trait. So that's part of it, too. Remembering that the Hero card itself does not represent everything there is to know about that hero. The kit is part of it. The aspects are part of it. That's all intentional. Darren This is an off-list question, so feel free to skip over it. I know the upcoming Angel doesn't have X-MEN. He's just X-FACTOR [How embarrassing! I meant X-FORCE]. Does power level factor in when you are designing for excluding some traits? Caleb Well, so Tony designed that, but I did want to say this is a perfect example of what I was saying about [how] you're looking at a character at a period in time, just a slice of this character. We know that Angel is one of the founding members of the X-Men, so we absolutely could have put the X-Men trait on there. But the version of Angel that you're getting in this pack is this slice of time that he was part of X-Force. So that's why he has the X-Force trait and not the X-Men trait. Though again, the upgrade is out there that you can make him an X-Men if you want to. Tony I was just going to say, certainly balance can be a factor when considering what traits to give a character. But for the most part, we try to give them the trait that makes the most sense from a thematic standpoint and then balance around the fact that they have that trait. Darren That's really cool. Having that perspective helps a lot. It’s just that little snapshot. [They are] not in both places [at] the same time. I really like that perspective and the perspective that their hero card isn't representing their entire hero. I know from Lord of the Rings a lot of that gets condensed to a single card, so it's kind of changing that mindset coming into Marvel for thematics. So, kind of on that note of what we were just talking about, power a little bit and balance. What would you say is the balance between going for a fun factor and the actual design versus the faithfulness to the character or gameplay mechanics? How are you balancing all of those during the design? Caleb Well, now I really want to hear Tony's take on it, because I know mine. Tony, what do you think? Tony I mean looking at the question, it's interesting that the question asker put a slash between fun factor and faithfulness. It had gameplay mechanics separate. Because I think it really comes down to the player whether they find it more fun to have a more true-to-the-comics faithful thematic experience or have a more satisfying gameplay experience. It really is a balancing act that has to be struck between those two things. Ideally, we find that spot where we are high on both of those metrics, but it really comes down to a judgment call [on] which one needs to be sacrificed if a sacrifice is required. I tend to start my designs like Caleb mentioned from what the Marvel comics have to say about the character, and then [I] build them up from there and design the mechanics around that. So hopefully just the fact that I started on a thematic level and built up from there will help the character feel true to its character through the game mechanics that I've come up with. Caleb Yeah, that's a great answer, Tony. I completely agree. Actually, I would say that our methods are very nearly, if not exactly, the same. That it really does start with the character and what makes that character unique, so it starts on theme. And you're trying to design something that feels very authentic. And obviously you're trying to make it fun, you know? And once it gets the play-testers, that's when we find out, “Okay, how much have we succeeded?” Eventually, yeah. You are just trying to balance it out. You know, if there's something that's super thematic, but it's just not fun, then you're going to start to work on making it more fun. And then make sure that you don't lose the theme along the way. Tony As an example, when I was working on the NeXt Evolution wave, there was an early version of Psylocke that was testing really well with the players. They were really liking the way she played, but I kept hearing feedback that she just doesn't feel like Psylocke. It's like “This is a fun character, but it's not a fun Psylocke character.” So, I ended up scrapping most of what that design was and going in a whole new direction that I thought would be more indicative, more capturing of the essence, of what Psylocke was about. Darren Oh, that's really cool to hear that you have that back and forth with the testers to get that gauge of thematics, not just how is it mechanically playing. Caleb If I can just take a second to brag on my coworkers, actually. I think I've been pretty outspoken about how I grew up on comics. I don't need to look up the characters that we're doing for the most part, because I've been reading their books since I was thirteen. Tony and Boggs, they're definitely comic book fans, but maybe not as obsessive nerd fandom like me. So, what I want to brag about these guys is when they get assigned a batch of characters, like X-Force for example with Tony. I know that he didn't know a ton of X-Force at the start. Well, these guys, they just read everything. It's really fun. It's great there's time in our day, and it is part of our job that we can do that too. It was amazing. Within the space of a couple of weeks, Tony's coming back to me, talking about all this insight he has gained and all about these characters. He is telling me stuff even I didn't know, for example, with the character of Domino. Domino is a character I've been aware of since the 90s, and I had my picture of her kind of from the Rob Liefeld days of the original X-Force run. And then Tony came back with, “Hey, Domino actually had her own book, and in there she had this posse of characters.” So, the vision