Rhino Heroic 1
We have kicked off our Heroic Mode series for Marvel Champions on our Live Stream at twitch.tv/homebasegames! We play every Friday, so come join us!
Heroic Mode is a special format introduced by the game designers at FFG to further scale the difficulty of Marvel Champions. Players must incorporate the 3 Expert cards into the Villain's Encounter deck, and during the Encounter Phase each player must draw additional Encounter cards for each level of Heroic; so when we're playing Heroic 1, we draw the 1 card as normal plus 1 for Heroic 1 for a total of 2 Encounter cards per player – if we were playing Heroic 2, we'd draw the 1 card as normal plus 2 for Heroic 2 for a total of 3 Encounter cards per player, and so on.
We are kicking things off with Rhino. Initially, we chose to use Ms. Marvel and Thor with Aggression and Protection, swapping traits between sessions. We specifically chose Protection as Rhino often deals big chunks of damage and his Charge has Overkill, meaning we can't absorb the entire attack with an Ally.
Protection has a few ways to mitigate damage; against Rhino we like Expert Defense for +3 DEF to negate the +3 ATK on Rhino's Charge. Unfortunately, we kept losing to threat, because neither of these Heroes can really thwart consistently – both have just 1 THW base, and only a couple of cards each to remove threat.
After struggling through a few games, we decided to switch things up a bit and use different Heroes and traits. Since our biggest hurdle was threat, we figured we should try adding in the Justice trait, and selecting Heroes that have base 2 THW. So we decided to try out Captain America with Protection and Capital Marvel with Justice – Cap 'N Cap!
This time we were able to defeat Rhino on the first go-around. The Protection was still important, and Captain America's Shield Block helped mitigate even more damage. Plus, his Fearless Determination was helpful now and again to catch up on threat. Captain Marvel's Crisis Interdiction came in handy, and her ability to use Energy Channel for damage was also relevant. I wouldn't consider this an optimal pairing, but it still felt like a very good mix of cards and abilities. It was nice that they could complement each other, and each help out once in a while with extra threat removal or damage bursts to the Villain and his Minions. That said, I think it was the combination of Protection and Justice that really mattered against Rhino – other heroes may have also done well with these traits.
Next we move on to Klaw Heroic 1...come join the party! We live stream Marvel Champions every Friday at twitch.tv/homebasegames. Stay tuned!!