MaGognificent (MODOK League S2 R1)

We're back with another bonus episode of the Road to Knowhere, a Marvel Champions LCG podcast. Today we’re joined yet again by tjjj and jarratt to talk about their experience with MODOK League Season 02, Round 01. This matchup pits our kouples against MaGog + Formidable Foe Environment (Expert side) + Colossus + Rocket nemesis sets using a hybrid Standard 1 + 2 and Expert 1 + 2 encounter set.

MODOK League is a “Marvel-champions Organization Designed Only for Kouples” League, meaning it is a two-hero team league where people can play with a partner or 2-handed on their own. Each team drafts heroes and aspects from a pool against the other teams.

MODOK League Discord server: https://discord.gg/6b4zBfchhA

MODOK League website: https://modokleague.wordpress.com

Episode Transcript

(00:09):
Hey friendos, welcome to a special episode of The Road to
Nowhere, a Marvel Champions LCG podcast.
Today we're recapping Modoc League Season 2 round one.
Modoc League is a Marvel Champions organization designed
only for couples. It's a two hero team league

(00:31):
where people can play with a partner or two handed on their
own. Each team drafts heroes and
aspects from a pool against other teams.
Fantasy sports style. So today we're going to be
discussing this first round, as already mentioned from the
second season and I'm your host,Josh Saru with us this week we
have TJJJTJ. How are you doing?
You're. Doing great, thanks for having

(00:53):
me on again. Such a pleasure, always a
pleasure. I haven't actually had a chance
to catch up for a while, so it'sgood to good to hear your voice.
It's been a minute. And Jarrett.
Hello. Hello.
Hello projecting calm. Yeah, trying.
I had two weeks off work about two weeks ago and that got me

(01:16):
calm and then I went into work and they said we need this thing
done and it's was a lot of writing.
I see. But it was it was fun to be
given the the opportunity, but also like this is hard to think
about and quite draining. So we've had a long weekend this
weekend. So I'm getting my calm back and

(01:37):
I finished that the first draft of it all on Friday.
So now I can just go through allof the notes, which is much much
easier. Beautiful 2 So you had a two
week. What did you do with your two
week holiday? I painted and listened to audio
books I listened to. I think I hadn't finished the

(01:57):
storm. I had like 2 books and but 2 1/2
books to go. But I listened to all of them
for the end of it and their lastbooks like 55 hours long while I
painted miniatures. So I painted all of my ISS
Vanguard game which I've been playing with friends.

(02:18):
So that's all painted and right.So as we go through the
campaign, everything will be, like, all spiffy.
And then I had these cool modelsfrom this game, Title Blades,
which I wanted to paint, so I painted them up.
And then on one of the days, I had, like, a board game day.
And one of my friends from work loves Title Blaze.
He's like, I want to play it now.
It's painted. So we did.
And that was fun. And yeah, then I ran out of

(02:43):
undercoat, so I couldn't do any more, which was a bit
disappointing. But I still read lots of
audiobooks. Yeah.
I love this. I love this.
Yeah. I so appreciate people who will
curate a board game experience and like paint minis and things
like that. I don't personally have the
patience for it at this point inmy life, but yeah, I very much

(03:04):
appreciate people who are, well,we have a, a friend who
organizes Gloom Haven and Frost Haven.
We we've been playing once a week for the last, that's like
three years or something. And in the last year he started
to paint the minis and it's really enriched the the
experience. Yeah, I think I used to paint

(03:26):
when I was younger, like Blood Bowl and.
Yeah, same here. Same here.
Like Warhammer armies, but not really not in the way that my
brother did. I preferred Audi K, but I
preferred the little epic ones with the little tiny minis and
but they were harder to paint, but I used to paint stuff when I
was younger and I've just gottenout of it.
You know, you just find other hobbies or you you end up having

(03:53):
children and, and they take up time.
Turns out. But I just, I, I hadn't even, I
sort of had bought like lots of games, especially Awaken realms
games, and they have so many minis and they're quite nice.
And I don't know why I keep buying the minis, but I do.

(04:13):
But this one, my friends are sort of they want to play it and
I'm like, I've been playing it and I'm like, I'm going to reset
the game so we can play it together because I prefer to
play it multiplayer than solo. It wasn't that much fun solo.
And I was like, maybe, maybe I'll like paint the minis.
A friend of mine had got someoneto paint all his and I was like,
looks great. So I just bought a bunch of

(04:35):
speed paints online. I was like, I'll just try this.
I'll see if I can get back into it.
And I really enjoyed it. It was really meditative.
And so, you know, listen to an audio book and you're kind of
killing two beers with one stone.
It's for sure. It's a good way of getting that
chill vibe. And, and it's not like I'm not
like super like like golden demon or whatever it is.

(05:00):
I'm nothing like that. But, you know, with the speed
paints and it's a little bit like watercolor meets paint by
numbers on a 3D space, and it's kind of fun.
Yeah. So and you know, like you say,
once you've got like this awesome like painted set, it's
really fun to play with it. It's it is kind of, I don't know

(05:22):
why it elevates it, but it kind of does.
So yeah, it was definitely worthdoing.
And because I've enjoyed it so much, I've wanted to keep doing
it. Tell me what speed paint is
because I actually don't know. Right.
I think there's two different, so citadels have one as well,
but they don't call it speed paint, they call it something
else. But Army painted do speed paint.

(05:44):
It's basically got 3 pigments init and one of them is heavy and
one of them is lighter. And so when you it's kind of
like it's not like an ink which you would put or a Washington
that you would put over something and everything would
go dark into the grooves. It kind of just does it all in
one. So you've got a lot of colours
and you'll like paint around thespace that you want and the

(06:05):
heavy dark colours will go into the grooves.
It's best to do it on white so that you kind of get the lighter
stuff on top. You still end up doing some dry
brush. You still end up doing some
little wash work if you really want to pick out some lines.
But it helps you do a really fast, a like much, much faster

(06:26):
model. Like I like showed some people I
said I did this in like 30 minutes and because they they
stay wet for a while, you can kind of work with them as well.
So you can do some other cool effects, which I haven't really
got into. I know that some people really
like that. Like once you've kind of got the
paint on, you can start like picking out colors and adding in
little colors. I've mostly only got speed

(06:48):
paint, so I don't have like other colors to kind of do that
with. But I have found that sometimes
you can kind of with like there's lots of aliens and real
and weird plant flora in this Isis Vanguard game because it's
like, it's basically Star Trek meets Mass Effect as you're like
flying through this Galaxy exploring new worlds.

(07:11):
And so everything's weird. And you can use like with the
speed paints, you could do like one colour and then mix another
colour in and they kind of like blood together on some of these
models and, and it really flows together quite nicely.
Good fun. I love this.
TJ, have you ever really painted?

(07:32):
Yeah, similar to Jarrett, I played quite a bit of Warhammer
in my early formative years and it has shaped my interest later
in life for sure. Never I So The funny thing about
it is, I think, I think Jarrett,you were kind of saying this is
like, I would paint and collect,but I would rarely play.

(07:52):
Like it was just more of a collector's thing for me and
like, I liked reading the books and the lore behind it and just
that kind of like sitting down with friends and painting and
stuff was was mostly what we were doing.
I played some Blood Bowl, playedsome Warhammer for sure.

(08:14):
I recently had, so I'll be talking about my son today who's
19 and is playing in Modoc league with me.
And we were playing just board games with some friends
recently. And I have a buddy who loves
reading the backstories out loudof just like the most generic
euro board games to everybody to, you know, he's, he's having

(08:36):
fun with it, but you know, he's like, this really sets the stage
for what we're doing kind of thing.
But anyway, my my son referred to it as lore and I I had a
really good chuckle. I love it.
I like doing it too. Kind of like build the theme
right and the theme is good. Then sometimes it explains why

(08:58):
you're doing actions and gaps. Right, which is, you know, every
Martin Wallace game, right? Like like every, every rule
decision has a thematic reason. But anyway, my buddy, my buddy
would do it with, you know, the most generic trick taking game
or whatever because there's always some little story in
there. Always would always insist you

(09:20):
have to read those. Like Scout.
I don't know if you've ever any of you have played Scout.
It's actually a really clever little card game where every
card, there's one to 10, but every card has 2 numbers on it.
So there's every combination of numbers like A1 and A10.
And when you first get your handyou can rotate it one way or the
other. And so you're playing and you

(09:42):
have to play it that way up and you can only play cards that are
grouped together and you're trying to get rid of all of your
cards. But the theme for this game is
that you circus like ringmaster type people and you're putting,
you're scouting people for your show and then you're putting on
a show, right? So you'll, you'll on your turn,

(10:07):
if you can't play on the currentset of cards, you can scout one
of them into your hand and you can put that anywhere in your
hand. And then the other, the other
action you can do is to show a group of performers who are
better than the current performers.
And that's kind of the theme. But it's basically just a, a get
out first card game with some with a cool mechanic.
But there's actually a theme to it.

