Marvel Champions: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D Expansion

Uncover the sinister plot of the mole inside the SHIELD Executive Board as Nick Fury and Maria Hill in the Agents of SHIELD expansion for the Marvel Champions living card game! 

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 latest addition to the Marvel Champions living card game is the Agents of SHIELD campaign box which gives you the new SHIELD heroes Maria Hill and Nick Fury and five scenarios focusing on an espionage theme. Throughout the box, you will be uncovering the mystery of a SHIELD mole, infiltrating AIM’s operations, and facing off against the true mastermind!  

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Director of SHIELD 

Now when the Agents of SHIELD box was announced, I was curious as to how Maria Hill would play as a hero. Her playstyle is certainly one of the more unique in the game to date, foregoing the usual attacking and thwarting events that most heroes utilise, instead filling the board with SHIELD supports and making use of their different effects – exactly like the Director of SHIELD. Playing Hill really does make you feel like you are deploying your forces and resources to quash the villain and their schemes. Hill also has an extra deck building ability that lets you include the maximum number of copies of three SHIELD supports from outside your chosen aspect and her leadership pre-con deck comes with three unique helicarriers, giving her a total of five in her deck. These mammoth six cost cards are incredibly powerful once you get them in play and Hill has several events that give you more counters or readies on these. Her hero kit comes with the Iliad, a helicarrier that can use a counter to either deal damage, remove threat, or heal and when you get this down early (like by searching your deck with Hill’s alter ego ability!) you can really start to put the pressure on the villain. This box’s villains have a lot of things that trigger when they are attacked and the Iliad is a perfect way to get around these hindrances. When your helicarriers are nearly out of counters, Hill can make The Hard Call to sacrifice a SHIELD support to deal damage to every enemy equal to that card’s cost. Throwing a helicarrier into a particularly troublesome situation is quite a dramatic way to deal with it! 

Hill’s kit is quite expensive and takes some time to set up, especially at higher player counts, but once she has set up she can cover most roles needed during a game and has a lot of options. The leadership cards with her lean into the SHIELD theme and it does highlight the fact that she is best suited to this aspect over all others, except for maybe justice which also has a good array of SHIELD cards. Being able to add supports from outside the aspect could definitely help with this and there is certainly potential to use other aspects but I think there is a good chance that leadership and justice will be her strongest aspects. The new card (that is not a helicarrier) that stands out most to me is Slingshot, a SHIELD ally who can be played under anyone’s control for a single energy resource and bounces back to your hand at the end of the phase. This is brilliant as even without an extra ready, which the Command Teams in the deck allow, you are getting an extra two damage or thwarting for a single resource and then an extra card in hand when she bounces back! 

Agent Fury 

While Hill might be the more unique hero out of the two included in the Agents of SHIELD, Fury brings a new twist on the form changing hero play style with his suit that flips between assault and stealth modes. The assault form is quite simple, when you attack with Fury you can spend up to 3 threat from the suit to boost the attack’s damage by that amount. This pairs really well with multi target attacks like Spray Fire that does 3 damage to the villain and all minions engaged with a player. The stealth form is how you mainly get threat on the suit as while in that form; if an enemy would attack you, they scheme instead. When the suit has 5 or less threat on it, 1 from that enemy’s scheme gets placed on the suit instead. You are also forced back into assault form if you attack in stealth, which thematically is perfect. I found this to be a really fun mechanic of balancing building up the suit’s power and then ‘going loud’ and boosting your damage. A few of his cards can switch his form back into stealth like Covert Surveillance that removes threat from a scheme and either put it on your suit if in stealth or switch forms if you are in assault. The other way to switch back is in alter ego and honestly I flipped down for that more than for healing. While this is a fun mechanic, I did feel that Fury’s damage in the pre-con deck tended to be a little lacking outside of big bursts, though his threat management is very strong. 

Fury also has a number of preparation cards (finally making a return in a big way since Black Widow introduced them), both in his hero kit and in his justice pre-con deck. His Secret Agent upgrade buffs these even further by letting him move a threat from a scheme onto his suit whenever one is triggered. I won’t go into all of them here but some highlights are his Eyepatch Camera, which prevents 3 threat from going on the main scheme and puts it on his suit instead, and the new justice card Informant, causing a minion’s scheme to remove threat rather than add it which pairs perfectly with Fury being in stealth form. The MVP (most valuable preparation) however has to be the basic card Practised Plan which puts a triggered preparation back into your hand after it is used. 

