This is our full Marvel Champions Buyers Guide which will help you identify what order you want to purchase new content for this game. For a complete list of expansions with links to our reviews view the full list here.
So, you’re ready to embark on the exciting journey of building a Marvel Champions collection. But with all the different hero packs and expansions to choose from, it can be overwhelming to decide what to pick up next. It’s especially tricky jumping into a game that’s already been regularly producing content for years – content that, for active players, has been acquired slowly over time – since there is now so much to consider.
Marvel Champions Buyers Guide
In this comprehensive Marvel Champions Buyers Guide, we’ll help you understand the various types of expansions that are available and give you our definitive recommendation for what order you should acquire all this amazing game has to offer. There’s a lot out there, so we’ll aim to make sure you are spending your money and time as efficiently as you can while you are catching up on this great card game. If you get it right, you’ll experience what we have – a constantly fresh, engaging experience that rarely disappoints – and if we do our job right, we might even be able to get you through without any disappointments at all.
There’s a few things to consider here, but you’ll want to make sure that the difficulty of the scenarios you are playing matches the strength of your card pool as well as making sure you are playing content (heroes and villains) that are interesting to you thematically. We’ll try to balance both in our recommendations.
We’ll first give you the basic knowledge of gameplay and expansion types that will help you understand what you need and what is available, but if you are already familiar with the game, feel free to skip to our specific recommendations for how you should buy the content.
Understanding the Game and the Required Components
Marvel Champions – The Card Game from Fantasy Flight Games is a cooperative card game where you, either by yourself or with up to three friends, assume the roles of super heroes taking on the iconic villains from across the Marvel universe. The villain is working to complete their nefarious schemes while trying to kill all the members of your team. You lose the scenario if they are able to successfully accomplish either. You’ll have to manage to keep either thing from happening, all while working to reduce the villain’s health to zero, which is your victory condition.
In order to track all of these elements, the core set includes health dials, threat markers, damage markers, and some all purpose counters. These are all needed to play a game – you can’t just have the cards. After market tokens and counters can work fine, but everything you need comes in the core set.
In order to expand your collection you’ll ultimately want more heroes and cards to build decks with and more villains to face off against, but what exactly does each of those things entail and what should you expect to find in each different expansion type?
Understanding the Components of a Hero Deck
Expanding your collection of heroes involves purchasing new hero packs which also include additional aspect cards to build decks with
The heroes all have basic abilities to attack, thwart schemes, defend, and recover – but each hero’s stats will differ. They also usually have unique special abilities that change the way they interact with the cards in their deck or with the villain. These abilities make each hero play differently, often dramatically so, each providing unique deckbuilding ideas and opportunities.
In this game you’ll draw a hand of cards that either give you additional abilities, improve your stats, or allow you to take actions. You play these cards by spending other cards from your hand as resources. Because you spend cards to play other cards, this leads to interesting decisions about what to play and what to spend with every hand you draw.
Something fairly unique to this game is the ability to switch between your hero form and your alter-ego form. Depending on which form you are in, the villain phase will either be focused on scheming (because you aren’t suited up to stop them from advancing their evil plots) or on attacking (because you showed up to fight). This is a cool mechanic that adds an interesting decision space about when to flip, and, because it influences the villain’s behavior, serves to make the scenarios so much more dynamic.
A hero deck consist of 40-50 cards and 15 of those form your hero kit and are specific to the hero you choose. The rest can be selected from a pool of aspect cards, which you’ll use to fill in the remaining cards. In almost all cases you select a single aspect and are only able to include cards from that one along with basic cards, which can be included with any color deck.
The four main aspects are:
Leadership, which is focused on allies
Aggression, which is focused on dealing damage
Justice, which is focused on removing threat from schemes
Protection, which is focused on defending against attacks
There is also a fifth aspect that comes with the Deadpool pack, ‘Pool, which is focused on taking on risk and/or immediate negative effects in exchange for rewards, but at this point that has a fairly limited amount of cards compared to the primary aspects.
