It is Wednesday my dudes!

Hello again everyone. FFG lives newest schedule confirms that Thor is to be the next Hero expansion following Captain America and Ms. Marvel.

The article for your perusal: https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/news/2019/11/26/ffg-live-in-december-1/

The upcoming stream will give us Thor's official announcement/reveal so that should be fun to see. The stream is also to feature a game or two that will be running all three of the expansions to be released in January. Should be a good bit of new information coming in this stream so I'm fairly excited for this one.

Anyway, hope you all have a great holiday and a good Wednesday.

Sweet!

Awesome! I wonder if they'll drop some hints at the next hero as well.

Next hero or first deluxe box

1 hour ago, Tarliyn said:

Next hero or first deluxe box

I'd take information on either. Or both. I'm not picky. 😎

I believe it will be another hero just to have all 4 aspects get their cards in the pool before a deluxe expansion.

There probably will be one more Hero before the first big box expansion. I've seen some people speculate that it's gonna be either Ghost Rider or Moon Knight, but either or something else is fine by me. Speaking of deluxe expansions though, what kind of theme would you all want to see for one of those? Fantastic 4, X-Men, and Guardians of the Galaxy all seem like good candidates, but are there others that you all would like to see? Personally I would love to see a Spiderverse big box, but won't expect something like that until we have a bigger glut of non Spider-People identities to choose from.

I think it will be Ghost Rider since he's on the box. Big box Guardians for same reason. Thanos and Rocket on box. Could have Ronan and Dormammu could be other villains. 5 original Guardians makes sense for the hero count with Mantis probably an Ally in one of the decks. Could see some hints in upcoming aspect cards as well as hero packs release. All we've really seen are Avengers, Shield, Defenders and Guardians on cards.

Keep in mind the boxes are called "Story Boxes". So I don't expect a theme around a particular team.

I would prefer X-Men or Fantastic Four over Guardians. Guardians has been overdone recently.

That being said, I think X-Men and FF4 would be harder to do right since they are much more of a choesive team when it comes to how they behaive in the comics.

Avengers and Guardians are a team too but it is easier to break them apart into individuals

Edit: it is not impossible to break apart FF4 and X-Men, just harder

1 minute ago, Tarliyn said:

I would prefer X-Men or Fantastic Four over Guardians. Guardians has been overdone recently.

That being said, I think X-Men and FF4 would be harder to do right since they are much more of a choesive team when it comes to how they behaive in the comics.

Avengers and Guardians are a team too but it is easier to break them apart into individuals

Given box art, I think Guardians is more likely right now...

As has been discussed elsewhere to a degree, the Disney/Fox buyout didn’t completely go through until earlier this year. The game was obviously in production for quite a while prior to that. Disney!Marvel clearly didn’t allow as much X-Men exposure in merch and games while Fox was competing with them, and that will take a little while to change entirely, especially since the MCU won’t be adding X-Men for a couple years.

All that said, I expect the GotG are the most likely first box set by a wide margin. After that, I certainly hope to see X-Men showing up quickly.

I'm guessing it'll be another female hero in conjunction with Thor. I can see gender parity being important to them (a 3/2 split in core, 1/1 in expansions so far excluding Thor) which frankly, I think is really cool. I wonder if we'd get something really goofy (compliment) like Squirrel Girl, or if we'd see the first Ally-to-Hero transition in Black Widow or Jessica Jones.

I would see Scarlet Witch more likely than squirel girl. She is an avenger, she is in she movies, she is a she :p.

When thinking of female characters even Ghost-Spider (Spider-Gwen) would be more likely than Squirel Girl. Though I am hoping for a spiderverse deluxe box in the future and she would probably have a better home there, 😛

Hope squirel girl eventually comes but there are better choices this early in the game.

Also, I don't think they will be able to do a one for one male/female on packs. Like it or not, atleast until they introduce the x-men there are more male than female relevant heroes. Its getting better but still not even

Scarlet Witch definitely feels like the most likely candidate for a female Avenger, but Wasp is also a fairly major character in the comics, so she could also fit (assuming her power set can be made distinct enough from Ms Marvel). I’d probably make her another Leadership character though. I agree it’s likely we’ll see a bunch of female characters in the game, but there is a much bigger pool of male characters to choose from (we can already see with the Villains, they’re almost exclusively male, barring a couple of minion characters).

I’d be surprised if they go for an Ally into a Hero so early when there’s so many characters to pick from, but an April release would be almost the perfect time to release a Black Widow pack in terms of cross promotion with her film... not clear how closely Marvel and FFG work on this licence though.

I'd be extremely surprised if the first box *isn't* Guardians/Cosmic. It just makes sense to do it now; the characters/franchise are unlikely to become more popular in the future unless GOTG 3 is amazing, and I imagine they'll start phasing them out of the MCU (or at least some of the characters). It's also obviously a good time to cash in on Thanos.