Mission Dossier 

Pairing with the fun and thematically strong new heroes is a set of 5 brilliant new scenarios which I found to be some of the best in a campaign box – even the most normal of the scenarios has a clever design twist. Black Widow is like a standard scenario in that you just need to deplete her health, however when she is attacked you have to remove a threat from the main scheme and then discard a card from the encounter deck with there being a chance of that being a preparation and therefore triggering an effect. If you keep the scheme empty she won’t be able to do this but it’s an extra challenge when she might hit you back or throw a minion in the way of an attack. After her, you have an infiltration mission to save hostages from an embassy guarded by Batroc. This is a beat-the-scheme scenario rather than KO Batroc with the added pressure of keeping the alert level under control as defeated characters raise this and the high alert buffs the villain and can cost you the game. This one feels really thematic in how it plays and Fury is naturally a good fit for this as he dodges attacks which can keep the alert level down. 

The third and fourth scenarios are my favourite in the whole box, MODOK and the Thunderbolts. MODOK is my new favourite scenario that has you protecting allies as part of the gameplay, which is often a feature that puts me off scenarios. He has 4 Inhuman prisoners that you have to free and then deplete his health to win, with earlier KO’s helping to free the prisoners. Not only are these allies very helpful once freed, them being defeated just locks them up again rather than costing you the game. MODOK wins by getting all of his 4 adaptoid environments into play, each of which buffs those minions. This is one of those scenarios that feels like the tables can turn quickly without it being unfair and also MODOK is one of those more iconic villains, it wouldn’t be right to have AIM scenarios without him! 

The Thunderbolts scenario is the newest multi-villain style scenario which is always my favourite type as there can be so much more variation between games than with others. This one is potentially the most customisable in the game so far thanks to how you use a number of Thunderbolt module sets to create the villain deck. There are 6 in the box and each of the upcoming hero packs for this wave will contain a new one, for a total of 10 unique modules, and you only need one more than the number of players to run the scenario. Each contains an elite minion that is a villain in its own right with double digit health pool and the villainous keyword and you need to defeat one of these per player before you can defeat their leader, Citizen V. He does cut you some slack by just healing if you are facing a Thunderbolt minion but they are far more imposing than him. They also like to hop about, retreating to the backup environment to heal and jumping to engage with players that attack them. This scenario has the potential to be the toughest in the box and it is also the one I can see myself coming back to the most often. 

Now the campaign box hides the identity of the campaign’s final boss and I won’t spoil that here. They are quite a fair endboss (or I’ve got lucky in my play testing!) and I think the incorporation of the campaign mode is the best I’ve seen so far but it is a little bit of a faff to set up outside of campaign mode. That being said, this is one of the best endbosses we’ve had since Magneto and I can definitely see myself coming back more regularly that with some others (looking at you Ronan). 

Expose the Traitor 

Speaking of the campaign mode, this box is another great example of the theming that is core to Marvel Champions. This one is also not too complex in execution, with the end goal being to discover the identity of the mole in the SHIELD Executive Board. These are represented by 3 board member environments that you need to keep taking secret counters off to prevent them from flipping and becoming villain attachments for the rest of the campaign. There are 9 evidence cards that represent their means, motive and opportunity and these are shuffled and split into SHIELD and AIM envelopes. By beating a scenario with a board member having no secret counters, you get to take a card from the SHIELD one which eliminates that evidence as a possibility. You also get to use these at the start of scenarios to allow a little deck customisation, although this is optional and also quite straightforward to do. Overall, this campaign mode balances the line between enhancing the scenarios whilst not being overly complicated to run or set up. This one is especially thematic and I love the envelopes and evidence cards as an extra fun prop.  

Conclusion 

Agents of SHIELD is another fantastic addition to the Marvel Champions game, with some of the most thematic and interesting scenarios the game has seen so far. The new heroes are interesting and fun to play without being too complicated to play and it is good to see a return of preparation and SHIELD support cards after a fair while without any new cards of these types. In a similar vein, the campaign mode enhances the scenarios without being fiddly or difficult. If you enjoy thematic and varied scenarios and heroes, Agents of SHIELD is an excellent choice for you.