(10:30):
And I don't know if the theme helps tell you what you're doing
in the game, but it's funny thatthere is one, right?
I like it. Yeah.
Well, if you're a first time listener and you think that this
is a podcast about Marvel champions, you're wrong.
We're actually here to just talkabout other board games, so
settle in for a long 2 hour. It can be a long, long, It can

(10:55):
be a long show just talking about Marvel champions, even.
Right, right. I can talk about board games for
hours. Yes, known fact.
So yeah, we're going to, we're going to talk about Season 2 and
you know, you were both A-Team for last season and are are
back. Maybe we can start talking with

(11:20):
the draft about the draft a little bit before we really
start talking about this round because, you know, I haven't
really had a chance to debrief on on the draft.
So you know, you, you two were, what number were you on the
draft? We had 18 teams #7 #7 There you

(11:42):
are. And yeah, I don't know if you
want to just talk through a little bit kind of how the draft
went, what you were thinking. I know Jared likes to make these
multidimensional spreadsheets inpreparation.
I think draft #2 delivered again, like I just, I, I really

(12:02):
think the drafting is fun and, and not just the experience on
the day of the draft, but kind of prepping for the draft and
the, there's a lot of discussionand banter around various
villains and combinations and what cards you find in them and
how you can find a hero or a combination of heroes that does

(12:23):
something unique that maybe everybody else is not thinking
about. So, and I think it played out
really nicely in the, in the second season as well.
So I'm just, I'm fascinated by the draft component and it's
just so much fun. Yeah, I've been having a ton of
fun with. It's really exciting seeing the
picks coming into it feels like draft day of like more like

(12:46):
draft day of the NFL than draft day of fantasy league, to be
honest. It's like just, and I know some
people said, oh, it'd be cool tohave like a, a streamed
commentary on it. It probably would.
It would be kind of cool. I think it would be cool, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, because there was, Imean, we, we were on a call and

(13:10):
so we had a lot of commentary back and forth just between us
as like the pics are coming in. And that was fun.
You know, one that that stood out to us was the Spider Woman
pick, which was real late, like 16th, because Spider Woman.
You've figured out a way of getting Spider Woman and Adam

(13:31):
Warlock into this draft. And Spider Woman is a absolutely
fantastic character, probably one of the top tier characters
in the game because of the combos you can do with here.
But she went really late. And I think part of it was I
thought the the way that you solved it was like she's going
to have one aspect, so you pick the other and then you obviously

(13:53):
you could swap between your two aspect picks, but she's always
fixed into one. I think that's really cool and
that she was in protection as one of her best aspects, but
leadership is really strong for her.
So I think a lot of people kind of let her go and the people
that did pick her up were able to get her and then wrap around

(14:15):
and get leadership in the secondround, which is pretty strong.
And so that was one of the kind of like highlights of the first
couple of rounds for me. And just like seeing other
things go early was also pretty cool.
Interestingly, you know, it is tricky because most of the
people who might really engage with this would be are involved

(14:39):
still having somebody who can stream it now, now, now that you
know, Journeyman 2 has taken an interest, it might be reasonable
to, you know, if if he's not trying to join us for Season 3,
but still kind of interested in talking about it, you know, that
might be a good person to kind of bring in and try to do
something fun like that. Yeah, that would be really, that

(14:59):
would be really cool to see someanalysis like some, and I think
someone who's not in the league,right to just be giving kind of
their opinion of the picks and how they see it and and then
taking that and then seeing how it plays out in the rounds and
which which teams rise to the top.
Well, and, you know, not not to toot his horn too much, but, you
know, he's just, you know, a really thoughtful person who

(15:22):
really, really does look at the scenarios deeply and really kind
of would have a lot of insight to offer in terms of, you know,
how a person might be thinking if they made a certain pick.
I think so that that might be neat.
Well, we'll we'll we'll try to see if something like that can
can go down. Yeah.

(15:42):
So will me tell tell us about your team's draft strategy?
Magog. Yeah, we we really, really.
Thinking on yeah, hell yes we. We drafted around Magog.
We, we looked at the the four and just saw that that one was,

(16:03):
it seemed anyways, just on a glance.
We didn't play any practice games before we drafted, just
kind of thinking about them. But yeah, we, we highlighted
Magog as the hardest one out of the four.
And so we really drafted around that.
I think it was the hardest 1 to get the 20 points from, yes,
like last round, Yeah, last season we got 20 each round.

(16:25):
And the hardest one was the first one.
Again, I think because it's it had the most health and it was
the hardest to do in eight rounds.
But Magog was, I've played Magoga lot and a lot of expert Magog
and it's very difficult like unless you're like really,
really thinking about it to not lose to like he will flip his

(16:51):
side first. Most of the time I play it.
So trying to get that to not happen and then also trying to
get it to not flip is really, really difficult because he's
relentlessly attacking you. He's such a fun game like match.
I do like him as a, as a villain, but in this particular

(17:16):
scenario, he was, it was just really challenging to try and
get the, or to figure out how toget the 20 points.
We didn't but like spoilers, but, but that was like, he was
the, it was that kind of thing. It's like, how do you manage to
achieve this? What do we need?

(17:37):
And we kind of landed on the fact that, well, we'll probably
be able to get protection and weshould get a defensive hero.
Shadowcat was definitely the topof our list as a defensive hero.
And then looking at the rest of the games, one of the things
which kind of stood out was thatstatus wasn't going to be that

(17:59):
valuable. Like pretty much everyone has
steady. I think the only one is
Taskmaster is. And and I I tried to
disincentivize status a little bit with some of the scoring as
well. Yeah.
So that devalued a lot of other characters that are quite good
at status effects. So, yeah, when we got to the

(18:20):
draft, I mean, we had a few, we had a few like defending type
characters that we wanted to try, but Shadowkat was certainly
the the top of that list. So like, I think people were
kind of both a bit surprised andthen not shocked when we took

(18:42):
her the the 7th spot because everything before then isn't
defensive. They're all just strong.
Yeah. And I think the other thing
that's, I mean, without getting too much into the draft, the
other thing that's interesting about this round, these four

(19:04):
matches, and maybe it's just theheroes that we picked, but last
time we didn't change the decks.The decks that we ended up on,
we land landed on. We like think of them minorly,
like with little sideboard cardsbetween each of the four games,
but they worked so well, right? Whereas here we've already
changed decks from one match to another.

(19:24):
And then we, we're just looking at the Taskmaster and I'm like,
oh, we took two flipping characters.
We've taken 2 flipping characters.
That's not good like and so we haven't tested it yet, but I was
like, I think maybe this is a good idea for Shadowcat and it's
completely different to the other stuff we run.

(19:46):
So I, I really appreciate that, that it's kind of getting us to
think about the, the deck tinkering a little bit more.
And I think to the heroes we picked were really versatile in
aspects like Shadowcat and Ant Man, both can really play.
Any aspect successfully and can move protection between them.

(20:10):
That was another thing we were thinking about is getting
protection early and getting another hero who could run
protection if we wanted to to swap aspects, which we have done
from game one to game 2:00. We we Shadowcat ran Justice and
Ant Man ran protection and it worked out great.

