Let's Play: Legendary

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willpell
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Let's Play: Legendary

Post by willpell » Sun Dec 15, 2013 4:22 am

Today's activity is a member of a currently-trendy class of game design known as "deck-building games" (DBGs), which are designed to give some of the "collectible card game" experience in a tolerably-priced single box, perhaps expanded periodically but not never-ending, and not suffering from the scourge of randomness in acquisition. This particular one is one of my personal favorites, in part because it's based on a property I'm quite fond of, Marvel Comics. The game is called "Legendary", and it focuses around the idea of assembling a team of super-heroes to thwart a villain's evil scheme; it has a nice mix of simplicity and depth, although it suffers from a slightly excessive amount of setup time, a common failing of all but the simplest (and, consquently, often the most unsatisfying) deckbuilders. It's not as bad as Arkham Horror in terms of this, but it does take a bit of effort; the payoff in gameplay, however, is likely to be worth it. The game has an official solitaire mode, but I find it unsatisfying, so I'll be playing two imaginary players, in order to give you a taste of how the game plays in practice. Legendary is an interesting mix of coop and competitive play; each player wants to defeat the most Villains, rescue the most innocent Bystanders, and otherwise get all the glory for having saved the day, but they sometimes have to work together a little and "take one for the team", or else the Super-Villain will complete his evil Scheme and they'll all lose. Thusly, competitive players can try to hoard points, while players who prefer to cooperate can simply work to thwart the villain; there isn't really much game ability for them to help or hurt each other, so it doesn't work ideally as such a hybrid, but it's something at least.

Unlike most DBGs, Legendary comes with a board, although this is not strictly necessary; it marks the location of several piles of cards which you could just remember, but makes it possible to avoid the extra cognitive load required to do so. In order to set up a game, I first lay out the board, then give each "player" their starting deck of 4 "SHIELD Trooper" cards and 8 "SHIELD Agent" cards. These are your hopelessly inadequate starting ratio of the game's two basic resources, Recruit Points and Attack. Every Agent has a star symbol with a "1" on it, representing 1 Recruit Point, while every Trooper has a claw-slash symbol with a "1", representing 1 Attack. Of these 12 cards, you start the turn with 6 in your hand, you play them all (or discard them, if they're not worth playing...for instance, 1 Attack never accomplishes anything, so if you have one Trooper and five Agents, the Trooper can be played to no effect or discarded, either way), then you put those cards into your discard pile and draw 6 more (which, on turn 2 of the game, will always be the other 6 of your starting set, so the two turns will always have the same combined total of 8 Recruit and 4 Attack, divided up to varying degrees of usefulness). The turn after that, and several times subsequently in the game, you reshuffle your discard pile to form a new deck and draw your replacement hand from that; you continue churning through your deck 6 cards at a time, while your deck steadily grows larger and larger. Ideally, you want to "destroy" (in this game, called "K.O.") your weak starting cards, removing them permanently from your deck so they don't clog up your draws, and leaving you with stronger cards every turn; this is the core of the deck-building game concept.

There are several switches you can flip when designing a DBG, so here are Legendary's settings on that scale, besides what I've already mentioned:
* Cards that are worth "victory points" at the end of the game do NOT go into your personal Deck in Legendary, but rather form a separate score pile. This is different from most DBGs, in which either all cards are worth some number of VP (except the ones you started with, and possibly a few unusual cards which are bought cheaply for powerful effects when played, specifically because they don't count toward your score), or else victory-point cards gradually clog your deck and force you to rely more and more on powerful cards to compensate. (Most DBGs use the former method, while the quite-frustrating latter mechanic is found in only one that I know of, a fantasy-themed game called Thunderstone which I have a somewhat perverse fondness for.)
* In some DBGs, you instantly refill the selection of cards from which you can purchase each turn, while in others, it is depleted over the course of your turn, limiting how much you can buy in one turn (and thus preventing "get immense quantities of money and ignore any problem you can't buy your way out of" from being an efficient strategy for winning). Legendary takes the former approach; you can't ever win the game with only Recruit Points, but if you can generate a functionally-limitless number of Recruit Points, you can buy a functionally-limitless number of "Hero cards", which may or may not actually help you win. (You typically need to acquire "villain cards" to gain Victory Points, and those are not constantly replentished as Hero Cards are.)
* Nearly every DBG has a "bad card" type which you can be forced to include in your deck against your will, which sabotages your efforts in one way or another. Legendary's version of this is the "Wound" card, which actually doesn't directly harm you in any particular way, other than being a card which does nothing useful and thus clogs up your draws. Legendary also includes an automatic ability to dispose of these cards, as many as you have in your hand, by skipping a single turn; other DBGs have less generous such options, or even none, forcing you to rely more on acquiring cards specifically for the purpose of destroying the "bad cards". In Legendary, you can take Wounds with relatively little consequence, and only take a turn to "heal" them all when you've acquired several of them; a few Hero cards even reward you for suffering a few Wounds in the line of duty, in true super-hero fashion.

