Hell’s Kitchen Has Never Been This Busy
There is something wonderfully appropriate about Daredevil finally arriving in Marvel Champions. While the Avengers are busy preventing the destruction of the universe for the seventeenth time, Matt Murdock is dealing with the sort of problems that make a neighbourhood feel unsafe: organised crime, corrupt power brokers and people who really should know better than to work for Wilson Fisk.
Fear No Evil, Fantasy Flight Games’ ninth campaign expansion for Marvel Champions: The Card Game, brings the fight back to the streets of New York. Alongside Daredevil, Echo joins the playable roster, while Kingpin and five of his criminal associates provide the opposition. The box contains six scenarios, one more than the usual five in a campaign expansion, and introduces a more flexible campaign structure that lets players choose how they tackle Fisk’s growing criminal empire.
It is an excellent setting for a game that has spent years sending heroes against world-ending threats. There is a different satisfaction in dismantling a criminal organisation, especially when the people running it are as personal, nasty and thoroughly human as Marvel’s street-level villains. More importantly, Fear No Evil has enough interesting ideas to make this feel like a substantial addition to the game rather than another box of villains waiting patiently in a collection.
Welcome to Fisk’s New York
The expansion’s campaign revolves around Kingpin’s attempt to tighten his grip on New York through five underlings: Bullseye, Electro, Hammerhead, Purple Man and Typhoid Mary. Each brings a different flavour of trouble, and the campaign gradually builds towards a confrontation with Fisk himself.
The headline feature is the scenario structure. Five of the six scenarios allow different villains to be paired with the relevant main-scheme sets, giving players more freedom over the order in which they tackle the criminal network. Instead of following one fixed sequence from beginning to end, the campaign asks you to consider which problems deserve attention first.
That is a surprisingly effective fit for the theme. Kingpin’s influence spreads across the city, and every crisis left unattended threatens to become a bigger problem. You must decide where to intervene, knowing that time spent dealing with one criminal operation allows the wider situation to develop elsewhere. It gives the campaign a sense of a city gradually slipping out of control rather than a series of unrelated villains waiting for their turn in the spotlight.
The decisions are more interesting because the order of scenarios can influence how the campaign unfolds. You are weighing immediate difficulty against the consequences of allowing another part of Fisk’s operation to grow. A straightforward villain may be worth clearing early, while a more troublesome encounter might be better tackled once your team is prepared.
The structure also gives repeat campaigns a reason to exist. You can change the order, bring different heroes and decks, and see how the experience changes when you prioritise different threats. It is not unlimited variability, but it is meaningful replay value built into the campaign rather than an expectation that you will simply play the same encounters again with a different superhero.
There is a caveat. Players who prefer a tightly scripted story may find the looser structure less dramatic than a campaign that builds towards a single, carefully paced climax. And although the choice of scenario order is welcome, it cannot make every encounter equally compelling. The individual villains still have to do the heavy lifting.
The Man Without Fear, at Last
Daredevil is the obvious headline attraction. His inclusion feels long overdue, and the design has a clever way of representing Matt Murdock’s heightened senses without making him a walking collection of generic combat bonuses.
His signature Sense deck provides a separate set of cards that can be inspected and used to influence the fight. The top card is available to him, with effects that can provide useful interventions at the right moment. It gives Daredevil a slightly different rhythm from heroes whose entire toolkit sits in one deck: you have another small set of options to consider while planning your turn.
The character also moves between his identities as Daredevil and Matt Murdock, with his attorney cards helping make the alter-ego side relevant to the overall engine. Temporary Upgrades provide another interesting wrinkle, offering benefits that last for a turn and encouraging you to time their use carefully. The result is a hero who feels versatile without requiring an entirely new rulebook to understand.
Daredevil is not the most demanding character in the box, which makes him a good entry point for players who want to explore a fresh hero without spending their first few games untangling a complicated engine. There is still room to learn the timing of his abilities and make better use of his cards, but the central idea is easy to grasp.
His pre-built Justice deck also makes the expansion easier to get to the table. You can open the box, shuffle up and start playing rather than immediately reaching for a deck-building guide. Dedicated deck builders will want to experiment, of course, but the starting point is perfectly serviceable.
More than anything, Daredevil benefits from having a distinctive identity. His mechanics are connected to how he operates in the comics, and the Sense deck gives that connection a presence at the table. For a character fans have wanted for years, that matters.
Echo Is the Pleasant Surprise
Echo has a harder job. She arrives alongside one of Marvel’s most recognisable street-level heroes, and her Protection deck asks more of the player than Daredevil’s starting setup.
Her signature ability lets her tuck events beneath her and replay them, including events played by other heroes. That creates opportunities to reuse useful effects and makes the team’s card choices relevant beyond the turn in which they were originally played. Her deck also leans into reactive play, with many of her most interesting decisions occurring during the villain phase.
This is where Echo begins to stand out. Protection can sometimes feel like an aspect that spends its time cleaning up after the villain, but her design gives that defensive posture a more active purpose. You are watching what happens, anticipating where help will be needed and looking for opportunities to turn an opponent’s actions into something useful for your team.
The learning curve is steeper than Daredevil’s, particularly for players unfamiliar with timing windows and reactive effects. You need to understand what can be played when, and the value of an event can change depending on the situation. That extra mental load is worthwhile because it gives Echo a distinct place in the roster rather than making her another hero who simply deals damage and removes threat.
