One of the things that I like about asymmetrical competitive card games like Star Wars: The Card Game and Android: Netrunner is that the opposing players do not share the same card pool. This means that you can buy one copy of everything and that actually supports both players. (Except, of course, that you need 2 and 3 copies of those core sets, respectively, and a second copy of the Edge of Darkness expansion for Star Wars: The Card Game for truly complete card pools.)

Here's my biggest hangup with Marvel Champions: if I decide to buy into the game, I would probably play it mostly with my spouse and our kids. But I am also a self-diagnosed completist. And I'm assuming that FFG doesn't include 12 copies of each card in Marvel Champions, right? If so, then that means that I would most likely need to purchase two to four copies of everything! (Unless, of course, no two of us want 2 or 3 copies of the same card(s) in our decks, and that gets even harder with 3 or 4 players all sharing the same card pool.)

So without buying a complete card pool for each of the 4 players, it looks like my options would be:

• A.) Buy additional copies of products only as needed.
• B.) Build decks in such a way that they can be supported with just one to three complete card pools.
• C.) Proxy cards as needed.
• D.) Use only the pre-constructed hero decks that FFG releases, without making any changes.
• E.) Something else I haven't thought of yet.

This, by the way, was just one of the reasons why I haven't bought any of the other co-op LCG's. And it's why I didn't buy into other LCG's like Legend of the Five Rings or Warhammer 40K: Conquest , because those competitive games had card pools that only truly supported a single player.

Anyone ever had this problem with buying into a co-op LCG for you and someone else to share? If so, how often did you find it to be a hindrance to your deckbuilding? And any idea how much of a hindrance it is with Marvel Champions?

Related question: does the Marvel Champions core set and/or the card packs come with any one-of or two-of cards, like the Android: Netrunner core sets?

I like keeping multiple decks ready. So when I wanna play I can play.

To achieve this, I proxy a few cards here an there.

The distribution model is made assuming each player is purchasing their own play set.

Just now, Ywingscum said:

I like keeping multiple decks ready. So when I wanna play I can play.

To achieve this, I proxy a few cards here an there.

The distribution model is made assuming each player is purchasing their own play set.

Yeah, I understand the business reasons. But honestly, I was really excited about this game.......until this occurred to me today. This may very well make or break it for me, and perhaps others as well. It's not as much of a problem in 2-player games, but in a 4-player game it's much more pronounced. I might just stick with other games like Legendary: Marvel or Sentinels of the Multiverse , since I don't get much of a chance to go to my FLGS to play games with other gamers. And those games are collecting dust right now anyway. I realize they don't quite scratch the same itch, but it's better than nothing.

When you build deck, you have to choose an aspect and can only use that aspect in addition to your signature cards and neutral cards.

So long as players play different aspects, the only shared card pool is the neutral cards. And most of those are either deck restricted or play restricted.

A single core set comes with a full play set of cards. It’s enough cards for a single player to have max copies of everything.

This does mean that you can only run 1 of each of the 4 aspects with a single set. There are also 4 of each neutral card (ie enough for each player to have one).

I think unless you’re all die hard Deck builders that have to min max everything, 1 copy will be plenty...

5 minutes ago, Deadwolf said:

When you build deck, you have to choose an aspect and can only use that aspect in addition to your signature cards and neutral cards.

So long as players play different aspects, the only shared card pool is the neutral cards. And most of those are either deck restricted or play restricted.

What if we all want to play the same aspect? Perhaps build four very aggressive, similar decks. Because that can be a thing.

5 minutes ago, FearLord said:

A single core set comes with a full play set of cards. It’s enough cards for a single player to have max copies of everything.

This does mean that you can only run 1 of each of the 4 aspects with a single set. There are also 4 of each neutral card (ie enough for each player to have one).

I think unless you’re all die hard Deck builders that have to min max everything, 1 copy will be plenty...

Could we realistically do it?.....Sure.....But for someone like me who likes to have ALL the options available, it looks like I would need up to four card pools or figuratively tie a hand behind my back when deckbuilding.

Basically, this is one of the core developmental concepts that differentiates this game from the aforementioned asymmetrical games with separate card pools. It makes me miss playing those games even more. Fortunately, those are both 100% complete card pools and are both sitting in binders on my shelves right now, ready to be used.

3 minutes ago, Wh0isTh3D0ct0r said:

What if we all want to play the same aspect? Perhaps build four very aggressive, similar decks. Because that can be a thing.