That covers everything I think we need to discuss before the game starts, so let's finish setting up. To create the "hero deck", you select five of the game's fifteen Heroes (officially the game calls for these to be random, but I prefer to pick and choose ones I haven't seen too much recently). I will be opting to use the following Heroes:
* James "Logan" Howlett, aka Wolverine, possibly Marvel's single best-known and most popular character, a functionally indestructible mutant with animalistic senses and instincts, his regeneration augmented by an unbreakable metal skeleton with claws that cut through anything. In Legendary, Wolverine has cards exclusively of a single color (I'll get to what the card colors do later), gold, a distinction I believe is unique to him of the game's Heroes, which I thought would be a nice touch for this "intro" game. He is also one of the two heroes who deals well with Wounds; the game tends to be noticeably different when one of them is not included, since Wounds in that case are exclusively harmful.
* Remy Lebeau, aka Gambit, who is a member of The X-Men like Wolverine (although the latter goes on solo adventures more frequently, and has even joined Marvel's other flagship team, The Avengers). Like all of the X-Men, Gambit is a mutant, having innate superhuman powers just as a function of his genes, but while one can imagine that real-world genetics could conceivably grant regenerative powers (albeit not quite as miraculous as Wolverine's), Gambit's "mutant power" is pure fiction, the ability to turn any object into an explosive by touching it, which he characteristically employs by throwing energy-charged playing cards at his opponent. He also fights skillfully with a quarterstaff and has a generally roguish personality; he's always been a personal favorite character of mine (while I consider Wolverine overused). But surprisingly, I don't think I've ever played him in Legendary, certainly not often, which again contrasts nicely with Wolverine who I've used quite frequently. Yet another way he differs from Wolverine is in colors, as he possesses cards in three of them (most characters have two)...a few cards that are gold like Wolverine, but also several in red and blue.
* Natalia Romanova, aka the Black Widow, the sole female hero I've selected for this game, and also the sole member of the Avengers (Wolverine, while he's been in the team in the comics, is not affiliated with them in Legendary). Unlike the all-mutant X-Men, the Avengers have no real unifying theme; they're just a bunch of Marvel's better-known heroes who have a history together. Black Widow was originally an enemy of theirs, a Soviet spy who sought to infiltrate and destroy them, but she later defected and became a perennial member of the team. Though not officially superhuman, she's extremely well-trained in all aspects of espionage, including hand-to-hand combat, and possesses a lot of "spy gadgets" including a taserlike characteristic weapon termed the "Widow's Bite". She is of course less-well known for any of this than for dressing primarily in a skintight black leather catsuit, and the game sort of goes along with the stereotyping; she's not one of the more combat-centric heroes, instead tending to primarily "rescue Bystanders", a game mechanic that I'll talk more about later. Her cards are red or black.
* Wade "Deadpool" Wilson, aka "the merc with a mouth", who is one of Marvel's more popular characters for rather different reasons than is typical of a superhero. There's nothing particularly heroic about him, indeed he is pretty much a straight mercenary as his nickname indicates; he casually kills people even more often than Wolverine, and his readers appreciate him more for his gallows humor, balls-out lunacy, and general "badassitude" than for anything you might call "heroism". He possesses the same colors as Black Widow (along with a tiny splash of gold), since they are similar "guns and gadgets and martial arts" types of heroes without "powers" per se, although Deadpool does possess some of Wolverine's regeneration in the comics (not reflected in the game). Deadpool is the one character in the game who doesn't have a team affiliation; the players are free to use their imaginations as to how, exactly, the X-Men and/or Avengers have twisted his arm into fighting alongside them.
* Finally, we have Colonel Nick Fury, who isn't a superhero in the strictest sense, having originally premiered in Marvel's World War 2 comics as "Sgt. Nick Fury and his Howling Commandos", but gradually matriculated over the decades into the Marvel Universe's version of a combination Henry Kissinger and John McClane, the head of the government super-intelligence taskforce SHIELD (as seen on your Troopers and Agents), who mostly directs other "assets" but occasionally gears up to personally enter combat in various tense situations. Like Deadpool, Fury is neither an X-Man nor an Avenger, but instead has the team affiliation symbol of SHIELD, the only card for the Hero Deck which does so. He uses the colors red, black, and a tiny bit of green, being the only character in this set who has the latter color. (Really, I should probably have used a green/blue hero like Thor or Cyclops in this set, rather than the Black Widow, but I didn't want to go entirely without female characters, of which Legendary includes only four in the base set. The comic industry's inability to maintain gender equity among their superheroes is suitable subject matter for a far longer essay than I'm already writing today.)

Each of the five heroes has five copies each of two "common" cards, three of an "uncommon" card, and a single "rare" card, totaling 14 cards per hero, so the hero deck is 70 cards. Of these, 5 are available for purchase at any time, being laid out in an area of the board called the "HQ" (headquarters), with a lovely picture of the SHIELD "Helicarrier", a ridiculous flying aircraft carrier which serves as the organization's home base in some of the more bombastic periods of Marvel continuity, when they don't care too much about seeming realistic. Since the players in Legendary loosely represent SHIELD operations commanders or something, they don't control the heroes directly; instead, a hero card is meant to stand for an ability, battle tactic, or stroke of happenstance which revolves around the hero's involvement in the ongoing battle.

Now that we have the hero deck made, it's time to create a Villain Deck. This is a more complex process; the deck represents the game's active opposition to the superheroes (and their SHIELD "handlers"), and so it needs to be multifaceted, to illustrate the chaotic nature of an ongoing supervillain crisis. The deck includes minor Villains, even more minor Henchmen, innocent Bystanders whom the heroes can "rescue" from the Villains, and two kinds of cards which represent the direct action of the Super-Villain that's ultimately responsible for the whole mess your heroes are working on straightening out. These two cards are called Scheme Twist and Master Strike - always five of the latter, and varying numbers of the former - and have no text on them, just a standardized picture to make them easy for the players to recognize (and cheaper for Upper Deck Games Inc. to print; I'm sure that wasn't accidental). Unlike other cards, which have most of the rules you need to know written right on them, these cards have their effects determined by which super-villainous "Mastermind" you're fighting, or what Villainous Scheme he's working to enact. So now would be a good time to figure those things out. There are only four Masterminds in the base set, but there are eight Schemes for them to enact, a fact that likely has to do with the fact that the Mastermind requires five cards and the Scheme only one. Despite this, while I've fought each Mastermind about once in previous plays of the game (I have played it more than four times, but there may have been expansions involved and I'm not certain of any MM I've dealt with twice), I managed to duplicate two Schemes, both of which were pretty boring anyway, and a couple other Schemes were ruled out for various reasons. So as with heroes, I'm hand-picking a Scheme for the game, one I've never tried before, while for the Mastermind I will use the Nazi terrorist best known as the "Red Skull", who is relatively the weakest of the four and is recommended for new players. For his scheme, I've selected "Replace Earth's Leaders with Killbots", which happens to neatly correct for one of the things I dislike about the two-player game; it should be interesting.