(20:30):
So yeah, I think that was a big part of our our draft strategy
is some versatility to allow us to adapt to the rounds.
Do you think we've got our handsfull with Taskmaster just
because of the the desire to flip?
But you know. We'll see.
Yeah. I can tell you I definitely,
I've definitely lost to every single one of these scenarios

(20:53):
when I was set, you know, setting them up to figure out
what's going on. So you know, every every one of
them is definitely posing some challenges.
Yeah, we lost some the Magog scenario a few times as we're
figuring out decks for sure. And the decks we landed on, we
were, we were pretty confident in that all I think the even the

(21:16):
game before that, we killed him off.
I can't remember exactly what itwas, but it was in the villain
turn. So there was threat on the main
scheme, right? So that was like losing 2
points. So in the end we ended up with
the same kind of result. Was that when we did the actual
game? Although I will say we we

(21:37):
misplayed. We did in the second to last
turn and I don't know if we would have gotten a perfect
round, but we would have at least gotten one more point We.
Wouldn't have had a perfect round here.
We had a target acquired on the board and what did we draw?
It was. It stunned you, which meant that
you couldn't, so you defended it.
Couldn't powerful punch. That's what it was.

(21:58):
Powerful punch. Yeah, right.
Yeah. I mean, you could powerful punch
to get rid of the stun, which iswhat we did, but you couldn't
powerful punch to get rid of thestun, attack, defend and then
flip back. So.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, that it really snowed
that like that boost really snowballed into a couple of
different things that we could have avoided.

(22:20):
But, and it was it was pretty funny.
In the second game, we had a target acquired on the board and
in Tabletop Simulator, you know how you can scale the cards up
and make them really big so thatwe didn't forget that we had
target acquired. We made it massive on the board,
like put it right below the encounter deck just so we but we

(22:40):
ended up not using it. But it was there and we weren't.
All of our boost cards went on top of it.
Yeah, just to make sure. OK, I'm going to, I'm going to
follow your lead into talking about Magog.
So let me set up a little bit more about the Magog scenario
since we're we're kind of veering in that direction.
So the Magog scenario had Magog with the formidable faux

(23:04):
environment on the expert side. So this is the one that gives
the villain steady and there's an acceleration icon and it used
the Colossus and Rocket Nemesis sets, which have some tedious

(23:24):
minions and some attachments that go on on Magog.
So the the design was to, you know, try to make sure that
Magog can get pretty big. And then we're using for this
whole season, we're using the standard expert one star set
that I made-up, which is basically all unique cards by

(23:44):
mishmashing the standard an expert sets from 1:00 and 2:00.
So there's, you know, one, I was1 total annihilation and one
assault, for example, that sort of thing.
And then to make sure that everybody suffers a nice early
tempo hit, Juggernaut starts thegame engaged with the first

(24:05):
player and Blackjack Bazooka also starts the game attached to
Magog. And that thing costs three
mental resources to get rid of. So you have a nice, nice juicy
tempo hit. The scoring is just very, very
quickly. There's four, four points for
speed. You get all of them if you get
it within eight. Eight points for hero health,

(24:29):
four points for various main scheme and side scheme threat
stuff, two points for minions, and then two points which are
scenario specific, which are as we heard Jarrett talking about a
little bit earlier. You have the challengers and
champion environment cards and you get a point if you flip over

(24:49):
to the cheering side before Magog does.
And then you get another point if you finish the game with
before Magog ever flips over. So that that's that's the the
wrap up on that. OK, so let's hear a little bit
more about your your game. Sorry to interrupt.
I just kind of want to make surewe had those out.

(25:10):
No. And I like I have to give a lot
of props to you for coming up with the standard expert mixed
and counter set. Like I think that's brilliant.
I love how that has played out and it's added a lot of interest
to the because Jared and I are both big fans of Expert too.
We we tend to play known fact. Yeah, known fact.
We tend to play with that in in a lot of our games.

(25:32):
And in particular, cards like Slug it out and seek and destroy
and Ruination are just a lot of fun to have to play around to
just be thinking about where they are in the deck and how you
could be planning for it and stuff like that.
So personally, I've really enjoyed these games because it's
just felt really different from my typical Marvel champions

(25:55):
game. And also you've really got me
hooked on the nemesis sets beingthrown into into the encounter
deck. Like it's so fun to just mix it
up and grab something, you know,from a back of hero and could
really add some spice to the game.
So yeah, just a kudos to the to you for the ideas that you've
you've put in here. Yeah, thank you.
I, I'm, I'm curious as we get a little deeper into it, to hear

(26:17):
about the experiences of folks that have one of the heroes that
have their nemesis set in there.Oh, true.
Yeah. I don't think we do.
I don't think. So I don't think so.
But we saw actually, I mean, we saw White Queen a lot in he's in
Test. Games so far.

(26:37):
Now, 2 games that we have actually done, we've we've only
seen not the White Queen, we've seen Yellow Jacket, who is fine.
Yeah, he he doesn't have any problems.
He's fairly innocuous. I I know.
Grand scheme of things. The White Queen was like one of
the most insane. I would be worried about Josh if

(27:00):
he included White Queen. Like that's a different level of
sick. If you're putting White Queen
into an encounter deck, I mean. Yes, well, I mean they were all
chosen with quite a bit of intentionality around the
villain, so there was it was a bit of a bigger picture thing
than just trying to find the meanest thing to do.
I appreciate. That you know, there's

(27:21):
definitely opportunities just todo mean.
Things right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.
Now tell me how, how you 2 because I mean, like I said,
I'm, I'm quite intentional on making sure there's a bit of a
tempo hit right at the start because I think it makes for way
more interesting choices where you have to decide if you're

(27:42):
going to deal with that thing onthe board or try to build up how
and I did that last season too, right?
But maybe even more this season.How overall has that kind of
felt in terms of the gameplay? I think it's like you said, it's
forced some decision making, whereas I think your typical
game, you just sort of like sleepwalk through the first

(28:03):
turn. It's like, all right, I'm going
to start playing some setup cards and you know, I'm done
right? Whereas I think these setups
require you to really balance setup with dealing with
problems. And I think it's it's it's a
much more interesting. So I think in the example of
Juggernaut being on the board, and I think Jacinto or somebody
on the Discord said something about it, but we tended to put

(28:24):
Juggernaut on the person that wewere going to let stay in Alter
Ego turn one in, in our practicegames.
And I think we played it that way in our official game too,
just because he's only got a scheme of one and you don't have
to deal with him turn 1. Basically you just you just sit
on him. The other thing is because we
had Shadowcat, we didn't ever clear the bazooka.

(28:49):
We just did, sat there the wholegame.
Interesting. Yeah, we just leave it.
We did. I mean for for better or worse
though, like it it bit us sometimes.
Like it didn't always play out, but.
Yeah, I think. And it took us a while before we
landed on the right deck for Shadowkat, who could deal with
the problems mostly. And you know, that targeted quad

(29:13):
misplay, like it probably did come back to bite us, But the
the problem with it was, and, and I've even had like a bunch
of the the Ant man that enhancedawareness in the deck just in
case we wanted to clear it, but it was a big tempo hit when

(29:34):
you're really trying to deal with a lot of other problems
quite quickly. So we ended up leaving it and it
was like, if we get the chance, do we clear it?
But in the end, there's so many other things that you are trying
to do that and you if you can't get it on the first turn, we did
think about a deck with Shadow Cat where maybe her defence is

(29:55):
high enough and you use some other stuff where it's like,
yeah, you can not worry about. You can actually just do a basic
defend even from her solid side.But that didn't really pan out
either. So we just ended up going with
her ability of insanity and, andjust kind of trying to tank

(30:16):
everything and ensure that she could get back a lot using
clever things like the powerful punch ability to attack, then
flip back and and come back to solid so that she was always
defending from the right form and it still wasn't perfect.

(30:37):
Like, there's only so much you can do and he's throwing out
multiple attacks. And I think because we played it
enough, we got to the point where it's like, oh, we don't
need to worry as much about the attack from the challenger if
the challenger comes out becauseit's only adding one.
We can take a few of those, but we're probably going to be

(30:59):
losing the main scheme at one point.
So that's 4. So we kind of had to math out
some things and yeah. Joe, did you, did you 2
experience the same thing that we did where you know, once,
once you had accepted that you're the Champions environment
had flipped over to the next one, It just felt like you had

(31:22):
so much runway. Yeah, we kind of did accept
that. We didn't.
Like we got real close because we forgot that Target acquired
play. So what ended up happening is
Shadowcat got stunned, which we could have cancelled.
Shadowcat couldn't then use the powerful punch to defend.

(31:44):
We used it on another defence action anyway to just take a
couple of damage on her from a minion that was in play so that
she could clear the stun so thatwe could like otherwise she was
never going to get back. She was just going to not be
able to clear that stun and and do things.

