March 15, 2025 • 12 mins
Welcome to Road to Knowhere, a Marvel Champions LCG podcast.
This episode provides a preview of Season 03 of MODOK League, a Marvel Champions 2-hero league. The purpose of this episode is to setup a series of interviews with players in the league, as they describe their preparation for the draft, their drafting strategy, and how they are thinking about matchup their drafted heroes up against the four scenarios. MODOK Season 03 League website: https://modokleague.wordpress.com/modok-league-season-03-big-bads-season/
MODOK League Discord server: https://discord.gg/6b4zBfchhA
This episode is also available as a youtube video:
https://youtu.be/tYoyBOeRSUQ
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:09):
Hey friendos, welcome to the Road to Nowhere.
Today we're going to talk about Modoc League Season 3.
Going to set up the draft a little bit because I've done a
series of interviews talking to folks from different teams about
their drafting strategy, how thedraft went, how they're planning
some of these things. And so I thought it would be
(00:31):
good to put an episode together that would be focused on, you
know, what people were actually drafting from, what they're
drafting toward in terms of the season setup.
The villains were fighting, those sorts of things.
So that's the plan. Let's get into it.
So Modoc League is A2 handed league where people can play
(00:53):
individually or with a partner. You're playing 2 heroes.
We usually play 4 rounds. They're separated by, you know,
three to four weeks usually and everybody gets their heroes and
sometimes they draft aspects andthey draft against the other
teams so that you you build yourteam.
This season the villains were all end of the box villains.
(01:19):
So we have Ultron, Strife, Red Skull, and Mojo.
We'll look at these in a little bit more detail in a moment.
There's a special standard and expert encounter set that we'll
also talk a little bit about andthen we'll look a little bit
more at the details of the draft.
(01:40):
So let's look at the villains first.
So the very first round is Ultron and Under attack.
This is mostly just kind of the vanilla core box Ultron villain,
except for we've also added Infinity Gauntlet.
And in addition to that, we actually start on stage 2A of
(02:03):
the main scheme. So this is the one where you
either are bringing out, you're either putting 2 thread on the
main scheme or bringing out a drone every turn.
Round 2 is up against Strife with obviously the Hope Summers
modular, plus Personal Nightmareand Anachronauts.
(02:26):
This is the Con of Heroes 2024 challenge.
And there's an additional condition that during gameplay
when Strife schemes, he gets plus X thwart where X is half of
the number of cards of the most common type in your hand,
rounded down. So this is just normally his
bonus for the number of cards you have in your hand is only
(02:48):
for his attack. This adds some bonus for your
thwart and is a reasonably tricky set of modulars to deal
with. The third one is Red Skull with
Hydro Patrol State of Emergency.State of Emergency is a bunch of
very miserable side schemes and Brothers Grimm.
(03:11):
Brothers Grimm is a single minion with a bunch of
attachments that either go on toBrothers Grimm or on to the
villain. And they're kind of can trips.
So they make something a little bit bad happen and then they go
and get an encounter card when after that bad thing has
happened, all the friendly side schemes out of Red Skull are
(03:32):
actually removed. So prison camps, censor the
past, Hydro reinforcements and mass chaos.
Those are all the ones where youget, well, Mass chaos isn't, but
the other ones are. You get some bonus when you
defeat them. Those are removed.
Hydro Patrols, the sorry, the Hydro Patrol modular 2 of the
hydro regulars are removed so that you have to go when it's
(03:54):
time to go get some hydro minions.
You have to go get nastier ones,and there's a few other things,
but we'll not worry about that. You can just kind of go read
this if you're really interested.
Round 4 is Mojo with Black Tom Cassidy.
And then instead of using show modular sets, we're actually
(04:18):
using the Super strength Flight and Telepathy modulars that
usually go with Mr. Sinister. There's a setup attachment that
comes in with each of those, andthose replace the show
environments, and then additionally they stack.
So when one of those comes in, the old one doesn't go out,
which is what would happen with the show environments.
(04:39):
So this is a much trickier version of Mojo.
So those are the four main encounters, and each of these
are susceptible to some different strategies, right?
You can definitely use status effects during against some of
these Strife for example, you can really lean into Hope and
(05:05):
being able to build up Hope and have your hero that has good
access to increasing stats be able to get Hope nice and big.
The encounter set for all of this is standard three with
Expert 1.5. Expert 1.5 is one that I used
(05:27):
last time, but I'll talk about the standard three first.
