What is Marvel Champions?
Marvel Champions is a co-operative living card game in which you build decks around your favourite Marvel heroes and take the fight to a variety of different villain scenarios you can further customise with modular sets. Your goal is to defeat the villain whilst thwarting their schemes, defeating minions, and keeping your hero alive. To do this, you have ally cards to aid your hero, event cards to perform actions, and upgrades and supports to give you bonuses. To play cards, you discard cards to generate resources so every card in your deck helps pay for others. Heroes have an alter ego side as well, which gives the heroes a chance to heal and perform other abilities, but you have to be careful not to give the villains too long to continue their schemes. The villain decks are played by revealing cards on their turn to perform different actions and pull in new threats for you to deal with.
Players build their decks around their hero specific cards and then pick one aspect to further change how that hero plays. Aggression cards focus on dealing damage, justice cards control the villain’s schemes, leadership focuses on boosting ally cards, and protection mitigates damage. The Marvel Champions Core Box is required to get you started, then expansion boxes provide two new heroes and a selection of villains to play in a campaign, hero packs give you a new hero and aspect cards to use, and scenario packs offer more villains to challenge you.
Introduction
Sam Wilson, better known as Falcon, is one of the newest heroes to join the playable roster in Marvel Champions. As an aerial Avenger, his pre-con deck naturally features an array of aerial cards and allies in the leadership aspect. His hero kit is built around him seeing the top card of the encounter deck and using that advantage to help control the game in his favour. There is also a new Thunderbolts modular set that can be used to customise your scenarios, especially the Thunderbolts one included in the Agents of SHIELD campaign box.
Eagle Eyed
Falcon is a great all-rounder with his good stats and ability to see the top card of the encounter deck during the player phase is fantastic for letting you prepare for the enemy’s attack. He can also discard that top card when playing aerial cards to help cycle what is coming up next. His attack and thwart events, as well as his signature ally Redwing, all let you discard this top card to buff the event based on the number of icons. This may not be the flashiest playstyle of heroes in Marvel Champions, but Falcon can reliably deal damage and thwart with these events and being able to see the next boost card does help plan for the villain attack or scheme.
The rest of the hero cards in Falcon’s hero pack are mostly upgrades and supports that help round out his capabilities. It is very rare in a game that I tend to get all of these in play and instead focus on getting a couple in play and focusing on those. The most unique of all is Aerial Recon, an upgrade that lets you voluntarily deal a player a face down encounter card (which of course you will know thanks to Falcon) to get a recon counter that you can spend to stop a player being dealt an encounter card. This is a fantastic way that Falcon can control the game by choosing what encounter card you are getting. Plus, in multiplayer you can use this to help your team out as well – Winter Soldier for instance loves minions being in play. The other support I try to prioritise is Falcon’s Flock which helps pay for aerial cards by using up one of five counters to help pay a resource towards aerial cards, of which Falcon naturally has many.
Flight Squadron
The Falcon hero pack comes with a leadership aspect deck predominantly themed around aerial allies (surprise surprise!). There are a couple of reprints in Adam Warlock and Cloud Nine but the rest of the allies are all aerial with a variety of abilities. The highlight for me is definitely Spectrum, an expensive ally to play but she holds a card used to pay for her with her stats improving depending on the resource icon of that card. If you can pay for her with a wild resource then she has a powerful stat line of 5 health and 3 attack and thwart! The new team card Flight Squadron lets you ready an aerial ally if all your chargers are aerial, with Spectrum being the best target for this in the deck. The main downside to this aerial pre-con deck is that it is quite slow to set up. Falcon is a good hero for controlling the game but I can see this deck being less impactful straight out of the box but nevertheless it is a good solid base for you to build upon.
The most interesting aspect card is Strength In Diversity which is a new alliance card – one that costs more per player but everyone can pay towards and use it. For each different trait on friendly characters, you can deal a damage or remove a threat from a scheme. When built around, this a very flexible card that lets you split the damage and thwarting very efficiently and incentives making a deck that doesn’t stick to a single trait. This is a card that you can easily build around for any hero and I’ve had a lot of fun incorporating this into other hero decks. It works well in Falcon’s pre-con deck as well as all the aerial allies have another trait so you can use this effectively even when playing solo.
Conclusion
This Falcon set is a very solid new hero pack for Marvel Champions, providing a control focused hero that thrives off aerial cards. His eye in the sky style ability to see the top of the encounter deck is very strong and that knowledge can be used to control the game in your favour. Him having a strong all-rounder set of hero cards means that he can work well in any aspect, though the new aerial leadership allies certainly make leadership a great option. The new aspect cards are certainly geared towards Falcon, but new additions such as Strength In Diversity are ripe with potential for other heroes, even those who prefer to stay on solid ground!
