March 15, 2025 • 60 mins
Welcome to Road to Knowhere, a Marvel Champions LCG podcast.
This episode's guest is Jarratt. It is the first in a series of conversations about the MODOK League Season 03 draft: preparation for the draft, drafting strategy, and hero matchups against the four scenarios. Please go listen to Episode 55---or visit the league website linked below---for a more detailed overview of the season.
MODOK Season 03 League website: https://modokleague.wordpress.com/modok-league-season-03-big-bads-season/
MODOK League Discord server: https://discord.gg/6b4zBfchhA
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:08):
Hey friendos, welcome to the Road to Nowhere, a Marvel
Champions LCG podcast. Today we're talking about the
Modoc League season 3 draft. Modoc League is a Marvel
Champions organization designed only for couples.
Modoc it is a two hero team league where people can play
with a partner or two handed on their own.
(00:30):
This season is played with a modified version of expert using
standard three with the twist that an extra pursued counter is
put on pursued by the past at the start of each villain phase.
So we have 4 challenges this season, Ultron with Under Attack
and Infinity Gauntlet, Strife with Hope Summers, Personal
(00:50):
Nightmare and an Acronauts. This is a Con of Heroes
challenge from last year. Red Skull with Hydro patrol,
State of Emergency and Brothers Grimm Mojo with Black Tom
Cassidy, Super Strength flight and telepathy.
And this season features 2 divisions, A10 team real time
(01:11):
division that drafted live and anine team turn based division
that drafted asynchronously over2 days.
Each team drafted against the other teams to pick 4 heroes,
one from each of four different groups.
Leadership was banned. And if you want more details on
the season, I recorded episode 55 as a preview to this.
(01:34):
You can go listen to that, get alittle bit more on the details.
I'm your host, Josh Saru, and it's time to take you to my
conversation with Jared. Jared, how are you doing?
I'm. Doing well.
It's early morning over here forme.
Yeah, yeah, it's, you know, early afternoon on a work day
for me. Somehow my Fridays just are a
(01:57):
little generous. So I have I have time to sneak
in a Marvel Champions chat. So the the plan is we're going
to talk a little bit about your overall experience with the
draft. So you were one of the teams
that was in the real time draft.So this was kind of the way
we've been running the drafts lots before and there was 10
(02:17):
teams all together. So yeah, I don't know.
You want to tell us a little bitabout preparation, what you're
thinking during the draft, any anything that really stood out?
Yeah, well, preparation similar to the last two drafts, they
have like a little spreadsheet and it's grown quite nicely
(02:40):
through the the Modoc league to get more and more information.
So I have to do less each time because the information is
already there and it kind of tracks like how good we think
each character is in the four, the five different aspects.
It's got a lot of things like isthis character good at defense,
(03:02):
status control, piercing setup and support, ranged economy,
aerial retaliate. And we'll also add it in things
like the Nemesis here, we kind of looked at each four of the
the matches to see who we thought was a good match up
against the particular villain. And it kind of gives you an
(03:24):
overall number. And then you can just kind of,
we also do like our preferred heroes.
So we kind of don't choose people we're not going to want
to play. And then it's all adjustable
like per season. Like if we don't think piercing
is super relevant, then we'll drop the value of that for the
(03:44):
season leadership, just put a 0 on it so that it didn't count as
something that you were tracking.
And then here we just had to like look at each of the pods
once we knew the pods and sort of get a ranking based on what
we thought. And sometimes we might adjust
the rankings so. You're building you're building
(04:05):
actual scores for each hero then.
Yeah, yeah. OK.
So for reference, the top scoring hero for me for or for
us for this round was Psylocke. And we could have taken here,
but the draft strategy because of the like board divisions made
(04:28):
it that there was one thing where because we were picking
early, we didn't want to pick that pull last because there was
some dire, well, what we thoughtwas dire, but actually they both
ended up getting picked. And it shocks me.
(04:48):
So in full or Division, I don't know which division it was, but
the division that had I called it two, it's two.
It had Valkyrie in Phoenix, yes.And it shocked me that they got
picked like they are two of the absolute worst nemesis to to
have. And this season you will see
(05:10):
your nemesis, Yes. And even some of the heroes that
we're picked now I'm like, oh, this nemesis is not OK.
So Hawkeye's nemesis like the nemesis is fine, but he brings
in two deadly shots which just do three damage to you.
And so you have the minute his nemesis comes into play, you
need to be really careful about your health.
It's like it's just. Interesting like that was that
(05:33):
was what happened with us last season is that we had storm and
then so you get the knife fightsin and you know.
Yeah. It's it's three or more damage.
Yeah. And so even like we've started
like dropping face to pass from certain characters, like in
tasting, because it's like actually, I tried face to pass
(05:56):
with Domino and it's like it forces you back to alter ego
because you have to get rid of this stupid attachment that
comes in with Topaz. It's like, Oh my God.
So it's really interesting what how the Nemesis and the their
sets can affect this draft. So, so let me let me just return
(06:17):
to this. You had Psylocke as kind of your
top squirt hero, but but in Group 4, just for for those that
are listening right, that had Ant Man, Deadpool, Hulk, Magic
Nightcrawler, Psylocke, Quicksilver, Rocket Spider,
Scarlet Witch, Vision, So other other heroes you would have been
happy to get if you didn't get Psylocke.
But then you looked at Group 2 where you ended up taking X-23,
(06:42):
which we'll talk about in a SEC.But you looked at some of the
other stuff and that said, you know, if we get stuck picking
this glass, it's really going tosuck.
Are we taking it late? Yeah.
So we would have been picking from the bottom if we picked
this last. Chances are we're picking from
the bottom 3 of this or even thebottom 2 this particular pool.
(07:04):
And while there's probably 3 or 4 decent, but the top five is
OK, but not as highly ranked as some of our other groups.
And so we just were like, well, X-23 is very strong, very strong
(07:25):
in the Ultron and Redscale matchups especially, which are
probably 2 of the harder ones. And so we, you know, X-23 was
gone. We probably, we weren't sure
what we were going to do. We had a bit of discussion about
this. Do we still take someone from
this pool like Ironhart or like if X-23 was picked first because
(07:49):
we had the second pick? Or do we sacrifice this pool and
get someone like Sylac? I was keen on that because I'm
really enjoying Sylac right now,but I also think Sylac has an
amazing match against absolutelyeveryone.
And, and I think I've suggested some strategies for some people
(08:10):
who did get Sylac for how they can deal with like, oh, you
could do this with Mojo and you could do this with like Ultron.
And there's lots of really interesting strategies for her.
I the first time I played her I wasn't like super sold but the
more I've been playing her I'm like ha ha this character is so
good. Yeah, I adore her.
(08:32):
Yeah, don't be shocked if I bring multiple silot Dicks to
Connor Heroes, because I just got my Dice Throne X-Men Dice
Throne playmats and it's a beautiful Psylocke playmat that
I might wanna bring with me anyway.
(08:53):
We didn't take Psylocke. Yeah.
And unfortunately, we might havehad a chance at taking Psylocke,
but the one of our drafters ended up not being able to make
it. So the bot picked Psylocke,
rightly so, just before we could, which was a shame.
Yeah, But the strategy was like,we'll go for X-23 first if she's
(09:16):
available. We'll look at the we'll look at
the other pools after that. We felt like the both pool one
and pool four were probably the strongest top to bottom.
We but pull one did get drafted quite heavily from before it got
(09:44):
to us. So we were picking from the
bottom too, which was unfortunate.
I do, I do feel that the the draft, the way that this
particular snake draft worked with the pools, probably it gave
a bit of an advantage to the people at the end of the draft
rather than at the start, which was maybe similar to the other
(10:06):
drafts as well. But interesting how you have to
strategize around that. So we maybe might have been,
it's hard to say which one you should leave to last.
So we kind of left pool one, especially because about the
time we could have picked from pool one, a lot of the best
stuff was gone and most of the rest of it was like low.
(10:31):
So when we got our like next twopicks which were pretty close
together, we were able to pick out Domino who was top about
pool 30. That's awesome.
Yeah. And also one of the kind of top
picks for us like Domino was a as a higher pick than higher
value, I think than X-23 and Spider who surprisingly, I don't
(10:56):
know why she's ranked quite low because she's amazing, but it's
just that she doesn't really do a lot of the like she doesn't
really have retaliate or aerial.She doesn't do range.
She kind of takes doesn't reallyhelp set up or support anyone.
(11:17):
She has no piercing. She does have some status
control. No defence is OK, but she's not
slightly going to run a perfect defence deck with her.
So yeah, I don't know why she ranks low.
I might need to like have a havea rejig with some of the things
with her here, but yeah, like. She ranks slow on your on your
(11:38):
score. On my board, yeah, but she's
actually, we both rank her quitehighly and we both were keen to
have her, but she's still like in that pool.
It was like silent magic, Deadpool, Ant Man, Rocket.
We're all better than Spider andScarlet Witch like these these
heroes are amazing. So this pool, like, looked
great, yes. But yeah, we kind of thought,
(12:02):
well, Spider's gonna be really, really good, so we'll grab here
as well, and we'll leave pull one to last.
And then, yeah, we ended up withthe choice of Hawkeye or Four
there. And, well, Four has a pretty
awful nemesis, so we went with Hawkeye, Yeah.
What I'm curious about is, you know, each of these heroes that
(12:23):
you have where where you see their strengths in terms of how
they line up the actual matchupsthat we have.
Yeah, it's interesting. This season has been like
probably a lot more testing. I'm always want like a can we
have like push the, the round like, yeah, like I just kind of
(12:45):
like that first round like is due soon.
It's like, oh, and I almost wantto be able to like just do a
round, like not that round, likejust a round.
Yeah, because you kind of end uphaving to test almost all of
(13:05):
them beforehand. Agreed.
Because you want to figure out what match ups you like and then
you've got like 4 possible aspects for every hero and then
every combination of heroes. We probably only use Hawkeye
(13:26):
once maybe. Oh, that's exciting.
But but then it's like who do weuse three times?
Is it Spyder? Is it X-23?
Is it Domino? So yeah, those are all.
And then where do we use Hawkeye?
So we actually tried Hawkeye quite a lot on Ultron and we he
(13:49):
just couldn't get it done, even though he has probably the best
status control and the ability to and.
The AOE, yeah. Yeah, and the AOE.
We've built a couple of pretty interesting aggression decks,
though the last, they're probably our best game together
against Ultron. Didn't use an aggression deck
but bring it 1 by 1 and then there's like multiple allies
(14:13):
that can do AOE. So Domino probably has the best
version of that deck because shealso has Diamondback.
But yeah, Richter does AOE against one player's drones and.
