A NOOB'S RANDOM THOUGHTS

Carol Danvers

• Has a useful Recovery of 4.
• Her commander ability is very useful. Drawing a card is very strong. Being able to give that card draw to the Player of your choice is insanely good.
• Use her ability to set up efficient hand play turns for the team or use it to give card draw to the Player with the most impactful cards in deck.
• A hand size of 6 is average.

Captain Marvel

• Both THW 2 & ATK 2 is useful and will see use during the game.
• Her Health of 12 falls into the average category, though her low DEF 1 undermines this a little.
• Luckily her Rechannel ability helps to keep her in the fight while also being extremely useful to filter through her deck.
• Note that her Rechannel ability (besides needing damage to heal) only requires a -resource; so if you can generate a -resource without discarding a card to generate the said resource, you effectively increase your hand size by 1.
• Hand size 5 is average for Hero Form.

Captain Marvel’s character card pool is divided into two extremes. On the one hand you have strong, efficient cards and on the other hand you have weak upfront combo-y cards. With her strong card draw/filtering she might be the best Hero for those who wish to play combo focused decks. Regardless of your play style, her strong abilities will help lead any team to victory.

Aspect Pairings with Captain Marvel

Aggression

Captain Marvel already comes with a few high damage options. What she lacks, and what the Aggression Aspect provides, is efficient low damage attacks and Minion control. With her card draw/filtering and the Aggression Aspect you will always have the right attack for the right target.

Justice

The Justice Aspect seems to be favoring -resources which make it a natural fit with Captain Marvel’s cards and abilities. A weakness of Justice is that it needs threat to be present to make a contribution. Captain Marvel’s reliance on -resources means that Justice -cards that do not have a use this turn can be fed to her Hero Ability or cards.

Leadership

Since playing Allies does not care in which Form your Character is, and since Captain Marvel prefers to consistently flip between Forms to maximise card draw, the two complement each other nicely. Additionally Leadership provides bodies to block the Villain’s attacks, minimising Captain Marvel’s reliance on her inefficient defense cards.

Protection

The Protection aspect gives Captain Marvel’s defensive cards actual value and combined with her Rechannel Ability she can stay in Hero Form a long time. Since she should be Aerial, she will also be contributing some thwarting events.

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A NOOB'S RANDOM THOUGHTS

• For 5 ER (Effective Resources) you prevent two Villain attacks.
• Looking at it purely from a numbers perspective, you need to prevent a minimum of 7 damage for this card to be good.
• In practice, there is a lot of hidden value.
• The worth increases against any Villain that has an ability that interacts with him attacking.
• For a team there is a lot of tempo to be gained by a Villain not being able to attack twice.
• This card can also be viewed as threat prevention since it allows Heroes to stay in Hero Form longer.
• If this card prevents attacks against low Recovery/HP Heroes, that adds even more value.
• It should be noted that the discard of Webbed-Up is a replacement effect. So it completely replaces the initiation of the Attack, meaning that abilities (good or bad) that trigger when the Villain initiates an attack do not trigger.
• This card could inadvertently cause the Villain to stack attack/damage boosting Attachment cards on himself, so keep that in mind.

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T'Challa went through an interesting arc during the pre-release period of Marvel Champions. Initially downplayed by much of the community as the combo-wombo Core Set Hero who wasn't named Iron Man, he was the first Champion I personally saw being written off. The initial impression was that he was too easily stymied by bad draws, and had too low of a ceiling for a combo deck.

Luckily, a few members of the community had other ideas, and the place Black Panther currently finds himself in with regards to higher level thinking about Marvel Champions is good- in fact, I'd argue that he's maybe the most future-proof Hero currently printed. Let's talk about what Black Panther really does, and how that's probably not what you think.