So, to finally assemble the Villain Deck so I can finish setup. The size of the deck varies based on the number of players; since I'm being my own worst enemy here, I'll use the slightly boring figures for a two-player game. This means that there are two "villain groups" in service to the Mastermind, one of which is specified on his card (there is one exception to this pattern, but he's not in this game so we'll discuss it in a future LP...I'm planning to do at least one for each Mastermind, if not for each Scheme), the other one normally being random but as usual I've hand-picked it. The villain also gets one group of Henchmen, extremely weak "mook" villains which give you something you can hope to actually Attack in the early game if you get lucky, while other Villains take substantial effort to defeat and this isn't possible until after quite a few turns. You also get the five Master Strikes, several Scheme Twists (5 in the case of the "Killbots" scheme), and normally in a two-player game, you get only two "Bystander" cards, representing innocent people in harm's way whom the heroes must rescue. In my opinion, using so few Bystanders is extremely boring, which was part of why I picked "Killbots"; it explicitly gives you far more Bystanders in the deck, as well as changing how they work. This gives us our total Villain Deck, as follows:
* Fixed Villain Group: HYDRA, a terroristic organization founded indirectly by the Red Skull in order to attack and subvert civilization in general. Their name refers to mythical Lernean Hydra - "cut off one head, and two grow back in its place" and they overall tend to be the opposite number of SHIELD in Marvel's stories. Villain groups are always eight cards total and four different cards; in this case, there are one copy each of "Supreme Hydra" and "Viper", male and female villains who have led the organization at different times in continuity, and three copies each of "HYDRA Kidnappers" and "Endless Armies of HYDRA".
* Other Villain Group: Masters of Evil, an extremely generic "anti-Avengers" which has always been just a grab-bag of assorted villains with no real connection, but generally organized by one Baron Zemo, a Nazi mad-scientist and rival to the Red Skull, both of whom spend a lot of time fighting chief Avenger "Captain America". Unlike the Red Skull, Zemo doesn't have an extremely realistic "skinless face" mask but rather an extremely stupid-looking pink hood, which is probably what makes him a mere Villain and not a Mastermind like Skullsy. Unlike HYDRA but like most of the other Villain Groups, the MoE have two copies each of their four member villains, including Zemo despite his leadership role, and likewise the robotic Ultron, who IMO is far more deserving of Archenemy status than either of the merely-mortal Nazis. The less said about the last two MoE villains in this game, "Melter" and "Whirlwind", the better (personally, of the MoE's immense and ever-changing roster, I would have picked "The Black Knight" and "Klaw", both of which are far more awesome and significantly, if finitely, less ridiculous).
* Henchmen Group: Sentinels. There are four different sets of Henchmen, each one containing ten identical cards, and in every case, they are a 3-point Villain, possible to defeat with just three of your four SHIELD Troopers, and have an ability which actually helps you on the turn you kill them. Of these, the Sentinels (giant mutant-hunting robots that often fight the X-Men) are the only one whose ability might actually hurt on occasions, as they KO one of the heroes that you fight them with...early in the game, this is largely beneficial, as it lets you get rid of SHIELD Agents and improves your draws, but at least on occasions you may find yourself with no weak cards that you can spare, and be forced to avoid fighting the Sentinels or else lose something good. This makes them a little more sporting than the other Henchmen, so I'm using them in this game.
* Other: Five Masterstrikes, five Scheme Twists, and a whopping 18 Bystanders because of the Killbots Scheme, whereas for any other Scheme, there would be 2 Bystanders and perhaps 8 Twists. Thusly, instead of the usual roughly 41-card villain deck, we have a 54-card one, so the game could in theory go a bit longer than average, if the heroes failed to attack the Red Skull directly.

Well, that I believe covers absolutely everything, so at long last, Let's Play!

I'm going to name my imaginary two players "Trey" and "Vir", since of the initial twelve-card decks, I've opted to pile-shuffle them into 3 piles and 4 piles respectively, to see whether this makes a difference in how well they randomize when further shuffled. (Along with variously prolonged setup and/or teardown times, when you sort out piles of specific cards that need to be kept separate, one of the occupational hazards of all DBGs is that they require you to shuffle extremely small piles of cards, which is not easily done, since shuffling tends to be based on having a rather decent-sized stack of cards that you can mix around in various ways.) Once this is done, I turn up the first five Hero cards into the HQ; they are Deadpool's Oddball (red, cost 5), Gambit's Card Shark (blue, cost 4) and Stack the Deck (red, cost 2), and two of Wolverine's gold cards, Keen Senses (cost 2) and Healing Factor (cost 3). Trey gets to go first, at the alphabet's insistence, and if he's lucky he could potentially have access to any of these cards on his turn.