(14:36):
Yeah, this store, but we weren'tusing Thorcas, was a bit
expensive to get in. It's one of the.
Yeah, it's Dust. Yeah, Dust does AOE against
everyone, which is pretty strong.
(14:57):
So she's not as good once you'vegone to level 2 drones and
Ultron 3, unless you have some kind of a way of like pumping up
her attack. But all of those are like quite
strong and yet like our best kind of version.
(15:18):
I think the best thing that we've had was like a protection
spider and AX23 Justice. We tried to do the bring it
strategy with Spire, but it didn't really work well enough
because you don't, you're not drawing enough cards at each
turn to like make sure that you get a bring it in hand to then
(15:42):
be able to go wild. So, so there was one turn where
I had, I don't know, like 8 drones in front of me.
It's like, yeah, I'll it's fine.I can soak the drone.
I can soak the drones and but then you don't get bring it
because you're only drawing 3 cards.
So it didn't really work as wellwith her as it does with some of
the other heroes that draw 5. But it's a pretty fun strategy.
(16:05):
It's not a deck that'll work against anyone else.
And so you we go, you go throughthat process of like, well, hey,
what's a deck that's good for this with a hero like every deck
is kind of different. You don't play like the same
deck, you know, against these these villains and they're all
different enough and they present different challenges
(16:29):
like you're you're not going to play a one way or another deck
against redscale, but you can doa lot of like when a side scheme
is defeated things. So you kind of you ignore the
the tempo like that you get fromone way or another, but you get
the other bonuses. So it's like a justice deck is
pretty strong against redscale. But if you want like a tempo
(16:50):
justice deck, then who do you play that against?
Ultron has very bad sized humans.
You don't really want to pull them out except for the one that
like puts thread on for every drone.
You want to pull that out when there's no drones, you don't
want the the villain to pull that out on you because then
suddenly it's got 10 thread on it.
So there's interesting choices and all of that, but every deck
(17:12):
is kind of different. The first season we didn't
change our decks. We like sideboarded a couple of
cards. The second season we changed our
decks a little bit, flip betweenthem.
There was some like Magneto where we just was like, let's
like do the stupid plan. So we kind of but the heroes
were the same. But here it's like you almost
(17:35):
like every match is like a totally different thing and you
don't even like trying to figureout who you're going to put
against them is the the tricky part.
How do you handle all of the threat that Redscale puts down?
Ultron puts down a lot of threatas well.
Mojo, you want to kind of hold him at Bay.
You don't want him to drain too many cards.
(17:55):
Mojo's probably the easiest because he has the easiest
scoring. I think all you have to do is
defeat him before you get like 2deck passes and you can slow him
down to be able to do that. He does have a lot of health,
but I don't think that's how. Like, you don't have to worry
about anything else other than that.
(18:16):
And even if you do go the other path, you don't have to worry
about the main scheme, which is nice.
So he kind of has the easiest scoring of all of them.
Strife is the only match we haven't actually tested yet,
which is probably dangerous. I know I don't really want to
(18:36):
have X-23 against Strife becauseStrife slows her down a lot.
Domino and and Spider are probably going to be best
against here, but that's up against him.
But yeah, Ultron and Redsko are definitely probably the two
challenges, the big challenges. Right, well, the having having a
(18:59):
low hand size, but Stillwell resourced hero is really good
against strength, right. So that's where Spider is good.
And you know, Stylock was kind of one of the early things I
picked out as, oh, that's probably a great hero against
Strife. Yeah, yeah.
I mean, like like I said, Salik was good against pretty much
(19:19):
everyone. So in in the Mojo match, what I
liked about her was she could stay in alter ego, set up the
and keep recycling the psychic misdirection or not.
It's not misdirection. I can't remember what it is.
The justice version of that cardwhile setting up like a really
(19:43):
strong justice base with their six hand slides.
She's not using her, she's usingher normal upgrades to just keep
cycling the psychic cards back in.
She can keep him confused if sheneeds to by getting Professor X.
She can and but she can actuallyjust redirect his threat into
minor threat like every turn. That's almost.
(20:06):
Manipulation. Second manipulation is the card,
yeah. And so she doesn't need to go
the hero, which means that as long as you've got someone
dealing damage, you're going much slower through the deck
because you're not draining like4 cards every turn.
Yep. And then she can deal with like,
(20:26):
just keep that threat down just off those strategies.
And there's like, quite a lot ofdifferent ways that she can do
it. And I thought that was like,
really, really strong. And yeah, as you say, Strife,
she's kind of just a natural forfighting Strife because of her
low hand size. And then she's got piercing, so
(20:50):
red scale has got a lot of tough.
I think I probably wouldn't haveused her against Ultron because
those other three matchups were her strongest.
Yeah, but having said that, she's very good at status
effects. So if you're going against
(21:11):
Ultron, you probably do a aggression with drop kicks and
because she can easily get to three physicals so you can keep
him stunned, and then she has all the abilities to do confuses
all day long. And Ultron is quite susceptible
to status in this game, whereas the other Mojo's not, which is
(21:34):
like, well, we don't worry aboutstatus, we just try and like
turn him against himself. The other thing that you could
do against Ultron is a protection deck where you make
Ultron attack the drones with psychic misdirection, which is
really fun. But it's even more fun when you
get out your nemesis and then you psychically misdirect your
nemesis against the villain and attack for like 10 damage.
(21:57):
That's amazing because she gets like plus one for every single
mental you have on the board. Yeah, yeah.
Did I say Solok was fun? You said Solok was fun, yeah.
Yeah. But you took X 23.
Yeah, well X-23 is also pretty fun.
(22:19):
Agreed. It's the the the X Force
characters. I'm not huge on the X-Men
characters to be honest. The X Force characters though,
like all of them. Angel's probably my lowest
ranked of them, and he's still pretty good.
Are amazing. Yeah.
They're like, really, really good.
(22:41):
The X-Men characters, My. I guess my beef with them is,
quite honestly, Beak and Triage.Like, I don't know why those two
characters are grey, but they kind of make every X-Men deck
look a bit samey, right? Yeah.
And so they have like, some coolthings, but they're all very,
(23:02):
they're not as versatile as theywould have hoped.
Yeah. Like a lot of the characters
that I like are versatile and have really interesting deep
building Hawks. And so the X-Men are kind of
just like, don't enjoy them as much as I'd hoped, which is a
shame. Well, they're, you know, all the
(23:23):
product of A1 Designer. Yeah, that's right.
And the X force is the product of another one who's still
there. Yeah, yeah.
Looking at these shield characters or the I'm not the
Shield wave and the the four characters that have been
spoiled, I mean, how exciting are all four, four of them?
They look really fun. Yeah.
(23:46):
So yeah, I think like the the wehaven't really made firm
decisions about who's fighting who yet.
It's definitely tricky and a lotof testing has happened and what
do you need to use where you know?
We hoped that Hawko would be good against Ultron because of
the status and the the AOE, but it's just not working.
(24:10):
We tried them against Redscale with a Justice Stick, which
works pretty well, but we figured that we needed more
thought and trying to find how to do things fast and maybe not
sixteenths fast, but any time that you can kill a villain in
like less than eight or nine turns, but if you're getting up
(24:31):
to 12 turns, you're letting themdo so much more to you.
So Redscale is like every side scheme.
You don't want to see any of those side schemes again.
So if you're getting past the like the seven or eight turn
mark, then it's like you have togo through it all over again.
There's nothing nice in there. You took out all the nice stuff
(24:53):
and I just left all the hard stuff, and Ultron's a bit the
same. Like the longer let Ultron go,
the the harder he becomes, the faster you can get Ultron to
Stage 3. You're almost in a better
position, but it's difficult to try and get the tempo to get him
there. It's interesting you say that
(25:15):
because we, I think we've only played the Ultron match once so
far and we actually got to stage3 pretty quick and then we
really stalled out actually. Right, because you can't damage
them all these drones. Yeah, we just just kind of the
way everything was set up, it was just, yeah, it was, I guess
(25:38):
it was easy to push that initialdamage and get through and deal
with all the Singleton 11 healthdrones.
But once they were up to two, itwas much less trivial.
Yeah, yeah, you when you get to stage 3, you're most don't want
to take the drones. You want to be able to deal with
the threat. Yeah.
Yeah, the and, and I did and I have found like with say Spider,
(26:05):
we've tried a protection deck which uses, you know, change of
Fortune and it's got Spider UK and Spider UK and Change of
Fortune don't work together. But early on, Change of Fortune
and energy barriers are really good for like dealing with
(26:26):
drones. And then later on, Spider UK and
the hangar Bay are really good with dealing with drones.
So once you get to the second phase, you're not really getting
the change of Fortune bonuses anymore, but you can deal with
the two drones that come out because Spider UK could just
take them both out. But you almost don't want to
(26:47):
spend that long in any of these phases like you do.
You want to start getting your damage on.
So finding where that damage comes from has been the
trickiest part. Think our best yeah, our best
round was still like it was lessit was like 11 or 12 turns.
I have done a round with Domino and and with so the domino using
(27:12):
that weird aggression thing thatI was talking about with the
bring its and one by ones and a spider deck with protection that
did it in seven. But I do think everything kind
of came together then like Change of Fortune came early and
if you like the last time we played Change of Fortune didn't
(27:32):
come out. But it's not bad in the X-23
because you can kind of throw iton here as well.
X-23's got the retaliate yeah, but for in general I would say
that X-23 has piercings so probably is required against
Redscale and X-23 has the retaliate so and kind of the
(27:56):
overkill potential so it's probably useful against Ultron.
X stream 3 usually does everything low value so not
great against Strife and Mojo. Anyone is probably going to work
there as long as you can have someone who is probably delaying
(28:17):
the like staying an alter ego more often.
So characters that flip more or stay in alter ego and could deal
with a threat are probably the ones to to stick with.
Domino is just in general a strong character.
The range is good against Redscale.
She's probably one that will have to put up against Strife,
(28:42):
and I've found her good against Ultron, but we probably won't be
using her there. Spider is, yeah.
I mean, Spider's just good, but you have to.
I think it's tricky figuring outwhich aspects to use.
Like I think Spider's got an amazing justice build, but that
(29:05):
justice build isn't best againstred scale.
So we're because you really wantto get the tempo from one way or
another with spiders. So I don't know where we put
that justice build at the moment.
We put in the protection build against Ultron, but I found it
was pretty strong against Mojo 2.
So where do you use the protection build, which is one
of his strongest? Can she run an aggression build?
(29:27):
Do we need to run 3? Obviously there's always pool in
the the back pocket. And I did try a domino pool
deck, which was really fun. And then, yeah, Hawkeye.
Like, if we're only gonna use them once, where's that gonna
be? What's his best aspect?
