Hi Everyone,

I am considering buying the core set of Marvel Champions and I have been watching some YouTube videos to figure out if this game is a good fit for me. From what I have been able to gather you choose a hero first, then you have 15 cards that are specific with that hero. Next you choose a general class, such as protection, leadership, etc and include those cards in your deck. This sounds a lot like Star Wars where you had your pods of fixed cards you have to put into your decks. Is there going to be any "deck building" in this game? Or is it just trying to find synergy within the fixed card sets you grab to assemble your deck? It seems like the hero packs for Captain America are sold out on all the website I have visited. Do you know if the hero packs will offer some customization options? Thank you for all your help! I really appreciate it!

Hi, @Tyberius_Deangelo ! If deckbuilding is your primary concern for potentially skipping out on this game, I think you'll find there's more to it than you currently think!

Each Hero has their 15 Hero-specific cards that are required to be in their deck, simply to make sure that you still feel like you're playing that character. When you choose an aspect, there is no set group of cards that you have to use. Heck, you can technically build a deck with no aspect! You just can't build a deck with more than one aspect in it. With a deck size of 40-50 cards you have control over what 25-35 of those cards are; roughly 2/3rds of the deck.

Obviously the game is fairly young, so if you really want to get creative with deckbuilding, you might be just as well waiting a little bit. Captain America was pretty severely underprinted, but we're all hoping that they get a better idea of just how well the game is doing so that they don't face that issue again to the same extent. That said, each Hero Pack adds a full pre-built deck for a certain aspect, as well as the maximum copies of another card for each of the other aspects. So they really do feel like they add a lot to the deckbuilding experience, and by this summer there will be six Hero Packs available.

Yeah, it's a bit mixed for deckbuilding. On one hand, each aspect pool is currently rather shallow, and though growing at a reasonable pace, so your options for what cards from an aspect to include are limited and a bit obvious. However, I've found it to be surprisingly compelling even in the limited pool, because it really feels like each hero has some intriguing synergy to try out with each aspect. When I was playing with just the core at release, I went through pretty much every combination of hero and aspect before settling on which ones are my preferences.

Except Iron Man, apparently? I can't remember playing a single game with him, ever. I guess I'm just not interested.

Bottom line, though, I really enjoyed my deckbuilding experience, limited as it was, and I think it bodes well for the future, as we receive more and more card pool choices.