So standard 3 has a small modification which is at the end
of sorry. At the start of every villain
phase, you add a pursuit counterto pursuit by the past, so your
nemesis minions are much more likely to come out.
(05:47):
And then additionally, if one ofthe heroes nemesis sets has
already come into play, when this triggers a second time, the
other nemesis set will come intoplay.
So you're very likely to have both heroes see both of their
nemesis sets during during a match.
There's some fiddly rules that go with that just to make it all
(06:08):
work, but again, this is something you can read if you're
really interested. And then Expert 1.5 uses the
Expert 2 Expert ones, except forUnder Fire, because I really
don't like the Expert 2 version of Under Fire.
I think it's especially nasty and not very interesting.
Some of the Expert 2 cards have interesting boost effects, so it
(06:31):
forces you to stay on your toes.I like this set of cards quite a
bit. I won't talk about scoring in
too much detail, but I'm going to talk about the draft because
that's really the point of all of this.
We're trying to set up what the draft looks like that normally.
We've typically had that each team drafts 2 heroes in two
aspects, and then you're welcometo kind of mix and match those,
(06:55):
even change them between rounds.This one did it a different way.
Everybody's going to draft 4 heroes and then leadership is
completely banned. But beyond that, you're welcome
to use any of the aspects with your heroes with some caveats.
And the caveats are that from amongst your 4 heroes, you have
(07:20):
to play each hero at least once.You can never use the same pair
of heroes more than once. So if I drafted Antman, Wasp,
Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, and I played Amman and Wasp in
round one, then I would never beable to play Antman and Wasp
again together. This results in you having to
(07:45):
play basically one of your heroes 3 * 2 of them twice, one
of them once, or every single hero twice.
It's just how the combinations work out.
And then additionally, every hero can only play each aspect
once. So you've got justice,
aggression, protection, and poolthat you can do that with.
(08:05):
So those are the constraints on what you're trying to do.
There ended up being 19 teams that were interested in playing
and some people wanted to do thereal time draft, which is really
fun, you know, getting to react to what everybody else is
saying. We even actually did it over a
live call this time and that was, that was really fun.
(08:28):
And then we also had an asynchronous draft for the first
time and that worked really well.
It was finished in about two days.
So I was, I was quite delighted with how well that actually
went. And the other thing I did not
mention about the draft is that,well, sorry, yeah, let me set
this up. So the idea was that there were
(08:49):
four groups of heroes and you had to draft one hero from each
group, and each group had one more hero than there were teams.
So the very final team that would draft from a given group
would always have two heroes to choose from.
So there was for the real time division.
(09:09):
So these are the people that were drafting live.
There was 10 teams, so 11 heroesin each group.
The excluded heroes were Bishop,Drax, Gambit, Groot, Iceman,
Jubilee, Magneto, Shadowcat, Spider Man, Peter Parker, and
War Machine. That is the randomly determined
(09:30):
heroes that were not in there. And then the heroes were
randomly placed in the four groups.
There was a restriction that Nova was not allowed to use pool
because there's an infinite combo that's somewhat easy to
get in there and not very interesting.
So that was kind of setting thatup.
The draft was Snake, and then the idea was that once you had
(09:54):
picked from a group, you were nolonger allowed to pick from that
group. So in terms of draft strategy,
you were often looking at the group and thinking about which
group were you comfortable picking much later based on your
draft order. Draft is snake style.
So you start at the first team, drafts goes all the way to the
(10:16):
10th team, then the 10th team drafts first and the second
round back to the first, and then first to 10th, and then
10th to 1st again. So the first team is also going
to have the 1st pick, which in this case was Chase and Sloth.
They were also going to have thevery final pick.
So we'll see that when we talk to Sloth.
(10:37):
But the idea is they already know that they can pick a
division or a group that they know there's going to be two
heroes that they don't mind choosing from between as their
final hero and then in the turn based division.
So this was the asynchronous draft that took a couple days.
And again, I was very delighted with how well it went.
(11:01):
The excluded heroes were Deadpool, Domino, Iron Man, Iron
Heart, Jubilee, Magneto, Nebula,Nightcrawler, Rogue, Scarlet
Witch, She Hulk, Spider Man, Peter Parker, again, Star Lord,
War Machine, and these were again determined randomly.
And the two drafts, the randomization had nothing to do
(11:23):
with each other, but it is funnythat there's definitely some
obvious overlap between them. There was only 9 teams in this
one, so that means there was 10 heroes in each of the groups.
