Marvel Champions Previews New Captain America Card Pack

Fantasy Flight Games has released a first look at its upcoming Captain America Hero Pack for Marvel Champions: The Card Game. The upcoming living card game is a co-op experience in which each player takes control of a hero and attempts to thwart the scheme of a villain. The upcoming Core Set contains five different heroes, and new heroes will be added periodically with new Hero Packs. The Captain America Hero Pack is the first of these packs and comes with a pre-made deck containing 40 cards, plus additional cards that players can use when building their decks. The deck also comes with an Obligation and a set of Nemesis cards that will hinder the hero over different scenarios.

You can take a look at all ten cards previewed by Fantasy Flight Games, which includes both sides of the Captain America hero deck along with Captain America’s Nemesis card and his Obligation, by scrolling down:

Captain America

Captain America is an extremely balanced hero with a fantastic ability: “I Can Do This All Day.” Cap’s special power allows him to ready himself once per round at the cost of discarding a card. This means that Captain America can defend during the enemy phase and then still attack or thwart during the Hero Phase, or he can attack twice to dish out additional damage, or he can thwart twice to keep the villain’s plans at bay. While losing a card from your hand can hurt, it’s a small cost to pay to be able to go twice in a single turn. 

Steve Rogers

On the flip side, Steve Rogers can get allies onto the battlefield using his “Living Legend” ability, and can automatically grab his shield from the deck or discard pile. Not only does show Steve’s ability as a leader, but also it gives him quick access to his most powerful upgrade whenever he needs to recover from an attack. All of Steve’s other abilities – hand size, hit points, and recovery are pretty standard compared to other heroes in Marvel Champions.  

 

Captain America’s Shield

Captain America’s Shield is one of the first Restricted cards in the game – meaning that players can only have two Restricted cards in their deck. Cap’s Shield is powerful, as it gives Cap an extra Defense and causes Cap to retaliate (which does damage automatically) whenever he’s hit by an attack. You’ll want to have Cap’s Shield around as often as possible, especially as it helps fuel some of his other attacks and abilities. 

 

Shield Toss

The Shield Toss is a great attack card that can quickly clear out minions. You’ll need to have Captain America’s Shield in play to use the Shield Toss, which requires a player to discard cards to deal 4 damage to multiple enemies. You can potentially deal out a TON of damage to different enemies using Shield Toss, and it’s only downside is that you can’t target a single enemy for one really powerful attack. Plus – you don’t even lose Captain America’s Shield when you play Shield Toss, so you can easily get the Shield back in play on the same turn if needed.  

 

Falcon

The Falcon is one of Cap’s primary allies. In addition to having his own Thwart and Attack stats, Falcon can also automatically remove threat from a scheme when he enters play. Falcon is a pricey card to play (costing four resources), but remember that his cost goes down when playing at Steve Rogers instead of Captain America. There’s other ways to reduce Falcon’s cost too, so don’t be too put off by the cost of getting him onto the field.  

 

Avengers Assemble

This is a strong card, especially when playing with another player. Not only can you boost any Avenger character in play, granting them an extra Thwart and an extra Attack, it also allows players to ready all Avengers to go again. When stacked with Captain America’s innate ability, players could potentially go up to three times in a round WITH a boosted Thwart and Attack stat. While this card also comes in handy when boosting your allies with the Avenger tag, there’s another card that can be used to make this card valuable when teaming up with characters that aren’t Avengers by default. 

 

Honorary Avenger

Honorary Avenger is a cheap upgrade that Captain America can use when teaming up with a non-Avenger. Note that this is a Basic card and isn’t specific to Captain America, so feel free to swap this card out if the other players are all playing Avenger decks already. The +1 hit point is another helpful boost, but it’s probably not enough to keep it in your deck if you don’t have need of that Avenger trait.  

 

Man Out of Time

This is Captain America’s Obligation, which gets shuffled into the Encounter Deck during each scenario. This can cripple your turn in one of two ways – either by forcing players to exhaust their hero automatically, or by discarding half of your hand. The easy move is to exhaust Steve Rogers in order to get this card out of play permanently, but the other option is good if your abilities are critically needed during a round. 

 

Baron Zemo

Baron Zemo serves as Captain America’s Nemesis, which can appear during an encounter as an extra complication. While not as powerful as a main villain, Baron Zemo can still do a lot of damage with his Quickstrike ability and can negate Cap’s ability to Thwart multiple times per turn.. We’ll have to see what other complications his Side-Plot brings to the game, which could make playing Captain America a lot more messy. From what we understand, Baron Zemo even has other Hydra goons that further make this nemesis extra dangerous. 

 

Slide 10

While the Captain America Hero Pack has a pre-made 40 card deck ready for play, it also comes with cards linked to other aspects that can be used when building a deck. For those wondering how Marvel Champions would work as a Living Card Game, it seems that these Hero Packs will give players new options even if they aren’t planning on using the pre-made deck. Expert Defense plays into Cap’s Defender aspect, which allows a player to get a +3 boost to Defense when attacked.