Thor will be released in March. 4th Hero Pack in April. So first Story Box could be May or June. They have announced products around 3 months before release, so I'd expect to see first details of the story box in Feb/March time.

I think the 4th Hero Pack will be Ghost Rider Justice. It follows the pattern they've got going of switching between well known and more obscure villains/heroes.

And the Avengers Assemble card art has 6 characters on it - each have been included/announced for the game so far. It also has an artist credit, meaning it was specifically commissioned for the game.

I think the first Story Box will be based on Thanos/Guardians of the Galaxy. Star Lord, Gamora and Rocket are all on existing cards from the core set - no other 'teams' appear in the game yet.

8 hours ago, yalestewart said:

I'm guessing it'll be another female hero in conjunction with Thor.

Nice UserName btw. There was an excellent new JL8 just yesterday, which was great to see

While I agree that FFG does a pretty good job of trying to be inclusive of female characters in games—even having to make some up for the LotR games—I don’t think it’s quite that big of a factor. The current Avengers roster (from that Avengers Assemble card art) and the Justice aspect seem more likely to have an impact on character choice, and no major female Avengers seem as solid a choice for Justice as Ghost Rider does, off the top of my head.

4 hours ago, SpiderMana said:

Nice UserName btw. There was an excellent new JL8 just yesterday, which was great to see

While I agree that FFG does a pretty good job of trying to be inclusive of female characters in games—even having to make some up for the LotR games—I don’t think it’s quite that big of a factor. The current Avengers roster (from that Avengers Assemble card art) and the Justice aspect seem more likely to have an impact on character choice, and no major female Avengers seem as solid a choice for Justice as Ghost Rider does, off the top of my head.

Yeah, I hope they dont invent heroes in this game. Enough content out there that I would hate to loose the opportunity cost for one of them by an invented hero. I would be shocked if they did that in champions though. Enough diversity built into marvel I think

2 hours ago, Tarliyn said:

Yeah, I hope they dont event heroes in this game. Enough content out there that I would hate to loose the opportunity cost for one of them by an invented hero. I would be shocked if they did that in champions though. Enough diversity built into marvel I think

I can’t imagine Marvel would allow it... but as you say there is so much source material available that I don’t see that as something they’d need to do for this game. I mean they could probably do years worth of content without having to dip into some of the more obscure characters.

Ghost Rider makes the most sense to me among the pool of heroes who are "obviously" Justice.

But in the Deck-celsior podcast interview with Caleb Grace, he mentions that sometimes they pair a hero with an aspect that is less obvious (or something along those lines).

Which makes me think that maybe they will go with a hero like Scarlet Witch, who has stronger Avenger ties rather than a hero who is more obviously a Justice hero.

It would getting a bit annoying seeing very obscure characters make it into the game while better known characters get ignored to make some kind of quota. I understand the need to toss in less popular heroes from time to time but I just don't want them digging in the bottom of the barrel to fill a certain spot while other characters get ignored for years.

Ghost Rider and Guardians of the Galaxy does seem like the best bet for what is next. I really want X-Men characters but I'm doubtful we will see any for a year or two.

War Machine and Black Widow are at the top of my list for characters that have a decent chance of getting released before the X-Men.

14 hours ago, jonboyjon1990 said:

Thor will be released in March. 4th Hero Pack in April. So first Story Box could be May or June. They have announced products around 3 months before release, so I'd expect to see first details of the story box in Feb/March time.

I think the 4th Hero Pack will be Ghost Rider Justice. It follows the pattern they've got going of switching between well known and more obscure villains/heroes.

And the Avengers Assemble card art has 6 characters on it - each have been included/announced for the game so far. It also has an artist credit, meaning it was specifically commissioned for the game.

I think the first Story Box will be based on Thanos/Guardians of the Galaxy. Star Lord, Gamora and Rocket are all on existing cards from the core set - no other 'teams' appear in the game yet.

Just a small correction, this art came from a comic cover ( https://shop.hanahancomics.com/shop/avengers-10-david-marquez-125-variant-marvel-18-700/ ). But yes, since the game is apparently based on the recent group formation, maybe Ghost Rider is the 4th hero pack (room for Dr. Strange and Blade)

Wow they just cut off Black Panther on the card 😂

7 hours ago, kraisto said:

Just a small correction, this art came from a comic cover ( https://shop.hanahancomics.com/shop/avengers-10-david-marquez-125-variant-marvel-18-700/ ). But yes, since the game is apparently based on the recent group formation, maybe Ghost Rider is the 4th hero pack (room for Dr. Strange and Blade)

Ah right - cool. I had made the assumption that anything from the comics didn't have an artist credit - since there's no one single artist - inkers, colourists etc. And that those cards with an artist credit were commissioned for the game. Now that comic covers fall into that category it's a lot harder to know what's new/from the comics.