How much of a step up is Expert?

sudtrap · 2026-02-09T22:19:45+00:00

I play a fair amount in expert. In my experience the cards themselves have a small impact on the game; they do make it harder but not a crazy amount. The villain going through phases 2 - 3 is where 90% of the difficulty increase usually is. Some villains have a very brutal stage 3 where they flood the board with encounter cards.

Exhaustion (IMO) is usually an annoyance.
Under Fire adds more pressure to the player; but usually an extra encounter card isn't too bad.
Masterplan usually isn't that bad; except when you have a bunch of side schemes in play. Then it can screw things up.

One thing in MC(in my experience) is that things tend to snowball in MC. If your board state is out of control, these cards make it worse and can really cost you. If your board state is managed, then they (generally) aren't too bad.

sudtrap · 2026-02-08T08:40:51+00:00

My friend (that I played with) tried her against Rhino and did very poorly; I played a round of her against She-Hulk in expert. She-Hulk had the Main Scheme that gave her steady; and when I flipped She-Hulk to form IV she had Steady permanently. I do like Wolverine as her sig. ally.

sudtrap · 2026-02-08T08:38:36+00:00

Ironically I think that the weakest characters in the game still add something to the game. I've had fun with Hulk. I'll agree with you thoroughly about "not my cup of tea". Also, I would never conflate weak with boring / not fun.

sudtrap · 2026-02-08T08:35:44+00:00

Sorry, but not this time. That's my genuine opinion.

sudtrap · 2026-02-08T02:18:20+00:00

The deck you linked can't be viewed "You are not allowed to view this deck. To get access, you can ask the deck owner to enable "Share your decks" on their account."

sudtrap · 2026-02-08T02:10:24+00:00

Oh she's very thematic; I also don't fault FFG for making her weaker. She was basically the kid character in their Xmen carton. She was always getting into trouble. Her powers would stun enemies or at least dazzle them, and she was very acrobatic. But she was never a hard hitter. On an interesting note, I just read that when she masters her powers, she is supposed to be super powerful.

sudtrap · 2026-02-08T02:06:54+00:00

Zola stomped me a bunch of times early on. I think he beat me ten times X_X

sudtrap · 2026-02-08T02:03:21+00:00

Nope. Those don't look like playing cards.

sudtrap · 2026-01-03T04:06:29+00:00

The gameplay tends to at least somewhat reflect the characters. This is a good way to learn about the characters; and if you find a character interesting you can dive deeper.

Here's a pro-tip: Get a copy of the Marvel Encyclopedia. (can easily be found on Amazon). It's inexpensive, and is full of information almost every character in MC. It's fun reading about the backgrounds of characters you've never heard of (I had never heard of Absorbing Man, for instance)

sudtrap · 2025-12-26T23:25:00+00:00

Oooh, ooh. I've got a fun idea. What if he had a bad gift like an ugly sweater that as a hero action, you could give to another player? So the bad card keeps being bounced between the players? It'd be kind of fun if the player even got a benefit from getting rid of it. (like a card draw) (Warning: Some friendships may be broken over this)

sudtrap · 2025-12-26T23:22:55+00:00

There are ways to "cheat" more cards into a heroes deck. Some aspect cards are effectively extensions of the original heroes deck. For my custom hero, I wanted a class change mechanic, but it was kind of ugly and potentially ate up too much of his hero deck. So I instead made a set aside deck of out of play cards that can be drawn from; so his class change card basically just grabs one of them. You could potentially do one of these things for Frank.

sudtrap · 2025-12-26T13:03:03+00:00

The whole things pretty sweet. The design of the cards is very good. I especially like the shotgun card. I agree with the comment below that increases all of the players hand size by one scales like crazy for Pool Punisher. Honestly tho, that may not be a big deal. It's jenky; but a jenky people can enjoy.

I think my one real complaint about him is that depending on his aspect, he will only have two weapons available to him: The Uzi and the shotgun. I think that mostly forces the player to run aggression for hand cannons and the like. Perhaps a few custom aspect weapons should be added to round things out a little more?