(32:06):
So we had to clear the stun because otherwise it's too
difficult to get back to phased anyway.
And then which meant that I had to take a lot of damage on Ant
Man and we'd let the bazooka out.
I think we had one block, but then we had another thing that

(32:26):
came in and hit Ant Man. So I was down like quite low and
the counters were racking up. They'd got up to like 17, I
think maybe even 18. And we're like, we probably need
to win this, this round like we don't.
So I think it was a 10/7 win. Like we, we had more room to go
another round, but we needed to like finish it that round.

(32:49):
We managed to clear everything. And the only problem we had was
I've taken a lot of damage. So we had there was a scenario
and where we could flip to, I could flip to John, I could get
the two health back that I needed and deal the last damage
or something. Or yeah.

(33:10):
There was like we had like this way in which it kind of worked
out so that we could kind of getall of the damage in that we
needed and just get up to the halfway point.
But I couldn't get Ant man back up to three away from his full
health. That was that was too difficult.
But Shadowcat was able to flip down and and heal and get to
that same point. So we we lost the point there

(33:31):
and we lost the point because the the chapter champion
environment flipped. But it was it was fun.
We felt good about that. We missed one.
Yeah, it was, I felt good about the game.
Like we played a really good game apart from that one
mistake. But even that one mistake was
only going to save us probably the health point.

(33:52):
And and it was still like, yeah,that was pretty cool.
Like once we started getting thesense of the rhythm of the
match, I think we started enjoying it a lot more.
It was like we didn't want to play it again because we played
it about 6-6 times, I think. Yeah, same.
But it was, I think once we got it, it was like, Oh yeah, like

(34:15):
it's it's really fun. We did try and kill Juggernaut
pretty quickly, but we could like take the one threat and
then take a hit on Ant Man because Ant Man is pretty good
at healing. Yeah, so we didn't have to deal
with him super fast. The one thing we didn't like
with him is we didn't want him back in the deck either, right?

(34:38):
So that he was one of the he wasone of the problems later on.
In the game it was. Yeah, it was.
So we were trying out Tufts early on and then every time
like that would come through andPierce and be like, oh, tuft
didn't work. So we had this strategy where
Shadowcat would defend one, takethe other, hit on the Tuft and

(35:00):
stuff like that. Well, we need to be really
careful because the boosts had piercing or they slug it out,
which kill takes damage. So there was a whole lot of
things to worry about, which waswhy we were using targeted Quad.
But there's only a few. There's like 3 effects, four
once Juggernaut is in the deck. And sometimes they don't matter

(35:24):
and sometimes they really matter.
So it was, it was definitely an interesting, that little
challenge. Yeah, the is the Shadow Cat was
definitely a belt and suspenderstype of deck.
So we had, you know, the full kit of defense cards that you
used to seeing powerful punch counter punch, jump flip was

(35:44):
pretty key for keeping the main scheme down because it was, you
know, with it being to accelerate a player, you know,
you're adding five every turn. So there's a big, big number to
chip down. But then I think that the aha
moment was when we started adding perseverance to it
because she loves to flip. And so she yeah, you'd always be

(36:08):
carrying that that tough in the event that you did run out of
defense to keep her from taking damage on the attack.
So being able to store that tough or like store an armor
tough on the board was just thatthat parachute if you found
yourself in trouble with anotherattack.
And then I just, I was looking at the number of cards in the

(36:28):
encounter deck and it's like 23 total, but with the amount of
surge that it is in there, it's really like 20 cards.
And of the 20 cards, five of those cards are attack
activation cards. So the percent of drawing a
second or third attack, sorry, third or fourth attack in a

(36:49):
round is really high. So you kind of had to plan for
getting it if you're both in Hero, getting attacked twice and
then getting attacked again. In that moment when you flip
Magog, like you defeat Magog forthe first time, you get you both
get another encounter card. So that was like a yeah.
We tried to see if we could figure out the cadence of only

(37:10):
killing him once, but it was really challenging.
Like, yeah, we could one way or another, the the the events we
could sorry, the side scheme. Yeah, we, we could definitely
pull out the challenger one time.
The challenger was probably going to get pulled out one time
anyway, because there's not there's only two minions in the

(37:32):
deck and there's the planetary invasion.
So that was probably going to happen.
But that's that's just not enough.
And then you need the best way of doing it is to clear the the
things which are on the GOG, theattachments.
Like if you get Magog and the two attachments is a lot, but

(37:53):
you kind of almost need to get the, you need the get it to 10
to get the Challenger. And so it just didn't quite work
out. So we had.
To there's a real chicken and egg situation.
Yeah, yeah, If you can get, if you're lucky enough to get
defend the title and take no damage on that defend the title,

(38:15):
then you could get to the 10. But it was you couldn't bank on
that. Like it was just too difficult.
So I mean, we did play around with like a global logistics to
try and get that to happen. It just wasn't worth it.
And in the in the the Ant Man deck that we built for Justice
was very heavy basic setup with just a little bit of Justice

(38:38):
cards like like 1. Lay down the law.
It was just you had to lay down the law and a couple of a couple
of one way or another's. So it was, it was kind of like
the rest of it was just like basic set up just to try and
ensure that we had resources, wecould do things.
And between us we had like 4 ready to rumbles because they're

(38:59):
great for both characters. So you can kind of play it on
each other if you need to. Oh, that's such a nice, that's a
really nice one. I like that the something like
ready to rubble that you can spread out across both.
We didn't really use it that much in the in the blockbuster
match, though. It was and I think we had one,
but it was way more important than Magog.

(39:20):
You constantly needed to be ready or Shadowcake constantly
needed to be ready. Like because if she wasn't ready
and you didn't have some way of readying her and she was on
solid, she couldn't get back to phase without kind of going back
to alter ego. So that was if you had an attack
event, it was fine, but if you didn't have one and often you'd

(39:42):
run out of resources because thedeck's primarily about doing
stuff in the film phase. Yeah.
So we needed to have some solutions to make sure that if
she did have to do a basic defence, she could ready so that
she could get back to phased forthe next turn, because she needs
to start kind of everything in phased.

(40:04):
Yeah, obviously she's a really interesting character.
Very cool. Yeah.
I was thinking, you know, I don't know if I had any of the
specific matchups super in mind with our our actual drafting
strategy. So like I mentioned, I'm playing
with my my 19 year old son and he has been playing Marvel

(40:29):
Champions quite a bit more recently with me.
But, you know, he hasn't been playing for the whatever it is
five years it's been out. And so when we were looking at
the draft board and where we were at and all those sorts of
things, we were really looking at kind of what were some of the
higher power heroes that he was familiar with that would make

(40:50):
sense as kind of a first hero todraft.
So we ended up getting Storm, I think, you know, to the
discussion earlier, because status effects weren't going to
be as value. I think I might have weren't
going to be as valuable. I think I might have downgraded
spider woman a little bit, But it's also kind of not one of the
heroes that he necessarily sees as super powerful either.

(41:15):
And then once we were looking atall that and I was like, what?
But it looks like we can almost guarantee that we get
leadership. I was like, I think, I think we
can do a draft where I'm going to get Star Lord as the as the
second hero. And then all of a sudden it got
really exciting because I was like, this is just going to be a
very, you know, you play the powerful awesome hero that you

(41:39):
like and I'm going to play Star Lord and we're just going to
have the most fun, which which we honestly did.
You know, you TJ, you were talking about how many attacks
there are in that deck. You know, when you're playing
Star Lord, you, you can close todouble that sometimes.
Yeah, it was some of those rounds were unreal how big those

(42:03):
those those stacks were. And you know, it was really neat
even from a tempo perspective, right, Because Star Lord,
because there's an element gun that has piercing, we were able
to easily clear Juggernaut in the first turn every single game
because of how the deck was built.
I was also able to get rid of the bazooka.

(42:24):
So Star Lord, you know, usually would be able to get out an
ally, clear the bazooka, get ridof Juggernaut, but of course at
the cost of taking at least one encounter card, right and then
having to deal with the consequence of your decisions
every every single turn. But you know, our our experience

(42:44):
was was kind of so different from what we hear from a lot of
the other folks. And with, you know, between
storm and star Lord, closing outthe game in terms of damage was
almost trivial. You just needed to try to stay
alive long enough and not accumulate too many of the the
counters on the the champion environment and then finish it

(43:07):
out. So we're usually, you know,
finishing out on turn 4 or whatever it was, but we still
took so many attacks that those counters still built up super
fast. But it was a very, very
different experience. Star Lord scares me like I

(43:28):
because you can't play it conservatively if you're really
going to play and you got to go all in and just and get that
quick set up and take the bad cards.
But such a scary, such a scary proposition in this particular
season just based on the villains that I saw.
I props to you for for trying totake that on.