I mean, he has a lot of, he has good aspects, but we found that
protection's too slow, certainlyagainst Ultron.
(29:48):
Everything was kind of just too slow with him against Ultron.
We just couldn't ramp him up fast enough.
He had, he's just like, oh, my health is a big problem
constantly. Yeah.
And he wasn't dealing enough damage and he wasn't dealing
with enough threat. So he just, he didn't have
(30:10):
enough tempo to fight Ultron. Even when we had things like the
the Bring It deck didn't work with him.
Weirdly. We thought it might, but it just
didn't. Yeah.
So it's, it's actually worked really well with Domino and I we
might not run it, but it was a cool idea.
(30:31):
So yeah, that's kind of where we're at.
We haven't like made any firm decisions yet and the, the, the
clock is ticking. I think the closest we've got is
probably, it is probably X-23 and Spider versus Ultron and we
need to do a couple more tests against Redskill to see who it's
going to be there. And then the last two, we'll
just have to pick with who who we've got left and and what
(30:52):
we're allowed to do. But yeah, because you have to
change aspect for every hero. Yeah, making a new deck for
every hero. So there's it is considerably
more tasting for this, Yeah. There's a lot more overhead.
Yeah, you, you do make a good point.
I hadn't really considered that extra overhead when I was
setting the time, so I might loop back to the community and
(31:13):
see if they want to change some of these deadlines a bit.
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I'm not, I
wouldn't complain because we definitely don't get as much
testing time as as you know, some people who, but not
(31:34):
everyone can play Marvel Champions all the time.
So. Yeah, the the, the teams that
live with their partner. Yeah, yeah, that'd be fun.
Yeah. Finding a partner that like
loved Marvel Champions, why do anything else?
No, yeah, my my daughter used toplay with me, but she hasn't
(31:59):
been playing as many games with me recently, so.
Yeah, there's ebbs and flows. I had that with Chester Junior
as well. Yeah.
So what about your draft then when you know similar sort of
questions, What was your strategy going into it?
Yeah, we, so I mean we did a farless detailed prep in part
(32:23):
because this the other draft wasa asynchronous draft, which
meant you could really just evaluate the current board state
and think about things. But similar to you, we had one
of the groups just felt like onewhere pretty much anything that
was in there we would have been been really happy with.
(32:48):
So that was for us. I think Group 4 that was Cable,
Magic, Nova, Quicksilver, RocketSpider, Ham, Miles, Vision,
Wolverine X 23. Yeah.
What? That's so good.
Yeah, well, so we. Didn't get picked.
(33:09):
Quicksilver. That, that makes sense.
He's probably my lowest rank of those, but he's good in the
against Ultron, surely. Yes, yes, yeah.
So we, we were looking at that and thinking to ourselves, OK,
well, we can, we can stall on Group 4 because it's just really
not a lot of urgency. We, you know, recognize some of
(33:31):
the things, you know, I took my foot way off the gas in terms of
usually I make status effects much less valuable on purpose.
And in this specific one, I tried to make it so that every
single match up had had some strategies that you could
exploit a little bit. So status effects are quite a
bit more viable than usual, for example.
(33:55):
And you know, kind of like you that, you know, Josh or Junior
and I both have heroes we like to play and you know, ones that
we consider strong, but also ones that we like to play and,
and balancing all those things. So we, you know, we had the 5th
pick, so we were right in the middle of our pack because there
(34:16):
was nine people in ours and it went in front of us.
Cable Black Panther, Angel magicWe we actually quite liked Angel
for a lot of these match ups, inpart because any, any you know,
he's really good where you want burst threat removal and burst
damage. And so that's always really
(34:37):
nice. But we we ended up taking Doctor
Strange, who was who was on the board and it felt really weird
because, you know, Captain Marvel was there and I and Silac
was also in that batch as well. And then we also had storm in
(34:58):
the last the last one. So we weren't going to, you
know, similar to probably your team, you weren't trying to pick
heroes that you already just picked in, in recent ones.
I would have 100% picked magic again.
Yeah. Definitely probably Rocket, but
not definitely not early yeah, Imean magic was gone by the time
(35:23):
the she was gone straight away like you just she's a top five
hero as she's gonna go probably really early most of the time.
So yeah, that was unlikely that we were going to get here unless
we picked her first. But yeah, I would definitely
play here. Like she's a kind of all day,
(35:44):
everyday hero for me. Yeah, I.
Hear you. Domino's like that for me as
well. Yeah, yeah, both, both TJJ and I
kind of feel that way about Domino, yeah.
So the So yeah, we ended up getting Doctor Strange first and
then by the time it came back around to us, we, you know, lots
(36:05):
of things had gone. But there there started being,
you know, some Wolverine got taken out of Group 4 and we were
just looking at it. Nobody else had gotten taken out
of Group 4. And so even though that was the
group, we were happy to oh, sorry, there was other earlier
(36:25):
on there was others. So Cable Magic and Spider Miles
and then Wolverine had been taken out of Group 4 so that it
was down almost to half, I guessat that point, but X-23 was
still there. So we decided to not try to
stall on on Group 4 and just grab X-23 because it seemed way
(36:46):
too good to be true. And you know, the the strengths
that you highlighted for X-23, you know, we also observed.
And then there's an interesting thing, because you know, despite
the fact that her all her stuff does get really expensive with
Strife, her synergy with Hope isreally good.
Yeah, that's true. Because she can get her her
(37:08):
stats up so nice and high. So we haven't tried it out yet,
but we we do have her earmarked as a potential hero against
hope, despite the you know, you play some sort of more expensive
build or something and, and, andsee if you can just really
leverage getting her stats way up.
But we haven't tried it out yet.So I don't know if it's how
viable it is and then could havecame to round 3 and Ant Man, who
(37:42):
is also somebody else that we wequite liked.
Ant Man's great for Ultron and also because he when he has his
what is giant size strength whenhe flips up to big, that's a +2
for the round. So he actually synergizes quite
well with Strife as well or withhope for for strife.
(38:08):
So we and we, you know, Ant man plays well in every aspect as
well. So we also had Ant man, you
know, reasonably high and. I don't.
Think too many things got taken out of that group by the time it
got to us, but you know, it was Ant Man when there was maybe 4
of of the heroes gone, 3 or 4 ofthe heroes gone.
So we, we, we snapped that up. We were pretty excited.
(38:33):
Yeah, MMM will always be a high ranked hero on our board because
even though he doesn't do a lot of the extra things aspect wise,
he's like a four across the board.
Like he plays so well in every aspect and so that ranks him
really high. And then as you mentioned
previously, you know, you reallydid have to consider it a
(38:55):
Nemesis set because I put some acceleration on Pursuit by the
Past in this one. So, you know, Ant Man is a
pretty friendly character in terms of dealing with the
Nemesis set. It's not not especially scary.
Doctor Strange is also really not especially scary.
(39:19):
And then by the time it came to Round 4 in Group 1, the heroes
that were left were Hawkeye, Iceman, Drax and Miss Marvel,
which was shocking to me that Miss Marvel was still in there.
I, I don't even know how powerful I think she is.
I just absolutely adore playing her.
(39:40):
So I was just, I was really excited to see Miss Marvel in
there. She's great in Justice and
there's lots of scenarios here where you want to have lots.
And Drax is also interesting though, because again, there's
some pretty good potential synergy with Hope because he can
get his he can get his attacks up nice and high, so.
(40:01):
Yeah, and he has that low hand size as well.
So you get strife, you get strife over and it's like, oh,
I've got a five hand size now. But again, his stuff is kind of
cheap. Yes.
So not ideal, but probably OK. Yeah, that was the push and
pull. Exactly.
(40:21):
And Drax would only have one scenario that we would
realistically want to play him in.
And you know, with, with Miss Marvel, realistically we could
picture playing her and up to three of the of the scenarios.
So then we're we're in the challenging spot where we
(40:43):
actually like all four of our heroes quite a bit.
I actually, I think you're probably sleeping on Drex in the
Mojo because Drex wants to go toAlter, go to Hero and stay there
and Mojo doesn't hit that hard. Yeah.
That is very true. I will take these hits, I'll
take these hits, I'll take thesehits.
Then it's like right, cool. Now I can just heal them and I'm
(41:06):
going to I'm just going to wail on you.
I'm just going to bring you downas fast as possible and you're
because I've got big damage and I'll just do this all day and my
other friend can either stay in alter ego or like flip back to
alter ego and like deal with thethreat and and dress could go.
But again, you know, you've got a choice between.
(41:30):
Well, I know he's good against this particular match and this
particular match, but miss Marvel could be valuable
anywhere. You know, against the Ultron,
she could just be playing a protection sidestep deck, like
just take no damage and just like wipe out drones, like for
(41:51):
like the first part of that game.
And yeah, against any of the ones where like threat is a big
problem, she can just like, remove the threat so quick.
Yeah, I think she's a she. She is actually really powerful.
It's not that you like playing here, she just seems really
strong. I do love playing her though.
(42:12):
Yeah. She also defined her charming.
I just find her a charming character in general.
Yeah, yeah, Lillian and I watched the Marvel's movie again
last night and she just like, it's so fun in that movie.
But yeah, she's the her alter ego like side awesome.
(42:33):
It's just like, it's so good because she's almost the hero.
You want to give it to alter Egoand and go go wild and which.
Yeah. And so.
So she's going to be good on that Mojo match where you might
want to flip back and forward quite a bit, Yeah.
Well, that's the thing. That's the the interesting
(42:54):
challenge with Drax though, right?
Is, you know, as you say, he wants to stay up and and Mojo
doesn't hit very hard, but at the same time to slow down the
cards from Mojo. Having two heroes that are both
really, really comfortable or even excited to flip to Alter
Ego is also spectacular. Yeah.
So I think you can definitely play a strategy where one hero
(43:17):
just stays in Alter Ego early tokind of slow it down.
But yeah, you'd have to test it.And you're not, obviously.
I mean, you probably had the chance to be like, oh, I didn't
have to do this for 24 hours, soI could test Drax right now and
see if we like him against Mojo.The draft went surprisingly
(43:38):
fast. It did, which was nice I think.
I was happy I I thought it couldtake over a week but it was done
in 2 days. Yeah, I think people were
excited to draft, but also yeah,yeah, yeah, yeah, you might.
We had good fun. I think you might almost just be
(43:58):
better off doing async drafts ingeneral.
The live draft is fun, but it might be easier for people to do
that because there's certainly people who have, we only had one
bot one I guess this time. But yeah, it's more it's more
fun when everyone gets to pick their own stuff.
(44:21):
Yes, agreed. I think because I knew I really
wanted to have multiple divisions because I had so many
heroes, I really needed to splitit up.
