Trying to avoid any major spoilers for people who have yet to play the expansion, but looking for some general tips and feedback.

Just got the new expansion box along with Hulk and Thor. I really wanted to test out Thor so that's who I picked.

Currently we have 3x losses against Crossbones and 0 wins. The closest game was a 3-player with Hulk (aggression), Thor (Teamwork), and Iron Man (Justice). The next 2 games were just Thor (Aggression) and Iron Man (Justice).

Might be just our bad luck, we aren't even playing on the hard mode, but we just can't seem to beat him. Going to try again with different heroes. Just curious how others are faring against this fight? Does it feel a lot harder than previous content, or are we just getting terrible luck with the card pulls?

Last game ended when 11 threat was added by the villain during a single enemy phase even though we only had one alter ego turned up.

Leadership Hawkeye, focusing on Rapid Response and heroes like Maria Hill and Squirrel Girl = amazing combo. I beat the entire campaign on Normal taking less than 5 damage through the entire campaign. My new favorite hero for sure.

Only played one game against him so far, 3-player with Captain Marvel Justice, Captain America Aggression, and Hawkeye Leadership. Normal Mode but with the extra three Expert cards because of miscommunication. He got Exo-Suit right away and we took way too long to deal with it, there were turns with explosions of minions, big bursts of threat, or other messes but we won in the end. Can't say too much since one game is a small sample size so my advice is to be flexible and deal with whatever hits the board during his turns - attachments, minions, or side schemes - before dealing damage to him. He's likely to ignore Tough but otherwise allies look like they ought to block well against him.

What are you struggling with? He shouldn't be that hard, he's mostly just a damage race. Main thing is not to let him get multiple weapons stacked on him unless you can knock him down quickly. Aside from improving his basic attack/thwart, it potentially makes Full Auto really, really nasty.

In terms of other characters, one thing to consider is that the four hand heroes are going to struggle more with removing weapons compared to other heroes.

11 Threat isn't a particularly unusual amount if he (or any boss) hits Advance. With a base 2 Scheme on his II version, if he's got one of the +1 bonuses he's likely to hit around 5 per scheme. While that's certainly a lot - in a 2 player game it finishes his 3rd main scheme straight up) - it possibly means you need to focus more on keeping his threat low, or possibly spending time in Alter Ego mode earlier so that you can stay in Hero made longer late game and race him.

We finally beat it. Did a duo game with Captain America and Black Panther. It went soooo smooth it barely felt difficult at all. It felt so much better drawing 6 cards with Black Panther and then having other cards to draw more. Starting up a turn with 9-10 cards was way more fun than Thor's 4 cards a turn. End opinion... I just think that Thor is just really not that good. I've been reading a lot of deck-building forms about Thor and everyone seems to have the same criticism. Kinda bummed, because I really wanted him to work better.

49 minutes ago, Atrael said:

We finally beat it. Did a duo game with Captain America and Black Panther. It went soooo smooth it barely felt difficult at all. It felt so much better drawing 6 cards with Black Panther and then having other cards to draw more. Starting up a turn with 9-10 cards was way more fun than Thor's 4 cards a turn. End opinion... I just think that Thor is just really not that good. I've been reading a lot of deck-building forms about Thor and everyone seems to have the same criticism. Kinda bummed, because I really wanted him to work better.

How do you get BP to 9-10 cards, but Thor only 4? BP has hand of 5 and Thor should have hand of 5 with Asgard. Thor is less good with no minions, but with minions he easily sit at a 7 card hand - 2 more than BP. For the rest of the drawing power they both have access to the same cards. I find getting BP to work consistently is much harder than Thor.

10 minutes ago, aermet69 said:

How do you get BP to 9-10 cards, but Thor only 4? BP has hand of 5 and Thor should have hand of 5 with Asgard. Thor is less good with no minions, but with minions he easily sit at a 7 card hand - 2 more than BP. For the rest of the drawing power they both have access to the same cards. I find getting BP to work consistently is much harder than Thor.

