MC Aspect Pairing Chart for Two-Player / Heroes vs Aspects
These are my very general ideas about pairing.
Marvel Champions Heroes vs Aspects (let's talk about the chart)
Black Panther Leadership + Captain America Protection
vs Green Goblin Risky Business.
The Breakdown: not really…
This was supposed to be a regular playthrough to talk about the usual Heroes, Aspects, and a Villain. Because they're similar, and Black Panther has a lot of buying power, I swapped Black Panther to Leadership and Captain America to Protection, and then I played them together. However, this playthrough leads us just a small step into the weeds of what makes Marvel Champions a cool, light-deck-building, cooperative, multi-role card game. We pair heroes with aspects to make a deck, and then we team up to beat a villain. After a few good and bad pairings, I want to discuss this topic from a higher view and talk about what makes a good team in Marvel Champions.
Backstory - why write about these playthroughs?
I’m trying to keep my box with good default hero/aspect pairings. Grab a deck and play –and also, I’ll be able to recommend optional aspects for the adventurous player. However, compared to my aspect switch with Vision and Spider Man, which I love, this switch wasn’t all so impressive.
Aspects: dipping a toe in the water
There’s a way we can think of the four aspects as having two goals.
- Aggression and Leadership help you advance toward winning,
- Protection and Justice keep you from losing.
It seems like most good teams are going to have at least one from each camp.
In the middle of this, someone was complaining on forums that “everything protection can do, leadership does better.” Does that blow my “one deck from each camp” theory? I think that might be true for some decks. It definitely might be true if you're building elite leadership decks with 10 allies, and it might be somewhat true for this (budget) Black Panther + Captain America team. BUT…
There are definitely different flavors of protection. In my box, Spidey blocks for the team. Drax is more aggressive; he gets hit, vows vengeance, hits back, then heals. Groot benefits from staying at max hp. Dr Strange gives everyone toughness…
And there are different flavors of Justice. Black Widow uses preparation cards to react to the villain’s cards. Vision changes form and reduces damage while thwarting. Spider Woman mixes aspects to boost all of her basic powers. Justice seems very versatile, and all these heroes can throw out some damage as the need arises.
Different flavors of Aggression. Iron Man slowly builds up to eventually attack for massive damage. Valkyrie is a minion cruncher from the first card. Gamora is a little bit hybrid –she thwarts when she does damage, and does damage when she thwarts. Rocket does amazing overkill.
Different flavors of leadership. Er… And maybe different reasons to use Leadership… Hawkeye is commonly paired with leadership because he’s too much of a glass-cannon, and needs allies to protect him. Captain America likes to defend + retaliate to protect his allies for maximum effect with Avengers Assemble. Captain Marvel has more resources, and has more expensive upgrades in her deck which makes her more of a "Voltron" deck.
Heroes vs Aspects
Now wait –did I just cheat? I’m supposed to be talking about aspects, but I’m comparing heroes… That’s the tangle which makes this game great. Different heroes tend to shift the methodology of an ordinary aspect deck. Let’s take Spider Man’s Protection deck –I added a few more [ready-your-hero] cards to help him block for more team members. There are still plenty of common Protection Aspect cards in Spidey’s deck which anyone playing protection might expect, but there are a few more cards which play to his strengths. Also, if you own the game, you know that Spider Man’s core deck was Justice, but a lot of players can’t resist his 3 Defense –upgradable to 4 in Protection. The better he defends for others, the more they stay in hero form, the less the villain schemes… It has a huge effect on how aggressively the team can play. If you don’t have to thwart much, you can stay on the offense, pouring more resources into damage.
The heroes are paired with an aspect, but heroes may have a different strength than their aspect. That’s part of why I’ve been writing about my playthroughs, to comment on how each hero feels when I fiddle around with the aspects. The heroes seem to retain a lot of their flavor. Captain America - Aggression would still be able to help with Protection. Also, the hero cards are mostly stronger than the aspect cards, which is why most people build their decks with exactly 40 cards. 50 cards would just water down the deck, and you’d draw your powerful hero cards (and double resource cards) less. Because of this, most people think of the Aggression Aspect as helping to damage minions, whereas hero cards are typically the go to when we want to damage the villain.
