My big issues with Champions

 Hi

So this is the story about how I felt like I had to apologize for playing marvel champions. 

I have a friend that I play Arkham horror with on a regular basis. 

We had a little gap between campaigns that I felt was a perfect spot to introduce him to marvel champions.

Oh boy.

The first week we played vs Kang and started off well, but my god does Kang drag on! 

we spent ages and ages (in different ages) fighting his stage one, but once we had finally beat that stage we put out the split stage and both of were starting to think the game had outstayed its welcome.

 The thought of having to beat two more stages was daunting and it was already getting late. 

We decided to continue with the game and was surprised to find that actually we defeated the other two stages in 4 turns, phew! was my fist thought, but we we started to talk about the game, and the weird that feeling was beating his other stages in so few turns.

We discussed about how this is backwards to how most other games normally play out. Most games start easy at first and get harder as the game goes on. This leads to a satisfaction when you slay the big bad boss and win the game. The game starting off difficult and then getting easier, felt like it was a slog to get started and then once we had, it was trivial to get to the end, robbing us of any joy beating the villain and just left us feeling a bit deflated. 

I chalked this up to playing Kang and my multiple other experiences of playing this have been very enjoyable and so I was keen to get another game in to show my friend all the fun that you can have playing the game.

That's where I made the second mistake, I played Star Lord.

I have posted on these forums before about my issues with Starlord and how I think he is better than Dr strange (yeah I said it and I'm happy to defend this if need be). The decision to play Star lord was a last minute thing and looking back I should of played anyone else. 

I personally think he is the worst thing this game has to offer and I will show you why.

We had planned to play vs Drang and my friend had chosen to play Groot. after a couple of turns of setting up we have the first stage down to 5 life, I had Star lord's helmet 3 encounters on the way and a Badboy on the table. 

So Star lord's hand size 5 gets 3 more cards and then flips takes no damage and draws two more for a fun turn of 10 cards for next turn. 

I'm going first so I flip play Nick Fury for 1 draw 3 more and then go on to deal all the remaining damage to this and the next stage to win the game. 

After laughing to myself for a second about how much damage he can do, all I was left to do was left to do was apologize for the game. 

Where was the fun in this? 

Who made Star Lords 15 cards in such a way that this is what he wants to do every game?

He is fun for no one (past the self indulgent joy  you get when you "go off" for 5 minutes until you look around the table and no one else is enjoying the fact that they didn't need to be there) 

After the bad taste that the second game we had played had gone we looked backed and discussed the game more broadly. 

Basically it started with me trying to convince him that the game is actually fun despite his two latest experiences  (he had played once before this) and we spoke about the response that I had herd on a podcast recently about how the developer had a sort of design philosophy of "this is a co-op game so we don't play test for broken decks, because people can just not play them" which by the way is not a great mindset to have because I feel it leads to things like this.

After this experience I was left feeling bad that I had put my friend through this and wondered why i played Star Lord when I knew this was the sort of thing he does. I enjoy the theme of Star Lord (risk for reward) and it wasn't that long ago I had bought him, so wanted to play with the new cards I picked him up purely as a last minute switch of hero and even played stinger in the deck (which I soon realized when I drew I couldn't even play).

It's bad that I had spent money on a character that I almost now have no interest of ever playing again. This also started me thinking about how much I had spent so far on this game and did I really need to spend any more if the experience is only going to get worse as more cards come into the pool, which is shame because since I got this game almost 2 years ago, its been the game I almost always want to get out and play again.

Lastly I will say that I know this is my fault for playing Star Lord and playing vs Kang so maybe this is just all self inflicted, but in some ways its a shame that playing cards that are in the game and not having fun is not great.

To finish on a good note please leave a comment (either here or on the forums) of what your favorite villain/heroes that you would put in front of an experienced card player that brings out the most fun this game has to offer for you?

until next time.