I was running Leadership. Start on the T'Challa side (6 cards), exhaust The Golden City to draw 2 more, play Strength in Numbers to draw another 1-3 cards.

My main beef with Thor is that he needs his upgrades to simply reach the starting values of other heroes, while other heroes begin decent and only get more awesome with their upgrades. Thor stalls himself out, and if you hit a treachery that makes you discard upgrades he has a much harder time making a comeback.

Again, it could have been the luck of the draw, but I would frequently draw my 4 cards for Thor only to find that I could maybe only play one of them (even after I tried to run a very cheap aggression list). While playing BP I had no issues dropping 1-2 upgrades a turn and if not hitting Wakanda Forever, at least having it in hand.

3 hours ago, Atrael said:

We finally beat it. Did a duo game with Captain America and Black Panther. It went soooo smooth it barely felt difficult at all. It felt so much better drawing 6 cards with Black Panther and then having other cards to draw more. Starting up a turn with 9-10 cards was way more fun than Thor's 4 cards a turn. End opinion... I just think that Thor is just really not that good. I've been reading a lot of deck-building forms about Thor and everyone seems to have the same criticism. Kinda bummed, because I really wanted him to work better.

Luck of the draw is a big part of Crossbones as he’s got a reasonably big deck with all the modules.

Thor is absolutely fine in multiplayer and actually one of my favourites to play with. I prefer him with Aggression so you can use Get over here to take minions from friends to boost your hand size. He does struggle a bit in solo, but he’s one of the more fun heroes to play in my opinion.

I haven't had any issues with Crossbones yet on Standard or Expert. I've done Hawkeye/Leadership + Captain America/Protection twice. I also did a run with solo Spider Woman Aggression/Justice. I've found it's just a race to see how few Experimental Weapons you have to add to the deck. The first two villains aren't that bad and then starting with Taskmaster it starts ramping. I got my first failure against Zola on Expert. For Crossbone you just wanna make sure you don't let attachments stack on Crossbones himself and you gotta be careful with everyone flipping to alter ego since Crossbones has small caps on all his main scheme stages. So you can't really recover from a big scheming turn and Crossbone in his second form on gets 2 scheme (with many 2 and 3 boost icons in the deck). For many main scheme stages he can one shot it if everyone is flipped without too much random chance.

In three player having both Thor and Hulk in the combination might be part of the problem if you are losing to threat. They both have very few ways to deal with threat. Thor usually wants to see lots of minions for his threat removal and for his card draw so he is slightly crippled against a deck with few minions. Crossbones I believe has some minions in there, but not as many as say Green Goblin or Zola. Thor would probably be pretty good against Zola. I have seen effective generic Thor builds, but it's definitely a more expert deck to play since he wants to be played a very specific way (and that way seems to hinge on Aggression cards for the most part).

18 hours ago, Atrael said:

Currently we have 3x losses against Crossbones and 0 wins. The closest game was a 3-player with Hulk (aggression), Thor (Teamwork), and Iron Man (Justice). The next 2 games were just Thor (Aggression) and Iron Man (Justice).

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honestly those seem like a couple of very...interesting pairings. Sub-optimal is a work that comes to mind and Crossbones I think is the hardest of the new scenarios due to the short clock on his schemes and ability to very rapidly become capable of 4-6 attack before boosts...Iron Man needs 2-3 turns to get his suit built to have a usable hand size, Thor and Hulk are unlikely to be much help there. That can let both a number of side schemes and Crossbones to equip 2, 3, 4, 5 weapons and be far more deadly than even Hulk drawing back to back Hulk Smashes.

Your choice of heroes is completely valid, there are tons of ways to enjoy the game, just be aware that by selecting those, you are creating a much more difficult scenario as they do not mesh well with its needs. Rhino, for example, that alignement should crush as you can deal more damage than he can and he does not pump out a ton of threat. Ultron you could do well against as Thor can build a massive hand size very, very quickly with drone encounters, Hall of Heroes, etc. But something like Crossbones...those 2 and 3 hero selections you will lose a lot before Iron Man gets rolling on his thwart machine and you are just too far behind to catch up.