I thought giving people the choice worked, worked really
well. And, you know, we may see that
people just end up deciding thatasynchronous is their preferred,
especially based on how fast we saw it.
(44:42):
It actually went yeah. Now, I don't know how many one
like 2 handed versus couples youhave this season.
It's what, half and half? It is half and half.
Yeah. I thought that was the other way
of splitting it up. But is a is a is one way.
But it is definitely nice to have about 10 Max in a draft, I
(45:03):
think. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You've got two things like 7 years.
Yeah. Well, yeah, I know we're pretty
excited. Yeah, I, I do think that yeah,
that that Doctor Strange pick isinteresting because you did give
up both Captain Marvel and Silacto go for Strange and his
(45:29):
interestingly, his probably his one of his strongest matchups
status wise would be Ultron, which is also probably his worst
matchup because he's not great against the drones.
But if you can find someone thatcan help him, yeah, it'd be
interesting to see how many times you use Strange in the
(45:51):
with your other heroes. Like maybe you just use them
once and. It's probably not going to be 3.
Yeah. But yeah, Joshua Junior was
pretty, pretty excited to, to bring in Strange and and yeah,
with the like I said, with the, with the status effects, it was
(46:12):
kind of recognised that he's he's definitely got some
advantages in this one. But but as as you do point out
the he's crap at dealing with drones.
Yeah, I mean, you probably couldmake him not crap at dealing
with drones though, because if you like just to get go back to
(46:34):
the bring it 1 by 1 strategy, you just like use three of each
of those cards and then suddenlythat was strange.
There's even more cards in hand.Like can like just wipe out two
drones easy and cyclist Dick so quick.
There's probably doing this a lot.
(46:54):
And yeah, there's the there's atleast 2, if not three.
He can afford to play for Thor. So you've got like 3 allies that
can deal with all the drones is another thing as well.
So yeah, so an aggression and throw in some more status.
(47:17):
He's probably pretty good at drop kicking because he already
has a wild. So when he doesn't have his
rings up he can he can do a dropkick.
So you can keep Ultron like stand as well.
So I think an aggression Strangeis probably very strong against
(47:39):
Ultron and probably deals with the weakness.
The other way would be a protection one where you just
use the energy barriers. Yeah, actually don't know if I
like it as much because you do have to kind of get everything
like there's too many combos, but it's OK.
(47:59):
Yeah. So there's there's ways of
strange dealing with the problemthrough the aspect, which I
think is is like his strength isthat actually he plays pretty
well in any aspect because the aspect could be irrelevant or it
could be important because his cards are really good.
But if you need the aspect to beimportant, you can make sure the
(48:23):
aspect is important, Yeah. Yeah, we we tried out the one
the one match up we did play. We played aggression, Ant man
and protection Strange against Ultron.
How'd that go? Good, because Ant Man was really
good at just kind of dealing with all the drones.
(48:44):
Yeah, until he gets to the second phase, right.
And then, well, that's where. We that's where we stalled out.
So that's where we're rethinkingexactly how we want to do it.
But boy, the first part of it sure felt like a breeze.
Yeah, so you've got Miss Marvel,Ant Man, Strange, and who was
your X-23? Yeah, yeah, the X-23 has the
(49:06):
overkill, which is not great in the second phase either.
Agreed, but it's quite good early.
She's quite good at dealing withdrones just because Honey Badger
can attack them. Yeah.
At least early on. And if you put her in aggression
(49:28):
then you can also. Honey Badger can attack her the
whole time. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We found that the, I guess with our heroes that a Justice X 23
is probably the strongest against Ultron because the
threat can get out of control. Yeah.
(49:49):
What maybe maybe before we go, I'll, I'll have a quick check in
with you because I think, you know, our conversation we're
having and then my own experience in, in doing some
preparations, having access to these 4 heroes and all these
options. I mean, obviously it is creating
a lot of overhead, but I'm really enjoying exploring all
(50:12):
these different paths that I I can take to actually try to
defeat the villains. I don't know how.
How does this version of the draft feel like it worked for
you? Yeah.
I think the only thing that I didn't that I felt like the
draft, the weakness of the draft, was that they felt like
(50:34):
there was an advantage in the even flow to being near the end
of a draft as opposed to being at the front.
So being able to pick from the three or four best characters
was less of an advantage in thisdraft, and having to pick at the
very end from the dregs was a disadvantage.
(50:55):
So I don't know how you would deal with that.
I like if the Agents of SHIELD box hadn't come out then like
this is probably a really fun way of like you get in a lot of
games and you kind of like have like a lot of little challenges
(51:16):
to try and figure out. But finally, against most of
these challenges, I think I prefer them almost as like non
non competitive, like these are really fun games, right?
The minute they become competitive, they come a little
bit more tedious. So like, like every match we've
(51:39):
had against Ultron, if we weren't factoring in the Modoc
score is far more interesting. And then you factor in the Modoc
score, it's like, oh, OK, you kind of have to do these things.
And, and, and so, you know, evenwhen we played against red
scale, we, we kind of just gave up on the Modoc near the end
(52:02):
because we had to, I had to killthe Hydra patrol, which dragged
in a couple of new minions, which we weren't going to be
able to kill. And we, but we'll at least just
kill redskill now we can't bullet.
So it's, it's just sort of stufflike that where it's like you
wouldn't worry about those sort of things in a normal game.
And it'd be, that'd be really exciting.
(52:23):
So I think you've done a great job making the villains like
really cool challenges from the point of view of like having to
figure out the best way of fighting them there.
If there wasn't a shield box, I'd probably like the process
would be cool because we'd be like, I don't, I'm just
interested in these 4 villains with these 4 heroes and like we
(52:45):
can for a couple of months, we can just play them.
But yeah, I would love to have more time kind of upfront.
And I did like the, I think I liked the draft of heroes more
than the draft with aspects, Right.
Yeah. And and then it's just I think
(53:10):
maybe the limitation of the herocan't use the aspect again is
maybe the only downside here because you are forced to test
like every single like depth with the hero.
(53:30):
So every hero kind of needs to be a little bit versatile, and I
wonder if a better limitation was you you can't use.
Just the same team. Yeah, you can't use the same
team and you must use different aspects is one way of doing it,
or you can't use the same team and you can't use the same
(53:51):
aspect combination. So if you've used aggression
justice, you can't use aggression justice again, but
that way you could have the samehero use justice.
So you might be like, I will, I'll always use spider and
protection, but I'll make sure Iuse it with this.
And so that might just make it alittle easier on the deep
(54:12):
building side. Yeah, that's.
That's that's a valid, valid suggestion.
I want, I think your to your earlier, you know, critique of
the folks that are picking laterwithin a given group are, are at
a disadvantage compared to to the advantages that you have
(54:35):
from picking earlier in the group.
You know, I think you can just make the groups a bit bigger so
that maybe there's 2 or even 3 unpicked heroes instead of just
one. And that mitigates quite a bit
of that I would, I would expect.Yeah, the only the other way of
doing it would be to be a bit more like fantasy football.
(54:59):
You actually go like 1 longer soyou draft 5 heroes.
Right. And one of them you don't have
to use like that. You, you or even with drafting 4
heroes, it's like you don't have, you don't have to use.
I mean, you kind of do have to use one because of the
(55:20):
combination rules. So the way the combinations
worked, you had to use one. But yeah, if you drafted 5, then
you could almost be like, well, actually these two heroes I can
use three times like each, or even I could use this hero 4
times as long as long as I use every hero that I've got one
time, then I can use one of themfour times.
(55:43):
And then I could use another oneof them three times.
Well, maybe, maybe it wouldn't work.
But there's, you know, there's some ways where you do it like
that. And I think, yeah, if you went
one longer. So it's like, well actually I
don't need to use as I just haveto use different combinations.
(56:04):
Then then you kind of create like the last hero.
Maybe you get a great last hero,maybe you don't, but you don't
have to worry about it as much. So you can kind of focus on four
groups and then you've got 5 heroes to choose from, but maybe
you don't have to use them all. Could be another way of doing
(56:25):
it. And then there's more drafting.
Everyone loves drafting. But I think that is one of the
things the strengths of like fantasy football is like, yeah,
your last three picks are like your or 4 picks are like your
your sideboard and you bring them in when you need them, but
you don't if you use them all the time.
They're not your core team. And I think that's the one thing
(56:48):
that we kind of haven't managed to achieve with this kind of
draft yet. Like you have to use everyone.
Maybe the 4th hero here is kind of like your your your sideboard
character. But I think of the that's.
How I was picturing it. Yeah, we had five, but you kept
the same restriction. You can't use this.
(57:08):
You have to use a different combination.
Like even with four heroes, if you have to use a different
combination, you're basically 322, one or two, 222, those are
your choices. You get 5.
You could still be 3221 that youcould actually end up with like
4 like 2211 or something like that.
(57:29):
It it does let you take a flyer on something that you think
could be effective, but if it turns out it isn't.
Yeah, doesn't. Then you're OK.
Yeah. Yeah.
So that, that is an interesting point.
So the you you could actually incentivize a bit more risk by
having something that you'd never have to use.
(57:51):
Yeah. And then you get the flow where
the the people at the top will be picking the last like first
in the kind of the fifth round. But the people at the bottom
have probably got the four idealheroes anyway.
So even though they're picking their last one like.
(58:13):
And then the other thing that you could do is when a pool is
down to three, and we kind of talked about this, maybe they go
into like a, like a, a box whereit's like you can, you can draft
any of these 8 heroes. So if I can't remember exactly
(58:37):
what our draft looked like when we had to take Hawkeye, but
maybe maybe one of the Driggs and one of the other pools was
just going to be better for us and, and we'd be able to do that
as another way of doing it. And I feel like that's more
complicated. And if you're going to do that,
you probably just don't have pools.
Yeah, that's that's yeah. But I did kind of like the idea
(58:58):
of the pools that made it that that was the bit that actually
made this draft probably slightly more interesting.
Was this like, where do you pickfrom?
At first I was like unsure aboutit.
And I do think it does advantagethe those people picking last in
the round a little bit more. But it was the interesting part
(59:20):
of the draft was actually havingthe pool.
So I, I would try and keep that.It's just like maybe have a 5th
pool. You get more heroes to choose
from then. Could be interesting if you're
going to do this style again. I have some ideas I'm going to
put out. Well, my next poll is to see if
people want to extend things a little bit.
But I have another, I have a couple of other bigger polls I
(59:45):
want to put out there for, to see to kind of gauge interest
for some of the different ideas I've been brainstorming.
Not necessarily that they will lock in what our next one is,
but just to get a sense of what's worth spending more time
thinking about and what's worth not even bothering.
So I have I have some other different styles of draft in
(01:00:06):
mind, for example. I look forward to the round
which is the opposite of the final boss and it's like the
first boss now. That that is on my list.
