Marvel Champions, Fantasy Flight Games’ new Living Card Game, is built around easy deckbuilding that uses four types of “Aspects.” Earlier this month, Fantasy Flight Games released Marvel Champions, a new Living Card Game that gives players the chance to control Marvel superheroes in their fight against evil. In Marvel Champions, players will pick a hero and then build a deck to use in an attempt to stop a villain from completing their objective. The deckbuilding itself is rather simple – players pick a hero card set and an aspect card set, and then combine those two with a set of basic cards to complete their deck.
Videos by ComicBook.com
So – what exactly are aspects in Marvel Champions? Each aspect (Leadership, Protection, Justice, and Aggression) represents a different playstyle that are used to compliment a hero’s natural abilities. Every hero can be used with every aspect, so it’s mainly a matter of picking an aspect that matches your playstyle and your hero’s abilities best.
We’ve broken down all four aspects to help you decide what aspect to pick for your Marvel Champions deck:
Aggression
Aggression is all about attacking foes and dealing out lots of damage. This aspect includes cards that boost a hero’s default attack stat as well as other cards that can pack a punch. Two of Core Set’s Aggression cards – Relentless Assault and Uppercut – both hit for 5 damage to either a minion or a villain. Relentless Assault on its own will usually deal enough damage to defeat any minion, and spending a Physical Resource to play it will move over any excess damage onto the main villain. Aggression also comes with the Tac Team support card, which gives players an extra 2 damage per turn to use on either minions or villains, and the Hulk ally card, which acts as a wild card that can either deal lots of damage to an enemy or hurt everyone on the field of play.
The Aggression aspect is best for players who like acting as tanks who focus on hitting enemies fast and hard.
Justice
The Justice aspect is all about countering an opponent’s scheme by removing threat tokens from the game. In Marvel Champions, threat tokens serves as the timer for scenario. The heroes grow closer to losing a scenario as a villain accumulates more threat tokens, so countering threat (using a player’s natural Thwart action or cards that can negate threat) is critical to giving your team enough rounds to win.
In addition to cards that increase a hero’s Thwart stat, the Justice aspect also includes cards like Great Responsibility, which causes any Threat about to be added to a scheme to be added to a hero as damage instead, or the Interrogation Room support card, which causes threat to be removed whenever a hero defeats a villain. The Justice aspect also includes two handy heroes – Jessica Jones (whose Thwart goes up based on the number of side schemes in play) and Daredevil (who automatically damages a foe whenever he thwarts on a turn.)
If you don’t want to worry about “beating the clock” in Marvel Champions, the Justice aspect is right for you.
Leadership
The Leadership aspect has two key abilities – it allows players to buff other heroes and it gives players the ability to get extra allies into play. Ally cards are handy cards that not only give players extra characters with which to attack or thwart, they also serve as invaluable defense cards that can take attacks instead of a hero. Typically, a player can only have three allies in play, but the Triskelion support card allows players to have up to four allies in play. Other Leadership cards allow players to bring discarded allies back into play, or boost their Attack and Thwart stats, making them even more powerful. Of course, the Leadership aspect has several allies, including Maria Hill, the Vision and Hawkeye.
If you like controlling multiple characters, you’ll want to use the Leadership aspect.
Protection
Protection is all about negating damage and defending against attacks in villains. In Marvel Champions, heroes have three default actions – attacking, thwarting, and defending. When a player defends during the villain’s turn, they negate a portion of the damage dealt by the villain, but they then can’t attack or thwart on their turn. The Protection aspect helps mitigate some of that problem by providing Counterattack even cards that deal damage whenever a player defends, and Indomitable condition cards that allows players to ready their hero whenever they defend.
Several Protection cards also help to negate or discard encounter cards. The Black Widow ally card can cancel an encounter card and allow players to draw a new one, while the Get Behind Me event card negates a treachery card when revealed and causes the villain to attack instead.
If you like serving as the primary defense, you’ll want to have Protection cards in your deck.