So, the first actual turn of the game begins. You always start your turn by flipping up a Villain card; Trey is in luck, as he gets a Sentinel, and has three of his four SHIELD Troopers in hand, so he can actually fight the thing and gain 1 VP right off the bat. He KOs one of the Troopers, since their utility is slightly lower than that of the Agents overall IMO, and is left with 3 SHIELD Agents to go recruit Wolverine, specifically his Healing Factor (replacing it with a Nick Fury card, Battlefield Promotion, which is red and costs 4). Hero cards which you buy are put into your discard pile, while villain cards you defeat go into a separate Victory Pile, so Trey puts the Sentinel into his VP and the Healing Factor, along with his remaining five SHIELD guys, into his discard pile. He draws the rest of his starting deck - five Agents and a Trooper, of course - and ends his turn.

Vir gets the game's first Masterstrike, and he won't be facing a Villain this turn; despite having randomized differently, he also started with three Troopers, but they won't do anything for him whatsoever this turn, so he's in poor shape right off the bat. Red Skull is recommended as a newbie villain because he not only has the weakest Attack of any MM, taking only 7 to defeat, but his "master strike" is more nearly helpful than harmful, causing both players to KO a hero. Trey can of course spare his sole Trooper in the new hand, since it can't possibly do anything by itself; Vir could do this as well, but with no 3s and a couple quality 2s in the Hero HQ for him to buy, he decides to be a little different and KO an Agent instead, keeping his Troopers for now. With his remaining two Agents, Vir recruits Stack the Deck Gambit, since it's more immediately useful than the Wolverine card. The new card in the HQ is Wolverine's Frenzied Slashing, cost 5.

Trey doesn't even have to think about it; while Oddball would be interesting, Frenzied Slashing is a Wolverine card and he's already working closely with Wolverine, so there's nothing remotely more worth buying for 5. But first he has to deal with his villain card play, which is the statistically-likely Bystander (a full third of the deck in this exact scenario, though the number doesn't increase with more players). Normally, if a Bystander comes out, it's "captured" by the last Villain to enter play, and when there are no Villains out, the Mastermind takes it; the Bystander can be claimed as a 1-VP prize after defeating the Villain or MM who holds it. However, the Killbots scheme didn't give away all those Bystanders just so the heroes could get free points; instead, they're the titular Killbots, villains who start out at 3 attack (effectively Henchmen, but without the largely beneficial side effects you get from fighting a Sentinel or the like). Being that these are on their way to Replace Earth's Leaders, the heroes can lose the game by letting too many of them "get away" (more on that in a bit). Still, with no Attack in his hand, Trey can't do anything about this first Killbot, so he just buys Frenzied Slashing and ends his turn, reshuffling his discard pile and drawing a new hand - which includes Healing Factor but not Frenzied Slashing, so he won't get to combine them just yet. The new hero card is Deadpool again, and our first grey card, Here, Hold This For A Second (cost 3).

In what is thoroughly not statistically likely, Vir gets another Masterstrike; this time, he doesn't hesitate to KO his Trooper, while Trey opts to give up an Agent, so except for that first Sentinel-killed Trooper, the two have now lost the same cards from their decks, in spite of my intention to try and diverge them. Left with five Agents, Vir could buy Oddball, but doesn't especially wish to; instead, he starts by buying Keen Senses, mostly just because it's not wise to let an opponent get away with hoarding too many cards of a single Hero (as this is likely to result in them getting extremely good hands once in a while, by exploiting the innate synergy among a Hero's own cards). This brings out a new card, which is Gambit's "rare" ultimate tactic, "High-Stakes Jackpot", a cost-7 card which is innately worth at least 4 attack, or the combined value of all the SHIELD Troopers you start out with. Neither player is currently even capable of buying a card that expensive, having not invested in anything which gives them the extra Recruit Points they'd need to exceed a maximum handful of 6 SHIELD Agents. Still, it's something to look forward to. With his remaining 3 SHIELD Agents, Vir could buy the game's "fixed purchase" card (another common feature of DBGs), the SHIELD Officer, which costs 3 RP to acquire and gives 2 every time it's played...but as it happens, "Here, Hold This For A Second" costs the same 3 and gives the same 2 RP, plus offering a potentially useful (though somewhat risky) ability. So Vir happily snatches that up, and replaces it with another Stack the Deck (which I swear I did not).

Another Killbot comes out on Trey's turn, and now something happens for the first time. Whenever a Villain enters play, before anyone has a chance to kill it, it enters a space on the board called the Sewers. If another Villain then enters play, the first one is pushed out of the Sewers to make room for the new one, and moves into the next space up, which is the Bank. There are a total of 5 of these spaces, forming what's called the City; if the entire City fills up with five Villains and a sixth one tries to enter it, the one on the far left is pushed out of the City and "Escapes", which doesn't look good on the resume of a super-hero that was supposed to have stopped it. In this particular Scheme, the Escape of five Killbots will end the game in a victory for Evil, so the game is now 2/5 of the way to being 1/5 of the way to being over. But not for long, because Trey is holding one Shield Trooper and one Healing Factor, and the latter is worth 2 Attack, so he makes short work of the new Killbot, adding the Bystander card to his victory pile. With the remaining three cards in his hand all being Agents, he acquires an Officer and is done. Normally, after buying cards on turns 1 and 2, you are left with cards still in your deck at the end of turn 4, but with all the KOing that's been done, Trey's deck is holding steady at 10-11 cards, so he draws what's left of it right now and isn't yet forced to reshuffle.