NOTE: Deck Building is NOT a requirement to play this game
Deck construction is my favorite part of the game and the thing that has kept me so engaged with Marvel Champions over many years, but I still remember how easy it was to get started on my first plays. Every hero comes with a pre built deck, ready to play, right out of the box. The balance between providing an easy entry point for new players and endless engagement for deck builders is a hallmark of Marvel Champions. So if you are new, don’t get concerned about whether you know the whole meta and all the best cards to use with your latest acquisition – just crack a pack and start playing. It’s how we all started.
Deck Building and Gameplay Resources
If you’re unsure about what to do with your heroes, head over to marvelcdb.com, a comprehensive deckbuilding companion and card database. Here, you’ll discover an extensive collection of deck lists, find inspiration, analyze card statistics, and create your very own decks.
It’s a community-driven platform where a whole squad of Marvel Champions enthusiasts eagerly share tips, strategies, and deck building advice. Whether you’re seeking fun, thematic decks, or aiming to optimize your gameplay, this platform showcases the game’s depth and versatility.
This game also boasts a robust community on Reddit and a growing roster of dedicated creators on YouTube. They provide insightful reviews, play throughs, and quality deck building advice. Join us addicts and dive into this amazing game with us.
Understanding the components of a Scenario (aka Villain)
Expanding your collection of Scenarios involves picking up new villains and new modular sets that can be combined for different difficulty levels and varied experiences
In this game, you assemble a scenario by putting out a villain, the villain’s main scheme, and then forming the villain deck which will include the standard set which is included in all scenarios, cards that are always included in that scenario, and modular sets that can be changed to change the difficulty or theme of the scenario. These are all shuffled together to form the encounter deck, which players will draw from in order to carry out the villain phase.
The villain’s turn is quite easy to run and is ultimately as straightforward as flipping encounter cards over from their deck. Things can get complicated, of course, but as far as automas go, it manages to be highly sophisticated and replayable but not that difficult to manage. Just shuffle everything together and go without someone being assigned to play as the villain.
One of the greatest strengths of this game comes from the inclusion of the modular encounter sets, which allow you to tune the difficultly of scenarios to your specifications, or create unique scenarios – even with a villain you’ve played many times.
The scenarios can be played on standard mode or expert mode. In expert mode you take on stages 2 and 3 of the villain (instead of 1 and 2 in standard) and adds additional brutal cards to the encounter deck. There are now three different standard sets of varying difficulty levels and two different expert sets – all of which increase the replayability and customizability of your collection. To get the additional standard sets, you’ll want to pick up the Hood and Age of Apocalypse.
Building Your Collection: Understanding the Different Products
What is a Living Card Game?
When we call Marvel Champions a “Living Card Game” (LCG), we’re indicating that it’s a game that grows and evolves over time, by continually releasing new content on a predictable schedule. This model differs from traditional Collectible Card Games (CCGs), like Magic: the Gathering or Pokémon, where you’re chasing specific cards that are packed randomly in booster sets. Instead, LCG expansions have standardized card packs, so you know exactly which cards you’ll be getting when you buy a pack. You can proceed without any of that “will I ever find that legendary card” anxiety.
Additionally, unlike other story based campaign LCGs, (like Arkham Horror the card game or the Lord of the Rings LCG) Marvel Champions is entirely modular. You take any hero and any villain and can start playing. You are not required to buy everything in an arc in order to play through a narrative. That does mean that the narrative elements of this game aren’t as rich as they are in the other two LCG’s, but what it gains is profound accessibility for new players. It is very easy to jump in anywhere.
That said, the core box should be your first purchase. Let’s jump into that.
Core Set:
The Core Set is where your Marvel Champions journey begins and should definitely be your first purchase. It provides the foundation for your card-wielding adventures with 350 cards, the rules and reference guide, and the tokens you’ll need to track everything in the game. Unlike other LCG games, you need just one core set for Marvel Champions.