for Domino changed as a result, from my 90s Domino to a more updated Domino with her posse. And that was really cool. It shows the commitment to the theme, and how important it is to be authentic and true to these characters, that we don't just do a quick Wiki search. You know what I mean? You could do that. You could just read the back of a DVD text and go, “Okay, I think I have an idea what this is about.” But instead, they're doing the deep dives. They're reading the books. I know Boggs, he became a huge Miss Marvel fan. He, like, read her whole entire run when he started working on that character. So that's kind of fun to see. It seems like 9 times out of 10 someone gets assigned a character they weren't familiar with before, and suddenly that's like their favorite character. They are reading all their books and excited to do the design now, and I think that's why it comes across in the hero packs when people get excited. It's because we're excited. Tony Yeah, I appreciate you saying all that, Caleb. I do have one exception I have to take with it. And that is that I don't read everything, because there's not enough hours in the day, enough days of the week to do that. A lot of these characters have been around for 60-70 years and it's impossible to get a full breadth of what the character has to offer. That's where it's great that we have all these play-testers who are so passionate about, not only the game, but about the comics as well. They can weigh in with their own thoughts. “Now, this may have been true of this character in this one run, but this feels more true to the character. And we'd like to see something more in this direction.” And that's really what happened with Psylocke, and I think the character ended up all the better for it. Darren That's really cool to hear, and I definitely feel that in terms of reading comics. There is just no getting to all of it. When I first started in, I was just like, “What do you mean I can't just start at the beginning and read a whole character’s story?” And then [there are] crossover events, and I have to go back and read a whole other line. I can imagine it's a lot of work really researching and diving into those characters, so it's appreciated. I love seeing that come through. Tony Yeah, that's another practical reason that heroes are a snapshot in time. There is such a breadth of history to these characters, and there are so many writers who have worked on them and so many different artists who have worked on them, that they have changed a lot over time. It's hard to know where to start and what version of the hero to pick. In order for us to have a cohesive feeling character, we kind of have to narrow it down to, generally, the best-known version of this character or the most popular series or book that this character was in and go off of that. KennedyHawk So, you just talked about balancing fun factor, faithfulness, and gameplay. There was another question about balance. How do you balance complicated with difficult? This user said that they find complicated scenarios to be more difficult just because they have to remember and think about more things. But do you have any thoughts on complexity versus difficulty? Caleb Overall, our goal is to really keep the complexity down as much as possible, keep the game very accessible, and also just relaxing to play. Early on, Nate French and I had a conversation where he described it as not being too “beard-strokey." [That] was kind of the phrase he used. Like people often stroke their beard and stare at a chess board as they think about their next move and consider all the options. And we didn't want Marvel champions to be that. We wanted it to be very fast-paced. Tony And I took that personally. As an admitted beard-stroker, I took that personally. Caleb I think there's still a lot of room in Champions for beard stroking for people who want. It is a challenge, because I think sometimes, especially with scenario design, that's where it's the most challenging for us as designers. We want to really differentiate each scenario, so that none of them feel too similar to justify, “Why am I playing Sandman instead of just playing Rhino again?” Right? Like it has to be because they offer two different experiences. Now the easiest way to make something different is to add these new layers to it. But that's complexity, right? So, the tricky balance is making it different somehow without adding too many new bells and whistles and all this unnecessary complexity. I think in general, when we approach a box of five new scenarios, we kind of allow ourselves, “Hey, maybe this one will be a little more complex, just so we can make it do what we want it to do.” But that's just one out of the five, and the others will be less complex. Like with Mutant Genesis, the Magneto scenario is admittedly a little more complex than maybe your average scenario because of the story that I'm trying to tell. That you are racing to board Asteroid M and sabotage Master Mold, and you're trying to do all these things as Magneto's doing his thing. So, there's a little bit more going on there, whereas like Master Mold, that's basically like playing whack-a-mole. Can I destroy Master Mold faster than he's pumping out Sentinels? There's not too much complexity there. So, in general, like I hear you. I hear that comment, right? I really respect that we do not want to make Marvel champions a chore to play. It should never be a chore to play where you just mentally burnt out at the end of it, right? But it is a challenge. Tony Speaking of allowing a little variation in complexity, when we do that, we tend to try to put that at the end of the campaign. Because we have to assume that campaign