Overlap
Let’s go back to that comment, “everything protection can do, leadership does better.” There’s a reason someone might think this, and that is –Consequential Damage. Wha? When your ally uses a basic power (attack or thwart), they take consequential damage. Doesn’t that make leadership weaker? The problem is that the allies will eventually knock themselves out… …So the round before they would knock themselves out from consequential damage, it’s common to have them block. Sure they might do 2 more damage, but they might block 3 or 4 damage, and keep your hero ready –so, they basically end up being used as shields. This means that if a Leadership Hero can get a lot of allies out, then he probably doesn’t need any help from Protection, in fact, he can usually block for others.
Depending on the team, Protection might be more or less necessary.
- Overlap: We’re all playing Leadership, Protection is superfluous,
- Helpful: Protection doesn’t have to cover all the bases, and can sometimes be more aggressive like Drax.
- Need it: Protection is huge, because someone is playing a glass cannon.
So >for Green Goblin Risky Business< Captain America had a lot of overlap with Black Panther, and we might say they were a little “under-aggressive” and “over-supportive.” Other villains might need a different pairing.
- Overlap: Green Goblin Risky Business really needs a good Aggression hero. You need to maximize damage to the villain when he’s in villain form.
- Helpful: against Ultron, Cap and Black-Eyed-P would have been great, as they both have Retaliate, and Ultron throws out 1/1 minions like popcorn.
- Need it: Black Panther-Protection with Hawkeye-Aggression would probably pair better against GG (Hawkeye is much more of a glass cannon).
- Lack of support: Conversely, what if we paired Hawkeye-Aggression with Venom-Justice? It sounds like a fun pairing, but without the extra protection, we probably need to keep Hawkeye in Leadership to have more allies for blocking. This would likely be over-aggressive and under-supportive.
The Evolution of Heroes and slightly more overlap:
The core set of heroes definitely feel more specialized. I think the core was conceptualized as a cooperative game. Every Marvel Champions streamer has probably made their own list of the best Aspects for every Hero. BUT. Because solo play is easier to produce and stream, the developers of Marvel Champions have leaned toward creating character decks which can succeed in solo play. This means that expansion decks tend to have more overlap in abilities. They’re definitely not all the same. The way each hero plays is always different and fun and the community can’t wait to get their hands on a new deck. The effect on solo play is that you choose an aspect which supplements a Hero’s weakness. In team play, we might choose an aspect which plays more to the strength of that Hero (this is my goal for building a box of fun Heroes for team play). So the flavors and niches still exist, but technically, newer Heroes are able to solo a wider array of villain challenges. Each Hero does so through different means, but the net effect is the same –a little more overlap in roles.
The upside is that it’s possible to create a successful team with almost any pairing of expansion heroes. So when Marvel Champions gets opened on game night, players can just choose whichever heroes they like, and be successful even if their Aspect choices are not ideal.
It’s a little weird in terms of aspect development as well. From the core set, Protection was commonly thought to be the weakest aspect, and Leadership the strongest. As of this writing, because of so much solo play, Protection is thought to be the strongest aspect, while Aggression is now the weakest.
Pairing Factor: Back to Black Panther Leadership and Captain America Protection. How do they pair? Well, honestly, these two decks feel mostly the same. For Green Goblin, I really missed the aggression aspect. This was a slow-build game with lots of board control. The villain only re-shuffled once, so it wasn’t a super-long game, but the slow-build nature made it feel long… I was running out of room to place upgrades and allies. With Risky Business, you have to flip Norman to GG to do damage, but every time he flips, he does 3 damage to all heroes (4 in second stage). Then he gets two madness tokens, and he can remove them to flip back. This happens pretty easily, so when you flip him, you want to hit hard before he flips back. The lack of aggression here was sorely missed. Despite having no Justice, thwart was pretty strong: they drew two side schemes one round, and cleared them both.
Black Panther eventually got all his upgrades out, and hit with Wakanda Forever 3x. I always finished the Wakanda chain with the Vibranium Suit to heal 2. I don’t know what to do with Black Panther –leaving him in protection isn’t all bad: retaliate, heal, and all those ready-after-defending cards… He seems workable in any aspect, but because he has extra resources, I definitely think he needs those expensive basic cards in his deck, like Avenger’s Mansion and Nick Fury. He is a versatile, resource heavy, team player.
Captain America. Unfortunately, Cap only blocked once (with a four-block), and the allies did the rest. The more I think about it, the more I think Cap doesn’t need to be in protection, because he already is ⇒ he can defend for others, he has retaliate, and he can discard cards to ready and defend again. He’s not so different from Black Panther; he’s a versatile team player. Conclusion: I’m leaving Cap in leadership…
Comments
Post a Comment