Hello Champions! BananaCrapshoot here and I am doing another article for the New Warrior Series, my article series focusing on introducing new players to the game, or card games in general to some basic fundamentals or aspects of the game. Today’s topic is deckbuilding. First I want to talk about the pre constructed decks. My partner in crime Tommy of Titan previously wrote a deckbuilding article I’ll link here: https://thesidescheme.wixsite.com/thesidescheme/post/deckbuilding-101
Now the core set and each expansion Hero pack come with some pre-made Decks, so if you are not interested in customizing your deck or building a deck yourself you can just use those. There is a card for Spider-Man and Captain Marvel as well as each hero pack with a pre made 40 card deck. Also the learn to play guide has some pre-constructed deck lists. These decks are okay overall, they aren’t super optimized or super efficient, but they are good enough to get you through all the content on standard/expert. If you lost your cards or learn to play guide with those lists, hallofheroeslcg.com has all the lists available for each hero pack, and you can find the learn to play guide online on FFGs website. If that’s your style then this isn’t for you at the moment, but when you are ready to take the dive into deck building, you know where to look. Now let’s dive into deckbuilding.
Some basics with deckbuilding in the game overall. Decks can be between 40-50 cards, you select one hero, they each come with 15 signature cards you have to include in your deck and you can select one of the 4 aspects to build with. You can only have 3 copies of each aspect/basic card allowed unless otherwise annotated on the card. Now you do not have to select an aspect you could just pick a hero and run the rest basic cards if you so choose. But 99.999% you will build with an aspect. recommend building a 40 card deck, when the player deck empties you get to shuffle your discard pile immediately and have a fresh deck, the penalty is to deal yourself and encounter card, which is a minor penalty overall. Another reason I recommend 40 is because with my current strategy of deckbuilding i want to filter through my deck as much as possible to see my power cards as often as possible. I’ll go into my strategy more in depth momentarily.
Now you have your hero and aspect selected? Now what? Well god we want a 40 card deck we have 25 slots left. I always include the 2x resource types so, strength, genius, and energy are auto includes. Currently Quincarrier is an auto include and maybe helicarrier. I also always put endurance and down time in my decks to start off, so really we have 18 spots open. Even in non Leadership decks I try to include 4-5 allies in my decks because they are so versatile and powerful. So now we are down to 13-14 cards to build with. Let’s say I’m building Black Panther Aggression, one of the strongest decks right now, and one I used to win our last draft league, you have his 15, genius, strength, energy, down time, endurance, Quin and Heli Carriers, Valkyrie, Hercules, tigra, Nick fury, and if I’m playing solo depending on scenario I’ll swap Hercules for mockingbird. So the other 14, I’m including jarnbjorn, 3x Mean swing, 1x chase them down, hall of heroes, 2x tac team, 3x counter attack, 2x honorary avenger, and 1x melee.
As you can see I have 5-6 Cards roughly that are events outside of the ones in black panthers 15. The reason for this is because I want to make my deck as thin as possible so I can cycle my deck a lot to see and play Wakanda Forever As many times as humanly possible during the game. Thats my basic strategy, even for heroic mode games, and I do that with all my decks if it’s captain America I want to see heroic strike and shield toss, spider-man it’s webbed you and swinging web kick, Thor it’s Hammer Throw and Lightning Strike. Every hero has those 5-6 cards you want to see a lot, this strategy allows you to do that.
Some other things to consider is adding the enhanced resource cards for characters really heavy on a single resource type like captain marvel or Thor, or tweaking your deck to fit the encounter you are playing. If you are playing Mutagen Formula or something with a lot of minions maybe relentless assault is a card you want.
If you have any questions about deckbuilding the facebook group, main discord channel, Marvel Champions Monthly, and The Side Scheme discord Chanels are all full of people willing to help out. That’s it for this article, thanks for stopping by. Hope this helps somebody out! Please check out the rest of our articles, as well as our podcast and youtube channel. I’m BananaCrapshoot, stay scheming Champions!