Of course, your mileage may vary but that is my experience

yeah in the second pairing for the first few turns of the game you are entirely dependent on Iron Man's Justice aspect cards to Thwart which means he's not getting setup up as fast. Iron Man in 2+ players really needs a partner that can handle all the Thwart first few rounds since he needs to be flipped to Alter Ego to dig. At least that's always been my experience with him. In a villain with a higher Threat cap per Main Scheme you might have a chance since you can go back and wipe away Threat from those first couple turns, but Crossbones has 3 per player, 5 per player and 6 per player with a possible 2+ scheming value per player per round. That's gets you behind the eight ball fast. Once you get to Crossbones 2 you can never both be flipped at the same time and you need to clear as much as possible each round off the main scheme. Captain America and BP probably did way better because those heroes have a much better chance early game of keeping the threat down. If you had those two decks with a Hulk or Thor as a third deck in the three player game it wouldn't be so bad.

Crossbones has some really nasty cards in his deck and it can get bad if you draw them at the wrong time.

If if he has 3 or 4 attack and draws Full Auto, you can just find yourself dead with some bad draws.

But I played a game yesterday BW and SpW and he was much more challenging.

I also tried him on Heroic and Hawkeye was dead round 2.

Overall, I think he is a well designed villain.

We did have fun each time, and yes I agree Crossbones was very interesting, the entire battle felt very thematic. I'm excited to see what else the expansion has to offer.

We seemed to draw all the wrong cards at the right time for them to destroy us. We weren't ignoring threat. For example, we would have the threat at 0 and only one player had to flip to alter-ego, Crossbones would scheme and pulled 3 boost then we pulled the treachery card that makes the villain scheme again, pulled another 3 boost, finally I think we had one surviving Hydra troop or CB had a bonus +1 scheme from a weapon that gave the final 2 points to finish off the main scheme in a single villain turn. Oh and getting Loki out really sucks for Thor.

Oddly, the game we won, we didn't worry about removing threat much more that what was being removed by each Wakanda Forever.

On 9/14/2020 at 10:15 AM, Deadwolf said:

Crossbones has some really nasty cards in his deck and it can get bad if you draw them at the wrong time.

If if he has 3 or 4 attack and draws Full Auto, you can just find yourself dead with some bad draws.

I was set up to finish him in one more turn since he had only 7 HP left. Sadly I revealed Full Auto with Crossbones at 4 ATK total and discarded a total of 7 boost icons, instantly killing Spider Woman. This might've been okay but Hawkeye revealed a minion with Guard and 4 HP. Long story short, I pretended I never drew that last minion and finished him. Although officially I would've died in the next villain phase. Definitely going to try again with a few adjustments to both of their decks.

On 9/15/2020 at 11:47 PM, thegargarking said:

I was set up to finish him in one more turn since he had only 7 HP left. Sadly I revealed Full Auto with Crossbones at 4 ATK total and discarded a total of 7 boost icons, instantly killing Spider Woman. This might've been okay but Hawkeye revealed a minion with Guard and 4 HP. Long story short, I pretended I never drew that last minion and finished him. Although officially I would've died in the next villain phase. Definitely going to try again with a few adjustments to both of their decks.

Full Auto can be scary if you don’t keep on top of his upgrades, but it’s also indirect damage. So by having allies out, you can pretty well mitigate it.

Two games at Expert, two Wins.

Dr strange protection, Black window (yellow) and Hawkeye agression. Pro only problem seems to so far that we Are too slow and enemy starts Sooner or later owerrun us with all the stuff he gets from previoius scenarios.

all in all easy two Wins so far, with full health characters, but we need more speed to beat enemy even faster!

Dr strange is taking hits, Black widow takes care of big boosts and hawkeye deal the damage...

On 9/14/2020 at 2:22 AM, Atrael said:

I was running Leadership. Start on the T'Challa side (6 cards), exhaust The Golden City to draw 2 more, play Strength in Numbers to draw another 1-3 cards.