Yeah, because the the first villains in most of the boxes
are pretty fun. Agreed, they're they're often
the best one in the box, or at least you know, top two well.
(01:00:30):
Jared, an absolute, absolute pleasure.
Thank you.
Hey friendos, welcome to the Road to Nowhere, a Marvel
Champions LCG podcast. Today we're talking about the
Modoc League season 3 draft. Modoc League is a Marvel
Champions organization designed only for couples.
Modoc it is a two hero team league where people can play
with a partner or two handed on their own.
(00:30):
This season is played with a modified version of expert using
standard three with the twist that an extra pursued counter is
put on pursued by the past at the start of each villain phase.
So we have 4 challenges this season, Ultron with Under Attack
and Infinity Gauntlet, Strife with Hope Summers, Personal
(00:50):
Nightmare and an Acronauts. This is a Con of Heroes
challenge from last year. Red Skull with Hydro patrol,
State of Emergency and Brothers Grimm Mojo with Black Tom
Cassidy, Super Strength flight and telepathy.
And this season features 2 divisions, A10 team real time
(01:11):
division that drafted live and anine team turn based division
that drafted asynchronously over2 days.
Each team drafted against the other teams to pick 4 heroes,
one from each of four different groups.
Leadership was banned. And if you want more details on
the season, I recorded episode 55 as a preview to this.
(01:34):
You can go listen to that, get alittle bit more on the details.
I'm your host, Josh Saru, and it's time to take you to my
conversation with Jared. Jared, how are you doing?
I'm. Doing well.
It's early morning over here forme.
Yeah, yeah, it's, you know, early afternoon on a work day
for me. Somehow my Fridays just are a
(01:57):
little generous. So I have I have time to sneak
in a Marvel Champions chat. So the the plan is we're going
to talk a little bit about your overall experience with the
draft. So you were one of the teams
that was in the real time draft.So this was kind of the way
we've been running the drafts lots before and there was 10
(02:17):
teams all together. So yeah, I don't know.
You want to tell us a little bitabout preparation, what you're
thinking during the draft, any anything that really stood out?
Yeah, well, preparation similar to the last two drafts, they
have like a little spreadsheet and it's grown quite nicely
(02:40):
through the the Modoc league to get more and more information.
So I have to do less each time because the information is
already there and it kind of tracks like how good we think
each character is in the four, the five different aspects.
It's got a lot of things like isthis character good at defense,
(03:02):
status control, piercing setup and support, ranged economy,
aerial retaliate. And we'll also add it in things
like the Nemesis here, we kind of looked at each four of the
the matches to see who we thought was a good match up
against the particular villain. And it kind of gives you an
(03:24):
overall number. And then you can just kind of,
we also do like our preferred heroes.
So we kind of don't choose people we're not going to want
to play. And then it's all adjustable
like per season. Like if we don't think piercing
is super relevant, then we'll drop the value of that for the
(03:44):
season leadership, just put a 0 on it so that it didn't count as
something that you were tracking.
And then here we just had to like look at each of the pods
once we knew the pods and sort of get a ranking based on what
we thought. And sometimes we might adjust
the rankings so. You're building you're building
(04:05):
actual scores for each hero then.
Yeah, yeah. OK.
So for reference, the top scoring hero for me for or for
us for this round was Psylocke. And we could have taken here,
but the draft strategy because of the like board divisions made
(04:28):
it that there was one thing where because we were picking
early, we didn't want to pick that pull last because there was
some dire, well, what we thoughtwas dire, but actually they both
ended up getting picked. And it shocks me.
(04:48):
So in full or Division, I don't know which division it was, but
the division that had I called it two, it's two.
It had Valkyrie in Phoenix, yes.And it shocked me that they got
picked like they are two of the absolute worst nemesis to to
have. And this season you will see
(05:10):
your nemesis, Yes. And even some of the heroes that
we're picked now I'm like, oh, this nemesis is not OK.
So Hawkeye's nemesis like the nemesis is fine, but he brings
in two deadly shots which just do three damage to you.
And so you have the minute his nemesis comes into play, you
need to be really careful about your health.
It's like it's just. Interesting like that was that
(05:33):
was what happened with us last season is that we had storm and
then so you get the knife fightsin and you know.
Yeah. It's it's three or more damage.
Yeah. And so even like we've started
like dropping face to pass from certain characters, like in
tasting, because it's like actually, I tried face to pass
(05:56):
with Domino and it's like it forces you back to alter ego
because you have to get rid of this stupid attachment that
comes in with Topaz. It's like, Oh my God.
So it's really interesting what how the Nemesis and the their
sets can affect this draft. So, so let me let me just return
(06:17):
to this. You had Psylocke as kind of your
top squirt hero, but but in Group 4, just for for those that
are listening right, that had Ant Man, Deadpool, Hulk, Magic
Nightcrawler, Psylocke, Quicksilver, Rocket Spider,
Scarlet Witch, Vision, So other other heroes you would have been
happy to get if you didn't get Psylocke.
But then you looked at Group 2 where you ended up taking X-23,
(06:42):
which we'll talk about in a SEC.But you looked at some of the
other stuff and that said, you know, if we get stuck picking
this glass, it's really going tosuck.
Are we taking it late? Yeah.
So we would have been picking from the bottom if we picked
this last. Chances are we're picking from
the bottom 3 of this or even thebottom 2 this particular pool.
(07:04):
And while there's probably 3 or 4 decent, but the top five is
OK, but not as highly ranked as some of our other groups.
And so we just were like, well, X-23 is very strong, very strong
(07:25):
in the Ultron and Redscale matchups especially, which are
probably 2 of the harder ones. And so we, you know, X-23 was
gone. We probably, we weren't sure
what we were going to do. We had a bit of discussion about
this. Do we still take someone from
this pool like Ironhart or like if X-23 was picked first because
(07:49):
we had the second pick? Or do we sacrifice this pool and
get someone like Sylac? I was keen on that because I'm
really enjoying Sylac right now,but I also think Sylac has an
amazing match against absolutelyeveryone.
And, and I think I've suggested some strategies for some people
(08:10):
who did get Sylac for how they can deal with like, oh, you
could do this with Mojo and you could do this with like Ultron.
And there's lots of really interesting strategies for her.
I the first time I played her I wasn't like super sold but the
more I've been playing her I'm like ha ha this character is so
good. Yeah, I adore her.
(08:32):
Yeah, don't be shocked if I bring multiple silot Dicks to
Connor Heroes, because I just got my Dice Throne X-Men Dice
Throne playmats and it's a beautiful Psylocke playmat that
I might wanna bring with me anyway.
(08:53):
We didn't take Psylocke. Yeah.
And unfortunately, we might havehad a chance at taking Psylocke,
but the one of our drafters ended up not being able to make
it. So the bot picked Psylocke,
rightly so, just before we could, which was a shame.
Yeah, But the strategy was like,we'll go for X-23 first if she's
(09:16):
available. We'll look at the we'll look at
the other pools after that. We felt like the both pool one
and pool four were probably the strongest top to bottom.
We but pull one did get drafted quite heavily from before it got
(09:44):
to us. So we were picking from the
bottom too, which was unfortunate.
I do, I do feel that the the draft, the way that this
particular snake draft worked with the pools, probably it gave
a bit of an advantage to the people at the end of the draft
rather than at the start, which was maybe similar to the other
(10:06):
drafts as well. But interesting how you have to
strategize around that. So we maybe might have been,
it's hard to say which one you should leave to last.
So we kind of left pool one, especially because about the
time we could have picked from pool one, a lot of the best
stuff was gone and most of the rest of it was like low.
(10:31):
So when we got our like next twopicks which were pretty close
together, we were able to pick out Domino who was top about
pool 30. That's awesome.
Yeah. And also one of the kind of top
picks for us like Domino was a as a higher pick than higher
value, I think than X-23 and Spider who surprisingly, I don't
(10:56):
know why she's ranked quite low because she's amazing, but it's
just that she doesn't really do a lot of the like she doesn't
really have retaliate or aerial.She doesn't do range.
She kind of takes doesn't reallyhelp set up or support anyone.
(11:17):
She has no piercing. She does have some status
control. No defence is OK, but she's not
slightly going to run a perfect defence deck with her.
So yeah, I don't know why she ranks low.
I might need to like have a havea rejig with some of the things
with her here, but yeah, like. She ranks slow on your on your
(11:38):
score. On my board, yeah, but she's
actually, we both rank her quitehighly and we both were keen to
have her, but she's still like in that pool.
It was like silent magic, Deadpool, Ant Man, Rocket.
We're all better than Spider andScarlet Witch like these these
heroes are amazing. So this pool, like, looked
great, yes. But yeah, we kind of thought,
(12:02):
well, Spider's gonna be really, really good, so we'll grab here
as well, and we'll leave pull one to last.
And then, yeah, we ended up withthe choice of Hawkeye or Four
there. And, well, Four has a pretty
awful nemesis, so we went with Hawkeye, Yeah.
What I'm curious about is, you know, each of these heroes that
(12:23):
you have where where you see their strengths in terms of how
they line up the actual matchupsthat we have.
Yeah, it's interesting. This season has been like
probably a lot more testing. I'm always want like a can we
have like push the, the round like, yeah, like I just kind of
(12:45):
like that first round like is due soon.
It's like, oh, and I almost wantto be able to like just do a
round, like not that round, likejust a round.
Yeah, because you kind of end uphaving to test almost all of
(13:05):
them beforehand. Agreed.
Because you want to figure out what match ups you like and then
you've got like 4 possible aspects for every hero and then
every combination of heroes. We probably only use Hawkeye
(13:26):
once maybe. Oh, that's exciting.
But but then it's like who do weuse three times?
Is it Spyder? Is it X-23?
Is it Domino? So yeah, those are all.
And then where do we use Hawkeye?
So we actually tried Hawkeye quite a lot on Ultron and we he
(13:49):
just couldn't get it done, even though he has probably the best
status control and the ability to and.
The AOE, yeah. Yeah, and the AOE.
We've built a couple of pretty interesting aggression decks,
though the last, they're probably our best game together
against Ultron. Didn't use an aggression deck
but bring it 1 by 1 and then there's like multiple allies
(14:13):
that can do AOE. So Domino probably has the best
version of that deck because shealso has Diamondback.
But yeah, Richter does AOE against one player's drones and.
(14:36):
Yeah, this store, but we weren'tusing Thorcas, was a bit
expensive to get in. It's one of the.
Yeah, it's Dust. Yeah, Dust does AOE against
everyone, which is pretty strong.
(14:57):
So she's not as good once you'vegone to level 2 drones and
Ultron 3, unless you have some kind of a way of like pumping up
her attack. But all of those are like quite
strong and yet like our best kind of version.
