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.
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
Cindy Moon, better known as the hero Silk, is the newest hero to join Marvel Champions with a pre-built protection aspect deck and an interesting and new playstyle. This hero pack also comes with a new Thunderbolts modular set that can be used as a key part of the Thunderbolts scenario or added into any other scenario to boost the difficulty.
Smooth as Silk
Silk gained her powers from the same spider that bit Peter Parker and as such she has some similarities to the original Spider-Man hero that came in the core box. Her stats are the same as his, with defence being the best of these, and she also has the genius trait in alter ego which is quite useful for some trait locked cards. She also has a twist on his big Swinging Web Kick attack with her Swinging Silk Kick.
This is where the similarities end as Silk’s playstyle revolves around her learning the villain’s tricks and uncovering clues, which is represented by tucking encounter cards underneath her hero card. The main way to get these is with her Silk Sense – by defeating minions and side schemes or resolving treachery cards, these tucks underneath Silk with up to a maximum of 4. Many of Silk’s cards use these for additional effects, and the encounter set of these cards impacts these effects. For example, the Swinging Silk Kick attack does 7 damage but if you discard a card from the same encounter set as the attacked enemy, it deals 2 extra damage and gains overkill. She has a set of upgrades that also benefit from these cards, which generally increase the corresponding stat (attack, thwart and defence) based on the number of matching cards you have. I found her best upgrade to be Organic Webbing which readies her up in exchange for one of her tucked cards which is brilliant for making use of multiple stat boosts. She also is a hero that likes flipping to alter ego to make use of J Jonah Jameson and her brother Albert Moon, both supports that can help add more cards to Silk. While in alter ego, she can also discard one of her tucked cards to draw 2 cards which is always worth doing where possible.
Gaining and spending these encounter cards is an interesting way of representing Silk learning how the villain operates and using that to her advantage. She is quite dependent on her upgrades and supports to make use of these cards but thanks to her high defence, she can soak up a fair amount of damage while you get a few into play. Generally I found it best to try and get cards from the villain’s set and use the extra modular cards for effects that don’t need a specific type. This playstyle may be quite reliant on luck for getting the right encounter set but I found it to be varied and unique compared to other heroes.
Warrior of the Web
Being the latest web warrior, Silk comes with some brand new allies and protection aspect cards. The highlight for me was Madame Web, a basic ally who lets you look at the encounter deck, discard one card and put the rest back in any order – with the amount being based on the number of web warriors you control. Being basic means she can fit in any aspect and knowing what’s coming up is very useful in planning ahead. Scarlet Spider pairs perfectly with the reprinted original Spider-Man ally as he can take damage for other web warriors, essentially acting as an extra pool of health for Silk and any spider allies. Speaking of Peter Parker, Silk comes with a new team up with him which is perfect for when you are in alter ego as it cancels the villain’s scheme and then confuses them. There are also some back of the pack web warriors for aggression and leadership which are aspects that have not had any web warriors yet. If you have other spider themed heroes like Sp//Dr or the excellent Sinister Motives campaign, the basic allies from them would be perfect for making a deck around these new allies.
The other protection cards that come in Silk’s hero pack are reasonably good, if a little at odds with her hero kit. There are a couple of new tech upgrades which seem to mostly be in the deck to go with the final new web warrior, Spider-Byte who gets cheaper to play based on the number of tech cards you control. The Stun Gun that can stun 2 minions or the villain once is clearly themed around the new vulnerable keyword so that is useful against the newest scenarios in Agents of Shield. There are also a few cards that play into a perfect defence protection deck which is a valid build but not really what the rest of the deck is doing. I did however really like the new preparation Ready For A Fight which lets you flip to hero form if an enemy would scheme and they attack instead. Protection doesn’t tend to have options that help you flip to alter ego and this makes that far less risky.
Like Lightning!
It is worth mentioning that Silk’s hero pack comes with a new Thunderbolts modular set which can be put into scenarios like usual or directly used in the customisable Thunderbolts scenario from the Agents of Shield campaign box. This set is themed around Atlas, a villain who grows in size and strength like Giant Man. He is a very tricky enemy as every turn he gains a growth counter which gives him an extra 2 health on top of his huge pool of 18 – if you let him grow too much he’ll become even harder to take down.
Conclusion
The Silk hero pack brings back the web warriors to Marvel Champions and offers a unique playstyle unlike anything the game has seen. Whilst her encounter card focused style may be a little inconsistent compared to other heroes, I find it to be a fun puzzle to use the enemy cards to your advantage in the best way. The new web warrior cards are brilliant and will only get better when used with previous web warrior allies. Even though some of the protection cards don’t tie into Silk’s own hero cards perfectly, they are great additions to the overall game for the protection aspect.
