In the "what villain next" thread a question came up about characters not being a Villain because they would be/we're a Nemesis. But why? I don't think they should be mutually exclusive.

Looking over the current Nemeses and Side Schemes from the Nemesis decks no interactions would fail if your Nemesis was the current Villain. The only thing that would occur is that the Nemesis card would bounce because of uniqueness and therefore Shadows of the Past would surge.

So bring on that Vulture scenario pack loosely based in Homecoming. He just might perform a little Highway Robert on the side.

I think this is expressly accounted for.

Look at the wording on Shadow of the Past. Your Nemesis Minion, Nemesis Side Scheme, and Nemesis Encounter Deck all enter play as different triggers, and Shadow of the Past only surges if the Minion didn't enter play. I think this is definitely going to happen.

Anything’s possible I guess. It seems to me they specially swerved bigger potential characters in favour of people who I wouldn’t consider a true ‘Nemesis’ - for example, Spider-Man’s Nemesis in the comics is the Green Goblin - he’s the one villain that has been able to hurt Peter deeply in ways people like the Vulture just haven’t... nothing would have theoretically stopped Green Goblin being Spider-Man’s Nemesis and also the first Scenario, but they went a different way with it. Likewise, I don’t think I’d have picked Whip Lash if you said to me “who do you consider Iron Man’s greatest solo villain?” - granted, there’s much less choice for memorable Iron Man villains, but there are bigger and nastier out there...

Equally, there’s nothing to stop a future Scenario pack coming out for a Nemesis, but then having a replacement Nemesis deck for that hero for use with that Scenario which could be interesting as well...

I think the Surge Clause is if you draw it while your nemesis is already in play.

There hasn't been any indication of a villain being duplicated. We will see in the rules reference, if it's not in there, it isnt likely to happen.

I mean, the fact that villains have the unique star only exists if they want to eventually allow for duplicates.

15 hours ago, CitizenKeen said:

I mean, the fact that villains have the unique star only exists if they want to eventually allow for duplicates.

Or just general consistency.

I feel like this is a case where they *could*do it, and they may well plan for it as something that could happen in the future, but I wouldn't expect them to do it unless the game runs long. There's PLENTY of Marvel characters to go around, so there's no real reason to double up on them early in the game's life span, and having the nemesis' be 'B-list' (or lower) characters allows them to feature those characters without them having to be full blown Villain releases.

There's all sorts of design space they could explore to do whatever they want in this regard. Likewise for different versions of Heroes.

However, I'd think they be wise to explore the breadth of the Hero and Villain options out there, given the sheer volume of content at their disposal and that most players would rather see, for example, the first version of Hulk as a playable Hero, ahead of the 2nd iteration of Captain America.

Likewise for Villains - seems like the 2nd tier guys are reserved for Nemesis and the big bads for the packs themselves.

They also have a similar conundrum with Allies and Heroes. We've already seen Hulk, Daredevil and Hawkeye as allies, but that doesn't prevent them from being full heros in future packs - groups will just have to think about their deckbuilding and consider not including those allies if someone else is playing as the hero.

On 8/11/2019 at 7:56 PM, CitizenKeen said:

I mean, the fact that villains have the unique star only exists if they want to eventually allow for duplicates.

Or to prevent multiple copies of that Villain entering play accidentally... the core game comes with 3 versions of each of the 3 Villains for example. It looks like the Green Goblin Expansion might have 6 copies of him (3 per scenario)...

I'm kinda hoping they have alternate nemesis options for heroes when they pop up. Like when Green Goblin comes out maybe we can have some cards including in that deck to replace the Vulture nemesis cards in the core set with Green Goblin nemesis cards. Maybe if they release a Vulture pack we can get a Rhino nemesis card set. I'm not expecting it but I think that would be pretty rad if they did it. It would give you another variable for deck building if you picked a hero with multiple nemesis options.

On 8/11/2019 at 8:56 PM, CitizenKeen said:

I mean, the fact that villains have the unique star only exists if they want to eventually allow for duplicates.

FFG could release cards with effects that check for uniqueness.

On 8/14/2019 at 9:27 AM, Khudzlin said:

FFG could release cards with effects that check for uniqueness.

They've done that before, in L5R at least.