Not drawing a Masterstrike this time, Vir gets a Killbot and can easily take it out, having three Shield Troopers plus Keen Senses, which adds another Attack point that he can't actually use. But first, he plays Here Hold This, whose effect (besides providing 2 RP, which you're allowed to generate slightly before you actually need it, just as you can with Attack) is to let a Villain capture a Bystander (which comes from the rather depleted stack of Bystanders that sit on the gameboard, not from the Villain Deck even in a game not using the Killbots scheme; the stack is rather depleted in this scenario, having started at only 30 cards and thus having 12 left, so Here Hold This may eventually end up being no better than a Shield Officer, but certainly is never worse). Since the only Villains in the city for now are Killbots, I'm treated to the delightful sight of a Bystander being captured by another Bystander, before one goes down in a hail of Trooper gunfire which manages not to do anything terribly permanent to the other. After all that, Vir has 2 RP from the Deadpool card, plus one from a SHIELD Agent, so he could afford an Officer, but chooses instead to buy another Stack the Deck, giving a little direction to his deck which currently contains cards from three different Heroes. The new card is a Healing Factor, so perhaps Vir should have taken that Officer instead; oh well, that's the way it goes sometimes. After drawing his replacement hand, Vir is left with one card in his deck, which process of elimination determines to be a SHIELD Agent.

I swear I totally shuffled the villain deck, but somehow, yet another Bystander/Killbot emerges. Vir uses Frenzied Slashing and a SHIELD Trooper to kill this, then has his four Agents recruit him one of the two 4-cost Heroes. Battlefield Promotion is interesting, as it lets you KO a SHIELD hero (even from your discard pile) to gain an Officer, effectively granting you 2 RP that turn (until the stack of 30 Officers runs out). But, having KOed all but two of his Troopers, he needs to ensure that he's not completely useless on Attack, so he decides he'd better take Card Shark, which provides 2 points of it, as well as a nice ability. The new card is Black Widow finally putting in an appearance (previously this game had been a total sausage party so far, apart from two of five normal people depicted running from an explosion on the Bystander card, and the SHIELD Officer - who shares Black Widow's taste in clothing, except hers looks more like latex than leather), in the form of Dangerous Rescue (red, cost 3, worth 2 Attack plus a potential ability).

Vir does not have a great track record of drawing villains; after those first two Master Strikes, he now gets the first Scheme Twist. In the Killbot scheme, each Twist increases the Attack power of all present and future Killbots, so they're now all up to 4. Vir doesn't especially care, having not a single point of attack in his hand, although he does have Stack the Deck, which he plays, drawing his last card and then having to reshuffle his discards into a deck, so he can draw one more. He must now put one card from his hand back onto his deck, and is very tempted to do this with his just-drawn-from-the-reshuffle Here Hold This, as it currently only enriches the value of the Killbot which his opponent will get a chance to defeat before him. But, with 6 Agents in hand, he decides he'd better put one of them back on his deck, so that the remaining 5 can combine with the 2 RP of HHTFAS, enabling the previously-unfortunate Vir to buy the most powerful Hero card by far which has yet appeared, High-Stakes Jackpot. This is replaced by Nick Fury's green card, Legendary Commander, which would be more useful if the Red Skull hadn't been KOing so many SHIELD heroes already - it gives them all +1 Attack, but the heroes have only 10 each in their decks (neither having bought a Fury card), and are likely to reduce the number even as they increase the deck size. With a cost of 6, LC is unlikely to ever be worth it, and is particularly irritating because it sort of un-comboes with the other Fury card out, Battlefield Promotion, as that one lets you KO your SHIELD heroes (granted, this is usually to replace those with Officers, but you may eventually run out of those and still want to KO Agents and Troopers, or even start KOing Officers if all your cards are enough better than them).

Comes back to Trey now, and a Killbot comes out. Trey's first action is to play Card Shark; besides its 2 Attack, this calls for him to reveal his top card. It turns out to be a SHIELD Agent, so nothing happens - but if it had been an X-Man (or X-Woman, if we had any of those in the deck; three of the game's four female superheroes are members of the X-Men, Widow being the sole exception), meaning currently a Gambit or Wolverine card, Trey would have gotten to draw it - and if it had been a Wolverine card, awesome combo action would have resulted. But, no such luck; settling for the merely decent, Trey plays Frenzied Slashing for 2 more Attack and takes out the Bystander-carrying Killbot, with his SHIELD Trooper being useless as usual. Having drawn his SHIELD Officer as well as two Agents, Trey buys another Healing Factor and ends his turn, letting one Agent go to waste. A second copy of Oddball fills the space.

Vir decides that he's frightened by constant change and innovation, and goes back to his comfortingly familiar pattern of drawing Master Strikes. He actually has to think quite a bit about what to KO from his hand, because he's holding Stack the Deck and thus can't predict what his hand will end up looking like...with no 2-cost cards in the HQ, his two Agents are currently quite useless, but if he draws exactly one more, he'll need to still have them both. And losing a Trooper is a similar conundrum, because he's holding two of them and Keen Senses - so he's one Agent and one Trooper away from getting things accomplished. Statistically, since he's got more Agents than Troopers in his deck, he's more likely to be able to draw what he needs on the recruiting side, and thus should logically forsake a Trooper and not try to kill the Killbot at all. But he's only got one more Trooper in his deck plus whatever cards he's bought, so he's not too likely to gain Attack, and even if his useless current attack improves, the single Killbot is the only thing to fight, so the long-term effects of choosing combat over recruiting power could hurt him in future turns. (One of this game's built-in hazards; because there's no weak enemy you can always fight, as in some DBGs, it's possible to build an awesome attack engine, but fall just short of taking out the Mastermind, and be left with a huge amount of Attack and nothing to do with it. This risk is greater for tougher Masterminds, obviously.) In the end, I decide that Vir will give up an Agent just to avoid becoming too similar to Trey, who is burning a Trooper without the slightest ambivalence...now, of their original starter cards, Trey retains one Trooper and seven Agents, while Vir has three Troopers and six Agents. So he proceeds with his actual turn by playing Stack the Deck, drawing his final Trooper (I should have realized, by process of elimination, that this was what the last card was), then reshuffling to draw one more card - which is Here Hold This, a near-perfect card to draw at the moment, since this gives him back the ability to buy a Hero after he lost his Agent, and the Trooper gave him back the ability to kill a Killbot, which will get a Bystander. Except, of course, that because Stack the Deck has to put a card back, this perfect hand has to lose one card, making it far less perfect; he must choose to kill the Killbot or buy a card, and cannot do both. It's an easy enough choice; he puts back his lone remaining Agent in hand, plays HHT solely to give the Bystander Villain a Bystander Victim, and then takes them both with three Shield Troopers and Keen Senses.

