With great power, there must also come great responsibility."
–Stan Lee, Amazing Fantasy #15
Rhino rampages through the streets of New York. Klaw peddles illegal weapons to the world’s most dangerous criminals. Ultron threatens global annihilation. The world needs champions to stop these villains. Are you up to the task?
Marvel Champions: The Card Game sees players taking on the roles of iconic heroes from the Marvel Universe as they try to stop infamous villains from enacting their devious schemes. With over 350 cards, 100 tokens, five hit point trackers, and more, the Marvel Champions: The Card Game Core Set gives you everything you need to start your journey in the Marvel Universe, letting you play as Iron Man, Captain Marvel, Spider-Man, Black Panther, or She-Hulk, combining your powers with your fellow heroes to take down the rampaging Rhino, the cunning Klaw, or the utterly terrifying Ultron!
The game brings the epic battles that define the Marvel Universe to your tabletop, inviting you to select a hero for you to embody and a scenario consisting of a dastardly villain and their devious scheme. Each villain and scheme provides a different experience, but all are challenges for your heroes! Nevertheless, if you can fight through the villain's various forms and thwart them with a combination of teamwork, skill, and luck, you and your fellow heroes will emerge as champions!
But it won’t be that easy. Every villain has their own encounter deck, full of minions and tactics, ready to knock out the heroes before they can save the world. Can you withstand Rhino’s assault when he finds a new ally in the dreaded Shocker? Will you be able to thwart Klaw when he unleashes a devastating sonic boom? Can you defeat an army of Ultron Drones? These challenges and more await you in each scenario. Do you have what it takes to overcome impossible odds and become the champions the world needs?
As a Living Card Game, the Marvel Champions: The Card Game Core Set is just the beginning. You can expect to see new Marvel Champions expansions coming out every month, and unlike a collectible game, there's no chase for rare cards—you'll find a full playset of each card in every expansion. As Marvel Champions continues beyond the Core Set, you'll be able to expand your collection with new heroes, scenarios, and more! Best of all, you'll always know exactly what’s inside a new Marvel Champions product.
In addition, although previous Living Card Game Core Sets required multiple purchases to get a complete set of cards, Fantasy Flight Games is proud to announce that just one Marvel Champions: The Card Game Core Set will give you a complete set of cards, giving you everything you need to customize your heroes!
EXTRAORDINARY HEROES
"The best thing we ever did was getting together in the first place. I was so new to the armor, to the adventure, and when this team got together... I said to myself 'this is worth doing, this is important.'"
– Iron Man, Avengers vol.3 #504
In every game of Marvel Champions, you step into the shoes of an iconic Marvel hero—a hero brought to life in the game with their own double-sided identity card and customizable deck representing their powers, tools, and allies they use to achieve victory. These 40-50 card decks allow you to truly embody the five heroes found in the Core Set. You can play as Tony Stark and build your own personal Iron Man suit with an Arc Reactor, Mark V Armor, and more. Then, when you’re ready, you'll put on the suit and unleash devastating Repulsor Blasts on your foes! Or maybe you’ll embody Spider-Man, thwarting villains' plans with superhuman agility and speed before inventing new Spider-tech as Peter Parker!
As these heroes, you can use your superhuman strength and speed to deal a massive attack to the villain, or use your genius intellect to thwart the villain, waylaying their progress toward completing their scheme.
These three values—thwart (THW), attack (ATK), and defense (DEF)—represent your hero's awesome natural abilities!
Every Marvel hero has amazing abilities, but any hero can tell you these skills come with a cost. During your turn, you’ll have the opportunity to play ally, upgrade, event, and support cards from your hand. Allies can thwart and attack the villain on their own terms, events are one-time effects that can provide a powerful punch, while supports and upgrades stay on the field to assist your hero in their battles!
To play a card from your hand, however, you have to first pay its cost, seen in the upper left corner of the card—and these resources are most commonly generated by discarding other cards from your hand. Perhaps these resources represent the mental fortitude you needed to invent a new repulsor ray on the fly, or the physical prowess to deliver a devastating web kick. This makes every turn of Marvel Champions a strategic decision. Will you forgo using yourLegal Practice (Core Set, 23) to deliver a massive Gamma Slam (Core Set, 21)? Or discard a One-Two Punch (Core Set, 24) to thwart the villain with your Superhuman Law Division (Core Set, 26)?
