Hello Champions, BananaCrapshoot here for the next part of the New Warriors series. This series is touching on topics that may be new or unfamiliar with players. In this one I wanted to touch on the subject of Advantages, now I also did a short vlog which I will link at the end, I don’t think this will be all that long but its worth spending a few minutes on.
To start I want to define advantage as it pertains to Marvel Champions, but before that I want to talk about some advantages people might be familiar with from other card games, to help paint my Marvel Bob Ross picture. The game I’m most familiar with outside of Marvel Champions is Star Wars Destiny. In Destiny there’s 2 kinds of advantage you can gain vs your opponent. In Star Wars Destiny it’s card advantage and resource advantage. In Destiny draw back up to your hand size before the start of each round, which is 5 normally that’s what you have for the round, one character Doctor Aphra changed this by allowing herself to draw a card for dealing indirect damage to yourself. This allowed her to stay relevant in the meta for over a year. On the other side is resource advantage which is the most common one in Destiny. The idea here is to play characters or other dice cards with resource sides or the built in ability to make more resources/round than your opponent like C-3PO and OG Snoke, this allowed you to play higher costed cards earlier so you can overwhelm your opponent. I just wanted to show how a different game has advantages in different ways. Using this for us I would define advantage in Marvel Champions as - Abilities or Cards you can play or trigger abilities on to increase your effective hand size for maximum resource efficiency.
In Marvel Champions we can gain an advantage against our opponent by increasing our effective hand size. So end of the player phase we draw back up to our hand size, 4-6 most times, and we use those cards to pay for other cards in our hand. Since each card is a resource it all boils down to resource advantage. How do we do this in Marvel Champions? Theres a few ways, characters with abilities to draw cards or generate resources, playing Supports or upgrades that draw cards or generate resources, or playing cards that generate more than one resource from hand.
Some characters that can do this are Captain Marvel, on her alter ego side she can let anyone draw a card, on her hero side she can spend an energy resource to heal 1 and draw a card. Spider-Man on alter ego can generate a resource, and hero side he can draw a card when attacked. Iron Man on alter ego can look at 3 cards and draw 1, and his Hero side he can potentially draw up to 7. These are all characters abilities that let you generate resource advantages, whether through resources themselves or card draw. Some supports or upgrades that also do this are Thor‘s God of Thunder, Enhanced Physique /Awareness/ Reflexes. Captain America’s Super Soldier serum, which both can be exhausted to generate a resource, along with Steve’s apartment Which heals Cap for 1 and draws 1. The other ones are the resource cards, the power of X cards, the genius, strength, and energy, also Vibranium for Black Panther and Energy Absorption for Captain Marvel. These all represent more than the one resource per card you normally get.
Now all this info and examples are great but what does this mean in game. Well the more advantage you gain, the bigger your effective hand size is, meaning you can play more cards from your hand each round and pay for more expensive things as well.
Now that we know what advantage is and the stuff that gives us advantage. How do we actually set that up and when do we do this in game. In general as soon as possible, anytime early game, first three rounds or so is the sweet spot I’ve found. So if you are playing Thor early game in general prioritize Asgard and God of Thunder over other cards so late game you can hammer throw/lightning strike every round.
Well that does it for today, thanks for sticking around for my rambling session. Hope you got something out of it. Be sure to check out our other articles, YouTube channel, and of course the podcast. The link for the YouTube video I’ll post below. Stay Scheming Champions!
advantage vlog - https://youtu.be/LJJVfI7Co4Q