She is also the sort of character whose potential grows as your collection grows. A wider pool of events gives you more possibilities to explore, and her ability to interact with cards from other players adds an interesting cooperative dimension. The pre-built deck is a useful introduction, although experienced players will likely have fun finding combinations that make her ability shine.
I would not call Echo the easier hero to recommend to everyone. I would call her one of the more intriguing reasons to buy this box.
A campaign expansion ultimately lives or dies by its villains. A clever hero design can keep players experimenting for months, but if the scenarios are forgettable, the box becomes an expensive source of deck cards.
Fear No Evil has a strong cast to work with. Bullseye is an obvious match for Daredevil’s world, while Electro brings a different kind of threat. Hammerhead, Purple Man and Typhoid Mary widen the range of criminal personalities, with Kingpin serving as the centre of the whole operation. They are recognisable characters, but the real test is whether they create encounters that feel different from one another.
The scenarios generally benefit from the expansion’s street-level focus. The conflict is rooted in crime, control and the people caught in the middle, rather than yet another cosmic device that must be stopped before the planet explodes. That makes the campaign feel coherent even as the villains change.
The modular approach is the most useful addition here. Being able to mix different villains and main-scheme sets means you are not locked into one exact arrangement every time you play. It gives the encounters more room to surprise you and makes the campaign feel like a web of connected threats.
However, the difficulty is not perfectly even. Some scenarios are comparatively straightforward, while others can push experienced players hard. That variation is part of the appeal for a group that enjoys adjusting decks and learning difficult match-ups, but it can make the campaign feel uneven if one encounter barely slows you down and the next turns into a desperate fight for survival.
The campaign's ability to accommodate different levels of experience is a welcome feature, though. The consequences of your progress can help soften the finale if the earlier encounters have been difficult, or make the final challenge tougher if you have handled the campaign comfortably. That is a thoughtful way of keeping the story challenging without forcing every group into the same level of punishment.
I would still prefer a campaign where every scenario earns its place, rather than relying on a few especially memorable encounters to carry the experience. But six scenarios, flexible ordering and a selection of modular combinations give this box more longevity than a straightforward five-villain sequence.
The Cards Beyond the Headliners
The hero and villain designs will attract most of the attention, but the additional cards are important to the expansion's long-term value. New aspect and basic cards provide
fresh tools for existing heroes, and they help make the box relevant even after you have finished the campaign.
The Protection cards are particularly interesting in the context of Echo's playstyle, while Daredevil's Justice deck provides new ideas around threat control, temporary upgrades and the Matt Murdock identity. The best additions are those that open up new deck-building choices without being so narrowly tailored that they become useful only to the hero they were designed for.
That is an important distinction in a living card game. A new hero gives you one character to play; a good selection of player cards can influence dozens of decks across your collection. If you enjoy building and refining heroes, that wider utility makes the expansion much easier to justify.
The box also comes with ready-to-play decks for both new heroes. These are useful starting points, particularly if you are buying the expansion primarily for Daredevil or Echo, but they should be treated as introductions rather than the final word on either character. Players who enjoy deck construction will find more to explore once they start combining the new cards with the rest of their collection.
Is Fear No Evil Worth the Investment?
For Marvel Champions players, Fear No Evil is a strong campaign expansion with several reasons to return to it. Daredevil is a satisfying addition to the hero roster, Echo has a distinctive reactive playstyle, and the six-scenario campaign structure gives players more control over how they tackle the story. The modular encounters and variable campaign order help the box avoid feeling like a one-and-done experience.
Its weaknesses are real but fairly contained. The scenario difficulty can swing, some encounters are less demanding than others, and Echo takes more effort to master than Daredevil. The campaign's flexibility is a strength, although it does not guarantee that every playthrough will feel equally dramatic.
For newcomers, this is an inviting way into the street-level side of Marvel Champions, provided they already own the core set. For veterans, it offers two worthwhile heroes, a generous batch of scenarios and additional cards that can feed into existing decks. The people who will get the most from it are those who enjoy both sides of the game: fighting villains and spending an unreasonable amount of time tuning decks to fight them slightly more efficiently.
I would not automatically crown it the best campaign expansion in the entire line. That depends on what you value in Marvel Champions, and expansions with a particularly strong roster of heroes or a consistently excellent run of scenarios remain serious competition. But Fear No Evil makes a compelling case for a different kind of Marvel adventure, where the stakes are personal, the villains are familiar and saving the city means dealing with the mess one criminal at a time.
Kingpin has built a criminal empire. You have six scenarios, two new heroes and a stack of cards. It feels like a fair fight. Almost.
Final ratings
- Overall rating: 86/100
- Artwork: 4.5/5
- Complexity: 4/5
- Replayability: 5/5
- Player interaction: 4.5/5
- Component quality: 4/5
What I liked
- Daredevil finally joins the game with a thematic, distinctive design.
- Echo offers a more reactive Protection playstyle with room for deck-building experimentation.
- Six scenarios provide generous content for a campaign expansion.
- Flexible scenario combinations and campaign ordering improve replayability.
What I didn't like
- Scenario difficulty varies noticeably.
- Echo takes more effort to learn than Daredevil.
- The campaign's flexibility does not guarantee equally strong scenarios throughout.