(43:50):
I when Star Lord first came out,I couldn't, I didn't get him.
I like, I tried, I'm like, ah, now this is just too risky for
me. And it took, took a particular
deck and I can't remember what it was, but I was like, oh, OK,
I'm getting it now. Right.
And then the web Warriors came out and I started putting web
warrior decks with them. Yes, I love them with web

(44:11):
warriors, especially the protection because you can kind
of have the web warriors kit, you can have a bit of a
repurposed kit and it all like works together.
But I've played in web Roy justice too and it's very fun.
So I don't know if you're going to throw in some web roars at
some point in the season. I, I wouldn't have probably
tried it on the, the early megawground, but yeah, they're,

(44:37):
they're, they're pretty cool. Yeah, the, I mean, TJ, the, the
big thing with Star Lord is the you have to learn to not feel
obligated to always have the gaspedal all the way down, right?

(44:59):
That, that you, you, you can pick your battles a little more
than it feels because the deck is really whispering in your ear
that you should be trying to do it all every single turn.
But you you kind of have to figure out how to restrain
yourself. Yeah, and you've also got like

(45:19):
A7 card hand to start off with. So you don't need to throw down.
Like you don't need to get an element gunned down straight
away because you don't need to be throwing out lots of damage
with his big attack event early.You can set up other things.
So it is definitely like a pick your battles like you almost

(45:44):
don't really want to be using his ability that much until you
have the helmet. And you know, you don't
necessarily want to be using theready effect like too often
until again, until you have the helmet.
That is, that is a strictly get you out of desperate situations
or finish the game card. Yeah, it's, but it can be
really, really fantastic if you're like, right, Right now I

(46:05):
want to get as many encounter cards as possible in front of me
because a, I've got my helmet and I can deal with them.
I've like set up my board. I can deal with situations or I
want to ramp heaps of damage through my big event or I need
to get rid of a lot of threat. You know, it's pretty valuable
in a, in a deck where you are using repurpose.
Obviously you're not going to have that opportunity here, but

(46:28):
you could use leadership OnStar Lord and a Blazer Glory Glory
turn is like amazing for that card.
So I can see that you might end up being Storm leadership most
of the time because she's quite strong in leadership.
But if you swap things around, there's some good opportunities
there. But yeah, I think the Star Lord

(46:49):
is like, it's one of those things that you kind of need to
learn. It's interesting because I like
you love Storm and and I can't get her and I've watched you
play and I'm like, yeah, that's amazing.
And I like just struggle every time with her.
Like she's a strong character, but I don't click with her.
But like Starwood, I Starwood I do click with.

(47:12):
It took me a while, but now I'vegot there that's.
What I love about this game, like I think that people are
tuned into certain heroes just because of the play style or
something about them that speaksto them.
It's fun. I do love the I love the text
that you you brought Joss, the Ready for Action.

(47:34):
I was thinking about that card alot for Magog that anyone who
had leadership would be bringingin Ready for Action Did it?
How did it play out? Oh, great.
I mean, we, you know, like I said, we did have to negotiate a
lot of attacks, obviously. And, you know, between, you
know, you were playing, you wereplaying a strategy where you're

(47:57):
trying to flip every turn and, you know, we were playing
justice and as to whatever degree we could, we were also
trying to do the same. But instead of having shadow
cap, being able to just kind of,you know, free tank those
attacks, we were trying to rely on ready for action and the
classes ally basically to to getus through those parts.

(48:20):
So yeah, it it worked. It worked quite well, honestly.
And you know, the the, the way the deck was built, I had Black
Panther as the only Avengers ally and then call for aid to be
able to fish out Black Panther and then Black Panther could
fish out ready for action and ways to recur Black Panther and

(48:42):
grab ready for action again. And because because Star Lord
can, you know, sink those, thoseextra resources if he needs to,
you know, if we needed a tough, usually we could get a tough, it
might have cost a lot, but we could usually do it.
It's a cool deck idea, I like that.

(49:04):
It was fun. It was super fun.
I, I mean, I have, I have no regrets.
I kind of came in, you know, I'mgoing to play with my son.
We're going to have lots of fun.I'm, you know, going to be
competitive, but I'm going to not be as focused on getting the
absolute top scorer as necessarily in the past because
I want to, you know, make sure that he gets the chance to
contribute as as a as an equal teammate.

(49:24):
And so why not have some real fun and just make it a Star Star
Lord season? Yeah, and it's great because
Black Panther, he can grab readyfor action, but then he can
transition to blaze of glory at the end.
That's great. I love it.
It I never ended up grabbing blaze of glory with black pants
actually. Well, part of it is like I

(49:44):
mentioned, I'm talking about four turn games.
So, you know, we were we were already usually closing it out
before I could have had the chance to do a bunch of set up
stuff because the the game is just putting so much Magog put
so much pressure on you with those counters.

(50:06):
What was your what? Turn Did you win your game?
Usually 4 almost every time. That's crazy.
Maybe even three one time, I don't remember.
I mean, we also lost a lot, but in our practice, in our practice
games. But yeah, 'cause you know, it
would, it would usually have come together by that point.

(50:27):
Yeah, 'cause with, with Star Lord, once you have a couple
pieces on the board, you you hitthat point where you're close to
the end of your deck and you've got a few of his cards in there
that get you encounter cards anddo your ready effects and all
those other things. And you're like, you're just
looking, there's 8 cards left and you know, there's a sliding

(50:49):
shot and you know, a couple other cards that you're like.
I think, I think we can just finish it now because because of
the amount of damage he can pumpout and then because storm again
can do so much damage and set you up to do damage, extra
damage with your your allies andeverything through.
I always forget what all the names of her her weather effects

(51:11):
are, but you know you you just even have more access to damage.
Storm is a pretty much a no set up character.
Like she's straight and like shehas some set up pieces, but
they're not they're not super important.
And then Star Lord has a bunch of set up pieces, but you kind

(51:33):
of pick and choose them based onthe deck as well.
Like you might never use leader of the guardians, or you might
always use leader of the guardians.
You might never need bad boy or you might want that multiple
times in a game. You.
Oh yeah. Bad boy was was huge for this
one. Yeah, I can see that.
And you'd almost want to get a bad boy down and then play a
build support and get it back again.

(51:54):
Yep. Agreed.
And then maybe play another billof support and get it back
again. Agreed.
But you probably didn't care about leader of the Guardians in
this match because the threat's not that much of a problem when
especially when you have a leadership and justice.
Well, we probably. Interestingly, Jared, we

(52:14):
actually ended up playing a Justice build that was more
about just getting, you know, Heroic intuition and using basic
activations to do most of our thwarting.
Yeah, I was looking on that. It was a very interesting deck.
And it just kind of went that way.
We just the the, you know, the justice events were just were

(52:36):
not the thing that it felt like we were trying to actually use.
So, you know, between Storm's Cape and that what leader of the
Guardians does for for Star Lord, we were just able to
control the threat mostly through those basic thwarts,
which was really fun. It was definitely a way that I
had not played as a Justice player.

(52:59):
Torrential rain is such a good card too.
I love this yes you know and I Ithink people complain about
storm only having one wart but she has three copies of
torrential rain and that card isbonkers.
Is 5 is 5 threat removal for twolike that's the efficiency there
is is through the roof. And and you usually have gotten

(53:20):
another two for just having goneover.
Because by cycling to by cyclingthe Hurricane, you it's actually
7, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So. Star Wars was pretty neat.
Pretty average unless it's really really strong.
Like it starts very average. Yeah.
And then it gets really, really good, yeah.