(15:18):
I think the best thing that we've had was like a protection
spider and AX23 Justice. We tried to do the bring it
strategy with Spire, but it didn't really work well enough
because you don't, you're not drawing enough cards at each
turn to like make sure that you get a bring it in hand to then
(15:42):
be able to go wild. So, so there was one turn where
I had, I don't know, like 8 drones in front of me.
It's like, yeah, I'll it's fine.I can soak the drone.
I can soak the drones and but then you don't get bring it
because you're only drawing 3 cards.
So it didn't really work as wellwith her as it does with some of
the other heroes that draw 5. But it's a pretty fun strategy.
(16:05):
It's not a deck that'll work against anyone else.
And so you we go, you go throughthat process of like, well, hey,
what's a deck that's good for this with a hero like every deck
is kind of different. You don't play like the same
deck, you know, against these these villains and they're all
different enough and they present different challenges
(16:29):
like you're you're not going to play a one way or another deck
against redscale, but you can doa lot of like when a side scheme
is defeated things. So you kind of you ignore the
the tempo like that you get fromone way or another, but you get
the other bonuses. So it's like a justice deck is
pretty strong against redscale. But if you want like a tempo
(16:50):
justice deck, then who do you play that against?
Ultron has very bad sized humans.
You don't really want to pull them out except for the one that
like puts thread on for every drone.
You want to pull that out when there's no drones, you don't
want the the villain to pull that out on you because then
suddenly it's got 10 thread on it.
So there's interesting choices and all of that, but every deck
(17:12):
is kind of different. The first season we didn't
change our decks. We like sideboarded a couple of
cards. The second season we changed our
decks a little bit, flip betweenthem.
There was some like Magneto where we just was like, let's
like do the stupid plan. So we kind of but the heroes
were the same. But here it's like you almost
(17:35):
like every match is like a totally different thing and you
don't even like trying to figureout who you're going to put
against them is the the tricky part.
How do you handle all of the threat that Redscale puts down?
Ultron puts down a lot of threatas well.
Mojo, you want to kind of hold him at Bay.
You don't want him to drain too many cards.
(17:55):
Mojo's probably the easiest because he has the easiest
scoring. I think all you have to do is
defeat him before you get like 2deck passes and you can slow him
down to be able to do that. He does have a lot of health,
but I don't think that's how. Like, you don't have to worry
about anything else other than that.
(18:16):
And even if you do go the other path, you don't have to worry
about the main scheme, which is nice.
So he kind of has the easiest scoring of all of them.
Strife is the only match we haven't actually tested yet,
which is probably dangerous. I know I don't really want to
(18:36):
have X-23 against Strife becauseStrife slows her down a lot.
Domino and and Spider are probably going to be best
against here, but that's up against him.
But yeah, Ultron and Redsko are definitely probably the two
challenges, the big challenges. Right, well, the having having a
(18:59):
low hand size, but Stillwell resourced hero is really good
against strength, right. So that's where Spider is good.
And you know, Stylock was kind of one of the early things I
picked out as, oh, that's probably a great hero against
Strife. Yeah, yeah.
I mean, like like I said, Salik was good against pretty much
(19:19):
everyone. So in in the Mojo match, what I
liked about her was she could stay in alter ego, set up the
and keep recycling the psychic misdirection or not.
It's not misdirection. I can't remember what it is.
The justice version of that cardwhile setting up like a really
(19:43):
strong justice base with their six hand slides.
She's not using her, she's usingher normal upgrades to just keep
cycling the psychic cards back in.
She can keep him confused if sheneeds to by getting Professor X.
She can and but she can actuallyjust redirect his threat into
minor threat like every turn. That's almost.
(20:06):
Manipulation. Second manipulation is the card,
yeah. And so she doesn't need to go
the hero, which means that as long as you've got someone
dealing damage, you're going much slower through the deck
because you're not draining like4 cards every turn.
Yep. And then she can deal with like,
(20:26):
just keep that threat down just off those strategies.
And there's like, quite a lot ofdifferent ways that she can do
it. And I thought that was like,
really, really strong. And yeah, as you say, Strife,
she's kind of just a natural forfighting Strife because of her
low hand size. And then she's got piercing, so
(20:50):
red scale has got a lot of tough.
I think I probably wouldn't haveused her against Ultron because
those other three matchups were her strongest.
Yeah, but having said that, she's very good at status
effects. So if you're going against
(21:11):
Ultron, you probably do a aggression with drop kicks and
because she can easily get to three physicals so you can keep
him stunned, and then she has all the abilities to do confuses
all day long. And Ultron is quite susceptible
to status in this game, whereas the other Mojo's not, which is
(21:34):
like, well, we don't worry aboutstatus, we just try and like
turn him against himself. The other thing that you could
do against Ultron is a protection deck where you make
Ultron attack the drones with psychic misdirection, which is
really fun. But it's even more fun when you
get out your nemesis and then you psychically misdirect your
nemesis against the villain and attack for like 10 damage.
(21:57):
That's amazing because she gets like plus one for every single
mental you have on the board. Yeah, yeah.
Did I say Solok was fun? You said Solok was fun, yeah.
Yeah. But you took X 23.
Yeah, well X-23 is also pretty fun.
(22:19):
Agreed. It's the the the X Force
characters. I'm not huge on the X-Men
characters to be honest. The X Force characters though,
like all of them. Angel's probably my lowest
ranked of them, and he's still pretty good.
Are amazing. Yeah.
They're like, really, really good.
(22:41):
The X-Men characters, My. I guess my beef with them is,
quite honestly, Beak and Triage.Like, I don't know why those two
characters are grey, but they kind of make every X-Men deck
look a bit samey, right? Yeah.
And so they have like, some coolthings, but they're all very,
(23:02):
they're not as versatile as theywould have hoped.
Yeah. Like a lot of the characters
that I like are versatile and have really interesting deep
building Hawks. And so the X-Men are kind of
just like, don't enjoy them as much as I'd hoped, which is a
shame. Well, they're, you know, all the
(23:23):
product of A1 Designer. Yeah, that's right.
And the X force is the product of another one who's still
there. Yeah, yeah.
Looking at these shield characters or the I'm not the
Shield wave and the the four characters that have been
spoiled, I mean, how exciting are all four, four of them?
They look really fun. Yeah.
(23:46):
So yeah, I think like the the wehaven't really made firm
decisions about who's fighting who yet.
It's definitely tricky and a lotof testing has happened and what
do you need to use where you know?
We hoped that Hawko would be good against Ultron because of
the status and the the AOE, but it's just not working.
(24:10):
We tried them against Redscale with a Justice Stick, which
works pretty well, but we figured that we needed more
thought and trying to find how to do things fast and maybe not
sixteenths fast, but any time that you can kill a villain in
like less than eight or nine turns, but if you're getting up
(24:31):
to 12 turns, you're letting themdo so much more to you.
So Redscale is like every side scheme.
You don't want to see any of those side schemes again.
So if you're getting past the like the seven or eight turn
mark, then it's like you have togo through it all over again.
There's nothing nice in there. You took out all the nice stuff
(24:53):
and I just left all the hard stuff, and Ultron's a bit the
same. Like the longer let Ultron go,
the the harder he becomes, the faster you can get Ultron to
Stage 3. You're almost in a better
position, but it's difficult to try and get the tempo to get him
there. It's interesting you say that
(25:15):
because we, I think we've only played the Ultron match once so
far and we actually got to stage3 pretty quick and then we
really stalled out actually. Right, because you can't damage
them all these drones. Yeah, we just just kind of the
way everything was set up, it was just, yeah, it was, I guess
(25:38):
it was easy to push that initialdamage and get through and deal
with all the Singleton 11 healthdrones.
But once they were up to two, itwas much less trivial.
Yeah, yeah, you when you get to stage 3, you're most don't want
to take the drones. You want to be able to deal with
the threat. Yeah.
Yeah, the and, and I did and I have found like with say Spider,
(26:05):
we've tried a protection deck which uses, you know, change of
Fortune and it's got Spider UK and Spider UK and Change of
Fortune don't work together. But early on, Change of Fortune
and energy barriers are really good for like dealing with
(26:26):
drones. And then later on, Spider UK and
the hangar Bay are really good with dealing with drones.
So once you get to the second phase, you're not really getting
the change of Fortune bonuses anymore, but you can deal with
the two drones that come out because Spider UK could just
take them both out. But you almost don't want to
(26:47):
spend that long in any of these phases like you do.
You want to start getting your damage on.
So finding where that damage comes from has been the
trickiest part. Think our best yeah, our best
round was still like it was lessit was like 11 or 12 turns.
I have done a round with Domino and and with so the domino using
(27:12):
that weird aggression thing thatI was talking about with the
bring its and one by ones and a spider deck with protection that
did it in seven. But I do think everything kind
of came together then like Change of Fortune came early and
if you like the last time we played Change of Fortune didn't
(27:32):
come out. But it's not bad in the X-23
because you can kind of throw iton here as well.
X-23's got the retaliate yeah, but for in general I would say
that X-23 has piercings so probably is required against
Redscale and X-23 has the retaliate so and kind of the
(27:56):
overkill potential so it's probably useful against Ultron.
X stream 3 usually does everything low value so not
great against Strife and Mojo. Anyone is probably going to work
there as long as you can have someone who is probably delaying
(28:17):
the like staying an alter ego more often.
So characters that flip more or stay in alter ego and could deal
with a threat are probably the ones to to stick with.
Domino is just in general a strong character.
The range is good against Redscale.
She's probably one that will have to put up against Strife,
(28:42):
and I've found her good against Ultron, but we probably won't be
using her there. Spider is, yeah.
I mean, Spider's just good, but you have to.
I think it's tricky figuring outwhich aspects to use.
Like I think Spider's got an amazing justice build, but that
(29:05):
justice build isn't best againstred scale.
So we're because you really wantto get the tempo from one way or
another with spiders. So I don't know where we put
that justice build at the moment.
We put in the protection build against Ultron, but I found it
was pretty strong against Mojo 2.
So where do you use the protection build, which is one
of his strongest? Can she run an aggression build?
(29:27):
Do we need to run 3? Obviously there's always pool in
the the back pocket. And I did try a domino pool
deck, which was really fun. And then, yeah, Hawkeye.
Like, if we're only gonna use them once, where's that gonna
be? What's his best aspect?
I mean, he has a lot of, he has good aspects, but we found that
protection's too slow, certainlyagainst Ultron.
(29:48):
Everything was kind of just too slow with him against Ultron.
We just couldn't ramp him up fast enough.
He had, he's just like, oh, my health is a big problem
constantly. Yeah.