Trey draws a new Killbot. He has an extremely boring hand; with Killbots being Attack 4 and him having had only Attack 3 before he gave up his Trooper, Healing Factor is completely useless, so he has only SHIELD Agent x5, with which he finally relents and purchases a copy of Oddball...wait, no, he gets Battlefield Promotion. He can't buy any more X-Men, let alone Wolverines, which is what his deck "wants", but if he has to take a non-mutant for his deck, at least Fury synergizes with his SHIELD Agents, while Oddball doesn't work incredibly well with much of anything. It is worth at least 2 Attack, and more if you get lucky and/or have been deckbuilding around it, but doing this requires (punnily enough) that you focus on cards with an odd-numbered cost, and this of course excludes SHIELD Agents and Troopers, though it does include Officers. It excludes BP as well as Card Shark, but is a combo with the former since that gets you Officers in exchange for starter SHIELDs...on a future turn, Oddball might be desireable, and perhaps Trey will draw only 4 RP and bitterly regret not having left BP to buy on that turn while getting Oddball while he could afford it. But such is the risk you take; without BP, Oddball is far too limited in utility to be worth its price, while BP will do a great job of getting rid of the remaining Trooper and then some Agents, which combined with the strong focus on Wolverine and occasionally Gambit, should make his deck pretty lean-and-mean.

The new card in the hero HQ is Covert Operation, a 4-point red Black Widow card, and one which is incredibly powerful in this particular scenario specifically! It gives +1 attack for each Bystander in your victory pile...normally that would be ones you Rescued from the supply stack, using the special abilities of other Black Widow cards (as well as Spider-Man and probably a few other heroes in the game, who specialize in the rescue mechanic), but in this case, it counts the Killbots you've been killing in large quantities, and is particularly nice if you happen to have Deadpool saying Here Hold This a lot. Yet another Killbot comes off the villain deck (I really am absolutely sure I pile-shuffled this damn thing; there should NOT be long runs of identical cards), and then I actually look at Vir's hand and realize he's drawn High-Stakes Jackpot. Currently able to kill a Killbot single-handedly, this Gambit card combines especially well with Stack the Deck, as it gets extra attack equal to the cost of the top card of your deck, which can be Stacked to be the highest cost of other cards in your hand...with a little luck, Vir might be able to kill two Killbots at once! Actually, that would take a lot of luck; he'd have to draw both a Trooper and a 3-cost card, since he doesn't have a 4-cost one, and his current hand contains no non-starter cards other than the two Gambit cards I'm trying to combo. And as it happens, the Troopers and various 3-costers are in the discard pile, and we know deductively that only two Agents remain in the deck, so that's what Stack the Deck will be drawing. It in fact does so, and must put one Agent back, leaving five Agents and HSJ. So, wasting one RP much as Trey did, Vir buys Covert Operation, then takes out a Killbot and ends his turn. The new hero card? A Keen Senses which will complete the trifecta of Wolverine cards for Trey's deck, costing only 2 but adding a great deal of potential power.

At long last, a Villain card (excluding Killbots) emerges from the deck! This is the Melter, a fairly pathetic villain on a conceptual level, but reasonably challenging in gameplay terms, although with a potential advantage when fought. When one player fights the Melter, both players get to peek at their top card and may choose to destroy it; you draw the peeked-at card (or the card under it, if you destroyed it) sooner than your opponent does, so while it might help them, it helps you first. But in spite of this potential advantage, the Melter at least has an Attack of 5, making him currently tougher than a Killbot - but worth a lot more VP, 3 instead of 1. Sadly, Trey again has only Healing Factor as an attack card, and can't do anything with just 2 attack, so he can only buy cards this turn - but he can buy quite a few of them, thanks in part to Battlefield Promotion, which is a bit less than ideal this turn because it has to destroy a card from hand (Trey has no discard pile), but still upgrades a SHIELD Agent into an Officer for a net profit of 1 RP. Using the Officer alone, Trey can purchase Keen Senses, and then brings out a new Deadpool card (a gold one, which I hadn't realized he had originally, though I've edited my text above to include this knowledge), the 3-cost "Hey Can I Get a Do-Over?", which lets you trade the rest of your hand for four random cards instead of playing them...more useful if you haven't been efficiently destroying all your weak cards, but still decent. And the card is a 2 attack, and Trey has been lacking attack power lately, plus it's Gold and thus can match up with the Wolverine cards, despite not being an X-Man. So, lacking a 4 to buy and not especially interested in Dangerous Rescue (even if it might be worth buying just to keep away from Vir with his Covert Operation), Trey gobbles this up and replaces it with a Stack the Deck.