My main beef with Thor is that he needs his upgrades to simply reach the starting values of other heroes, while other heroes begin decent and only get more awesome with their upgrades. Thor stalls himself out, and if you hit a treachery that makes you discard upgrades he has a much harder time making a comeback.

Again, it could have been the luck of the draw, but I would frequently draw my 4 cards for Thor only to find that I could maybe only play one of them (even after I tried to run a very cheap aggression list). While playing BP I had no issues dropping 1-2 upgrades a turn and if not hitting Wakanda Forever, at least having it in hand.

I would just discard Mjolnir, since he can pretty much auto recover that.

On 9/20/2020 at 5:34 PM, Derrault said:

I would just discard Mjolnir, since he can pretty much auto recover that.

I don't have the card in front of me, but isn't getting Mjolnir back his alter-ego action, meaning it will exhaust him? Just seems to further slow the tempo, and since Crossbones is so punishing on his schemes we were really trying to limit how often we would end a turn in alter-ego form.

@Hannibal_pjv

We have done the Dr Strange/Black Widow combo earlier and it is crazy strong. We previously had some hard fights against Ultron till they came out and made Ultron feel like a walk in the park.

1 hour ago, Atrael said:

I don't have the card in front of me, but isn't getting Mjolnir back his alter-ego action, meaning it will exhaust him? Just seems to further slow the tempo, and since Crossbones is so punishing on his schemes we were really trying to limit how often we would end a turn in alter-ego form.

Thor on Thor side exclusively without putting in some serious work to add reliable hand adders seems like not making use of his strengths. Mjolnir is a resource, the strongest Thor builds I personally have seen use it as a resource a lot, flip to take say...Hall of heroes, so getting Mjolnir back is no issue. If you are trying to stay on Thor side the entire game as a general rule you are going to need help from your friends as he cannot really get many blockers in front. Even in Leadership, which would eschew many of his best hand-building possibilities, he will struggle to get enough allies out so you will get beat down on HP.

With his small hand size you are not going to be helping get rid of the weapons that pile up on Crossbones, you will not be able to get many allies, you cannot mitigate threat, and without access to cards like Get Over Here, Relentless, Melee, etc you are not doing much with the minions so you really need to be pumping 6-8 damage every turn to make Thor viable and that seems really hard to do without flipping to build hand quite a bit so should not be an issue...good news it, getting Mjolnir is free action on Odinson side, doesn't exhaust him

3 hours ago, Atrael said:

I don't have the card in front of me, but isn't getting Mjolnir back his alter-ego action, meaning it will exhaust him? Just seems to further slow the tempo, and since Crossbones is so punishing on his schemes we were really trying to limit how often we would end a turn in alter-ego form.

It doesn’t exhaust him to use the action.

In the RoRS campaign book it says to use the Hydra Assault with Crossbones, but his Scheme deck says to use Hydra Patrol. Which is it?

25 minutes ago, smickletz said:

In the RoRS campaign book it says to use the Hydra Assault with Crossbones, but his Scheme deck says to use Hydra Patrol. Which is it?

Another forum board says it should be Hydra Assault as the correct set of cards to be added. Not my post, but read up if you want more details.

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2497665/crossbones-setup-errata-confirmed

10 hours ago, Atrael said:

Another forum board says it should be Hydra Assault as the correct set of cards to be added. Not my post, but read up if you want more details.

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2497665/crossbones-setup-errata-confirmed

for what it is worth, Caleb acknowledges the mistake in their Ant Man and Wasp playthrough against Crossbones, suggests going with the intended Assault but also adds they are modular, it doesn't exactly break the game to use a completely different one.

For what it is worth, I find Patrol much easier, your mileage may vary

They are close,

Patrol has 2 chumps and 3 minions on the nastier side.

Both Assault minions are mid level threats.

Hail Hydra and Hydra Patrol are similar also in threat level, Hail Hydra is potential extra damage whereas Patrol is a side scheme and then some minions.