And I think actually, you know what, that's about it.
That's about all I need to do toset up all these conversations
(11:43):
I'm going to have with some folks about their drafting
strategies and who they ultimately picked and how
they're thinking about taking their heroes up against these
different scenarios. So thanks for listening.
Hey friendos, welcome to the Road to Nowhere.
Today we're going to talk about Modoc League Season 3.
Going to set up the draft a little bit because I've done a
series of interviews talking to folks from different teams about
their drafting strategy, how thedraft went, how they're planning
some of these things. And so I thought it would be
(00:31):
good to put an episode together that would be focused on, you
know, what people were actually drafting from, what they're
drafting toward in terms of the season setup.
The villains were fighting, those sorts of things.
So that's the plan. Let's get into it.
So Modoc League is A2 handed league where people can play
(00:53):
individually or with a partner. You're playing 2 heroes.
We usually play 4 rounds. They're separated by, you know,
three to four weeks usually and everybody gets their heroes and
sometimes they draft aspects andthey draft against the other
teams so that you you build yourteam.
This season the villains were all end of the box villains.
(01:19):
So we have Ultron, Strife, Red Skull, and Mojo.
We'll look at these in a little bit more detail in a moment.
There's a special standard and expert encounter set that we'll
also talk a little bit about andthen we'll look a little bit
more at the details of the draft.
(01:40):
So let's look at the villains first.
So the very first round is Ultron and Under attack.
This is mostly just kind of the vanilla core box Ultron villain,
except for we've also added Infinity Gauntlet.
And in addition to that, we actually start on stage 2A of
(02:03):
the main scheme. So this is the one where you
either are bringing out, you're either putting 2 thread on the
main scheme or bringing out a drone every turn.
Round 2 is up against Strife with obviously the Hope Summers
modular, plus Personal Nightmareand Anachronauts.
(02:26):
This is the Con of Heroes 2024 challenge.
And there's an additional condition that during gameplay
when Strife schemes, he gets plus X thwart where X is half of
the number of cards of the most common type in your hand,
rounded down. So this is just normally his
bonus for the number of cards you have in your hand is only
(02:48):
for his attack. This adds some bonus for your
thwart and is a reasonably tricky set of modulars to deal
with. The third one is Red Skull with
Hydro Patrol State of Emergency.State of Emergency is a bunch of
very miserable side schemes and Brothers Grimm.
(03:11):
Brothers Grimm is a single minion with a bunch of
attachments that either go on toBrothers Grimm or on to the
villain. And they're kind of can trips.
So they make something a little bit bad happen and then they go
and get an encounter card when after that bad thing has
happened, all the friendly side schemes out of Red Skull are
(03:32):
actually removed. So prison camps, censor the
past, Hydro reinforcements and mass chaos.
Those are all the ones where youget, well, Mass chaos isn't, but
the other ones are. You get some bonus when you
defeat them. Those are removed.
Hydro Patrols, the sorry, the Hydro Patrol modular 2 of the
hydro regulars are removed so that you have to go when it's
(03:54):
time to go get some hydro minions.
You have to go get nastier ones,and there's a few other things,
but we'll not worry about that. You can just kind of go read
this if you're really interested.
Round 4 is Mojo with Black Tom Cassidy.
And then instead of using show modular sets, we're actually
(04:18):
using the Super strength Flight and Telepathy modulars that
usually go with Mr. Sinister. There's a setup attachment that
comes in with each of those, andthose replace the show
environments, and then additionally they stack.
So when one of those comes in, the old one doesn't go out,
which is what would happen with the show environments.
(04:39):
So this is a much trickier version of Mojo.
So those are the four main encounters, and each of these
are susceptible to some different strategies, right?
You can definitely use status effects during against some of
these Strife for example, you can really lean into Hope and
(05:05):
being able to build up Hope and have your hero that has good
access to increasing stats be able to get Hope nice and big.
The encounter set for all of this is standard three with
Expert 1.5. Expert 1.5 is one that I used
(05:27):
last time, but I'll talk about the standard three first.
So standard 3 has a small modification which is at the end
of sorry. At the start of every villain
phase, you add a pursuit counterto pursuit by the past, so your
nemesis minions are much more likely to come out.
(05:47):
And then additionally, if one ofthe heroes nemesis sets has
already come into play, when this triggers a second time, the
other nemesis set will come intoplay.
