Magneto Hero Pack: Marvel Champions

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

The final hero pack of the mutant trilogy is none other than Magneto himself. Magneto comes with a pre-built Leadership deck and his hero kit is focused upon drawing his powerful magnetic trait cards to crush the villains opposing him. How does Magneto compare to the other mutant heroes playable within Marvel Champions?

Magneto Was Right

The Magneto Hero Pack is the second pack in the game to reintroduce a villain as a hero, the first being Nebula. I was so pleased to see that they did the same thing as they did with her pack and that is reinterpreting villain scenario cards into hero appropriate ones. Magneto’s playstyle revolves around his magnetic pull ability to discard cards from the top of his deck until he gets one of his own magnetic traited cards (which is every one of his hero cards) and then you can put that into your hand. While this does mean you are discarding a lot more cards than most heroes, getting an extra card is a really powerful thing in Marvel Champions, as it means you have more options and resources. He has a couple of upgrades that synergise with this as well, the best being his cape which gives him a ready up after the magnetic pull. For those worried about the discarding, Magneto does have some ways of mitigating this. Asteroid M lets you shuffle the top most magnetic card in your discard pile back into your deck and heal some damage when you are in alter-ego, meaning you have more chance of getting a magnetic card sooner. Magneto himself shuffles the top 3 cards of the discard pile back into the deck when he flips to alter-ego so he does get a lot of benefit from flipping.

Magneto’s events are also very powerful when they hit certain conditions. He has the standard attack and thwart event pattern that most heroes follow. His big attack Metal Shards is a 7 damage attack that gives him a tough card if he defeats that enemy which is a perfect minion slayer. Electromagnetic Blast is a decent enough thwart event but the true benefit is if it clears a scheme then you can remove an enemy attachment – a situational effect but a strong one. The most unique events are the pairing of Wrapped In Metal and Magnetic Missile. You can use the first to lock down a non-elite minion and then the second defeats that minion and deals damage and a stun to another enemy. This is a little tricky to pull off as you need an appropriate target but it is very satisfying to lock down an annoying minion and just leave it there ready to fling at the villain later on!

As heroes go, Magneto is very versatile and he is quite rich in resources compared to the average hero. He can quite easily be built into any aspect and I think Leadership is a great place to start with him thanks to its flexibility and brilliant X-Men focused cards. In the Aggression and Protection aspects, you most likely will want to have some extra ways of dealing with threat as this is potentially his weakest point, but the amount of ready ups he can get from his cape means this is less of an issue than in other more offensive heroes. Justice Magneto is a great option as he has plenty of attack events which helps mitigate the fewer options for damage in the aspect. I would say because his hero cards are strong and you are guaranteed one a turn thanks to his magnetic pull, you are most likely to be using those rather than aspect cards and this could potentially make his decks play quite similarly to one another.

House of M

As a Leadership deck, the Magneto Hero Pack is packed with brand new ally cards, and seeing these is often my favourite part of the aspect cards. This pack certainly does not disappoint on that front with a bunch of new X-Men that focus on effects on entering play. Phoenix and Cyclops finally get their own aspect ally cards and they play brilliantly in this deck, with Cyclops buffing all attacks on an enemy for a phase and Phoenix giving an X-Men ally a ready and some healing. Kid Omega is a cheap ally with good stats who can deal a damage or thwart off every scheme if you pay an extra resource for him – perfect for when the villain’s board is packed with problems for you to solve. The most expensive ally is M who has powerful stats but perhaps best of all defeats an minion with less health than her when she enters the field. All of these new Leadership allies are great new additions to the game and will fit into decks quite easily as only Phoenix really needs the X-Men synergy. The new basic ally is White Queen and she removes a status card on entering play which is a great effect but really quite situational in comparison to the others you get here.

The other new Leadership cards in the deck are an interesting selection. There are a pair of new cards that focus on sacrificing allies for powerful effects; one gives your hero a tough card and heals them, while the other adds their attack or thwart to your hero’s and readies them afterwards. The others are to help you get the allies into play and I found that Won’t Stay Down worked really well with Magneto as it puts a X-Men or X-Force ally from your discard pile to your hand, which is perfect for saving any allies that you’ve discarded.

It is worth mentioning the new player side scheme New Recruits included in this hero pack as it is the second in the game to use the linked mechanic (a sideboard of cards that you get to choose from once the relevant conditions are met). This one gets you (and other players in multiplayer) 1 of 4 X-Men allies for your deck that all gain a bonus if you are an X-Men or Mutant character. Each of these are good cheap allies that can help you adapt to the current situation – say you are struggling with threat, you can grab Anole who can get up to 3 thwart with his bonus.

Conclusion

Of all the hero packs from this current wave of Marvel Champions, the Magneto Hero Pack is the one I would recommend most of all. He is a powerful and versatile hero who can reliably grab his hero cards from the deck to deal with most problems that scenarios can throw at you. Some people might not be as keen on the discarding part of his playstyle, but there are ways of mitigating this and I found that the benefits far outweigh the downsides. The new aspect cards, especially the new X-Men allies, are all interesting and work together well fresh out of the pack. I can definitely see myself playing Magneto time and time again and I look forward to building plenty of decks for him.