(53:42):
Yeah, well, we, we, you know, had the back door benefit of
actually losing our first official game, which meant that
I was able to start with the helmet in my starting hand,
which then just kind of turbocharged what you could do
with Star Lord. Because, you know, then every
single time you're looking at Star Lord's thwart card, you're

(54:02):
like, well, I could just take anencounter card and make this
thing actually more efficient. No problem.
Yeah, between us, we got to playwith the two best helmets in the
game. Yeah, that's actually true.
Because the the Ant Man's helmet's so, so important for
this. Yes, yes.
So we were both running a superpower training to make sure

(54:26):
we could get it out. Oh, and yeah, we even the second
game, it was so fun what we did with it.
Yeah, yeah, is. It too early to talk about that.
Yeah, well, we will check in on that a little bit later.
So let's I'm just going to go through real quick.

(54:47):
We had for the top three finishers for for this first
round. We had Jacinto and Steven
getting the only perfect score, Kakita, Jamie and the Ugly
Knight getting 19 and then a four way tie for 3rd with all of

(55:08):
us with 18 points. So you 2 so amazingly bad.
Me and Josh rue Junior and pink pony girl 12 all all got 18 and
two of the teams actually took two attempts.
So got 19 points, but took a onepoint penalty for doing another
second attempt. So that's, that's kind of the,

(55:29):
and then after that we got some sixteens and we got all the way
down to about 8. So, you know, pretty wide
diversity in scores. And you know, we when you looked
at some of the teams, especiallythe aspects that they had, it
was really obvious this Magog round was just going to be a
very, very tough go. Yeah.

(55:50):
And I think going back to the draft, that's why you saw
protection go way up, I think isbecause of this match up.
Like people knew that they had to have something, some answer
for it. I think the other interesting
thing with the draft was that there was you the in the first
season you evened out like the the aspects, but here you like

(56:10):
just went all in on it's going to be a random.
I think you may be well, I'll have less pool, but everything
else is completely random. And so with like 12 justice
available or 13 even 1414 justice available, people just
ignored it and we all got it at the end.
I would have preferred aggression to Justice
personally, or even Paul, but weended up with justice because we

(56:32):
were so low in the last round. And that's just what happened.
Whereas in the first season, justice and leadership were the
first things to just go. So I wonder what would happen if
there's like 14 leadership, is that gonna wait or people still
grab it early? Yeah, I think that's that.
That was a really fun part of the draft, I think.

(56:55):
Yeah, agreed. Fully, Fully agreed.
I was looking at this because I did mention I liked the the
spider woman pick where you could grab the leadership.
I I don't know that they'll actually change these decks to
be honest. The spider woman protection
leadership is a classic. Captain Marvel is is in queen of

(57:15):
this game kind of deck. They don't have a suitor, which
I thought was interesting, but they do have a call for backup.
So they're, they're, I guess they're hoping to get either
Captain Marvel or call for backup to get her out early.
I mean, I could see it. I could see it going really
wrong if you just get a really crap draw, but I think the odds

(57:40):
are probably in your favor to get it out decently early.
Right. And then another thing that
protection also offered for thismatchup was that you were able
to get use the Nightcrawler ally, which in terms of ways to
not take counters from Magog is is one of the better ways to do

(58:02):
it. It does kind of chew up your
your tempo like crazy though. Yeah, we struggle with the
Nightcaller ally because Shadowkit was too busy playing
everything else. Yeah, and I do love the
Nightcrawler ally with Utopia asa general strategy, but it just

(58:27):
wasn't fast enough against Magogand we we lean way more heavily
into just every kind of defence event that we could get our
hands on that was going to help.But yeah, Nightcrawler is pretty
awesome. You've got to be careful about
that. Slug it out though.
Don't like if you're not playing, yeah, if you've got

(58:51):
Nightcrawler on One Health, thenit ain't going to work.
And if you've got Nightcrawler on, he's defending because
you're not even an X-Men. It's definitely, and it's on One
Health, it's definitely not going to work.
It's going to get real bad. So yeah, slug it out is the

(59:13):
thing to watch out for. And that and I remember I think
last season we had a really similar situation where like
actually I'm going to use this card to heal a Nightcrawler so
that he doesn't die right? And you slug it out did come
out. So it's those things you've got

(59:35):
to think about I. Want to talk for a second about
the Kita Jamie ugly night decks,please?
I'm so I just just as a quick. Just as a quick check in.
SO I mean maybe set, maybe set it up sorry, say like what the
heroes and aspects were. Yeah, so, and I don't know who

(59:57):
played who, but they had Justiceand Gambit and their aspects
were, I'm sorry, Cable and Gambit, the aspects were justice
and aggression and they they paired Remy up with aggression
and obviously Cable played justice and.

(01:00:19):
Just looking at the the gambit deck, like it's super clear he
never left alter ego or or if hedid, it was like at the end to
close it out. But he's got 3 copies of
meditation, basically all grey cards and three red cards.
Psyloc, Sunfire and Wolverine thing else in here is a grey

(01:00:41):
card. And so, yeah, I think, I think
he I think part of their strategy is just like, who cares
about the threat? We can manage it because cable
that's what he does and you know, flip to close the game
out. So it clearly it worked.
They got 19 points. It's kind of gambit what he does

(01:01:02):
as well from alter ego too, right?
Like he's. Really.
Yeah. He's so good at that when he can
set up the boost right, So you can have knowledge of the boost
going into the. Yeah, it's, I like this a lot.
It's very cool. I think the other.
Go ahead. Oh, right.
The other interesting thing withGambit, because I in the solo
league challenge against Venom that we just had, I tried out

(01:01:25):
Gambit and Gambit's ability was terrible because most of the
boosts are the zeros and boost effects.
And it was like, it was just awful.
And I'm like, and half the time I was discarding the zero
because of like, I don't want that thing to show up.
And but that the Dick that Magogwas packing was definitely rife

(01:01:48):
with with threes and fours. There's a four, there's a few
trees, a lot of twos. Yeah, it was deadly.
So his ability was going to be really, really strong and clear
a lot of threats. So I can see the value in that
gamut. 'S going to have gamut's going
to have a good time like pretty much throughout this, these

(01:02:10):
scenarios, I think it's going tohave a good time.
I do find I found the interesting thing with Gambit is
that he is unlike what we were just talking about with Star
Lord and Storm. He takes a while to spool up
because he doesn't get the counters that quickly.
So you can't just roll into a first turn with a really strong

(01:02:31):
event with the charge cards. You have to actually build up
that kinetic energy. And once he's like on 4 plus
counters, he's he's going strong.
But before then and you can afford to spend 3 because you
recharged them fast enough. But when he's on zero and and
going up to one and then maybe he plays a molecule acceleration
against the two, he's still not going fast enough.

(01:02:54):
So if you are spending your entire time in Alter Ego with
him and you never go to Hero ever, then you're probably never
going to get much out of any of your attack cards.
They're just going to be so low value.
Yeah, very cool. And then the the cable deck in

(01:03:17):
this case was kind of similar towhat I was describing where
there weren't any for that we did was there weren't any
specific justice events in it, right.
I mean, we know, we know Cable has, well, he has three actually
has three copies of it, but his his thwart event is super
powerful once you're actually rolling because it's three

(01:03:40):
threat plus one for each each scheme in the victory display.
I'm surprised to not see one wayor another.
I feel like there were some great one way or another targets
in this one with the vendetta wasn't too bad.
Pump up the crowd if you could clear it.
Same turn was pretty easy. And yeah.
Always. I mean, I guess the challenge

(01:04:02):
with cable is you're kind of constantly trying to put the
player side schemes on the boardand clear them.
So pushing out more is that is not always that that
straightforward. I think there's the with the
player side schemes, you get them down and once you've got it
going, the mind scan can clear for a lot and then you've got

(01:04:23):
those 3 overwatches which are probably the thing which is your
just this event. Yeah, yeah.
And you drop you can just drop them on the main scheme and then
you ping the main scheme for sixand clear a player side scheme
is a pretty. It was pretty good.
Because it was going out like 5 every turn.

(01:04:44):
So you almost, yeah, you can kind of just once you've got an
acceleration counter and that happens also pretty quickly.
Then it goes up 6A turn. And if you can clear 6, you can
clear a player side scheme. Yeah, pretty valuable.
Cable's so fun he dropped down to 4th this time, but he is

(01:05:09):
definitely one of the stronger characters in the game.
Those top slots in the draft arereally tough to be in.
It's really hard to make a choice in like the top three.
Like what Here you're going to pick.
Yeah, the, yeah, it's interesting.
I've been trying to think about that a little bit.