With five copies of Wakanda Forever! jumping off of his list, it's very tempting to think of the deck as being centered around it, and that's not completely wrong- T'Challa does want to prioritize building his suit, and he's made incredibly awkward by getting too many of his critical cards at once. It feels rough to pitch Black Panther upgrades early because the ideal is to get them on the table comfortably during the first pass of the deck, so that the second run through and beyond is a streamlined, multiple-Wakanda-Forever-a-turn valuefest. And make no mistake- Wakanda Forever is offering value, above all else, and you'd be hard pressed to find another hero who can match the late-game potential of a Black Panther with every upgrade on the board and a ton of card draw. Not easily found is a villain who can withstand very many multiple-Wakanda-Forever onslaughts.

This is a lovely dream, and frankly, it's almost certainly going to pan out for you- but it's also neglecting one of the biggest strengths Black Panther has to offer the enterprising Champions player. He's the combo character that doesn't actually need to be fully set up to make an impact.

Smart use of T'Challa's "Foresight" setup ability makes Wakanda Forever relevant from the very first turn, and by all means if you can use that or Black Panther's balanced stats to put out early fires to stabilize the board, you should. Panther Claws and Tactical Genius offer exceptional value from Wakanda Forever by themselves, and in minion-heavy scenarios Energy Daggers is worth fetching, too. Beyond just Black Panther's suite, going forward EVERY upgrade that FFG prints for Marvel Champions has to be looked at first from the perspective of this deck- the deck that has Shuri. Already, deck-defining upgrades such as Jarnbjorn become a lot more alluring with a built in way to go grab them, and Shuri's ceiling will only rise as the cardpool expands.

It's hard to overstate how impactful this flexibility is- Tony Stark isn't going to be remotely functional while he sets up, but there are no such restrictions on the King of Wakanda.

Speaking of T'Challa's kingship, having an entire nation at your beck and call has perks. His suite of economic cards- Ancestral Knowledge, The Golden City, and 3 copies of the ludicrous Vibranium are unparalleled, now and likely for the duration of the game's life.

Energy Absorption is the only real comparison for pure spending power, and that card has very specific purposes within the context of Carol Danvers and her 15-card suite. It's so critical for Captain Marvel not to waste those that they're better thought of as more of a combo piece within her deck. T'Challa, on the other hand, hits the table offering pure economic superiority. The other heroes in the game are limited to Energy, Genius, and Strength for double resource cards, which means that Vibranium alone is doubling the amount of economic burst available to us, and those doubles are to boot. It's patently ridiculous. Not only do these cards enable easy removal of nasty villain upgrades such as Sonic Converter, but they also mean that T'Challa's turns are just regularly smoother than most of his companions'. Black Panther is, on top of his inherent flexibility, more capable of experimenting freely with resource-intensive strategies than any other Hero in the game. If a concept is too expensive to work for T'Challa, that concept is simply too expensive to work.

As high-cost cards continue to come out for Marvel Champions, more and more players will learn to look towards Wakanda to try those builds for the first time. They will come for the economic flexibility and they will find that Black Panther is so well rounded that they may not have a reason to leave. In a game that hinges upon making smart decisions with your resources, with finding the most efficient lines of play, players will come to realize the real power of Black Panther's design. You don't choose the black suit merely to look awesome and to string together big endgame combos with Wakanda Forever.

You choose it to be rich.

I think it's generally accepted that the average value for non-Hero card damage is around 1.5 damage/cost, with Hero cards reaching closer to the 2 damage/cost range.

Non-Hero Aspect Card Examples

Tac Team

• Cost of 3 (true cost of 4) for 6 damage
• 1.5 dmg / 1 cost

Uppercut

• Cost of 3 (true cost of 4) for 5 damage
• 1.25 dmg / 1 cost

Relentless Assault

• Cost of 2 (true cost of 3) for 5 damage (minions only)
• 1.67 dmg / 1 cost

Melee

• Cost of 3 (true cost of 4) for 6 damage
• 1.5 dmg / 1 cost

Hero Card Examples

Swinging Web Kick

• Cost of 3 (true cost of 4) for 8 damage
• 2 dmg / 1 cost

Supersonic Punch

• Cost of 2 plus 1 to go Aerial (true cost of 4) for 8 damage
• 2 dmg / 1 cost

Photonic Blast

• Cost of 3 minus 1 for card draw (true cost of 3) for 5 damage
• 1.67 dmg / cost