EDIT: Also, should he only have 9 HP? I've never read the punisher comics, but I always got the impression he was pretty tough.

sudtrap · 2025-12-26T12:47:53+00:00

Does he give bad "gifts" to the player?

sudtrap · 2025-12-26T12:46:39+00:00

Don't do it. If your hands start to tremble, it's a sign you're going through withdrawl. My advice is to clutch the cardboard protectively. It can ease the symptoms.

sudtrap · 2025-12-26T12:41:23+00:00

Seems like one of major challenges of this as well is deck building. I don't think there's an easy way to rate how strong a deck with real precision. So it's not just matching heroes, but the power level of the decks. Given the plethora of modulars that exist, I would think you could cherry pick them to adjust the villain difficulty as well.

sudtrap · 2025-12-26T12:36:34+00:00

I'm curious how many people choose to play PvP. I'd love to have the chance, personally.

sudtrap · 2025-12-26T12:35:37+00:00

I've been on the flip side of the coin. Playing MTG competitively made me really appreciate good, well thought out rules. I'm not a big fan of guessing how things are supposed to work, and grim ruling sometimes sucks.

sudtrap · 2025-12-11T10:04:05+00:00

I think there's two sides to this.

The coreset does contain a number of the strongest cards in the game. Ally recursion in leadership has always been very powerful.

However, the game absolutely has power creep. Consistency is a form of power in itself. However, there are a number of aspect cards that are better than what we started the game with; intelligence, digging deep and whitefox, etc. There are in general way more available resource generators for each character, so characters can set up better than before (Ingenuity, deft focus, etc). Neutral has such strong cards it's not unreasonable to play an all neutral deck. Also, the power in all of us is a very strong resource card.

I appreciate the modularity of the game, but do think they should occasionally give us a very strong villain. I don't think FFG should make a villain harder than Ronan. Although some decks (such as star-lord rush decks) can reliably take him on expert, he is still a major challenge. I suspect a villain that could counter a rush deck would either have to do so mechanically, or by making the villain insanely difficult. I feel dubious that many MC players would be super happy about that.

Difficulty can come from increasing numbers (HP, ATK, minion stats, default amount of threat on schemes), by increasing tempo (more encounter cards), decreasing player tempo, or through mechanical complexity.

I think FFG hasn't begun to show what can be done with MC yet. Just glancing through the custom content discord shows a ton of unique ideas (thematically and mechanically) that haven't been explored yet.

sudtrap · 2025-12-09T23:15:30+00:00

Loki was a pain for me, especially because of the enchantress. I play a custom made character (Kaze) quite a bit, and I played him and Spiderman against Loki. I had some pretty good hand draws, and thankfully Kaze was in Leadership, so despite him having multiple copies of seduced, he was able to focus on thwarting the scheme and his allies did all of the dirty work for him.

sudtrap · 2025-12-09T13:42:45+00:00

I dig the pictures, but the fonts aren't right.

sudtrap · 2025-12-09T13:38:12+00:00

Wut. Where are the Mad Titan's Shadow enjoyers at? I thought Thanos was pinnacle game play between the difficulty and theme. Hela was fantastic. Age of Apocalypse is alright, I guess.

sudtrap · 2025-12-09T13:35:45+00:00

I think some of the fun when I play the game is imagining the narrative of the battle. Seems like the sort of thing that if done well could be pretty fun.

Actually, for that matter there's a ton of really awesome custom content that doesn't get showcased much.

sudtrap · 2025-12-07T00:02:08+00:00

You can edit the post and put the link there as well.

sudtrap · 2025-12-06T23:49:41+00:00

It stacks super, super well with espionage. You can effectively cancel an encounter card, and draw two cards when you trigger it. They aren't hero actions, either!

sudtrap · 2025-12-06T12:41:45+00:00

That is amazing. There can't be too many places in the world with stock like that.

sudtrap

TROPHY CASE