Welcome heroes and villains alike! I am Tommy of Titan and I’m back with an article about some new interesting things we are trying to do to spice up community interaction within Marvel Champions. I know we here at the Side Scheme spend hours and hours each day thinking about Marvel Champions. This is one of the crazy ideas we came up with to try and play together in a time where social distancing reins supreme. This is Draft league!
It didn’t start as an idea specifically for this isolation we are all going through, but it did make sense to apply it to this situation. The original idea was to create a format that would help a community or a store to run events. Essentially what we wanted to do was to create a system that would allow players to all play games within a league of sorts, and have restrictions on what they could play. It would all start with the draft.
The draft is simple. It’s a 2 round draft that can be adjusted to fit the amount of players you have. As an example (and probably a recommendation) let’s look at an 8 player draft, like the one we are currently playing. Randomly determine a draft order assigning each player a spot from 1-8. After the first round, players will select in reverse order in the second round. This is known as a snake draft. Each player is required to select a Hero and an Aspect. Each Hero is available in the pool to be picked only once. In this example each aspect is available twice. So if a Hero is selected as the first pick, no other player may draft that Hero but if an Aspect is selected, one more player may select that Aspect before it is removed from the pool entirely.
This draft will determine what each player will play as their deck for the duration of the “season”. There is no restriction on basic cards and players may change deck composition between games as long as they don’t alter their Hero or Aspect.
Ok so now everyone knows what they are gonna play as their deck, but what will they play against? That’s where the organizing player or players have to do some work. The organizing players, or commissioners, have the responsibility of creating a schedule of games for the players to play. For the purpose of our league we decided to make all of the games solo games since we live in a crazy world at the moment. What this did was allow us to open this league up to our discord and include players from all over the country.
BananaCrapshoot came up with a killer set of 4 encounters that will likely cause more losses than wins. This schedule should be created prior to the draft by the commissioners so that no players have knowledge of what decks they will have at the time of its creation. It should also be shared with all participants so that they know what they will be facing.
Well, now that you know the general premise of the entire thing, let’s take a look at the league we are currently running in our discord channel. We had 8 player signed up to participate and we put some trading rules into place prior to the draft. I won’t go into that here, but a trade did happen in the second round so I thought I’d reference it. This is how our draft went down.
1st: ScottE- Captain America
2nd: BananaCrapshoot- Captain Marvel
3rd: Conspiracy- Spidey
4th: KennedyHawk- Black Panther
5th: JohnEwils- Thor
6th: Inception- Leadership
7th: JustJack- Iron-man
8th: Tommy- Ms Marvel
9th: Tommy- Leadership
10th: JustJack- Protection
11th: Conspiracy(trade)-Protection
12th: JohnEwils- Aggression
13th: KennedyHawk- Aggression
14th: Inception(trade)- She-Hulk
15th: BananaCrapshoot- Justice
16th: ScottE- Justice
So that’s the draft we did. Now here’s a look at the insane schedule that BananaCrapshoot put together for us to suffer through.
Expert mutagen running interference
Wrecking crew heroic 1
Expert Klaw Legions of hydra heroic 1
Expert Ultron Power Drain heroic 2
Now obviously this isn’t a competitive game and there’s no way to police cheating in a solo game that’s played in someone else’s home across the country unless everyone is recording games. We are taking a much more casual approach and I believe that lines up with the spirit of the game. We are going strictly by the honor system. The only prize we are offering is a unique champion color for the winner’s name in our discord channel so that everyone knows that he or she is better than the rest of us. I should also mention that in the event of a tie, we have a 5th and final tie breaker game that will require the finalists to record the round they made it to, as well as health remaining on the villain. This will make it so we have an undisputed champion.
Well, that about does it for this article. I’ll be posting more about this with updates of how everyone is doing. Be sure to look out for game play videos from BananaCrapshoot and myself on our YouTube channel, as well as games from KennedyHawk who has already posted a few from this league (and is kicking some major behind I might add). As always, if you are interested in more content please stay tuned here for more articles, as well as checking out The Side Scheme on FB, YouTube, Twitch, Patreon, and wherever you listen to Podcasts. I’m Tommy of Titan ominously drifting into the shadows.