(01:05:30):
You know, in terms of, I think alot of people see it a bit as a
bit of a curse to end up gettingan early pick.
I don't want to be. I don't want to be in the number
one slot. You wait so long for your second
pick. It's it's pretty.
Yeah, I think it's it's pretty punishing.
I don't like having such a late pick in the last round.

(01:05:56):
That's fair. Yeah, here it probably didn't
matter because you knew you wereprobably getting justice.
Yeah, you're you're making a bunch of choices and then
feeling like the choices are completely out of your hand for
the end. Yeah, I.

(01:06:19):
Wonder if there's a different way to balance that for future.
Yeah. Well, have you, have you given
that any thought, Joss? Well, I think, I mean, for now,
I don't think I'm going to leaveSnake just because it is.
Any other active decision is going to introduce, you know,

(01:06:40):
new inequities somewhere else that are just going to feel
potentially even worse. So it's kind of at the moment,
it's kind of a nature of the beast sort of thing.
But yeah, it would be curious totry to figure out how to do do
something a little bit differentat some point maybe.
I was thinking about like if youput maybe the top person,

(01:07:00):
whoever finished first or the top three have to go in those
first three slots and then everybody's random after that,
that would be kind of funny. That's the.
That's the punishment. Yeah, that's pretty funny.
The. Oh my gosh.
Yeah, because first pick's great, but last pick is is not.
And unlike a play in a fantasy football draft, you're drafting

(01:07:26):
like, well beyond your team. So by the time you get to like
the 17th pick, you're just, you know, you're hopefully getting
something that you might be ableto trade if you need to.
It doesn't matter. You might never play them.
It kind of just like, And there's always probably enough
players that it's OK. Yeah.
Whereas here, like, everything that you're drafting, you have

(01:07:48):
to play. So there's no there's no side
board. There's no extra bonus thing.
You don't get to be like, oh, you have a a fifth round where
you can pick one of these particular heroes and you'll
have to use the once and the theone time.

(01:08:08):
Well, I can tell you, sorry, Jared, I'll tell you I, I do
have some alternate set ups to what we've been doing kind of
coming up in the somewhat near future for, for things.
So there's going to be some different styles of things in
terms of what you're going to have to consider in your draft,
even though if it might still ultimately be a snake.

(01:08:30):
Did you think 18 was too many or?
Well, I yeah, I mean, I think I'm going to make the fairly
reasonable assumption that we'llprobably continue to take on
more teams as we move forward. So I'm not.
I'm going to probably have to slice it up into divisions.
I know how to splice it up. Do you?

(01:08:55):
Everyone who's playing two handed is in one and is playing
two players in another. Interesting.
And then you get a 10 and an 8 here and I think people will
still want to play two handed and that's cool.
I mean, that's just I play a lotof two handed at home and I just

(01:09:15):
feel like that's a good way of breaking it up, right.
You probably end up with pretty even.
It won't be perfect. Like there's probably more more
people might be playing together, but you you probably
get a good split. Probably worth seeing what it's
like when you people obviously register for the next round.
But that that would have been one way of doing it here.
But I definitely want to see what an 18 draft was like.

(01:09:40):
So that was. Exciting.
I I don't want to get bigger than this for a single draft.
I don't think so. Yeah, I'll have to think about
some of those splittings. But yeah, I don't know.
It's kind of a fun future, future problem.

(01:10:02):
I know you 2 are looking at somemore decks.
Did did either of you have any other decks from this past round
that you wanted to shout out? Yeah, I had one that I'm trying
to see who it was so, so amazingly bad.
Oh yeah. First of all, shout out to So
amazingly Bad. I know you said this in the cast

(01:10:23):
with Journeyman, but thank you so much for putting that stuff
together. It has made it very easy to set
up each of these scenarios. And also the custom artwork on
the Total Annihilation card. Come on, this is amazing.
So yeah, so back to the deck theon so so amazingly bad had magic

(01:10:45):
and phoenix with protection and justice and they ran it Justice,
magic and protection Phoenix. And I think the magic deck is
pretty pretty typical to what you would see from a justice
deck. You got Wolfsbane, Cosmo.
I really like the predictable ploy a lot in that deck.
I think that's a really smart, smart play for this setup

(01:11:08):
because you can and play it for one, which just feels really
good. So I like that deck a lot, but I
got to give a shout out to the very underplayed and I think
misunderstood card that is serveand protect.
And I'm I'm actually really positive on serve and protect

(01:11:28):
right now. I think it has a very small
window in which it's good, but Ithink that window is really good
in this particular scenario. So serve and protect the card is
it's an alliance card, It's one from the the recent wave, and it
says when any amount of threat would be placed on the main
scheme, exhaust an X Force character and an X-Men X-Men

(01:11:49):
character, prevent that threat and give each of those
characters a tough status card. As we talked about in this
scenario, because of the two perplayer threat at the beginning
and the formidable foes, you're adding five threat right at the
beginning. So if you can cancel that with
serve and protect and hand out two Tufts.
Yeah, amazing. In this in this scenario, that's
amazing. Yeah, super good.

(01:12:11):
So if I had to nominate Rocket Raccoon, Most Clever Tech, it's
that one. I really like that play here.
Yeah, and it would have been neat if they they were in the
situation where their their heroes were actually the two

(01:12:33):
because they both had X-Men heroes.
But if they had 1X Force and oneX-Men hero, that would be really
neat, because then you know thatthat thing is almost always
live. Always online.
Yeah, yeah, always. Yeah.
Super. Cool 3X force characters across
the the Allies. Yeah, between Wolfsbane, Siren

(01:12:55):
and Warpath, yeah. Yeah, it would have almost loved
to have seen A and mid team justto keep Wolfsbane alive.
I. Can see that.
But maybe it doesn't matter thatmuch because there's no digging
deeps and the Magic Dick, which just makes me sad.

(01:13:22):
I sure I certainly got to take advantage of digging deep.
Digging deep is so good in the Magic Dick.
Magic is just so fun in general.Well.
Yeah, you, you 2, you two reallygot intimately familiar.
We, I mean, I've already, I've played her a lot and I've played

(01:13:42):
her in a few different aspects and I've played a couple of
different leadership decks. But yeah, once we landed on a
protection deck for her, we justkind of stayed in it.
And I had played her in protection before, but I really
liked the the repurpose with her.
It helped in that set up that wecould pass clarity of purpose to

(01:14:09):
her and really make use of the energy barriers and take them
down as you need to. And then she could just
repurpose whenever she felt likeit instead of kind of waiting
for a big turn, which I thought was really, really strong.
I think repurposed too often. You want to kind of wait and

(01:14:30):
then kind of do like two or three at once and have a but or
do one and have a bunch of otherready effects.
But she has the ready effect built in.
You can use Utopia for another one as well.
So she kind of like cycles readys pretty easily, which I
really like. I don't, I don't know if we've

(01:14:52):
had the discussion about repurposed decks, but you know,
when, when I've spoken about repurpose publicly, I mean, I
really love repurpose, but I thereason I like it is because I
like decks that have kind of access to solutions when you
need them. And so I really love that about
repurpose where when you need a bunch of sword or you need a

(01:15:17):
bunch of attack in just a short amount of time, right, you don't
have to set up the big repurposeturn.
It's just that you, you kind of can bring those solutions in
short order. And then like you're saying,
someone like Magic who has extrareadies means you can take
advantage of just doing a singlerepurpose and really solve your
problems. And we could use like the three

(01:15:39):
energy barriers with her just toand have that clarity of purpose
just to kind of set them up. They're sitting there when you
need them and you don't need to to repurpose them all the time.
But to your point, that's exactly what happened in our Ant
Man game against Blockbuster is he had repurposed in the debt.