A Sentinel turns up, and for the first time, a villain (specifically, the last emerged Killbot which the heroes have yet to kill) gets pushed out of the Bank and into the third space, called the Rooftops. In a slightly ridiculous stroke of luck, Vir has drawn Covert Operation right after buying it; with 5 Bystanders already claimed in various ways, this combines with two Troopers and a Keen Senses to produce a total of 8 attack! So, at long last, someone can directly attack the Mastermind, with 1 point to spare even. Here's how that works: each Mastermind comes with four "Tactics" cards, so whenever you defeat him (all four are male in the base set...few enough of Marvel's villains are female in the first place, and even fewer of these are "arch" enough to deserve Mastermind status, although one very promising candidate by the name of The Enchantress was squandered on a normal villain card here in the base set...I believe one of the expansions finally brought in a Mistressmind, but am unable to remember for sure and have no idea who she might be), you randomly take one of the remaining Tactics cards and execute its Battle effect. Red Skull being the wimp he is, all his Tactics give you a bonus rather than a penalty, and Vir has stumbled on a particularly timely one: Negablast Grenades, a captured weapons cache which grants the hero raiding Skullsy's villainous lair +3 fight for that turn! So, having 1 point left to combine that unexpected windfall with, Vir even gets to take out another Killbot - which means that next time he draws Covert Operation, it'll be worth at least 6 attack, 1 shy of single-handedly taking out Skullsy again. Alas, after all that, Vir has pretty much shot his wad; with only two SHIELD Agents left, all he can buy is a third Stack the Deck which he only barely wants. Would have been nice to get Dangerous Rescue instead, but oh well.

Out comes Gambit's gold card, Hypnotic Charm, a 3-cost 2-recruit card which lets you mess with your deck a bit. And then Ultron arrives in the sewers, pushing the Sentinel into the Bank and Melter onto the Rooftops. It's a good time for this 6-Attack villain to turn up, because Trey has finally gotten his focus on Wolverine cards to pay off - he is the first player to complete a "Superpower", which is an ability on cards which requires them to be combined with other cards of the same color. I've alluded to it several times, so here's how it works...first, Trey plays Healing Factor, which is a gold card like every one of the Wolverine cards (according to the rulebook, the color gold represents heroes's "instincts or reflexes", and that's pretty much what Wolverine has going for him). In addition to the lovely gold border (which, in a rather nice touch of graphic design, gradually disappears behind elements of the card art as the card's cost increases, essentially "zooming in" on the picture of the hero, until their single ultra-expensive "rare" card has no border at all, just a piece of art which takes up the entire card except for a small text box), the card's "instinct" categorization is signified by a little "brainwaves" symbol, which I will denote in text as "{I}". And now, Trey plays Frenzied Slashing, which he's been happily using just for 2 attack for several turns, but in addition, it has the ability "{I}: Draw two cards". Thusly, because he's previously played an {I}-symbol card (in other words, a gold card, though rare cards don't have the actual border which displays their color), the Healing Factor superpower works, and Trey gets to use eight cards this turn. The two cards he draws are just Shield Agents, and were all that he had left in his deck...but now, he gets to play Card Shark, requiring him to reshuffle his discard pile in order to get a new deck, and then revealing the top card of that deck, which he'll get to draw if it's his other Healing Factor or his Keen Senses (an X-man, in other words). It proves to just be an Agent, alas, but even so - two Wolverines and a Gambit have gotten Trey up to 6 attack, and his deck's one and only Trooper makes it seven, so he takes out another of Red Skull's Mastermind Tactics. This one is called HYDRA Conspiracy - Trey gets to draw two more cards, and could have gotten still more than that if some HYDRA villains had been good enough to show up in this game, and Trey had managed to kill them. One of those cards is the revealed Shield Agent, and the other one is unfortunately Healing Factor #2, which isn't useful right now. So Trey is left with 5 Agents, unable to afford more than one card, and yet again passes on Oddball or Dangerous Rescue in order to take Hypnotic Charm, further padding out his X-Men-slash-Instinct-Heroes theme. For something like the fifth time this game, Trey draws all that's left of his deck, and he further calls my shuffling abilities into question by flipping another Hypnotic Charm into the space left by the first one.

Another Sentinel appears, hurrying the villain conga line along, and the Melter makes it to space number four, the Streets. Only one more remains, the Bridge; if he gets pushed twice more, he'll escape. He doesn't do anything special when he Escapes (Ultron, for example, does...although what he does is give you a Wound, so Trey with all his Healing Factors is rather eager to see that happen). With only 1 attack, Vir can't help prevent the Melter's escape, but he can come up with 6 RP by playing four Agents and Here Hold This. He gives the Bystander to Ultron, who is worth very little VP compared to his cost, unless you happen to be specializing in the black-bordered cards, which represent "Technological Heroes" (Ultron is good at coopting other machines, and has the usual killer-robot shtick going on to an epic degree). With this goodly sum, he could afford Legendary Commander Fury, but isn't interested; instead, he both harvests Dangerous Rescue for himself and gets the second Hypnotic Charm away from Trey, replacing them with Battlefield Promotion and then Stack the Deck. Finally being forced to reshuffle again (he's not quite so efficient at burning through his deck as Trey), he draws a third copy of Stack the Deck to go with the two he had left, with High-Stakes Jackpot at the very bottom of his previous deck - only two of the cards in his new hand do not have Gambit on them!

