Aspect Expressions (Junkerman's Marvel Champions Blog)

Black Widow - Justice  +  Rocket - Aggression  vs Crossbones Just for fun!  I just wanted a fun playthrough with some older heroes to start the break.  I might play a few more RoRS villains with similar hero combinations.  Plus I want to test Adam Warlock with the flippy Counter Earth.   Pairing:   Black Widow almost feels like a protection deck.  She blocks so much damage and bad stuff.  Rocket was a slow build, but things happened in order.  Lots of control until they got built out, that's always a nice feel.  I like Crossbones.  He's easy-ish for my decks, but he has those nice weapons which mess with you, and lots of minions with special abilities.  Natasha and Rocket were able to prevent the main scheme from advancing for a while, but it's so short with 3 per player, that eventually, the encounter deck advanced it.  Rocket handled almost all of the minions.  I held back on Rocket's Pistol , but tha...

Angel - Protection + Psylock - Justice vs Ebony Maw Ebony Maw: I like how the spells give you time to plan.  They're powerful, but they don't fire off immediately.  We exploited his weakness --stuns and confuses.  This mostly prevents him from activating his spells.  Only one spell triggered (Fireball on Psylock), and they were able to slow down the rest.  At the end, there were 7 untriggered spells on the board, although 5 only had one more counter on them.  That would have been ugly: stunned, confused, take damage, discard from your hand...  Whew!  The main scheme puts spells into play immediately.   Protection and Justice are usually a weak pairing, but they handled the main scheme + one side scheme easily.  One one minion came out.  Neither hero made it through their decks, or got fully built out.  This was a strong win. Angel: I mean he's so good in Protection.  He flipped between Angel and Archangel almost eve...

Mental Paralysis is widely thought to be a dead card.  It's hard to find anyone who has ever used it.  This is the essence of bad hero design.  Useless cards.  Looking at Marvel CDB, one reviewer had 40 playthroughs with Phoenix, and zero uses of Mental Paralysis.  We need another home rule.    Restrained needs some love, but I like how Unleashed affects her cards, so I'm doing that with the home rule. Attach to an enemy, treat an enemy's attachment as blank. If you have the Unleashed trait, discard Mental Paralysis ==> discard an enemy attachment / weapon, and confuse that enemy. Is this too powerful?  Well, it depends on the villain.  Ronan's weapon comes to mind, but it d epends on the attachment.  The key here is that attachments are hard to get rid of.  They often require you to spend 2-3 specific resources (this is also 3 total resources, but you can spend any 3).  This can blank an attachment which can't be discarded ...

Rich did it again.  He got me Shuri and Silk, so I went ahead and picked up a bunch of sale expansions.   Cycle 8 Apocalypse Agents of SHIELD Cycle 9 Jubilee Magik Nick Fury Falcon Shuri Bishop Maria Hill Winter Soldier Silk Jubilee Justice + Gambit Aggression vs Green Goblin MF Pairing Rough start.  They got hit with tons of minions early.  Gambit was throwing charged attacks early, but was having trouble keeping up.  Jubilee was clearing threat, but had to flip a lot.  Eventually, she was stunning + confusing the villain every round.  It wasn’t a fast game, but Green Goblin barely got through half of his deck, because Jubilee blocked so many activations. Jubilee She took a long time to finally clear Shopping Spree .  In the end, she fired it off three times.  She used her hero power only once at the start.  Her hero power feels like such bad hero design.  If there’s one house-rule I might do, it’s changing her hero power....

Okay, so my friend Rich of coopgestalt.com got me two more heroes from the new wave:  Silk and Shuri.  That’s strike one against my pledge to not buy Agents of SHIELD.  Then Age of Apocalypse was reprinted.  That’s strike two.  Then in an online discussion, I found out that Agents of SHIELD reprinted almost all of the Sinister Motives SHIELD cards.  Strike three… Sure enough, one of the big gaming web-sites had a sale.  I’m pretty sure this was a conspiracy.  Ahem.  I picked up both Expansions, Falcon, Winter Soldier, and even Jubilee. Now all I’m missing is Ant Man War Machine Sinister Motives SP//DR Spider Ham Except for Sinister Motives, I have a lower interest in those heroes –although SP//DR has some amazing cards in his pack.  War Machine is also out of print.  Of course, I never thought to get Hulk, but then someone gifted him to me.  With our home rules, which I may still tweak, he’s a big favorite. Anyway, so far, I l...