(01:16:02):
He had two of them, I think not heaps.
And we had a turn where it was resource, resource, resource and
a repurpose. And we hit the helmet out and
we're like, well, we need to do something.
We actually probably are not in a great state if we don't like
get rid of most of the threat. So we, we repurposed the helmet

(01:16:25):
and we got the helmet back and then late in the game we
repurposed it again. And we never repurp.
We never even you never even played the energy barrier.
I think you also repurposed the.Bullets, I think it was.
Yeah. So you played the Risk Allnance,
repurposed the helmet, repurposed the Risk Allnance on

(01:16:46):
the kind of the final turn. But yeah, it was like we needed
something right then. So we we just kind of like
sacrificed one of our key piecesknowing that we'd get it back
because we hadn't played either of our superpower trainings yet.
Yeah. I love that.
I mean, we, we've been discussing kind of online a

(01:17:06):
little bit of that just right there.
The most rewarding I think that Marvel Champions is, is when you
get thrown a curveball such thatyour main plan is just not the
plan that you're actually going to be able to execute.
And you have to. You have to find these other
ways to be successful within your deck.
I think that's what's been fun about these scenarios that you

(01:17:28):
put together as well. Because they're already trying
to make your plan A not work very well.
Yeah, Taskmaster is going to be super interesting because none
of us have. Obviously you've played it, but
none of us have experienced Taskmaster, which isn't
Taskmaster. You don't get to do anything
fun, you only get to do the bad stuff.

(01:17:48):
So I feel like he's going to be a ramped up challenge of I don't
know how much I'm going to enjoyit, but that's OK.
I mean, those allies are are great, like so great, but we
don't get them, no. But that's actually a classic
Journeyman 2 set up is he loves playing taskmaster without the

(01:18:11):
allies and the sides games just boost up because actually
taskmaster is really hard. If you take that stuff out and
you put something else in, pretty fun.
Yeah, I almost wish that those those allies and the captured
for Hydras were a modular set. Yes, yes, yeah, totally.
Yeah, I mean, like you can stillplay them as a modular set.

(01:18:34):
It's like just put them anywhereif you really want to.
But I kind of, I think now they probably would have been a
modular set. Oh, we agreed.
But when they first made them, it was kind of tied to Taskmasks
and but yeah, I kind of almost like if, oh, you can use this,
you should use this as a modularset in this particular scenario.

(01:18:57):
But with Taskmaster, actually you don't need them.
You could actually, they don't have to be required.
They could have only been required for the campaign and
then it would have been sick. Agree.
And again, you've made it, you've done it anyway.
It's like, here's Taskmaster thehard way.
Have fun, OK? Another person I'm keeping my

(01:19:20):
eye on right now is Lexicon withthe Adam Adam Warlock Racket
Rock Raccoon combination. Right.
Also, you know your experience of playing lots of rocket.
Love Rocket, Big fan actually, and, and Jarrett knows this.
I hadn't really played Rocket much before we played that
round, so it was a little bit ofa leap of faith.
I mean, I was out of pocket whenwe did that first draft.

(01:19:43):
And so I just kind of let Jarrett run with it.
I was like, yeah, I mean, whatever you think, you you
know, this game in and out. And so he kind of, he checked in
with me about it before he made the Rocket pick was like, OK,
sure. Is it a rocket or Deadpool?
Well, actually I really like Deadpool too.
Deadpool would have been we had leadership.
Deadpool would have been a absolute bonkers pick.

(01:20:03):
Yeah, now that I've played more Deadpool, because Deadpool has
the piercing. Deadpool could have played an
insane sidekick deck, but the the Rocket deck really did work
for us. Yeah, it would have worked
either way, I think, but neitherof those picks would have been
bad. They would have really supported
Magic. I think at first though, we were

(01:20:26):
thinking Magic's going to be playing leadership and Rocket's
going to be playing protection, but it turned out that we went
the other way. And so Deadpool would have also
been a fantastic pick. But yeah, you you'd played a
little bit of Magic, I'd played probably a bit more Magic, I'd
played a lot of Rocket. You hadn't played much Rocket.
And it ended up that I played Magic the whole time.

(01:20:48):
I mean, we switched them around a lot during testing, but then
you found a Rocket deck that youreally enjoyed and we just ended
up rolling with it. And it was it's a very cool
Rocket deck is it just draws so many cars, spends a lot of time
in Alter Ego. So you get a lot of the bonuses
from repurposing, not repurposing, tinkering, his

(01:21:12):
tick. You get a lot of extra cards.
You can play Moon Girl a lot. You've got later on in the game
you're getting Moon Girl and you're getting lots out of White
Tiger, Nick Fury. All of these characters are
giving you like everything you need so that when you kind of go
to hero, you can kind of do a bunch of stuff and come back.
So you kind of always have so many choices that and you you

(01:21:38):
run through the deck so quickly that everything is like coming
back to you to anchor it again, to use it again.
Yeah, really, really clever way of like kind of using the allies
to hone in on rockets ads that you want to use.
Very fun. Lexicon's deck pretty similar,

(01:22:00):
but he's he's got a spin on it for sure.
Ready for Action shows up, whichis an obvious pick for this
round. Yeah, I'm going to.
I'm going to guess that card disappears with future rounds.
I don't think people are going to play it to the degree that
we're seeing it in this round. No.
But he kind of went a little bitof a different route.
He's got Guardians of the Galaxy, the support and is

(01:22:23):
playing some inspired and reinforced suits, so I like this
so. For folks who forget, Guardians
of the Galaxy is the Guardians team card and is the one that
has response after you plan upgrade on an ally draw card.
So you're really trying to work on your allies.
He has Drax in here, which is you know, I just a way that I

(01:22:46):
love to push damage is in the Drax basic ally he is.
He is, I mean. He might be the most efficient
damage in the game, right? Like.
If you're talking about villain damage he is the most efficient
at in the game. Yeah, it's, it's unreal.
And then this. Is 3:00 to 12:00.
Yeah. Yeah.

(01:23:08):
And then the Adam Warlock deck, I just, I love being able to
throw everything you love from all the aspects into a single
deck and, and playing it. So he's running all the
expensive outleys with summoningspell, you know, gold balls and
Psylocke and Wolverine and X-23 and Cable.

(01:23:28):
Lots of cool stuff in here. Speaking of Guardians of the
Galaxy team, Cart I in my pursuit to play all of the
terrible sidekick Dicks. One of them was.
One of them is Black Panther with Cheri, and Cheri has got

(01:23:52):
one of those effects that when she comes into play, she gives
you something. So yeah, she want to play her a
lot, but well, I didn't do that.Instead I played A2 handed game
where and I think I was playing with Nebula, but it had to be a
guardian and I gave honorary guardian to Black Panther so he
could play more honorary guardians.

(01:24:15):
And it was a Dick that was basedon Cherie and as a sidekick and
Yondu and I stacked them to the nines so everyone had to be
guardians because I wanted the team up card for Black Panther.
And it was a loosely based off the what if, what if Black
Panther was the leader of the Guardians of the Galaxy episode.

(01:24:38):
And it was so fun. It I mean, it definitely needed
to be like have a bit of set up,like you had to get the the
honorary guardian down onto Black Panther so that you could
get the sometimes it didn't all come together immediately, but
it still came together in enoughtime to I think I played through

(01:24:59):
a campaign. I can't remember which campaign
that's fun, but it was just, it was really good and and they,
they both of them were just likethey had like, I don't know, 5
plus things on them and they're just like doing damage or thwart
as they need to. Yeah, it was.
It was a lot of fun. Beauty.

(01:25:21):
I think we're probably at a goodspot to try to wrap up, maybe
get less thoughts out of each ofyou.
TJ, any, any final thoughts? Any anything else you want to
shout out or anything else? No, I think I'm good.
Yeah, I think, I think that I'm excited to see the league grow

(01:25:42):
in numbers from Season 1 to Season 2.
You know, I try to encourage anyone like I play with people
in person on Thursdays. I'm somewhat active in the the
various discords and I'm always trying to encourage people to
come join us in the league because there's a lot of fun to
be had. So yeah, I'm I'm hoping there's
more people that will join in the fun and that they bring a

(01:26:06):
strong gift game. To the draft.
Important. I think it's the most important
aspect actually of the whole thing.
It's just how strong is your gift game?
Yeah, yes, agreed. How about you, dread?
Yeah, not too much more to say like looking forward to the last

(01:26:26):
couple of challenges. I really have have enjoyed the
way Magog certainly stretched the way that you play the game
and Blockbuster, we flipped the deck building and we're looking
at changing how we're building the decks again for Taskmaster.
And then Magneto is always a pretty challenging here, a

(01:26:48):
villain to fight hero villain. So yeah, I think you've done a a
really nice job of like making it hard but enjoyable this
season. So great.
Well, thank you. Thank you for the the lovely
final compliment and thanks bothfor for actually joining this

(01:27:10):
week. It was awesome to catch up with
both of you. And thank you, listeners, for
joining us on the Road to Nowhere.