What’s up Champions?! BananaCrapshoot once again here to bring you a Marvel Champions article. Hope you all are staying six feet apart from everyone while reading this. Normally I do hero pack breakdowns or High Fives articles but today I wanted to dig a little deeper into the meat of the game. I am going to look at how I evaluate a card’s efficiency and what that means in terms of damage and thwart put out by Heroes. I hope this is helpful and I hope you enjoy. I am going to use this to kick off a New Player series aimed at helping newer or inexperienced card gamers increase their win rates and get to those heroic level scenarios.
How We Value:
Now the first thing we need to talk about is how I evaluate a card with its cost. For the purposes of this exercise I’m going to assume each card in hand generates one resource. There’s a few ways to do this. One is by counting the card itself being played in addition to any cards used to pay for that card. An example would be is a 2 cost event card is actually 3 cards from hand most times. So if a 2 cost event deals 6 dmg it’s 3 cards=6 dmg or 2 dmg/card. Another way is just to look at the resource cost itself and evaluate that way. So for the same 2 cost event dealing 6 dmg it would be 3dmg/resource. I normally use the second way because there are lots of cards we can get on the board that generate free resources for us like Helicarrier, God of Thunder, Superhuman Strength, and the enhanced resource cards. Threat can be evaluated the same way but tends to be a tighter ratio than dmg, or 1 resource generates less thwart than 1 resource does damage.
The Averages:
Now that we know how I break down a card let’s look at some of the averages we get. When you hear people talk about “the curve” that’s the average thwart or damage out per card or resource. Generally cards in the Hero’s 15 card signature deck are “above curve”. Now I took all the basic and aspect cards that are attacks or heal dmg and you get an average of 2 dmg/resource. Then I did the same thing for thwarting and you get an average of 1.5 thwart/resource. So those averages are the baseline for me evaluating cards and if I think they are good value or not depend on where they fall within that average or ”the curve.” Now I’m not gonna dive super deep passed this because I don’t want to lose too many people but for a hero card the averages work out to 2.7 dmg/resource and thwarting works out to 1.8 thwart/ resource.
That’s Great but What Now?
So I wanted to put this out there because I think it could be helpful to players new to card games and new to this game in particular. I also wanted him to point out how thwarting is more valuable than damage is by the numbers. Ultimately we win by dealing damage but we stay in the game by dealing with threat.
I also wanted to bring up something that might seem contrarian to my main points here. And that’s that sometimes a ”bad” card or a card ”below curve” can be the best card you can play. An example of this is haymaker, it’s 1.5 dmg/resource which is below our average, however for a 2 cost card, it might be the best card in your hand that turn. Example being Captain Marvel, she has 2 dmg dealing cards in her kit and both deal, generally, at least 5 with photonic blast and energy channel. That’s overkill on a lot of minions and wasting that dmg can hurt your soul, enter haymaker, the perfect 2 cost minion smasher for your average scenario. So even though in general it’s a bad card dmg/resource wise, it could be the best card you can play at the time. Which is a really unique conundrum this game has, and finding that balance of high value bombs vs bad value gems is really interesting.
Wrapping Up
Well I’m going to wind this down, but yea, I hope some of you find this useful in evaluating cards and finding those OP beaters to help push you to the next level with Marvel Champions. Just knowing the averages helps a lot and this game it’s not as black and white as other games. Be sure to check out the rest of our articles, YouTube, the podcast, and Patreon if interested. Stay scheming Champions!
Confuse is easier to calculate than stun is. And I was planning on doing an article on this in the future. But for this discussion confuse is with roughly 3 thwart. And a stun is rough to 4.5 dmg. So a confuse or stun are worth about 2 resources.
Great article! Tackle and Concussive Blow are both 3-resource cards which impose Stun & Confuse respectively, and have a 3-damage rider. So does this this mean that imposing Stun or Confuse would be worth 2 or 3 pts? EDIT: Cap America's Heroic Strike is 6-damage with a Stun rider. If his card is basically worth the same as Spidey's Swinging Web Kick (3 for 8 dmg), then Stun might be worth 2 dmg. Anyway, I find this kind of stuff interesting.