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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.
Intro
For fans of the 90’s X-Men cartoon like myself, the announcement that Jubilee was coming to Marvel Champions was a hugely welcome one. She bursts into the game with a pre-built justice deck and a play style focused on firing off flashy events, but how does she stand up alongside the other X-Men heroes?
Totally Radical!
Jubilee as a hero gets her strength from firing off attack and thwart events and gaining bonus effects from spending different resource types. Her hero cards include two attack and thwart events with three copies of each. If you spend two different resources types when paying for them, you can stun the attacked enemy or confuse an enemy respectively. The interesting part of these event cards is that the three copies of each have a different resource icon, effectively giving Jubilee a wider spread of resource types to improve her chances of triggering the bonus effects. Her hero kit also comes with three double resource cards that all have a different mix of resource types, plus Jubilee herself can exhaust to generate a wild resource, so she has a lot of resource variety in her hero cards alone. She also is a relatively straightforward hero to learn, with the biggest challenge being the need to use different resources for events.
Now these events themselves are flashy on their own, but once Jubilee is geared up then the fireworks really start! The pair of upgrades that really make Jubilee a force to be reckoned with is her coat and sunglasses. Both of these serve the same purpose, the sunglasses are attack focused and the coat is thwart based. When you play an event of the relevant type with multiple different resource types, you can exhaust that upgrade to deal damage or thwart equal to the number of resource types spent. They also buff Jubilee’s base stats, but to be honest her ability to exhaust for a wild resource meant that this bonus was rarely used in my games. Jubilee can effectively multitask with her events, hitting multiple enemies and clearing schemes, and the need to pay with different resources is not difficult with the variety in the hero cards and her own ability. Her player side scheme, Shopping Spree, is a bit tricky to thwart as it requires exhausting an alter ego but once cleared gets you an item card - which can be the coat or sunglasses.
Total Bummer…
While Jubilee is a very versatile hero, she does have some downsides. She has a number of events that can stun or confuse which generally gives her the protection she needs, but as a result she struggles against stalwart villains. I gave her a try in a protection aspect deck to see if this can mitigate this and it gave her some more survivability with her hero cards covering the damage and thwarting.
The other issue she can have is that sometimes there isn’t enough threat to thwart with her events and coat combo. This is a good problem to have though! It becomes less of an issue when you are playing with more heroes or in an aspect other than justice. This does feel appropriate with Jubilee working better as part of a team, and in a multiplayer game she would be an excellent pick to support the overall group.
Justice Is Served!
Jubilee comes with a pre-built justice deck and a number of these new cards are clearly designed with her in mind. That’s not to say they are unusable by other heroes, just that Jubilee can use them better than most. Multitalented is a new basic card that can deal damage, thwart, and heal you if you spend the right resources, which of course Jubilee should be able to. This gets even better with her coat and sunglasses as she can trigger both of them with this. It would take a lot for me to not include these in any Jubilee deck. My favourite of the new allies is Husk as you can spend different resources on her for different effects. These include buffing her stats, self-healing, and readying her and she is a great resource sink for any justice deck - especially an X-Men one. Jubilee’s double resource cards that have different types are perfect for getting multiple effects from Husk if you don’t have any events to fire off.
There are a couple of new justice cards that are interesting for the game as a whole. Waylay is a rare justice attack event that is a little situational but gives the aspect a new way to deal damage which it often lacks. When your hero thwarts a scheme you can play Waylay to deal 4 damage, or 7 damage if that removes the last threat from the scheme. The other new justice card that shakes things up is Disguise, an upgrade that you can exhaust along with your identity card to thwart for 2. The reason that this is especially interesting is that it can be done in alter ego. There are some heroes who like to spend more time in alter ego than others that will get a lot of this - Black Widow and Nebula spring to mind in particular.
Another brilliant extra inclusion in the deck is a team-up card to go with Jubilee’s signature ally, Wolverine, and a second copy to go into a Wolverine deck. This confuses an enemy and then deals damage to a confused enemy. This being an attack event is perfect for both heroes and an extra confuse rarely goes amiss.
Conclusion
Jubilee is a very fun new addition to Marvel Champions and her playstyle as an event driven hero is reminiscent of some older heroes with an interesting twist with the resource management. She needs to get her upgrades into play before she can start firing at full strength and her defence is a weak point, but once she is built up she can effectively multitask between damage and thwarting. The new justice cards are interesting and spark inspiration for new decks for other heroes which is exactly what I like to see.
