Whole Box - New Environment - Heroes Without Double Resource Cards

Whole Box Deckbuilding in the New Environment: 

Heroes Without Double Resource Cards

FFG's announcement:

FFG are "retiring" older expansion heroes and expansion boxes.  Captain America and Dr Strange are out of print, selling for $250 on eBay, and yes, they are selling.  Sinister Motives is gone, and somehow, Age of Apocalypse is all sold out.  Meanwhile, all older content is going way up in price.

The Shift:

This is kinda weird.  Star Lord, Nova, Ironheart, Spider Ham, SP//DR, Psylocke*, Angel*, Iceman*, Jubliee, Nightcrawler, and Magneto all came without Double Resource cards in their packs.  That's 6 of of the last 8 heroes.  Technically:

  • Psylocke came with 3x The Power of the Mind
  • Angel came with 3x The Power of Flight
  • Iceman came with 2x The Power in All of Us

But if you go looking on Marvel CDB, you'll see that 99% of these decks use the standard Double Resource Cards.  Why?  Not all cards are cheap.  In gameplay, they help you play more cards.  Some players would say that they help you have "bigger turns."


Double Resources in Deck-Building

These three cards are a staple for almost every deck.  Unlike the aspect-specific double-resource cards, these can be used with any card.  Double Resources are a big factor in deck-building.  This is partially why almost every deck-builder is conscientious about going over the 40 card minimum.  It's common to see 41, 42, maybe 43 cards in a popular deck.  Not much past 43.  There are two reasons for this:

  • The most common reason given is that hero cards are more powerful, and you don't want to water down your deck with aspect cards.
  • The second reason, based more on deck efficiency, is that you're spreading your double resource cards among a larger card pool, so you'll have fewer "big turns."
In a 50 card deck, you definitely notice this, though perhaps less if you're playing Adam Warlock and discarding 5 cards from your deck every turn.  Hence, some Adam Warlock builds are 45 or 50 cards.

Optimizing Resources vs Cards

In a 40 card deck, the optimal number hovers between 4-7 double resource cards, depending on the cost-curve of the deck.  In practical terms, most decks can only have 5: Strength, Energy, Genius + 2x Power of (Aggression, Justice, Protection, or Leadership).  But there are a few others, as seen above.  

So right now, if I look at the top 10 most popular Angel decks, they all use Strength, Energy, and Genius, along with 3x The Power of Flight, so they commonly have six double resource cards.  And Protection decks tend to be cheaper --that's why Hulk Protection is very popular, because his hand size is the worst in the game.  So at the cheap end of popular decks, we see six double resource cards.  Conclusion: double resource cards are foundational to almost every deck.

What does this mean?  How does this shift the game?

Solo players don't care.  They build decks on the fly.  The resources in the core box are all they ever need.  Bringing Marvel Champions to the table on game night is what suffers.  I think the "New Environment" is shifting toward solo play, while multiplayer (game night) Marvel Champions is being phased out.  So what do we do?


Kingdom Come Cards to the rescue.


https://kingdomcomecards.com/

They have all the extra cards you might need.  I was able to get five more sets of double resources for $0.25 each --$3.75 total (then add shipping).  It was so cheap, I even picked up a couple other bargain bin cards that I needed --some more Justice cards, and an ally or two.  Then I went crazy and ordered enough Justice cards to just build a separate (Justice) deck for She Hulk.  Admittedly, it's a backdoor route to take to keep Marvel Champions friendly for game night, but such is our mania.  If Fantasy Flight keeps steering content to the "New Environment," then it looks like I'll be ordering from Kingdom Come Cards more often.  B-)

 

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