And he wasn't dealing enough damage and he wasn't dealing
with enough threat. So he just, he didn't have
(30:10):
enough tempo to fight Ultron. Even when we had things like the
the Bring It deck didn't work with him.
Weirdly. We thought it might, but it just
didn't. Yeah.
So it's, it's actually worked really well with Domino and I we
might not run it, but it was a cool idea.
(30:31):
So yeah, that's kind of where we're at.
We haven't like made any firm decisions yet and the, the, the
clock is ticking. I think the closest we've got is
probably, it is probably X-23 and Spider versus Ultron and we
need to do a couple more tests against Redskill to see who it's
going to be there. And then the last two, we'll
just have to pick with who who we've got left and and what
(30:52):
we're allowed to do. But yeah, because you have to
change aspect for every hero. Yeah, making a new deck for
every hero. So there's it is considerably
more tasting for this, Yeah. There's a lot more overhead.
Yeah, you, you do make a good point.
I hadn't really considered that extra overhead when I was
setting the time, so I might loop back to the community and
(31:13):
see if they want to change some of these deadlines a bit.
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I'm not, I
wouldn't complain because we definitely don't get as much
testing time as as you know, some people who, but not
(31:34):
everyone can play Marvel Champions all the time.
So. Yeah, the the, the teams that
live with their partner. Yeah, yeah, that'd be fun.
Yeah. Finding a partner that like
loved Marvel Champions, why do anything else?
No, yeah, my my daughter used toplay with me, but she hasn't
(31:59):
been playing as many games with me recently, so.
Yeah, there's ebbs and flows. I had that with Chester Junior
as well. Yeah.
So what about your draft then when you know similar sort of
questions, What was your strategy going into it?
Yeah, we, so I mean we did a farless detailed prep in part
(32:23):
because this the other draft wasa asynchronous draft, which
meant you could really just evaluate the current board state
and think about things. But similar to you, we had one
of the groups just felt like onewhere pretty much anything that
was in there we would have been been really happy with.
(32:48):
So that was for us. I think Group 4 that was Cable,
Magic, Nova, Quicksilver, RocketSpider, Ham, Miles, Vision,
Wolverine X 23. Yeah.
What? That's so good.
Yeah, well, so we. Didn't get picked.
(33:09):
Quicksilver. That, that makes sense.
He's probably my lowest rank of those, but he's good in the
against Ultron, surely. Yes, yes, yeah.
So we, we were looking at that and thinking to ourselves, OK,
well, we can, we can stall on Group 4 because it's just really
not a lot of urgency. We, you know, recognize some of
(33:31):
the things, you know, I took my foot way off the gas in terms of
usually I make status effects much less valuable on purpose.
And in this specific one, I tried to make it so that every
single match up had had some strategies that you could
exploit a little bit. So status effects are quite a
bit more viable than usual, for example.
(33:55):
And you know, kind of like you that, you know, Josh or Junior
and I both have heroes we like to play and you know, ones that
we consider strong, but also ones that we like to play and,
and balancing all those things. So we, you know, we had the 5th
pick, so we were right in the middle of our pack because there
(34:16):
was nine people in ours and it went in front of us.
Cable Black Panther, Angel magicWe we actually quite liked Angel
for a lot of these match ups, inpart because any, any you know,
he's really good where you want burst threat removal and burst
damage. And so that's always really
(34:37):
nice. But we we ended up taking Doctor
Strange, who was who was on the board and it felt really weird
because, you know, Captain Marvel was there and I and Silac
was also in that batch as well. And then we also had storm in
(34:58):
the last the last one. So we weren't going to, you
know, similar to probably your team, you weren't trying to pick
heroes that you already just picked in, in recent ones.
I would have 100% picked magic again.
Yeah. Definitely probably Rocket, but
not definitely not early yeah, Imean magic was gone by the time
(35:23):
the she was gone straight away like you just she's a top five
hero as she's gonna go probably really early most of the time.
So yeah, that was unlikely that we were going to get here unless
we picked her first. But yeah, I would definitely
play here. Like she's a kind of all day,
(35:44):
everyday hero for me. Yeah, I.
Hear you. Domino's like that for me as
well. Yeah, yeah, both, both TJJ and I
kind of feel that way about Domino, yeah.
So the So yeah, we ended up getting Doctor Strange first and
then by the time it came back around to us, we, you know, lots
(36:05):
of things had gone. But there there started being,
you know, some Wolverine got taken out of Group 4 and we were
just looking at it. Nobody else had gotten taken out
of Group 4. And so even though that was the
group, we were happy to oh, sorry, there was other earlier
(36:25):
on there was others. So Cable Magic and Spider Miles
and then Wolverine had been taken out of Group 4 so that it
was down almost to half, I guessat that point, but X-23 was
still there. So we decided to not try to
stall on on Group 4 and just grab X-23 because it seemed way
(36:46):
too good to be true. And you know, the the strengths
that you highlighted for X-23, you know, we also observed.
And then there's an interesting thing, because you know, despite
the fact that her all her stuff does get really expensive with
Strife, her synergy with Hope isreally good.
Yeah, that's true. Because she can get her her
(37:08):
stats up so nice and high. So we haven't tried it out yet,
but we we do have her earmarked as a potential hero against
hope, despite the you know, you play some sort of more expensive
build or something and, and, andsee if you can just really
leverage getting her stats way up.
But we haven't tried it out yet.So I don't know if it's how
viable it is and then could havecame to round 3 and Ant Man, who
(37:42):
is also somebody else that we wequite liked.
Ant Man's great for Ultron and also because he when he has his
what is giant size strength whenhe flips up to big, that's a +2
for the round. So he actually synergizes quite
well with Strife as well or withhope for for strife.
(38:08):
So we and we, you know, Ant man plays well in every aspect as
well. So we also had Ant man, you
know, reasonably high and. I don't.
Think too many things got taken out of that group by the time it
got to us, but you know, it was Ant Man when there was maybe 4
of of the heroes gone, 3 or 4 ofthe heroes gone.
So we, we, we snapped that up. We were pretty excited.
(38:33):
Yeah, MMM will always be a high ranked hero on our board because
even though he doesn't do a lot of the extra things aspect wise,
he's like a four across the board.
Like he plays so well in every aspect and so that ranks him
really high. And then as you mentioned
previously, you know, you reallydid have to consider it a
(38:55):
Nemesis set because I put some acceleration on Pursuit by the
Past in this one. So, you know, Ant Man is a
pretty friendly character in terms of dealing with the
Nemesis set. It's not not especially scary.
Doctor Strange is also really not especially scary.
(39:19):
And then by the time it came to Round 4 in Group 1, the heroes
that were left were Hawkeye, Iceman, Drax and Miss Marvel,
which was shocking to me that Miss Marvel was still in there.
I, I don't even know how powerful I think she is.
I just absolutely adore playing her.
(39:40):
So I was just, I was really excited to see Miss Marvel in
there. She's great in Justice and
there's lots of scenarios here where you want to have lots.
And Drax is also interesting though, because again, there's
some pretty good potential synergy with Hope because he can
get his he can get his attacks up nice and high, so.
(40:01):
Yeah, and he has that low hand size as well.
So you get strife, you get strife over and it's like, oh,
I've got a five hand size now. But again, his stuff is kind of
cheap. Yes.
So not ideal, but probably OK. Yeah, that was the push and
pull. Exactly.
(40:21):
And Drax would only have one scenario that we would
realistically want to play him in.
And you know, with, with Miss Marvel, realistically we could
picture playing her and up to three of the of the scenarios.
So then we're we're in the challenging spot where we
(40:43):
actually like all four of our heroes quite a bit.
I actually, I think you're probably sleeping on Drex in the
Mojo because Drex wants to go toAlter, go to Hero and stay there
and Mojo doesn't hit that hard. Yeah.
That is very true. I will take these hits, I'll
take these hits, I'll take thesehits.
Then it's like right, cool. Now I can just heal them and I'm
(41:06):
going to I'm just going to wail on you.
I'm just going to bring you downas fast as possible and you're
because I've got big damage and I'll just do this all day and my
other friend can either stay in alter ego or like flip back to
alter ego and like deal with thethreat and and dress could go.
But again, you know, you've got a choice between.
(41:30):
Well, I know he's good against this particular match and this
particular match, but miss Marvel could be valuable
anywhere. You know, against the Ultron,
she could just be playing a protection sidestep deck, like
just take no damage and just like wipe out drones, like for
(41:51):
like the first part of that game.
And yeah, against any of the ones where like threat is a big
problem, she can just like, remove the threat so quick.
Yeah, I think she's a she. She is actually really powerful.
It's not that you like playing here, she just seems really
strong. I do love playing her though.
(42:12):
Yeah. She also defined her charming.
I just find her a charming character in general.
Yeah, yeah, Lillian and I watched the Marvel's movie again
last night and she just like, it's so fun in that movie.
But yeah, she's the her alter ego like side awesome.
(42:33):
It's just like, it's so good because she's almost the hero.
You want to give it to alter Egoand and go go wild and which.
Yeah. And so.
So she's going to be good on that Mojo match where you might
want to flip back and forward quite a bit, Yeah.
Well, that's the thing. That's the the interesting
(42:54):
challenge with Drax though, right?
Is, you know, as you say, he wants to stay up and and Mojo
doesn't hit very hard, but at the same time to slow down the
cards from Mojo. Having two heroes that are both
really, really comfortable or even excited to flip to Alter
Ego is also spectacular. Yeah.
So I think you can definitely play a strategy where one hero
(43:17):
just stays in Alter Ego early tokind of slow it down.
But yeah, you'd have to test it.And you're not, obviously.
I mean, you probably had the chance to be like, oh, I didn't
have to do this for 24 hours, soI could test Drax right now and
see if we like him against Mojo.The draft went surprisingly
(43:38):
fast. It did, which was nice I think.
I was happy I I thought it couldtake over a week but it was done
in 2 days. Yeah, I think people were
excited to draft, but also yeah,yeah, yeah, yeah, you might.
We had good fun. I think you might almost just be
(43:58):
better off doing async drafts ingeneral.
The live draft is fun, but it might be easier for people to do
that because there's certainly people who have, we only had one
bot one I guess this time. But yeah, it's more it's more
fun when everyone gets to pick their own stuff.
(44:21):
Yes, agreed. I think because I knew I really
wanted to have multiple divisions because I had so many
heroes, I really needed to splitit up.
I thought giving people the choice worked, worked really
well. And, you know, we may see that
people just end up deciding thatasynchronous is their preferred,
especially based on how fast we saw it.
(44:42):
It actually went yeah. Now, I don't know how many one
like 2 handed versus couples youhave this season.
It's what, half and half? It is half and half.