box is a player’s first campaign box. So, we want to start them out in the shallow end of the pool and have them work their way toward the deeper end. Darren It's interesting to hear how you are approaching it with complexity. Because I know there are a lot of relatively similar characters. Like you have bruisers like Rhino or Venom, and it's crazy how one or two cards can make them feel totally unique without adding a ton of complexity. So, it's fun to see those designs come across. And I have to say in terms of the box starting on the less complex and building, that's fun for me, because I think some of those first scenarios are some of my favorites. But I really love that progression through the campaign of feeling the scenarios kind of build. Magneto in particular was such a good end to a box. Loved it. Caleb I'm really glad to hear that. Thank you. It occurs to me as we're talking about complexity as well that it makes a difference whether you are playing these scenarios as standalone games or if you're playing as part of campaign mode as well. And I would just encourage anyone who feels like, “Boy, there's just a lot going on, a lot to keep track of.” Like just play, standalone. Don't worry that you're missing out on something, because for me, personally, sometimes I find standalone is my preferred way to play. The campaign is definitely a vital part of the game, and it's there for people who want that progression and those consequences to carry over from game to game. But I initially got excited about Marvel Champions because it was something I could just get to the table really fast, and then invite my friends and say, "Come fight Klaw with me. Let's take on Ultron real quick.” And there wasn't any baggage or overhead of like, “Well, first, I have got to find all my campaign cards, and I have got to do all this other stuff.” It was just “Let's get right to it.” So, if people ever feel a little overwhelmed or whatever, I encourage you to just put campaign mode aside and take on your favorite villain, just straight up. Darren Nice. That's a good suggestion. I love standalone as well. It's just fun to jump around and [do] random villain of the week style plays. That's great. So, this one's jumping back a little bit to when you were talking about that balance between fun factor and gameplay. When you're designing heroes or villain scenarios and considering all of that balance, how is it that you actually decide when a hero or villain is done? Caleb Oh boy, that is a good question! I'm going to say right now that game design is absolutely as much an art form as it is a science. And so there is a lot of subjectivity in the answer to that question. There is definitely just a feeling. If you can imagine, how does a band... like my favorite is Pearl Jam... How do they know when a song is done, right? Like how do they know when it doesn't need any more work? And I imagine there's a feeling right of “This just feels good. This feels like it's doing what we want it to do.” So, for me there's a lot of that with heroes and villains. I kind of have an idea of what I want this hero to be able to do [or] what I want the scenario to feel like, and it can be very subjective. Just, yeah, this feels like the experience that I was setting out to create. And I could keep trying to needle at it, but I think at this point I'm getting diminishing returns on that effort. So, I'm just going to call it good, and I'm satisfied with it. Well, Tony, I'm curious what you think about that cause you and I sometimes have slightly different approaches. Tony Yeah, my first gut reaction was to say when my deadline hits. It’s as you say: basically, design is very much an art form, and so you could keep working on something indefinitely and never have it be perfect. But just kind of as a practicality, at some point you have got to say “This feels good in the state it's in. I don't think messing with it any further is going to get me any significant improvements to it. And so yeah, I'm satisfied with where this is.” And from a practical standpoint, there does come that time in your play-testing when your testers have limited time left to work on something. And so, you really have to make a judgment call. What needs the most attention right now? What am I still not feeling super comfortable with? And it's just really a judgment call. You play the thing yourself. You see what kind of feelings and emotions you have as you are playing it. Ideally you observe play-testers playing the scenario and listen to the discussions that they have in between it. [You] really try to pick up on those off-the-cuff comments like “Oh, that feels bad.” or “Yuck. I hate seeing this card.” and then try to make changes to those things that make them feel better. Caleb I think you hinted at the scientific side of it there with the process, right? There's kind of a consensus then among our play testers where you're balancing your experience with theirs and taking their feedback into account. I think in general, with each set it kind of reaches a point where testers start saying “This feels good. I don't think there's a lot more to do on this one anymore.” And it's very gratifying when that's your opinion too, and you go “Okay, well, if we're all kind of in agreement then I think we're ready to move on.” KennedyHawk Some more design questions here. What is a problem in design that you've encountered that you are most proud of finding a solution to, and what was that solution? Tony For me, I'll just go back to the Psylocke design and talking about how it wasn't feeling true to the character. And having to make the call that I just need to take a fresh pass on this. I need to try again, almost from scratch. A