Getting back to Jarnbjorn, at the rate of 1.5 dmg / 1 cost you would need to get 6 uses out of Jarnbjorn to get average value. To get Photonic Blast type value (1.67 dmg / card) you would need to get to 10 uses. Any uses beyond 10 and you are approaching some of the best damage value in the game (but you'll never get to 2 dmg / 1 cost because of the initial 2 cost investment to play Jarnbjorn).

• Cost of 1 (true cost of 2)

• 1 use = 2 damage / total cost of 3

• 2 uses = 4 dmg / 4 cost

• 3 uses = 6 dmg / 5 cost

• 4 uses = 8 dmg / 6 cost

• 5 uses = 10 dmg / 7 cost

• 6 uses = 12 dmg / 8 cost (1.5 dmg / 1 cost)

• 7 uses = 14 dmg / 9 cost

• 8 uses = 16 dmg / 10 cost

• 9 uses = 18 dmg / 11 cost

• 10 uses = 20 dmg / 12 cost (1.67 dmg / 1 cost)

Having to attack first limits it's utility a bit, but on the positive side it does thin your deck out and free up hand space (by being on the board).

Overall, a potentially strong card, but it needs a deck to be built around it. Getting into those double-digit uses will really allow for that positive return on your investment.

Effectively 2 stuns for the true cost of 5 (printed 4 + the card itself). As best as I can tell, in the existing card pool, this is one of the least efficient ways to prevent enemy attacks.

If we assume that you usually get 1.5 damage / 1 cost, we can try to evaluate the stun-specific cost of other cards like Superhuman Strength and Heroic Strike.

Superhuman Strength - stun cost of 1.67

• Cost of 2 (true cost of 3)
• Adds 2 damage to an attack. Assuming 1.5 dmg / 1 cost, the expected cost is 1.33
• True cost of 3 minus the 1.33 expected cost of damage leaves a balance 1.67 cost
• The card offers 1 stun, so we can assume the stun is costing us the entire remaining 1.67 cost

Heroic Strike - stun cost of 0 (YES, ZERO!!)

• Cost of 3 (true cost of 4)
• Puts 6 damage on an enemy. Assuming 1.5 dmg / 1 cost, the expected cost is 4
• True cost of 4 minus the 4 expected cost of damage leaves a balance of 0 cost
• The stun actually costs you 0 additional cost above and beyond the expected cost of the damage!

Now, if we assume that an ally block and a stun are effectively the same (which they aren't exactly due to boost cards), we can pull in another data point like Mockingbird (who offers a stun AND a block).

Mockingbird - stun/block cost of 1 each

• Cost of 3 (true cost of 4)
• At her most efficient she is thwarting instead of attacking - so we will assume a 1 thwart / 1 cost
• This puts her expected cost at 2
• True cost of 4 minus the 2 expected cost of thwarting leaves a balance of 2 cost
• The card offers 2 stuns (technically 1 stun and 1 block), so we can assume that each stun/block is costing us 1 each.

Going back to Webbed Up, it's clear that offering 2 stuns at a true cost of 5, or 2.5 cost per stun, is a poor trade off.

The final point to consider is that Webbed Up offers a NEGATIVE synergy with Spider-Man's Spider-Sense ability, by stopping the villain's attack before it is initiated.

**Edit: I was discussing with another player recently and they made the "negative synergy" point a lot more elegantly than I did:

• If you are playing multiplayer and prevent 1 attack on yourself, Webbed Up effectively costs you 6 cards (4 cost + the card + missing 1 Spider-Sense draws).
• Playing solo, you prevent 2 attacks, making the effect cost 7 cards (4 cost + the card + missing 2 Spider-Sense draws)!!