Additionally, the Core Set features five heroes: Spider-Man, Iron Man, She-Hulk, Captain Marvel, and Black Panther. There’s also three villains to get you started: Rhino, Klaw, and Ultron. It includes the basic cards you’ll need to combine with the hero cards to start creating decks. However, the game is designed for pick-up-and-play, with pre-built decks for each of the five heroes, including two that are specifically designed for your very first game, allowing you to quickly jump into battling the villains of the Marvel universe.
The core set comes with all the encounter you’ll need for the villains and also supports cooperative play for any player count – one to four players. Just this pack is going to give you everything you need to get started.
Hero Packs:
The best way to expand your Marvel Champions deck building options is with hero packs. If you’re unsure about which packs to get, picking up your favorite hero is the easy answer. For example, if you’re a fan of Steve Rogers, pick up the Captain America hero pack, crack it open and you’re ready to play.
While these packs play right out of the box, each hero pack adds new cards to your collection to help improve your decks and give you more options for you to chose from when creating decks for your heroes. Captain America comes with a leadership deck, but what if Cap got real angry? Why not try him in aggression? A huge part of the fun in this game is finding new combos and trying new deck ideas.
I suggest focusing on acquiring hero packs that include cards in your preferred aspect. If you enjoy the Protection aspect, for instance, consider starting your collection with hero packs like Ms. Marvel, Doctor Strange, and Quicksilver. This way, you can steadily build your arsenal of green cards and explore new strategies within protection. Here’s a handy list of all the heroes and which aspects they include in our comprehensive expansion list.
Another deck building strategy is a team-based approach. Often there are basic cards that work in all aspects that are built around team keywords, so by selecting packs that align with a specific group, such as the Avengers, the X-Men, Web Warriors, or Guardians, you’ll acquire a complete set of cards that complement their unique traits and builds.
Our recommendations for picking up hero packs focuses on staying balanced between the aspects, so that you are building a useful card pool rather than staying focused on one aspect or one team.
Campaign Boxes:
As you immerse yourself deeper into the game, you’ll might find yourself sick of facing off against the villains from the core set every night. The easiest way to remedy that is by picking up a campaign box. These expansions provide five new scenarios to face off against and well as two heroes. As well as new modular sets and a campaign that links the five scenarios together. You can play them as a linked campaign or standalone. The story elements are, admittedly, not super strong, but a campaign box does provide a thematic experience from the various corners of the Marvel universe.
While, with heroes, you are mostly okay just picking up a hero that you like, these expansions are a little more complicated. It’s important to find the one that aligns with your interests and preferences, but more critically, skill level. For that reason I don’t recommend Galaxy’s Most Wanted as your first expansion, even if you are a big Guardians fan, as it can be VERY punishing before you’ve built up your card pool.
In the list below I set out a purchasing strategy that gets you the boxes in an escalating level of difficulty. You can’t really go wrong with the Rise of Red Skull, Sinister Motives, or Mutant Genesis, so if you love one of those IPs, you can ignore my order and pick up any of those. Otherwise, I’d stick with the order I outline below.
Standalone Scenario Packs
Each Scenario pack introduces new mechanics and ideas to the game. They include between 1-3 scenarios and have a tradition of being a particularly creative design space for the designers to push the boundaries of the game. Like Risky Business from the Green Goblin pack where Norman Osborne can flip to his own alter-ego form, or a villain like The Hood that can randomly pull out different encounter sets as he recruits people to his cause. Or a villain like Kang that makes the heroes split up to chase his variants through time.
These are smaller boxes, but can be an inexpensive way to pick up one to three more vscenarios to face off against. They also tend to include great encounter cards that be added to any scneario to add variability to all scenarios.
Personally, my favorites are Green Goblin (which I think is essential), the Hood (which gives you a ton of new encounter cards to spice up any scenario), and Mojo Mania. Mojo Mania might be the best bang for your buck here as it feels like a great mini campaign with its three compelling villains. In any case, step up the challenge and embrace the excitement of facing off against new foes with these scenario packs.
So What Order Should I Buy Stuff?