That is not very practical and also is probably terrible.

That said, the core supports 2 players perfectly fine and supports 4 for casual play. But If you are planning on playing 4 players regularly, then 2 cores may be worth it to allow 2 aspects at once.

Thing is, if you’re the kind of player who HAS to have all the options for ALL the players then you’re very much an outlier, so it’s only natural that the only real solution for you is to buy lots of extra product that most players would see as redundant.

1 minute ago, Deadwolf said:

That is not very practical and also is probably terrible.

That said, the core supports 2 players perfectly fine and supports 4 for casual play. But If you are planning on playing 4 players regularly, then 2 cores may be worth it to allow 2 aspects at once.

If it wasn't so dang expensive, I'd say "Challenge accepted!" and build four decks that use the same aspect. I am really curious to see how that would turn out. Team Covenant has also talked a bit about the pros and cons of that potential strategy.

2 minutes ago, jonboyjon1990 said:

Thing is, if you’re the kind of player who HAS to have all the options for ALL the players then you’re very much an outlier, so it’s only natural that the only real solution for you is to buy lots of extra product that most players would see as redundant.

FFG loves completists like me! 😋

1 minute ago, Wh0isTh3D0ct0r said:

If it wasn't so dang expensive, I'd say "Challenge accepted!" and build four decks that use the same aspect. I am really curious to see how that would turn out. Team Covenant has also talked a bit about the pros and cons of that potential strategy.

Not only would your team be extremely one dimensional (an all aggression team would be eaten alive be threat)

But different heroes prefer different aspects, so you'd be shoehorning an aspect onto a hero who is more efficient with something else.

Are any of the other LCG's, especially the co-ops, also 4-player games? If so, and you've played one or more of those games with 4 players from a single card pool, chime in!

3 minutes ago, Deadwolf said:

Not only would your team be extremely one dimensional (an all aggression team would be eaten alive be threat)

But different heroes prefer different aspects, so you'd be shoehorning an aspect onto a hero who is more efficient with something else.

Over time that would change as we get more heroes who lean toward the same aspect.

5 minutes ago, Wh0isTh3D0ct0r said:

Are any of the other LCG's, especially the co-ops, also 4-player games? If so, and you've played or or more of those games with 4 players from a single card pool, chime in!

Arkham and LotR also support up to four players. I'm kind of like you where I have four players build from my card pool. For LotR I bought the three cores and a lot of the staple cards that you'd want extras of were available. Most the 1x ofs in the core weren't cards that you absolutely had to have three of in every deck. It wasn't until adventure packs came out that I had issues. Daeron's Runes was the first card that everyone in the group using the Lore faction immediately wanted in their deck. So, we'd have to split it up and at one point a friend bought a second of that adventure pack just to be able to include his own. There were and still are a few cards like that in LotR.

When I picked up Arkham, I knew of the above issue and I bought doubles of the first two cycles. After that, the cards got more niche for certain investigators and I haven't run into anything since those cycles that is a must have for everyone, like say Lucky was early on.

The Marvel game looks to make this easier for me. Since you can't mix aspects (at least that we know of) into a single deck then it's an easy rule for me to tell my friends to pick an aspect and build around it. I don't see them really ever fighting over one of them. It may happen, but this game is quicker than the others, with less deckbuilding. It's going to be far less a burden to switch things around so everyone gets a turn with what they want to play.

I support a number of players out of my card pool for Arkham, so buy doubles of pretty much everything that comes out. So long as you avoid collision, it's more than enough to support around 6-8 decks at the same time.

I'm not sure what the suggested solution would be here. Include 4 playsets of everything in the core? That would increase the price dramatically, which would break even for you but mean a lot of wasted extra cards for people who just play one person out of their collection.

2 hours ago, Wh0isTh3D0ct0r said:

This means that you can buy one copy of everything and that actually supports both players.

This is true for purely casual players, but not for anyone who plays the game more seriously. Netrunner (and I think Star Wars? Largely blocked that catastrophe of a game from my mind) required a player to have both decks. As soon as you do that, the helpful split goes away and you're back in the same boat. Honestly, even for casuals it's very limited - unless one player is always the Runner and one is always the Corp, or they play the same decks all the time, you're going to need a bigger pool to support both sides.

7 minutes ago, Buhallin said:

unless one player is always the Runner and one is always the Corp, or they play the same decks all the time, you're going to need a bigger pool to support both sides.