The Supreme Hydra now puts in an appearance; costing 6, he pays off only 3 VP by himself, but adds that much more for every other HYDRA dude you kill. The Melter is now on the Bridge; the city is full! Trey plays Do-Over but chooses not to get one, playing it just because it's a gold card, so that he can then play Keen Senses and trigger its {I} superpower, drawing a card. This requires reshuffling, and with a bit of luck (thanks Falkor), it produces Healing Factor, getting Trey up to 5 attack and thus letting him take down the Melter. Who, I just realized, is even more helpful to the guy that beats him up than I thought...each player reveals their deck, and you choose whether to KO it. Thusly, if your opponent is unlucky, you can nuke one of his best cards, while getting rid of your own chaff - or stick your opponent with drawing his chaff while you preserve your good cards. In this instance, Trey reveals Card Shark and hangs onto it...while Vir reveals Dangerous Rescue and loses it, never-used! Tragic for Vir, awesome for Trey, and ridiculous in terms of probability. With the Melter defeated, Trey moves on to purchasing...he should have played Battlefield Promotion Fury before reshuffling his deck, as he no longer has a discard pile and has to destroy SHIELD Agent from his hand, but this still upgrades him to 6 RP from the three Officers in his hand, letting him buy Legendary Commander Fury.

Vir's insanely Gambit-centric turn starts with the arrival of a Killbot. He Stacks the Deck three times, drawing four net cards and leaving Covert Operation on top of his deck. He plays High Stakes Jackpot (which happens to be a {I} card), revealing Covert Operation and putting 4 Attack in his 4 Attack, so he can kill a Killbot while he kills a Killbot. He then plays Keen Senses, triggering its superpower to draw a card which is of course Covert Op, and then plays Hypnotic Charm. This lets him peek at his top card, which he discards because it's a mere SHIELD Agent, and then triggers its {I} superpower, peeking at the opponent's deck as well! Trey's next card will be a SHIELD Agent, he decrees, and then he finally gets around to using some of what he's generated. With 9 attack just so far, he takes out the Killbot and is left at 5 Attack, then plays Covert Op with 7 Bystanders in his victory pile, giving him enough to take out Red Skull. The second-to-last Mastermind Tactic is Endless Resources, granting +4 RP...and, still having 5 attack left, Vir plays his two Troopers and gets up to 7 attack, hitting the Red Skull again (this is completely legal) and ending the game. The last tactic, Ruthless Dictator, messes with your deck and might occasionally be slightly harmful, but it doesn't matter since it won't affect the chances of victory. So, with Ultron and the Supreme Hydra and two Sentinels all crossing their arms indignantly at being ignored - apparently an old man with a rubber mask and a uniform fetish is more of a threat to society than three killer robots, two of them gigantic and the third functionally immortal - the Red Skull is defeated.

There's an optional variant where the game has one final hand called a Showdown, to determine who can beat the Mastermind one last time, but I'm in no mood whatsoever to prolong this already rather drawn-out game, so I'm skipping that. Instead, we'll move right on to counting up the VP. It's really no contest...having beaten the Mastermind three times, at 5 VP a pop, and having the seven Bystanders besides, Vir comes to a total of 22 VP. One Mastermind, one Sentinel, four Killbots and the 3-VP Melter come to only 13 VP for Trey, even though he had seemed to be doing better at first. With an only-adequate hand and no hope of drawing into anything amazing (thanks to Hypnotic Charm Gambit confirming that his next card would be an Agent - ironic, that Vir bought the Charm simply to spite Trey of the chance to get it, and instead used it to suppress him so effectively), Trey would probably not have won the Showdown if I'd done it anyway, and would only have closed half the gap with Vir even if he had...so it was definitely a blowout victory for the guy who bought a 7-point Hero, and lots of ways to keep drawing into him.

Well, a lot of things didn't happen that game which could have. The Bystanders didn't run out, which was a very real possibility in this scenario; no Villains escaped, no Wounds were dealt out, and only a handful of the Villains in the deck ever saw play. We never got out Baron Zemo, whose special ability makes you want Avengers when you beat him, much as Ultron makes you want Tech heroes...in this match, there were only 14 Avenger cards and maybe 20 Tech cards in the Hero deck, so the more-impressive Masters of Evil were not really especially interesting. Most tragically, we never saw the Endless Armies of HYDRA, an extremely profitable 3-VP enemy with only 4 Attack, but who play two extra Villain cards when you fight them, potentially causing quite a shake-up in your plans. The somewhat-silly Whirlwind never turned up either, which means that the five spaces of the City were never differentiated; Whirlwind, another 4-Attack foe but worth only 2 VP, has a strange Fight ability which only works when he's in the 3rd or 5th spaces, and which might be good or bad depending on what your hand looks like (it KOs two of the Heroes in said hand, which might let you get rid of SHIELD weaklings, but might also rob you of the very attack power you need to beat him, especially if something's forced you to discard cards). And of course, there are a slew of Hero cards we never saw, and lots of Superpowers and combos that didn't appear. I'll be wanting to play other Heroes and Villain Groups before I revisit any of these, but part of why I love this game is it's very substantial replayability; it's not that you can't have some things happen over and over and start to grow boring, but there's always the potential to discover new interactions or mine previously-unexplored sections of the game. I look forward to sharing a few more of these possibilities with you in the future - preferably, earlier in the evening.
You either die Chaotic, or you live long enough to see yourself become Lawful.
Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
My long-neglected blog.

Davecom3
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Re: Let's Play: Legendary

Post by Davecom3 » Sun Dec 15, 2013 11:52 am

With how I saw it played previously, I thought this was more a cooperative game than a competitive one. With a slight MVP bonus for the one with most points after the game.

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willpell
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Re: Let's Play: Legendary

Post by willpell » Sun Dec 15, 2013 8:49 pm

It varies depending on the players involved. I guess my playgroup is a bit on the competitive side. The expansion villain Galactus is pretty much designed to *force* you to cooperate, and we've been reluctant to take him on.
You either die Chaotic, or you live long enough to see yourself become Lawful.
Glemp wrote:To some extent, you need to be arrogant - without it, you are vulnerable being made someone's tool...for Herbert's sake, have the stubbornness not to submit to what you see instantly, because you can only see some facts at a time.
My long-neglected blog.

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