With the caveat, that you can buy stuff in whatever order you want, and depending on what team’s you prefer – avengers, X-men, etc – you might make some different choices than I’m suggesting here – but here is the order I recommend players buy the content.
Don’t overthink it. You just want to acquire some new villains to play against, and as you work toward being able to consistently defeat them, pick up more aspect cards to help improve your decks and make it easier. Then, get some more scenarios and start the process again. That’s how I’ve structured my buying plan below – to set you up for success in building a card pool as you take on villains with (slowly) increasing difficultly. Not a perfect science, but it’s the right strategy and should be a lot more even than release order.
I’ll link below using Amazon Affiliate links, if you are ready to make your next purchase, I’ll also link to our full, comprehensive review of each product if you want to dive in more.
The Core Box – This should be your first purchase – no way around it – because it’s the best value and provides everything you need to get started INCLUDING tokens, dials, and the all-important standard encounter set. It also includes five solid heroes and three great scenarios – and five modular sets. A no brainer. Read our full review here.
One Hero Pack in each aspect to launch your deck-building journey:
Captain America – Leadership cards focused on the Avengers Trait. (full review here)
Wasp – Some solid Aggression cards, but the basic cards that come with Wasp are incredible. Must have.
Scarlet Witch – Justice cards
Ms Marvel and Doctor Strange – the protection cards in the core box are pretty underpowered, so I’d pick these both up at the same time to get your green decks on track
The Rise of Red Skull – nice step up in complexity and difficulty from the core box, while still remaining beginner friendly. Solid heroes – Hawkeye takes some quality deck building and practice to get right, but spider woman is a strong hero that can use two aspects at a time allowing her to run some of the strongest combos in the game. The Rise of Red Skull should be your first of the story boxes. Read our full review here.
Green Goblin Scenario Pack – Two Scenarios, both featuring the Green Goblin. In Risky Business the villain has an Alter Ego, which is interesting and unique, but won’t hold your interest long term, but Mutagen Formula is still in contention for the best in the game. Plus the pack includes three excellent Spider-man themed modular sets to help shake things up. Full review here.
More Hero Packs. You’ll need the cards to improve your deck building options so you can consistently beat Zola, Red Skull, and Green Goblin.
Ant Man – Leadership deck focused on attachments that boost allies, unique in that he has a three sided card with two hero forms, tiny form and giant form.
Hulk – Aggression deck. He’s a weak hero, but has some great aspect cards.
Black Widow – Justice deck. More of a niche hero and the first that was viable to play in mostly alter-ego, but some essential aspect cards.
Quicksilver – Protection cards
Sinister Motives – One of the best expansions in the game. All the scenarios are unique and interesting – with a brutal challenge at the end with Venom Goblin, to really test your deck building – the campaign mode is interesting, and two great heroes with solid aspect cards. A winner, all around. Comes with Spider-man – Miles Morales and Ghost Spider. Full review here.
More hero packs to expand your pool. At this point you’ll probably start to have multiple decks on hand for each aspect, and most decks will start to feel stronger – but you are still pretty weak in some archetypes. The cards in these packs should help.
War Machine – Leadership deck
Thor and Valkyrie – Aggression decks (you should buy these two together, never alone, for the Asgard trait cards)
Spider ham – Justice deck
SP//dr – protection deck
If you play multiplayer you want the Once and Future Kang Scenario Pack. One of the best experiences in the game, but if you only play solo, you don’t get any of the benefits – it’s just extra long. Skip it. Full Review here.
The Hood scenario pack will give you eight excellent modular sets and standard ii and expert ii. They aren’t perfect, and neither is the scenario itself, but the value here is undeniable. This pack makes everything you have more interesting, giving you a lot more value from the stuff you already have. Full review here.
Start mixing those new modulars in. Stop playing Rhino with Bomb Scare. Please. Then pick off the the champions (both of which come with a modular set) and the last couple Avengers.
NeXt Evolution – the easiest X-men box, but some very interesting scenarios, especially Juggernaut, and a great next step after the Spider-verse box. Comes with Cable and Domino. Full review here.