lot of card names and things stayed the same, because we had commissioned artwork at that point. So, I was a little bit restricted on that, and that's a practical restriction that I think a lot of people don't think about. When we're designing a wave, we start the art on that very early, because the artists need time. We only have so many artists, so we have to do things in batches of art. So, we have to allow enough time that our artists have the time they need to get all the artwork that we need done. We may commission a piece early on that we end up totally changing the design of that card and so we either have to find something from a comic book that we can use in its place, or we have to try to find a way to make that card work with the artwork that we have. And so, coming up with a solution to the Psylocke problem is probably the biggest roadblock I've had in working on Marvel Champions to this point. Caleb That's a great answer. You did a really good job with Psylocke, too. It's hard for me to come up with as great an answer as that, so I actually have two, because one is a little bit of a tease. The next product that I've done in the X-Men wave... I can't talk about details, because it hasn't been announced... But I wanted to really try something different with the campaign mode. I can't go into details, but what I can say is that I spent an extra amount of time on a campaign mode, and what I did at first just didn't pan out. And there was a lot of time I'd put into it. So, I had to pivot and find a solution while we were already in play-testing. And [I’m] really proud of what we came up with. There's a little bit of a tease there, something to get excited about for the next campaign. I'm excited to see what people think of it. That was easily the biggest hurdle I had to overcome working on the line. But since that's just a tease and kind of neither here nor there, I will say of released product, Rogue was the most difficult nut to crack because her power set is so unique from everyone else’s. And trying to figure out a way to represent “How are we borrowing powers from other players or other characters with Rogue? Like what does it mean for her to borrow powers from a minion, an ally, a villain, or even another hero?” And that took some doing to figure that one out. I'm really happy with how it ended up, so that would probably be the one that I can talk about the best. Darren Well, that's fun to hear. I should say from the get-go, X-Men have never been my favorite comics or shows. So, I was kind of dreading coming into this knowing that we're just getting so many X-Men in a row, and it has been a lot of fun seeing the designs that have come out. I've been so excited for these waves. Rogue was a lot of fun to play with all of her deck building hooks. And I am thrilled about this X-Force wave, because I think Domino looks like she's going to be top of the line for me. I think you guys have done great overcoming some of these problems and bringing out some really fun designs for the player base. Tony Thank you. That's great to hear. Darren Talking about design, as a comparison point, Tony, you came from a board game background doing games like Star Wars: Outer Rim and Unfathomable. And Caleb, you did the Lord of the Rings living card game, and even while designing Marvel Champions, you did the Star Wars deck building game. Comparing your experience, how does designing for Marvel Champions differ from your experiences working with other games? Tony I'll jump in here first. We've already talked about the schedule being one of the main differences. The fact that working on a game line like Marvel Champions means you're constantly moving from one product to another, to another. Every time you finish one you know that there's going to be another one coming after it. When I was working on the board game side, there was less certainty of what my next project was going to be. It really came down to what game does the studio want to make now, and who has the availability to make it? And so, I ended up working on a bunch of different game lines while I was on the board game side. Having that variety is nice, but I really enjoy working on a game that I love playing versus maybe being assigned to do an expansion for something that maybe I'm not as enthused about; it's not my style of game. So, they're different in that way. Another difference that really hit me hard when I started on Marvel Champions is just the volume of artwork that a card game needs. Even working on something like Imperial Assault, which has a bunch of cards but also minis and tiles and things, was just not even close to what I've had to come up with for Marvel Champions. I would often enlist Caleb and Michael Boggs in helping me write art briefs just so I could keep up with all of the art requirements that were needed for this game. Caleb Yeah, you just finished some art briefs recently and your work flowed into it. It's fresh on your mind. Tony Yep, yep. Caleb I think it's one of those things too. Like the first couple of times you write art briefs, you're so involved. [It’s] like each art brief that you write is a masterpiece, and you put so much thought into it. And then you get to be where I am. I've been doing this for 11 years now. It’s just like we're churning out our briefs because at some point the artist is going to do what they're going to do. You just need to give them the essentials, and the art directors do a great job of making sure it turns out the right way. Because I used to do that when writing our brief for Lord of the Rings at first was just this daunting “Oh, it needs to be authentic, and I need to get it right.” Eventually you write 100 different orc