Yeah. I thought that was the other way
of splitting it up. But is a is a is one way.
But it is definitely nice to have about 10 Max in a draft, I
(45:03):
think. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You've got two things like 7 years.
Yeah. Well, yeah, I know we're pretty
excited. Yeah, I, I do think that yeah,
that that Doctor Strange pick isinteresting because you did give
up both Captain Marvel and Silacto go for Strange and his
(45:29):
interestingly, his probably his one of his strongest matchups
status wise would be Ultron, which is also probably his worst
matchup because he's not great against the drones.
But if you can find someone thatcan help him, yeah, it'd be
interesting to see how many times you use Strange in the
(45:51):
with your other heroes. Like maybe you just use them
once and. It's probably not going to be 3.
Yeah. But yeah, Joshua Junior was
pretty, pretty excited to, to bring in Strange and and yeah,
with the like I said, with the, with the status effects, it was
(46:12):
kind of recognised that he's he's definitely got some
advantages in this one. But but as as you do point out
the he's crap at dealing with drones.
Yeah, I mean, you probably couldmake him not crap at dealing
with drones though, because if you like just to get go back to
(46:34):
the bring it 1 by 1 strategy, you just like use three of each
of those cards and then suddenlythat was strange.
There's even more cards in hand.Like can like just wipe out two
drones easy and cyclist Dick so quick.
There's probably doing this a lot.
(46:54):
And yeah, there's the there's atleast 2, if not three.
He can afford to play for Thor. So you've got like 3 allies that
can deal with all the drones is another thing as well.
So yeah, so an aggression and throw in some more status.
(47:17):
He's probably pretty good at drop kicking because he already
has a wild. So when he doesn't have his
rings up he can he can do a dropkick.
So you can keep Ultron like stand as well.
So I think an aggression Strangeis probably very strong against
(47:39):
Ultron and probably deals with the weakness.
The other way would be a protection one where you just
use the energy barriers. Yeah, actually don't know if I
like it as much because you do have to kind of get everything
like there's too many combos, but it's OK.
(47:59):
Yeah. So there's there's ways of
strange dealing with the problemthrough the aspect, which I
think is is like his strength isthat actually he plays pretty
well in any aspect because the aspect could be irrelevant or it
could be important because his cards are really good.
But if you need the aspect to beimportant, you can make sure the
(48:23):
aspect is important, Yeah. Yeah, we we tried out the one
the one match up we did play. We played aggression, Ant man
and protection Strange against Ultron.
How'd that go? Good, because Ant Man was really
good at just kind of dealing with all the drones.
(48:44):
Yeah, until he gets to the second phase, right.
And then, well, that's where. We that's where we stalled out.
So that's where we're rethinkingexactly how we want to do it.
But boy, the first part of it sure felt like a breeze.
Yeah, so you've got Miss Marvel,Ant Man, Strange, and who was
your X-23? Yeah, yeah, the X-23 has the
(49:06):
overkill, which is not great in the second phase either.
Agreed, but it's quite good early.
She's quite good at dealing withdrones just because Honey Badger
can attack them. Yeah.
At least early on. And if you put her in aggression
(49:28):
then you can also. Honey Badger can attack her the
whole time. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We found that the, I guess with our heroes that a Justice X 23
is probably the strongest against Ultron because the
threat can get out of control. Yeah.
(49:49):
What maybe maybe before we go, I'll, I'll have a quick check in
with you because I think, you know, our conversation we're
having and then my own experience in, in doing some
preparations, having access to these 4 heroes and all these
options. I mean, obviously it is creating
a lot of overhead, but I'm really enjoying exploring all
(50:12):
these different paths that I I can take to actually try to
defeat the villains. I don't know how.
How does this version of the draft feel like it worked for
you? Yeah.
I think the only thing that I didn't that I felt like the
draft, the weakness of the draft, was that they felt like
(50:34):
there was an advantage in the even flow to being near the end
of a draft as opposed to being at the front.
So being able to pick from the three or four best characters
was less of an advantage in thisdraft, and having to pick at the
very end from the dregs was a disadvantage.
(50:55):
So I don't know how you would deal with that.
I like if the Agents of SHIELD box hadn't come out then like
this is probably a really fun way of like you get in a lot of
games and you kind of like have like a lot of little challenges
(51:16):
to try and figure out. But finally, against most of
these challenges, I think I prefer them almost as like non
non competitive, like these are really fun games, right?
The minute they become competitive, they come a little
bit more tedious. So like, like every match we've
(51:39):
had against Ultron, if we weren't factoring in the Modoc
score is far more interesting. And then you factor in the Modoc
score, it's like, oh, OK, you kind of have to do these things.
And, and, and so, you know, evenwhen we played against red
scale, we, we kind of just gave up on the Modoc near the end
(52:02):
because we had to, I had to killthe Hydra patrol, which dragged
in a couple of new minions, which we weren't going to be
able to kill. And we, but we'll at least just
kill redskill now we can't bullet.
So it's, it's just sort of stufflike that where it's like you
wouldn't worry about those sort of things in a normal game.
And it'd be, that'd be really exciting.
(52:23):
So I think you've done a great job making the villains like
really cool challenges from the point of view of like having to
figure out the best way of fighting them there.
If there wasn't a shield box, I'd probably like the process
would be cool because we'd be like, I don't, I'm just
interested in these 4 villains with these 4 heroes and like we
(52:45):
can for a couple of months, we can just play them.
But yeah, I would love to have more time kind of upfront.
And I did like the, I think I liked the draft of heroes more
than the draft with aspects, Right.
Yeah. And and then it's just I think
(53:10):
maybe the limitation of the herocan't use the aspect again is
maybe the only downside here because you are forced to test
like every single like depth with the hero.
(53:30):
So every hero kind of needs to be a little bit versatile, and I
wonder if a better limitation was you you can't use.
Just the same team. Yeah, you can't use the same
team and you must use different aspects is one way of doing it,
or you can't use the same team and you can't use the same
(53:51):
aspect combination. So if you've used aggression
justice, you can't use aggression justice again, but
that way you could have the samehero use justice.
So you might be like, I will, I'll always use spider and
protection, but I'll make sure Iuse it with this.
And so that might just make it alittle easier on the deep
(54:12):
building side. Yeah, that's.
That's that's a valid, valid suggestion.
I want, I think your to your earlier, you know, critique of
the folks that are picking laterwithin a given group are, are at
a disadvantage compared to to the advantages that you have
(54:35):
from picking earlier in the group.
You know, I think you can just make the groups a bit bigger so
that maybe there's 2 or even 3 unpicked heroes instead of just
one. And that mitigates quite a bit
of that I would, I would expect.Yeah, the only the other way of
doing it would be to be a bit more like fantasy football.
(54:59):
You actually go like 1 longer soyou draft 5 heroes.
Right. And one of them you don't have
to use like that. You, you or even with drafting 4
heroes, it's like you don't have, you don't have to use.
I mean, you kind of do have to use one because of the
(55:20):
combination rules. So the way the combinations
worked, you had to use one. But yeah, if you drafted 5, then
you could almost be like, well, actually these two heroes I can
use three times like each, or even I could use this hero 4
times as long as long as I use every hero that I've got one
time, then I can use one of themfour times.
(55:43):
And then I could use another oneof them three times.
Well, maybe, maybe it wouldn't work.
But there's, you know, there's some ways where you do it like
that. And I think, yeah, if you went
one longer. So it's like, well actually I
don't need to use as I just haveto use different combinations.
(56:04):
Then then you kind of create like the last hero.
Maybe you get a great last hero,maybe you don't, but you don't
have to worry about it as much. So you can kind of focus on four
groups and then you've got 5 heroes to choose from, but maybe
you don't have to use them all. Could be another way of doing
(56:25):
it. And then there's more drafting.
Everyone loves drafting. But I think that is one of the
things the strengths of like fantasy football is like, yeah,
your last three picks are like your or 4 picks are like your
your sideboard and you bring them in when you need them, but
you don't if you use them all the time.
They're not your core team. And I think that's the one thing
(56:48):
that we kind of haven't managed to achieve with this kind of
draft yet. Like you have to use everyone.
Maybe the 4th hero here is kind of like your your your sideboard
character. But I think of the that's.
How I was picturing it. Yeah, we had five, but you kept
the same restriction. You can't use this.
(57:08):
You have to use a different combination.
Like even with four heroes, if you have to use a different
combination, you're basically 322, one or two, 222, those are
your choices. You get 5.
You could still be 3221 that youcould actually end up with like
4 like 2211 or something like that.
(57:29):
It it does let you take a flyer on something that you think
could be effective, but if it turns out it isn't.
Yeah, doesn't. Then you're OK.
Yeah. Yeah.
So that, that is an interesting point.
So the you you could actually incentivize a bit more risk by
having something that you'd never have to use.
(57:51):
Yeah. And then you get the flow where
the the people at the top will be picking the last like first
in the kind of the fifth round. But the people at the bottom
have probably got the four idealheroes anyway.
So even though they're picking their last one like.
(58:13):
And then the other thing that you could do is when a pool is
down to three, and we kind of talked about this, maybe they go
into like a, like a, a box whereit's like you can, you can draft
any of these 8 heroes. So if I can't remember exactly
(58:37):
what our draft looked like when we had to take Hawkeye, but
maybe maybe one of the Driggs and one of the other pools was
just going to be better for us and, and we'd be able to do that
as another way of doing it. And I feel like that's more
complicated. And if you're going to do that,
you probably just don't have pools.
Yeah, that's that's yeah. But I did kind of like the idea
(58:58):
of the pools that made it that that was the bit that actually
made this draft probably slightly more interesting.
Was this like, where do you pickfrom?
At first I was like unsure aboutit.
And I do think it does advantagethe those people picking last in
the round a little bit more. But it was the interesting part
(59:20):
of the draft was actually havingthe pool.
So I, I would try and keep that.It's just like maybe have a 5th
pool. You get more heroes to choose
from then. Could be interesting if you're
going to do this style again. I have some ideas I'm going to
put out. Well, my next poll is to see if
people want to extend things a little bit.
But I have another, I have a couple of other bigger polls I
(59:45):
want to put out there for, to see to kind of gauge interest
for some of the different ideas I've been brainstorming.
Not necessarily that they will lock in what our next one is,
but just to get a sense of what's worth spending more time
thinking about and what's worth not even bothering.
So I have I have some other different styles of draft in
(01:00:06):
mind, for example. I look forward to the round
which is the opposite of the final boss and it's like the
first boss now. That that is on my list.
Yeah, because the the first villains in most of the boxes
are pretty fun. Agreed, they're they're often
the best one in the box, or at least you know, top two well.
(01:00:30):
Jared, an absolute, absolute pleasure.
Thank you.
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