X-force hero packs, mostly for thematic reasons at this point. You’ve got a great card pool at this point, so you should be able to make any hero work now. Challenge yourself to make a consistent Hulk deck for solo play. (Hint: S.H.I.E.L.D Justice deck, but mostly gray cards)
Mutant Genesis – the best X-men box, but a bit uneven in terms of difficulty, which is why I’m putting it second. Comes with Colossus and Shadowcat. Full review here.
Get some X-men hero packs
Cyclops – Leadership
Wolverine – Aggression deck focused on boosting attack events. Full Review here.
Phoenix – Justice
Rogue – Protection
Mojo Mania scenario pack. Three new scenarios. Great modular encounter sets. A bit off the wall, in the theming, but the scenarios are solid.Full Review Here.
More X-men heroes
Age of Apocalypse – This is still pretty new as of writing, but there are some excellent scenarios here. Introduces mission side schemes, which are a bit of a bust in my opinion, but you only need to play with them in the campaign. The heroes are, without question, two of the best in the game so far. Comes with Bishop and Magic. Full Review here.
Pick up the rest of the X-men
Ice-man – Aggression cards that boost the villain upgrade attachment strategy with excellent basic card reprints Full Review here.
Jubilee – Justice
- NightCrawler – Protection
- Magneto – Leadership (November 2024)
Mad Titan’s Shadow – this might be a surprise for people, but this was a pretty uneven box, to be sure. Two of the best scenarios in the game are here: Thanos and Hela. Worth picking up just for those two, but you’ll want to play the others as well. If you really want to amp up the difficulty, this also comes with the infinity gauntlet modular set, which can be used with any scenario to up the difficultly significantly. Worth noting that if you are all bout the Avengers, you might want this sooner for the thematic and iconic villains, but the thing that moves it down the list is the difficultly of some of it’s scenarios (which is higher, I’d say, that any of the X-men boxes) and the fact that the heroes are forgettable as far as I’m concerned (though Adam Warlock is quite unique since he can include cards from all aspects). Comes with Spectrum and Adam Warlock. Full review here.
Pick up the Guardians. I had a hard time putting this crew this deep into my recommendation because they are all great – some of my favorites, in fact – but it’s worth noting that a lot of their aspect cards are trait restricted, so I saved them for right before you take on the Guardian box so you can have a true thematic experience taking on the last box I recommend you pick up.
Galaxy’s Most Wanted – People love to hate on this box, but remember that the reviews of it that you are reading are all from a few years ago when the card pool was tiny and we didn’t have many deck building options. With the right deck and a powerful hero, some of these scenarios can be a blast. I can attest that it was difficult to take on this box with only the core set heroes and a few new aspect cards, but if you follow my advice and buy in this order, I’m not saying this box will be easy, but you’ll be able to take on the Collector, Nebula, and, yes, you might even get a big win against the infamous Ronan. Certain heroes will still struggle, but at this point, you’ll have a real shot – even in expert campaign mode. Box comes with Rocket and Groot. Full review here.
Wrecking Crew Scenario Pack – You do not need this. If you have absolutely everything else, and are curious, I can guarantee that you will get a few interesting games out of it. It’s not the same as anything else, with the way it has multiple villains and multiple encounter decks and main schemes. My main issue with it is that it’s not modular, and will always play the same, no matter what you do. I don’t hate it, it’s fine, but if you really want to play against the Wrecking Crew, The Hood comes with a modular set starting the quartet and it’s one of the best in the game. Add those encounter cards to any other scenario and forget about this pack. Full Review here.
Conclusion
As you can see, the options for expanding your Marvel Champions expansion are endless and the replay value is off the charts.
But remember: it’s not a race. There’s a lot of game to explore just in the core box, and if you pick up new stuff every so often, you’ll have found a decent amount of replay value, even if you never quite collect the entire game. The important thing is to get playing. It really is an amazing game that’s very easy to pick up and extremely rewarding for those who dive in deep.
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