enemy art briefs, and you just start going, “An orc running at you with an ax. An orc running at you with a spear.” You just start changing minor details. Oh, I totally lost the question, because I was enjoying your answer so much. What are we answering? Darren How does designing for Marvel champions differ from your experiences working with other games? Caleb Oh yeah, so there I started to touch on it working on Lord of the Rings. My career has this kind of interesting journey of the most complicated game that I've worked on was the first one that I worked on with Lord of the Rings. I absolutely love that game, but it has a steep learning curve. Even at the time that I came in relatively early in its life, there were already some pretty involved scenario designs, some really intricate ideas. And I love that. That's really what I was into at the time, personally. The more intricate, the better. The more it could create that sense of immersion by making me feel like I'm actually doing what's happening in the adventure. And then over time, I begin to realize there's a fine line between intricate and exhausting. And I've probably wandered too far into the exhausting a couple of times with my designs where I maybe got a little carried away because I got really excited about an idea. You can sit on this side of the computer screen looking at the files and imagine how great it will be. And it's easy if you're not play-testing regularly to lose sight of what it feels like to be on the other side sitting at the table with the cards. One of the smartest things I ever did was I started a weekly Thursday night play test that ran for years. That really helped me to stay grounded and say, “Okay, I need to start to ease up on the complexity and keep that experience in mind.” And so, we brought that to Champions, where it was like if Lord of the Rings is up here being this intricate and involved, we want to make Champions a little closer to the ground, more accessible, [and] a little easier to play where less bandwidth is necessary to keep track of what's going on. And then, you mentioned the deck building game I made, and that was like step further even of like “Make this as beginner friendly as possible, and as quick to pick up. Like I want to be able to learn this game and start playing in five minutes or less.” So that's kind of been fun for me, just learning personally the value of simplicity and trying to shift my focus from how clever I can be to more of an end user experience and what are the people who are playing getting out of it. Seems like a natural thing to think about, but it's amazing when you first start in this business without a lot of formal training, everyone kind of brings their own stuff to the table. But I think we all eventually get there. Darren That is really neat to hear. I imagine as you're designing it, it's hard to let go of an idea or a mechanic you're really latched onto that you're excited about and having to maybe temper that in consideration of the players. I bet that would be pretty tough. Caleb Yeah, absolutely. I mean when it's like stuff you're really passionate about. I love Lord of the Rings. Like Aragorn's my boy, you know. And then you get a chance to design an Aragorn hero. The temptation there is to have him do everything, because he's Aragorn, and then you realize that's not good design. Good design is making a version of Aragorn who does this one thing really well in a really flavorful way, and then becoming comfortable with that. That I think is a hard lesson, but it's essential to good game design. KennedyHawk Speaking of unreleased concepts, I know it's been discussed before that there was originally a fifth aspect called Determination. Have you ever had any thoughts about adding an aspect or bringing Determination back to the game? Or is that something that sort of gets worked into the rest of the pool? Caleb Right, no. You never say never in this business, but it seems the odds are very slim that we would add another aspect. Because, as you say, it was there at the beginning, and we ultimately cut it for a good reason. So, knowing that we had already conceived of a fifth aspect, and then as a team... because it wasn't an outside decision. That was a decision that Boggs, Nate, and I made together. We determined that this aspect is basically just borrowing ideas from other aspects. It didn't feel unique enough to itself. It just wasn't bringing anything truly new to the table that wasn't already kind of covered by the other aspects. So, what we did was we took some of our favorite ideas from Determination and then put them into the aspects that they belonged in. You can see that with [how] Boggs made the Aggression card Toe to Toe, where I believe it's like the villain attacks you, and then you deal 5 damage to the villain. That was a Determination card. The definition of Determination was like “I'll do anything to get the job done. I'll take punishment in order to gain an advantage.” But we looked at that card and went, “You know, that's really just an aggression card.” And I think we have others now. Like I believe Justice has something that will put a side scheme into play in order to get advantage. Tony, maybe you made that card. Remember what that is? Tony No, that was Galaxies Most Wanted, I think. One Way or Another. Caleb Oh gosh, is it that old? Gosh, Okay, I'm sorry. It all blends together. That's another box card. I love those designs of high risk, high reward. That was kind of what Determination was about. But we realized what they were doing was really stepping all over the toes of the other four aspects, so we just folded those ideas into the aspect that it belonged with. Tony And yeah, an