Ms. Marvel: Nobody threatens me.

In the two years that she has been a part of Marvel Champions, I had never played a single game with Ms. Marvel. She brought us Down Time, Endurance and Morale Boost, which were auto-includes in many of my decks.

But the talk in the forums and the channels I watched painted her viability in a poor light, so I never dug into her cards very deeply. As time passed, new shiny things kept getting released that kept my focus elsewhere. (I literally have still never played Iron Man or She-Hulk...and they were in the core set.)

So I decided to go back and see what Ms. Marvel was about, and discover where she could fit in my games.

The first thing I saw was the synergy between her upgrades and Morphogenetics. She can return events to her hand, and her upgrades boost Attack and Thwart events. I was intrigued.

So I dug through the events in every aspect, and quickly learned that it is easy to get caught up in a concept and miss the details. Specifically, that while Ms. Marvel can boost events, she can only boost ATK and THW values. Which means that her ability to return ATK, THW and DEF events to her hand is stifled by her inability to enhance DEF events.

I also found out that Leadership has almost zero ATK or THW events, which meant that Ms. Marvel was one of very few heroes to synergize poorly with 'the Blue'.

Armed with this information, I focused on the primary strengths in which I was interested: her upgrades.

To take advantage of them, Kamala needs to draw cards. She needs to get those 2 critical upgrades (Embiggen! and Shrink) out as early as possible. Her Alter-Ego ability is clearly designed to facilitate this, to an almost broken degree. Taking advantage of this ability means you will be spending a lot of time in AE on your first pass through your deck (which will likely be quick). I should take this moment to point out that she can both Recover and use her AE ability since it doesn't require exhausting her as a cost. And with 5 REC, she can take some big hits and then roll to AE for healing and digging through her deck.

All this time in AE will lead to Ms. Marvel having plenty of threat to deal with, while also letting her benefit from cards that are triggered by flipping.

I have a tendency to lean on the Justice aspect when feeling out a character, as it is the one aspect that gives heroes room to breathe...eliminating threat on the Main Scheme with reckless abandon. (It is essentially the 'Stalemate' aspect, as you can flip to AE and heal with little repercussion, while preventing the Villain from ever completing their scheme.)

That's when I noticed that Justice has more Thwart and Attack events than any other two aspects combined. Which meant I could actually pick and choose what I liked, rather than being forced to use what was available based on other limitations (Like Guardian or Aerial only?).

Which led to this deck.

The choices made here are meant to eliminate threat from schemes, and then punish the villain for letting you do that. What makes Ms. Marvel amazing is that her upgrades basically blow the bell curve on all cost analysis. Lay Down the Law is a great card, but with Ms. Marvel it is borderline insane at 5 threat for 1 resource.

Then there is Impede, a decent recursive card...but with Ms. Marvel, you get to remove 5 threat. Every. Single. Round. Even an accelerated villain would have a hard time keeping threat on the main scheme.

Multitasking is already excellent, but you need a side scheme in play to get the full value. Which makes One Way or Another feel like it was explicitly created to ensure Multitasking was useful. But how much more useful is it when Ms. Marvel Shrinks it to remove 4 threat from the main and side scheme? 8 threat removed for 2 ER? Have I died and gone to the Grand Arena?

Then you have Swift Retribution which, for a single resource, allows you to deal 6 damage to the villain. Sure, the villain schemes...but with all of the thwarting events in the deck, this is barely a hiccup in your progress.

So here's the plan of this deck: Remove threat, then hurt the Villain through threat removal.

In order to remove threat, we have the Beat Cops, which haven't seen a lot of action lately. However, when paired with overpowered Thwart events, two Beat Cops keep the threat down so well that I almost don't need their secondary explosive ability. But I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.

The big combo here is to have Impede and Turn the Tide in your hand. with Embiggen! and Shrink. You play Impede to remove five threat with Shrink, then it returns to your hand. If this removed all threat, you play Turn the Tide and Embiggen it to hit for five damage and return it to your hand.

Rinse and repeat ad nauseum.

You will need your chump blockers if you want to stay in Hero form, and you need to be in hero form in order to play almost every single event in this deck. The best way to visualize this is coiling like a spring. In AE, all of the kinetic energy is stored in the spring, and you need to leap out and lay waste. So use your coiled time to burn through your deck for her upgrades and get them into play. Take hits on the chin because you absolutely want to be in AE repeatedly, so don't waste the REC action by defending with her awful 1DEF.

Once you get out Embiggen and Shrink, everything slots into place and your turns become puzzles to solve. You clear so much threat that you're really just trying to time your complete removal with Turn the Tide, while managing your chump blockers and cherry-picking accurately with Amir.

Frankly, you can clear 4-5 threat per turn, while dealing 2-4 damage, without even regularly relying on Marvel's hero ability. I mean, that ability doesn't hurt, but you can dish out remarkable amounts of damage just playing the deck straight.

To be fair though, I always recommend playing with a protection character to cover your bases. And by bases, I mean your *$$.