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Eliminate the villains of Marvel Champions with X-23, the daughter of Wolverine!
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.
*Snikt*
The X-23 Hero Pack slices into Marvel Champions with a brand new hero in a pre-constructed aggression deck. X-23 is one of my favourite Marvel characters and seeing her make her way into Marvel Champions alongside the other members of X-Force is really brilliant. What makes it even better is how versatile a hero she is!
X-23 Slices In
Laura Kinney, also known as X-23, is the daughter of Wolverine and so has some similarities to his hero pack from last year. Her recovery stat is very impressive like Logan’s and she also starts the game with her claws as a permanent upgrade. This lets her deal two damage to herself in exchange for two extra attack for that round. However, this is where the similarities to her father end. Laura’s play style is heavily focused on readying herself in order to perform multiple basic actions, a play style similar to Quicksilver. She has a few different methods to do this, with the most consistent one being her hero ability to ready once per phase whenever she takes damage. This lets her defend and then reliably ready when the villain attacks, and then do the same again on her own turn with the damage she takes from her claws. Her base stats are quite good, especially her thwarting ability, and her attack can be buffed which makes those readies even more valuable. Typical turns I have with X-23 usually start with a thwart and then at least one buffed attack. She does not have many thwarting options outside of her basic one. The only card she has to help with this is Animal Instinct, which gives her basic thwart a bonus based on her current attack. This is substantial, but does require you to be able to use her basic ability which you may not always be able to do at the right opportunity.
Another of her many strengths is how cheap it is to play most of her hero cards. She has three cards that need two resources to play (one being her signature ally), and the rest are all one or zero cost. This makes her far more consistent than the majority of heroes as you can easily afford to use her cards and often play several in a turn.
Clawed Sisters
The other key part of X-23’s strategy is her adopted sister Gabby, better known as Honey Badger, who is the signature ally of her deck. Gabby is not especially exciting by herself but whenever she takes damage, X-23 gets another ready. There are quite a few cards that interact with both X-23 and Honey Badger, some that are improved by having Honey Badger in play and one that directly uses her. My personal favourite is Regenerative Longevity which heals four damage from between both characters for a single resource, meaning you can keep Honey Badger in play for even longer and top up X-23’s health to fuel her claws. The card that requires both characters is called Sisterly Bond and it adds X-23’s stats to Honey Badger’s, which can massively add to her damage when timed right, and that doesn’t even take into account your own hero. I have managed to have turns where X-23’s attack is 5 and got 2 attacks of her own, plus another powered up one from Honey Badger.
Honey Badger is one of those cards that really impacts how well you perform in a game, and there are a few cards in X-23’s kit that can help find her easier. That being said, if you don’t have her in play, that doesn’t make X-23 a weak hero. As stated before, her consistent readies and hero cards mean she can handle multiple threats at a time. However, her obligation card can be nasty when it comes out at the wrong time as it steals away Honey Badger wherever she is until you recover and then she is discarded. It is not so bad if she’s in your deck or discard pile, but if she’s in play it can really dismantle your setup.
Aspect Analysis
The preconstructed deck in the X-23 Hero Pack uses the Aggression aspect, it’s like the Wolverine one in the last wave. Overall these aspect cards in the deck are either brilliant for X-23, or not designed for her at all. The new X-Force allies are all very solid and they are more costly to play which balances quite well with the resources cost of X-23’s hero cards. The new Aggression player side scheme Keep Them Busy is perfect for high attack heroes as it uses their attack stat and not their thwart one and takes a large chunk of threat off the main scheme. There is a new card that attaches to side schemes to add this effect on, but X-23 is already capable of managing them without an extra step.
The basic cards in the deck are all excellent choices for X-23 however. There are two returning X-Force support cards that allow for more card draw and reprints of Endurance that buffs a hero's health, but most importantly is another player side scheme. Specialized Training takes a lot more thwarting to clear but when it is beaten, every player can attach one of four set-aside upgrades. Each of these buffs a stat or max health, and then allows that player to draw a card when they use that associated stat. I am not sure some of the heroes that struggle with threat would use this but I think this is a very powerful card for virtually every hero in Marvel Champions.
Conclusion
The X-23 Hero Pack is a brilliant new addition to Marvel Champions. X-23 as a hero is very reliable and powerful who can capably handle most threats that come her way. Being able to ready frequently means she can make use of multiple basic powers every turn, defend every turn with little drawbacks, and come back in the player turn ready for more. She is viable in every aspect as her hero cards can do a bit of everything, although the extra thwarting in Justice is especially helpful. My favourite has been Leadership to give Honey Badger even more support. The only real drawback is that Honey Badger is needed in play to get the full mileage out of X-23, but she is perfectly capable without her.