aspect really needs to have its own identity in order for it to feel necessary to the game, so if we were to do another aspect, they would really need to have its own identity that could make it stand on its own. Caleb I'm really proud of the four we have. I feel like they really cover all the bases of what the game needs. Darren I think it is fun seeing those Determination concepts come out in the aspects. Toe to Toe is one of my favorite cards, and I just like that risk/reward of using it to take out a wimpy minion that's punching you or to risk a villain attack. It was a lot of fun. And I know there's an upcoming card for Aggression in X-23 that's coming out that feels very Determinationy. [It’s] the Now I'm Mad card, where if your hit points are below half, you get a boosted attack and a lower thwart. That's a very Hulk card, and I love it. We have just a few more questions, so I think we could tackle them as a speed round. So maybe we'll just ask the designers one at a time running through them. You guys can do some short answers on these, but let's go ahead and start with Tony. Speed Round Darren What hero designed by someone else do you most wish you designed? Tony So, I'm not sure if this question is asking which hero do I wish I could take credit for, or which one do I think I can do my own version. And maybe in both cases I might say Wolverine. He is an awesome design, and I really love the way he turned out. And I did to some extent get a chance to make my own Wolverine with X-23, so being able to design her after Caleb had designed Wolverine was a lot of fun. It was at some unique challenge in figuring out how to make her feel sufficiently different from Wolverine. Darren I am excited for X-23. They look very different and unique, so you guys did great there. What is your favorite interaction between a hero's kit and an aspect specific card? Tony Oh man, that is a tough one. I guess I will mention that some of the Justice cards that I designed for Domino's pack, I designed specifically to work with her mechanic of discarding from the top of the deck. But I wanted to do so in a way that made sense with other heroes. That it didn't feel like it was just another Domino card but outside of her aspect. So, somebody like the two, the two allies, Wolfsbane and Feral, both have abilities that are good for any hero but are just a little bit better for Domino. Darren Which hero and/or scenario do you think has the most thematically creative mechanics? Tony That's another tough one. I feel like there's so many great designs in this game. What I was thinking about recently was the Project Wideawake scenario with the Sentinels. I just love the Mutants at the Mall side scheme getting Jubilee as your ally. This feels so much like that first episode of the X-Men cartoons that it's perfect. Caleb I love that answer, Tony. Tony And going back to [when] Caleb was talking about Rogue before, I think the solution he found for trying to capture her skill set in this game was just... chef’s kiss... just great. I'm really happy with how she turned out. Darren Who would you like to see in the game that isn't already in it? Tony I've mentioned this character before. I'd love to do a Squirrel Girl hero. I already have some ideas about what kind of mechanics I might put into her kit, and I really love the wacky off the wall type of characters, because they allow me to do wacky and off the wall stuff in their designs. So, I would love to do a Squirrel Girl hero. Darren Well, I would be here for that. I just want to have that Squirrel Girl versus Thanos match up to get that classic ‘her standing over Thanos’ comic image. KennedyHawk As long as we get Tippy Toe, right? Tony Oh yes! Totally. Darren What is your favorite aspect to design for, and why? Tony That's another tough one. It's like choosing between children. If I had to pick one, I'd probably say Protection, because I really enjoy it as a support aspect. Caleb has told me multiple times, going back to the design of the game, that Nate French was always saying “Why would I ever defend? What is the point of defending?” So, I love coming up with new and creative ways to prove Nate wrong that defending is pointless. Darren Protection is my favorite aspect, so I love hearing that. It is so much fun to play. Caleb Yeah, Nate famously said he would rather die than defend. We played a play test game early on, me, Boggs, and Nate, and it came down to we were going to defeat the villain on the next turn. We just had to survive. Nate drew like an assault for an extra attack. He could have defended and survived to win the game, but instead he was true to his word. Darren Oh man! That is funny. Caleb That's classic Nate. Yeah. Darren Oh, so Tony. What is your favorite hero and/or scenario to play? Tony The hero I often find myself going back to is Ironheart. I just love her leveling up mechanic. It's such a fun little mini game trying to get those killing blows and those final thwarts to get the extra experience. It's just so much fun. And when you get to that Level 3, that version three of your hero, you just feel unstoppable. As for a scenario, there's so many good ones in this game, it's hard to pick one, so I'll just go back to the one I mentioned before with Project Wideawake. I really enjoy the feeling of that Sentinel scenario and how they're trying to capture my allies and round them up. I'm not one who ever chump blocks. I like using my allies to their full extent and not chump blocking, so it's not as threatening to me. But I love how it does punish those people who just throw away their allies as if they have no care in the world. Darren Oh, see there's Protection there helping you out. Keep your allies on