Klaw Heroic 1
Next step in our Heroic mode series...Klaw! We take on this villain with his recommended encounter set, Masters of Evil. Friday's are Marvel Champions night, so pop into our live stream over at twitch.tv/homebasegames!
Against Klaw and the Masters of Evil, we wanted to use Thor as one of our heroes. Thor tends to get a bad rep for three main reasons. One, he can't really thwart, so he's hard to play on solo mode; he needs a partner to help manage threat. Two, his Nemesis – Loki – is one of the worst in the game because he's so hard to kill. And three, he needs to fight against a Villain with lots of minions in order to consistently trigger his "Have at thee!" Hero ability to draw cards and be effective. That said, in the right match, Thor can really go off and be super fun to play! This match-up is a good opportunity to give Thor a chance to shine.
A Thor Aggression deck is very well-suited to face Klaw and the Masters of Evil because there are quite a few minions in the Villain deck with this setup (9 total), which means Thor will often trigger his Hero ability to draw 2 cards every turn. Also, the Masters of Evil minions are beefy with at least 5 health, but that's no problem for Thor with a base 3 ATK (assuming he's wielding Mjolnir...which he should pretty much always be doing) and Mean Swing to give him +3 ATK for an attack. Plus Battle Fury let's him ready after he bashes a minion to then attack another target!
But like we said before, Thor's biggest weakness is thwarting – he has base 1 THW and only a few cards in his deck that allow him to remove threat from a scheme. He needs a partner who is at least pretty good at consistently thwarting to compensate. We tried a few different variations – Captain Marvel, Black Panther, Spider Man – all with Justice...but we found ourselves consistently falling behind in threat, particularly with the side schemes. So we pulled out Iron Man Justice with the usual good stuff and that got us there!
This actually turned out to be a very good pairing – Thor basically focused on all the minions and would splash damage onto Klaw periodically while Iron Man did his "thwarting thing" and then punched through big chunks of damage onto Klaw with Repulsor Blast and Supersonic Punch once his suit was assembled.
Now we move onto Ultron Heroic 1 (ugh)...Stay tuned!!