Even if both players play both sides, you can always pull a card from a deck temporarily when it comes from the card pool that your opponent isn't currently using.

11 minutes ago, Wh0isTh3D0ct0r said:

Even if both players play both sides, you can always pull a card from a deck temporarily when it comes from the card pool that your opponent isn't currently using.

That sounds like such a pain it would force me to buy another set just to avoid it. But fair point - if you're willing to accept the overhead of shuffling cards from deck to deck, it is possible to do.

But I'm still not sure what the proposed solution is here. Doubling the available card pool would also double the price for everyone. It wouldn't make it any cheaper for you to play, but would increase the price for everyone else. That doesn't actually seem like a net win.

2 minutes ago, Buhallin said:

But I'm still not sure what the proposed solution is here. Doubling the available card pool would also double the price for everyone. It wouldn't make it any cheaper for you to play, but would increase the price for everyone else. That doesn't actually seem like a net win.

Yeah, I'm not sure that there is a solution. Regardless, I need to continue pondering all of this as we get closer to the game's release date. Right now I've gone from "DEFINITELY!" to "Hmm...Maybe."

I'll admit that LCGs are very restrictive with just 1 starter set but that problem tends to go away if you keep up with the sets. You'll have a bigger card pool to work with.

It's true you can only really work with each player using a different aspect out of the core box but each hero you buy will expand that. With the release of Captain America you get more cards for the Leadership aspect and two people could play leadership.

They said some cards in character packs will be duplicates from the starter. That might ease your pain even more.

So what I’m getting here is you want full playsets for 4 players from one core set at the cost of a 1 player core set.

Or even better, what if they just give it away for free.

32 minutes ago, Ywingscum said:

So what I’m getting here is you want full playsets for 4 players from one core set at the cost of a 1 player core set.

Or even better, what if they just give it away for free.

We interpret things the way we want to.

To answer your question directly OP this game has truly a full playset of cards for one player. It has a full playset of each aspect (there are 4 aspects). It doesn't have a full playset to support complete freedom for four players with the neutrals. It includes 4 copies of each neutral card (which is more than a complete playset for 1 player). So each of the 4 deck you build could take 1x of each or you can shift them around to suite the different decks. Many cards are 1x max in a deck so those have no issue. For the neutrals you have exactly 4 of those. There are enough neutrals to fill out 4 decks. So really we are talking about maybe a half dozen cards that might be contested if each player is building a different aspect in a 4 player game. That's easily fixed by doing a couple proxies if it bugs you that much. The big thing is it's very easy to build 4 extremely functional decks with 1 core set. I also suspect the neutrals that might be contested in a 4 player game will be exactly the sort of thing they plan on reprinting in the hero decks when they talk about reprints. In addition each hero pack comes with a complete deck of cards for a hero in a given aspect. So building multiple functional decks in each aspect seems like it will happen sooner rather than later in this game.

This is by far the most friendly of the FFG LCGs toward playing with one collection for 4 players. Yeah in the beginning you'll have trouble doubling up on any of the aspects, but also doubling up on the aspects isn't exactly advised. They all fill a very particular role. As the player card pool grows it will be easier to potentially support multiple aspect decks within one collection of a single copy or each product. I have played 4 player with both my Arkham and LOTR collection. Arkham is by far the hardest due to the way deck building works in that game. It's not possible to play 4 players with 1 core set. With 2 core sets it's restrictive.

So while in one collection you won't have the complete freedom to build any combination of four decks I also think that's an incredibly horrific ideal to chase. You'd need to buy 4 copies of each hero deck and potentially 4 copies of each campaign expansion in addition to 4 copies of the core set. That's also gonna generate a ton of waste from the truly redundant cards like the Spiderman playeset of cards or cards like Genius that you only ever need 4 of in your collection.

Also "The enemy of art is the absence of limitations". I do believe that to be true. Often times the results are more interesting when you force additional limitations on yourself in these games.

4 hours ago, Wh0isTh3D0ct0r said:

We interpret things the way we want to.

It’s not interpretation; the game comes with the maximum number of cards for each hero and aspect, and 4 full sets of basic cards

58 minutes ago, Derrault said:

It’s not interpretation; the game comes with the maximum number of cards for each hero and aspect, and 4 full sets of basic cards

Clearly you didn't understand something at least one or two steps back.