the board. To close out the list for you, what Marvel Champions gameplay achievements do you personally have that you wish to humble brag about? Tony I don't know. I don't really have anything specific in mind, but I will mention one down-to-the-wire finish that my game group and I recently had. We were playing Spiral on Expert, and [we] had had a couple of defeats. So, we were feeling a bit frustrated, and I want to say she had both sets of her swords. So, she was swinging for god-awful amounts of damage. I was playing Gambit. I was down to one hit point left when I got a Gunslinger out of the encounter deck. The Gunslinger has Quickstrike, and I only had one energy resource in my hand, so I couldn't take him out before he took me out. And had he defeated me... my Under Surveillance that I had attached to the main scheme was the only thing keeping us from losing the scheme, so if I was defeated, Under Surveillance leaves. Everybody loses. But fortunately, my friend still was ready with Rogue and was able to defend that attack, and we managed to eke out that victory over Spiral. Darren Ah, that sounds like a fun match. Okay, so jumping over to Caleb, we're going to go through the same questions just doing that speed round again. So, Caleb, what hero designed by someone else do you most wish you designed? Caleb Oh gosh, you know I should have been taking notes while Tony was answering his questions. I was over here going “Man! I'm glad he's not asking me that, because I don't know the answers to these.” What hero designed by someone else? Oh gosh. Because there's so many good ones, it's hard to choose. I like Archangel a lot. That's just a really fun design. The tri-form... different from Ant-Man and Wasp though, right?... that it's changing between Angel and Archangel. That was something Tony and I kind of talked about early on. Well, I started to get excited. Same with Cable. These were both heroes that I was like, “Oh, that's a great idea. That'd be so much fun, man. I could imagine how I'd do that.” And Tony's kind of like, “Well, would it be okay if I designed my set?” It's like, yeah, yeah, I'm busy over here. I should let you do it. And they just turned out great, you know. They're just awesome. Darren Oh man yeah, this whole wave is looking awesome. So, Caleb, what is your favorite interaction between a hero’s kit and an aspect specific card? Caleb That was the one that I was like “Oh, I could answer that one!” Because, yeah, that's Cyclops, and [I] created the whole suite of TACTIC upgrades that attached to minions so that you know he's got different options in the different aspects. I can't remember the names of them right now off the top of my head [for] the leadership one, the tactics one... but I do really enjoy just searching those cards out in alter ego form, and then switching to hero form and blasting a minion with an optic blast. That's always fun. Darren Pinned Down is one of my favorite cards in the set, and that was a perfect card for Cyclops. Caleb Yeah, that's the minus two attack, right? Darren Yeah, yeah, I use that card in so many decks, you know? Caleb I love the art on that. That's one of those we were talking about earlier where you get pick up art, and sometimes you just find the perfect image. Rockslides got someone in a headlock. It's just perfect for Pinned Down. Makes me happy. Darren Such a great card. Okay, so which hero and/or scenario do you think has the most thematically creative mechanics? Caleb Oh, shoot yeah, the first thing I thought was one of mine, so now it sounds like I'm bragging on myself. But I like Hela, you know. Mostly what I like about Hela is the reaction to Hela from the fans. We wanted to do something different that felt more like going on a quest than necessarily just getting into a fight with the villain. And we weren't really sure how people would respond to that, because the game really is mostly about fighting villains. But everyone was so excited about the journey that they went on in that scenario. I was like, “Wow, we're really onto something here. I'm going to need to do more stuff like this in the future, I think.” And so that informed Magneto's design as well. You know, they're trying to put a little more story, a little more journey, of what the heroes are trying to do besides just defeat the villain. Darren Having that progress in that quest feel was really cool to bring in. Galaxy’s Most Wanted had kind of a similar-ish one that hinted toward it with Escape the Museum, and then Hela just knocked it out of the park. Loved that scenario. Alright, so Caleb, who would you like to see in the game that isn't already in it? Caleb There's a lot of street level heroes that I'd like to see. I know a lot of people want to see Daredevil. I think we'd also like to see Moon Knight or Ghost Rider. A lot of those characters I think would be really cool to see. Tony (Jokingly) Do you think people want those? I got the impression they weren't really excited for those kinds of heroes. Caleb You know, I was a little sad when X-Men were announced, because it felt like until X-Men were announced, every new set we released or announced, they'd be like when are the X-Men coming? Right? So, I felt like, “Okay, we're announcing the X-Men. Finally, everyone's going to be really excited.” And then the moment we announced the X-Men, they're like when is Daredevil coming? Like, come on, guys. Yeah, just be happy for one minute, please. Darren Oh man, I know a lot of people were excited when X-Men came into the game. But Daredevil is on a lot of art, constantly reminding us he's not quite here yet. Darren What is your favorite aspect to design for, and why? Caleb Uh, I think I find myself doing a lot of