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What is Marvel Champions?
Marvel Champions is a co-operative living card game in which you build decks around your favourite Marvel heroes and take the fight to a variety of different villain scenarios you can further customise with modular sets. Your goal is to defeat the villain whilst thwarting their schemes, defeating minions, and keeping your hero alive. To do this, you have ally cards to aid your hero, event cards to perform actions, and upgrades and supports to give you bonuses. To play cards, you discard cards to generate resources so every card in your deck helps pay for others. Heroes have an alter ego side as well, which gives the heroes a chance to heal and perform other abilities, but you have to be careful not to give the villains too long to continue their schemes. The villain decks are played by revealing cards on their turn to perform different actions and pull in new threats for you to deal with.
Players build their decks around their hero specific cards and then pick one aspect to further change how that hero plays. Aggression cards focus on dealing damage, justice cards control the villain's schemes, leadership focuses on boosting ally cards, and protection mitigates damage. The Marvel Champions Core Box is required to get you started, then expansion boxes provide two new heroes and a selection of villains to play in a campaign, hero packs give you a new hero and aspect cards to use, and scenario packs offer more villains to challenge you.
Introduction
Kurt Wagner, better known as Nightcrawler, finally arrives to Marvel Champions in his own hero pack, complete with a pre-built protection deck that capitalises on his incredible defensive prowess. Nightcrawler is one of the most popular X-Men characters, but how does he fare in the world of Marvel Champions?
*Bamf!*
Unsurprisingly, Nightcrawler’s hero cards focus on a trio of upgrades called Bamf which can be attached to enemy characters and then later discarded from them in order to allow him to defend their attack without exhausting. Nightcrawler’s defence score of 3 is already impressive enough, but combined with Bamf he can really effectively block attacks for himself or other players. He is also able to get these upgrades quite easily as his alter ego card can fetch one from his deck once per round and in hero form he can spend a resource to get one back from his discard pile.
The tricky part of playing Nightcrawler is knowing when to use these upgrades as his hero events interact with them in various ways. For example, his Scout Ahead card costs 1 resource and lets you thwart for 3 from a scheme, but if you discard a Bamf from your hand as well, you can thwart an addiction 3 from another scheme. Others are not optional and use Bamf as a requirement to play them - Teleport Drop being a powerful attack event that stuns the enemy as well but needs you to discard an attached Bamf from the target. My favourite of his events is the brilliantly named Tally Ho. This is played when you use a Bamf to defend without exhausting and returns the Bamf to your hand and deals 3 damage. This is really useful in keeping your Bamfs around and I found the damage can be handy in dealing with minions if you have managed to get multiple Bamfs into play.
En Garde!
Nightcrawler is more than just events however as he has several kit cards that supplement his defensive playstyle. Potentially the best card in his deck is the fantastic Kurt’s Cutlasses, a weapon that counts as 2 restricted cards (I suppose he does have one in each hand!) but it gives him bonus attack, defence and retaliate. This brings his total stats to 2 attack, 2 thwart, and a massive 4 defence, making Nightcrawler a defensive powerhouse. I also love that his resource generation upgrade, Prehensile Tail, also lets him control a third restricted card which is a lovely thematic combo for players who want to give him an extra weapon.
The other card that I consider to be a must-play from his hero cards is his signature ally, Daytripper. She is a cheap ally to play and has a good stat line but the best part is that she finds a copy of Bamf from your deck or discard pile when she enters play, attaches it to an enemy, and then deals a damage to every enemy with a copy of Bamf attached to it. For 2 resources, you get a lot out of playing her and it was very rare that I would not play her whenever she entered my hand.
A Peaceful Soul
As with all heroes in Marvel Champions, Nightcrawler is not without flaws. While he excels at defending, his damage and thwarting output can be lacking in comparison. He has the Scout Ahead events mentioned previously which are efficient but that is it except for his basic thwart which you will likely need to use whenever possible. His damaging events are all reliant on having Bamfs attached to enemies and while you can get these back from your discard pile, it can limit your options. This is easily fixed by deck building into aggression or justice, but it is possible to use protection in a solo game and win, it is just potentially more reliant on luck and combos with Bamf. I would also say protection is a brilliant aspect for him in multiplayer where you can rely on other players to fill in his shortcomings as he is likely to be able to help them massively by defending multiple times a turn.
Riposte!
As previously mentioned, the Nightcrawler hero pack comes with a pre-built protection aspect deck and it is easy to see why looking at his playstyle. The protection cards in this hero pack are very synergistic and I would say this is one of the most interesting sets of aspect cards I have seen in a pack in a while. The lynchpin of this is the new upgrade Change of Fortune, which you can use to draw 2 cards when you defeat an enemy during the villain phase. One of the drawbacks of protection can be that you use the bulk of your hand on cards during the villain phase and leaves you with few options on your turn. This card has given protection a new archetype focused around dealing damage to minions in particular during the villain phase and benefit from this extra card draw. This deck brings new cards designed with this mind, from Riposte that buffs defence and deals damage if you prevent all damage, to a minion only upgrade called Under Control which deals damage if you defend against the minion’s attack and take no damage. The deck also comes with a event, brilliantly named “Come Get Me, Bub!”, that brings a minion into play, heals you for 3, and gives you the tough status - all for 0 cost. This new archetype works very well with Nightcrawler as his Bamf cards lets him defend multiple times and make use of his high defence score.
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