Importantly, although you're giving some cards up, this also means you'll always have the oppurtunity to perform amazing feats on your turn! You refill your hand at the end of your turn, meaning you'll always have the resources you need to make an impact in the fight, and you never have to "sit out" for a turn, engendering fast-paced action with a mix of strategic decisions. Marvel Champions is always about reading the field, working with your teammates, and prioritizing the best course of action.
But being a hero is about more than just super heroics. In fact, you start the game as your hero's alter-ego—the side of your hero identity card representing Peter Parker, Carol Danvers, T’challa, Jennifer Walters, or Tony Stark. Once per turn, you can change the form of your character, morphing into a powerful hero or returning to their alter-ego. In your alter-ego form, you'll gain access to a unique ability and the option to heal up. As the hero, meanwhile, you'll be able to directly attack the villain.
Your alter-ego can recover from epic battles using their recovery (REC) value!
Marvel Champions: The Card Game places just as much emphasis on your character's alter-ego as it does on their hero form. Many cards in your deck aren't based on your hero's powers, but on their life outside their costume. As the leader of a nation, T'Challa (Core Set, 40B) has unique advantages compared to the more stealth-and-tech oriented Black Panther (Core Set, 40A). For example, only T'Challa can call on his Ancestral Knowledge (Core Set, 42) to find the proper course of action. But having a life outside of hero work also entails a certain sense of danger. Each of these alter-egos has their own obligations and responsibilities that your adversaries can target at the worst possible moment!
Choosing between your hero and your alter-ego also directly impacts how the villain acts in their phase. If you're in your hero form, the villain will ignore their scheme in favor of attacking you directly, but if you're in your alter-ego form, the villain will ignore you to advance their nefarious plans. Taking too much damage from the villain's attacks can cause your hero to be knocked out of the fight, but sometimes you have to do whatever it takes to stop the villain’s plans! It’s also about teamwork—if all of the heroes decide to end their turn in their alter-ego form, a villain like Rhino is free to rampage through the city. But always facing the villain head-on and dealing with his brute strength may not be the best idea, either. Proper teamwork is key to defeating the monstrous villains arrayed against you.
UNSTOPPABLE VILLAINS
"Ultron. We would have words with thee."
– The Mighty Thor, Avengers Vol.3 #22
Your hero is endowed with undeniable might, but saving the world won’t be easy, as each villain’s scheme puts your hero directly in harm’s way and the Marvel heroes will have to rely on their wits, skills, and a little bit of luck if they have any hope of saving the world.
Marvel Champions is a truly cooperative game, meaning no player directly controls the villain during a scenario. Instead, an easy-to follow checklist and unique encounter deck guide the villain's actions while throwing in plenty of surprises along the way!
The villain begins their turn by placing threat on their scheme. These threat tokens represents the villain's plans coming to fruition, and it's something the heroes want to avoid at all costs. If a villain can push their scheme to fruition by placing enough threat on it, the heroes lose the game. Luckily, you always have a chance to fight back. If your band of champions can work together and knock out the villain with photon blasts, web-kicks and more, you win the game!
The Break-In! is the final scheme in Rhino's scheme deck, and if seven threat per player is placed on this card, the heroes lose the game!
After the base threat is placed on the scheme, the villain then turns their attention to each individual hero by activating against them. If you are in your hero form, the villain attacks you! If your character is in their alter-ego form, however, they aren’t around to stop the villain from advancing their scheme further!
Just like the heroes, villains have natural abilities, adding threat by scheming (SCH) or dealing damage with an attack (ATK). Unlike the heroes, they use them for pure evil!
And the villain won't stop there. After activating once for each hero, every player is forced to draw an encounter card! Each villain’s encounter deck is unique to them and represents their powers, tools, minions and more. Each hero also has a unique obligation shuffled into the encounter deck at the start of the game, ready to pop up at the most inopportune times. Some of the encounter cards you face might be minions or additional villains arriving to help the main villain in their scheme, while others may represent a devastating obstacle to your heroes. If your characters can withstand all of these attacks, they enter another player phase where they continue in their battle to save the world!
A WORLD OF HEROES
The world needs champions—are you up to the task? This Core Set is just the beginning, and as a Living Card Game, new heroes and villains are on their way to Marvel Champions. What new challenges and powers await? Find out when Marvel Champions: The Card Game launches in the fourth quarter of 2019, and be sure to keep an eye on our website for more information on Marvel Champions, including additional previews, livestreams, announcements of upcoming expansions, and more!
