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To get the obvious part out of the way: yes, it is very much like the Lord of the Rings LCG, and will be immediately recognizable to anyone who's played the current crop of living card games, or indeed Magic: the Gathering, where all the basic mechanics are from. Each player controls a hero, who has a thwart (willpower in LotR), attack and defense stats, as well as hit points (a lot of them!).
There are some clever bits, though. Each hero has an alter ego, who has no combat stats, but instead has a different ability and a recovery stat, which they can use to restore hit points. What the villain in the scenario does depends on which form your hero is in: if you're a hero, the villain attacks you; if you're your alter ego, the villain advances their scheme. It's quite clever and gives the players a lot of control over how the game proceeds.
Each player also has a deck of 40-50 cards, which includes 15 hero-specific cards. In time-honored card game fashion, these basically consist of allies, attachments and events. Each deck can only include cards from one aspect (color/sphere) and basic (colorless/neutral) cards, so with just the core set, deckbuilding consists of choosing a hero and an aspect.
The only real twist is that you pay for cards by discarding other cards for resources. Each card has one or more resource icons in the bottom left corner, showing what kind of resources it produces, and there are resource cards specifically meant to be discarded for resources. Because you replenish your hand at the end of every turn, there's a real incentive to do as much as you can every turn, which suits the theme of the game very well.
Another fun thing is something FFG did in Arkham Horror, which is that each hero comes with their own unique weakness: both an obligation card that's shuffled into the encounter deck, and an individual nemesis and associated encounter cards that can be summoned into play by the encounter deck.
I love that one of the core set heroes is She-Hulk, by the way. As you can see, the cards are nice to look at and quite functional. The visuals throughout are in the contemporary Marvel comics style, with surprisingly few nods to the cinematic universe. It's interesting, for instance, that even though the Captain Marvel movie was a big deal, Yon-Rogg is definitely not Jude Law!
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We got stuck in with the recommended tutorial decks, i.e. Spider-Man Justice and Captain Marvel Aggression facing Rhino. Another key difference to the other LCGs is that instead of us trying to accumulate progress on a quest, we're trying to stop the villain from accomplishing his aims. I suppose this speaks to how superheroes are generally reactionary, but maybe that's a topic for another day. In this case, Rhino is trying to break out of prison, and we're trying to stop him.
In this case, it's mostly a simple enough matter of beating up on Rhino until we reduce him to 0 hit points, while stopping him from gathering too much threat on the main scheme (quest). We focused on the beating up part; when some minions turned up, I got to play a card with a picture of a raccoon on it.
There are four different kinds of resources in the game, but you don't need a resource match to play your cards. However, as the raccoon card shows, sometimes you get benefits from using a specific kind of resource for a certain card.
Finally, after some surprisingly devastating Swinging Web Kicks, Captain Marvel took Rhino out with an Energy Channel, and we were victorious.
A second attempt with the Captain Marvel Leadership and Iron Man Aggression ended up with my Captain Marvel eliminated from play, but she bought enough time for Iron Man to gather his gazillion tech upgrades and beat the crap out of Rhino.
Back in the Lord of the Rings card game, my partner plays a mono-Tactics deck with a heavy emphasis on attachments, based on Boromir and Legolas beating everyone up. Oddly enough, it's apparently a very short step from that to an Aggression deck with a heavy emphasis on attachments, based on Iron Man beating everyone up. Who knew?
I also tried my Captain Marvel deck solo, and enjoyed the experience. Solo play in the Lord of the Rings card game is quite different to multiplayer, because it's so much easier to control the pace of the game. Here, that's so much easier overall that the difference doesn't feel nearly as big, but I found solo Marvel to also be quite good fun. It was very rewarding to finally knock out Rhino with a maxed-out Energy Channel!
After the first scenario, we tried the second one, where instead of a straight-up fight to beat up Rhino, you get... a straight-up fight to beat up Klaw.
I'll be honest: the first two scenarios play out exactly the same way, and that was a bit disappointing.
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With potentially the entire Marvel universe to play with, it's not like this game is ever going to run out of material. As a household of Marvel aficionados, naturally we have lots of opinions on who needs to be included in the game as it expands. I mean seeing as how there's already a raccoon card, they're clearly going to do the Guardians of the Galaxy at some point, so I very much want Nebula and Valkyrie heroes. And obviously Nikki. Ally cards we need include Jessica Biel's character from Blade: Trinity. In fact, I'm holding out for a Blade-themed deluxe expansion or whatever they're going to call the box sets.
My list of heroes we absolutely need to see in the game:
Dazzler
Karma
Domino
Moondragon
Wildstreak
Vendetta
Death's Head
Misha from the Warheads
Although to be fair I guess I might have to accept Misha as an ally. And finally, of course, my favorite Marvel character of all time: Motormouth. I will be very disappointed if we don't get a Motormouth hero pack!
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So we've had fun with the core set! There's a couple of things I'm a bit leery about, though, in comparison to Fantasy Flight's earlier LCGs. We've been told we're getting hero packs, villain packs and story boxes; the first will include a new hero and a ready-to-play deck, the second has a new villain and some scenarios, and the story boxes will presumably have some of everything. So whereas with the Lord of the Rings you'd buy an adventure pack and get a hero, a pile of player cards and a quest to play, now we have to pay double (on top of a considerably more expensive core set!). Okay, we get more cards, but that leads to my other question: how is deckbuilding going to work?
While it's definitely a good thing that the core set comes with four playable decks (unlike, say, the Arkham one), restricting each deck to a single aspect means there's no deckbuilding to be done with the core set. In the announcement of the Captain America hero pack, we were told that that hero pack will come with 15 Captain America cards, 17 Leadership cards and eight basic cards, plus a new card for each other aspect. That's not exactly a lot in terms of deckbuilding. If the Cap deck is playable right out of the box, I guess some of the basic cards have to be at least functional reprints? The resource cards, for instance. So for a Leadership player, there's the 17 new cards and maybe something new in neutral; everybody else is getting three copies of one new card. This isn't exactly going to be a fast-growing cardpool.
I get that not everyone likes deckbuilding, but hell, I do. I'm fondly recalling the Lord of the Rings core set, with which you could build all kinds of decks by mixing two or even three spheres. I'm kinda bummed that it looks like it's going to be quite a while until I get to do any proper Marvel deckbuilding.
The other thing that feels a little bit disappointing is that so far, the core set scenarios have felt very similar. We have to stop the villain from gathering enough threat to win, and do enough damage to them to beat them up. And that's it. If all the quests are going to be like this, then I'm afraid this is going to get kinda old pretty fast.
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So, a verdict. Marvel Champions feels promising, and we've enjoyed playing it. Would we recommend dropping 70€ on a copy? Frankly, not really. At this point so much depends on where the game goes. Hero and villain packs will apparently be dropping throughout next year, and for me at least, whether the game is worth playing or not is really going to depend on whether they take both deckbuilding and the villain decks in new and interesting directions or not. Overall, we feel cautiously positive - but let's see.
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