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
Brainwashed by Hydra, Bucky Barnes became known as the Winter Soldier and was used as a weapon. Now free from this control, he fights on the side of the heroes and enters Marvel Champions in his own hero pack with a powerful aggression aspect deck. He specialises in taking out minions in order to slow down the villain and this is one of the most synergistic pre-con decks the game has had in a little while.
Lethal Protector
The Winter Soldier excels at eliminating minions and this is reflected in the number of cards in his hero kit that reward you for it. His own hero ability, Lethal Protector, is one of the most straightforward and effective in the game – when he defeats an enemy with an attack, remove 2 threat from a scheme. Bucky also comes with some brilliant attack events that can overkill minions or stun an enemy if paid for with the right resources, which is perfect for locking down minions that you couldn’t finish off this turn. To help pay for minion slaying attacks, Bucky can make use of his Cybernetic Arm which is a wild resource generator for attacks and buffs their damage. I love that in a similar fashion to Cap and his shield, Bucky can grab his arm in alter ego on the first turn which gives him a lot of consistency in the games I’ve had with him. Potentially the strongest hero card that Bucky has is Arm Block as it blocks an attack completely when the arm pays for it plus it deals damage.
Naturally defeating minions is a big part of the game plan here and he comes with some extra incentives for this. Silent Infilitration is a preparation upgrade that lets you ready up and confuse an enemy after you defeat an enemy, which is fantastic for when you need to heal but don’t want to risk the villain scheming. A slightly concerning part of his hero kit is that he has no thwarting cards – the main way he deals with threat is his ability. The main drawback to Bucky’s hero cards is that he only has one that finds him minions – his safe house. It lets you search for a minion (it not being random is very helpful) and then draw a card. The problem is that you can only do this in alter ego which isn’t always the best choice, especially if playing solo, but it can be useful when you have that window.
SHIELD Strikeforce
Thankfully this is a gap that can be filled in the aspect and the Winter Soldier hero pack is brilliant fresh out the box for a minion slayer like Bucky. Spoiling for a Fight is a new card that fits the “bring on the minions” theme that all the aspects have at least one of now and this one readies your hero as a reward. Bucky has 2 for each stat so the ready is nice but here the minion is the most important part. Man on the Wall is a soldier-only title that discounts the next card you play by the number of minions engaged with you and this is fantastic for when you have got a bit greedy with minions and need to clear some fast!
The other flavour of the deck is SHIELD and this was my favourite part of the aspect cards. Getting allies of Captain America and Deathlok (specifically the Agents of SHIELD version) is brilliant but the new SHIELD sidearm and Bambino weapons are fun additions to the aggression aspect, even if they are trait locked. The reason I enjoyed these so much though is because of the last card I want to mention and that is Firepower. This lets you exhaust up to 3 weapons to deal 3 damage per weapon. This includes any weapons attached to allies that you own. Now in this deck there are only 5 weapon cards (Bucky has his own rifle), however this is a card you can certainly make decks around – Rocket Raccoon is top of my list for this. Bucky also comes with 2 team up cards – one for Cap and one for Black Widow (his signature ally).
Conclusion
The Winter Soldier hero pack is one of the best from this wave and it certainly adds another strong hero to the roster. Minions are some of the most interesting enemy cards but they do slow you down and distract from the villain’s schemes so having a powerful minion slaying hero is always welcome to make games more interesting without being infuriating. The aggression aspect cards are brilliant additions and work well together straight out of the pack – with definite potential to use elsewhere. If you are looking for a new aggression hero, you can’t go wrong with the Winter Soldier.