cool Leadership stuff. Not necessarily because Leadership is my favorite aspect, but there's something about it that appeals to me. So now, yeah, now again, I'm thinking of unreleased stuff that I've designed that I'm really excited about. And I'm sorry to just keep teasing, because it's going to be a while before it makes it out. But I just find that something about Leadership and interacting with allies in unique ways just sparks a lot of creativity for me. Darren What is your favorite hero and/or scenario to play? Caleb [My] favorite hero is generally a toss-up between Cyclops and Captain America. I really love throwing that shield. I've been doing it for years. I'm still not tired of it. Or zapping bad guys with an optic blast. Favorite scenario? I feel like Master Mold is fun for me, just because it’s straightforward. Sometimes I just want to play. I don't want to play campaign mode. I just want to jump into a fight, and I love how every time you go to alter ego to recover, he builds another Sentinel. And so, you know, like “Gosh, I need to recover, but that means I'm going to have to fight another minion. I just have to hope it's not a really big one.” You’re like, oh, no, it's the 8 hit point one. I love the pressure and the immediacy of that scenario. I feel like it's poor taste to always answer with my stuff. Darren Oh no, feel free to toot your own horn, because those are some great designs. Caleb I appreciate it. I do. I do really enjoy it though, like the stuff that Tony and Boggs are doing too. Like I think the Sinister 6, that's a brilliant scenario. When we were talking about Hela a second ago and storytelling and stuff, that was another one that came to mind. I really enjoy that you don't win that scenario by defeating the villain. You have to escape this ambush, and they just keep teaming up with you. But if we're going to get to cards, I wish I had designed, I wish I had designed the treacheries in that set, because Boggs came up with the best card names and abilities. Like for all the different Sinister 6 team ups, right? Like my favorite was the Frequent Flyers, where it's the Sinister Six with AERIAL. I wish I could remember the other ones off the top of my head, because they're all amazing. But yeah, I wish I had come up with some of those names and some of those fun concepts. Darren I really loved all of Sinister Motives. But Sinister Six was a lot of fun, having that kind of back and forth, seeing these different villains pop up. To close it out, Caleb, what Marvel Champions gameplay achievements do you personally have that you wish to humble brag about? Caleb This one I can't really take all the credit for. It was Gen Con last year. My memory being what it is, I can't remember the gentleman that I was playing with, but he let me borrow his Venom deck. I just had a great time with it, because turn one I had the Symbiote Suit. Turn one I played Symbiote Suit, and I just spent the rest of the game just wrecking stuff. It was amazing. It was an extra encounter card from turn one of the game, and we just mopped the floor with the villain because Venom was doing so much work. That was a lot of fun. Darren Oh man, I love that suit. Like I think it was a great way to incorporate [it] into the campaign. And, ah... to see some of the other players get slightly annoyed so early in the game... Caleb No, it was great. So, we had this moment where I said like, “Okay, I got it. It’s turn one. Like, should I play it?” And I think maybe it's like “I'm playing with the designer. I can't tell him what to do,” because he was like, “Well, whatever you want to do” kind of thing. I was like, “Well, then I'm going to do it!” because that just seems like way too much fun. And it really was. So again, sorry I can't remember the gentlemen's name right now, but big props because the deck that he had customized was a ton of fun to play. Darren Oh man, that sounds like a lot of fun. That wraps up all of the questions that we had in our list. Closing Remarks KennedyHawk Yeah, we made it through everything in about an hour and a half, so good job team. Nice! Caleb This was fun. KennedyHawk Are there any other closing remarks that the designers want to leave for the community that's loving your games? Caleb Thanks for all the questions and all the interest in the game. And I hope you guys continue to stay interested. I think people have a lot to look forward to with the NeXt Evolution wave. Tony really did a fantastic job with that box. I know Boggs did a little bit of work at the beginning, but Tony really carried it through to the end. Yeah, you guys are in for a treat. Tony Yeah, I'm really excited for everyone to get NeXt Evolution in their hands. I do want to give Michael Boggs credit. He did some excellent initial designs on several scenarios and several heroes. Even though I took it across the finish line, a lot of his blood, sweat, and tears went into that, and I think everybody's going to be really excited to have that in hand. I can't wait to hear everybody's feedback on it. KennedyHawk Awesome. Well, thanks again for coming on and answering questions. And thanks to Darren for running the show while my children pestered me in the background, so that was perfect. Darren Thanks for hosting us. KennedyHawk Hopefully everybody gets the chance to try out the demo scenario at Gen Con, because that’s just... it seems like it’s further away, but it’s less than a month. So, it’s coming up. Tony Yeah, definitely. Caleb and I will both be there. So, if anybody wants to stop by and say hi, please do so. KennedyHawk Thanks everybody for tuning in. Outro Thanks for tuning into Marvel Champions Monthly. 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