So you're very likely to have both heroes see both of their
nemesis sets during during a match.
There's some fiddly rules that go with that just to make it all
(06:08):
work, but again, this is something you can read if you're
really interested. And then Expert 1.5 uses the
Expert 2 Expert ones, except forUnder Fire, because I really
don't like the Expert 2 version of Under Fire.
I think it's especially nasty and not very interesting.
Some of the Expert 2 cards have interesting boost effects, so it
(06:31):
forces you to stay on your toes.I like this set of cards quite a
bit. I won't talk about scoring in
too much detail, but I'm going to talk about the draft because
that's really the point of all of this.
We're trying to set up what the draft looks like that normally.
We've typically had that each team drafts 2 heroes in two
aspects, and then you're welcometo kind of mix and match those,
(06:55):
even change them between rounds.This one did it a different way.
Everybody's going to draft 4 heroes and then leadership is
completely banned. But beyond that, you're welcome
to use any of the aspects with your heroes with some caveats.
And the caveats are that from amongst your 4 heroes, you have
(07:20):
to play each hero at least once.You can never use the same pair
of heroes more than once. So if I drafted Antman, Wasp,
Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, and I played Amman and Wasp in
round one, then I would never beable to play Antman and Wasp
again together. This results in you having to
(07:45):
play basically one of your heroes 3 * 2 of them twice, one
of them once, or every single hero twice.
It's just how the combinations work out.
And then additionally, every hero can only play each aspect
once. So you've got justice,
aggression, protection, and poolthat you can do that with.
(08:05):
So those are the constraints on what you're trying to do.
There ended up being 19 teams that were interested in playing
and some people wanted to do thereal time draft, which is really
fun, you know, getting to react to what everybody else is
saying. We even actually did it over a
live call this time and that was, that was really fun.
(08:28):
And then we also had an asynchronous draft for the first
time and that worked really well.
It was finished in about two days.
So I was, I was quite delighted with how well that actually
went. And the other thing I did not
mention about the draft is that,well, sorry, yeah, let me set
this up. So the idea was that there were
(08:49):
four groups of heroes and you had to draft one hero from each
group, and each group had one more hero than there were teams.
So the very final team that would draft from a given group
would always have two heroes to choose from.
So there was for the real time division.
(09:09):
So these are the people that were drafting live.
There was 10 teams, so 11 heroesin each group.
The excluded heroes were Bishop,Drax, Gambit, Groot, Iceman,
Jubilee, Magneto, Shadowcat, Spider Man, Peter Parker, and
War Machine. That is the randomly determined
(09:30):
heroes that were not in there. And then the heroes were
randomly placed in the four groups.
There was a restriction that Nova was not allowed to use pool
because there's an infinite combo that's somewhat easy to
get in there and not very interesting.
So that was kind of setting thatup.
The draft was Snake, and then the idea was that once you had
(09:54):
picked from a group, you were nolonger allowed to pick from that
group. So in terms of draft strategy,
you were often looking at the group and thinking about which
group were you comfortable picking much later based on your
draft order. Draft is snake style.
So you start at the first team, drafts goes all the way to the
(10:16):
10th team, then the 10th team drafts first and the second
round back to the first, and then first to 10th, and then
10th to 1st again. So the first team is also going
to have the 1st pick, which in this case was Chase and Sloth.
They were also going to have thevery final pick.
So we'll see that when we talk to Sloth.
(10:37):
But the idea is they already know that they can pick a
division or a group that they know there's going to be two
heroes that they don't mind choosing from between as their
final hero and then in the turn based division.
So this was the asynchronous draft that took a couple days.
And again, I was very delighted with how well it went.
(11:01):
The excluded heroes were Deadpool, Domino, Iron Man, Iron
Heart, Jubilee, Magneto, Nebula,Nightcrawler, Rogue, Scarlet
Witch, She Hulk, Spider Man, Peter Parker, again, Star Lord,
War Machine, and these were again determined randomly.
And the two drafts, the randomization had nothing to do
(11:23):
with each other, but it is funnythat there's definitely some
obvious overlap between them. There was only 9 teams in this
one, so that means there was 10 heroes in each of the groups.
And I think actually, you know what, that's about it.
That's about all I need to do toset up all these conversations
(11:43):
I'm going to have with some folks about their drafting
strategies and who they ultimately picked and how
they're thinking about taking their heroes up against these
different scenarios. So thanks for listening.
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