Chaos here!
It’s become a bit of a tradition around here for me to build a Legendary: A Marvel Deck Building Game setup based around Marvel movies as they release. I love Legendary and MCU movies, and it’s even better when the movie is for one of my favorite superheroes. Hooray!
The Premise:
In honor of the recently released, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, I have created a scenario and setup for Legendary: A Marvel Deck Building Game that tries to capture certain elements of the movie. From this point forward, there will be spoilers for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
The Setup:
This scenario will be played with two players, myself and my wife, Confetti.
Heroes:
- Goliath (Civil war)
- Skirn, Breaker of men (Fear Itself)
- Spider-Man (Legendary base game)*
- Stature (Civil War)
- Stepford Cuckoos (Messiah complex)*
- Wasp (Ant-Man)
*Our initial setup included Spider-Man, but he was then traded out for the Stepford Cuckoos
Scheme: Trap Heroes in the Microverse (Ant-Man),
- Ant-Man (Ant-man) has been included as the hero shuffled into the villain deck
Mastermind: Kang (Annihilation)
Villain Groups:
- Intelligentsia (World War Hulk)
- Timelines of Kang (Annihilation)
Henchmen: Cape Killers (Civil War)
I have included sidekicks and new recruits as possible buys.
Setup Rationale:
This setup obviously required heavy reliance on the 2018 Ant-man expansion. Using so many elements from it felt a bit like cheating, but it did make sense for an Ant-Man movie based experience. However, I did mix enough from other sets to make mine feel unique. (For those who really want to stretch things a bit though, I might recommend the “Baby Hope” scheme from Dark City to represent keeping the mcguffin from Kang and then mixing Ant-Man in as a regular hero).
On the villain side, I have Kang as the mastermind because he is the big bad of the movie. This brought in Timelines of Kang as a villain group, which seemed appropriate since many forms of Kang show up by the movie’s end. The Intelligencia became my second group because they are M.O.D.O.K.’s villains and he is at least pictured with them. The henchmen are the Cape Killers because they always work as faceless goon types, and they are not too far off from Kang’s soldiers from the movie. So, boom, a villain ensemble that covers the baddies in the movie (Sorry, there is no Bill Murray villain group).
For the heroes, some choices were easy, but I then had to figure out how to fill out the roster. Wasp would stand in from both Hope and Janet. Even though she’s in her Stature outfit instead of Stinger, we had Cassie on hand. From there, I had to get a little creative.
Originally, I put in Spider-Man as a nod to the joke where the coffee shop worker mistakenly calls Ant-man Spider-Man instead. As much as I love Spider-Man, he really didn’t work well with this setup, so I had to remove him (he would be replaced with an equally unfit character).
The resistance characters from the movie are not represented in the cards available in Legendary, so I put together a stand in team. Skirn stands in for Jentorra, the warrior lady. Her leanings towards draw mechanic actually work well with our other heroes. I then threw in The Stepford Cuckoos as both Quaz, the movies mindreader, and as a representative of the entire resistance since her clone ability could be interpreted as rallying the troops. Turns out she was as useless as the no-name resistance extras were against Kang in the movie.
Finally, I added Goliath (Bill Foster) because he was in the second Ant-Man movie, but he could also represent the large moving building in the movie. Again, I had to get creative.
The obvious question now is, “Where is Ant-man?” That’s where the scheme comes into play. “Trap Heroes in the Microverse” requires adding a hero to be added to the villain deck. Enter Ant-Man. This captures the idea of Scott helping Kang unwillingly, but also eventually realigning with the rest of the heroes. The microverse piece ties into the movie’s setting of the quantum realm. Finally, the evil wins if enough villains escape ties into Kang’s plan of escaping the quantum realm in the movie. Tah dah! We have a setup.
The Game(s):
For our first game (and a few after that), we fought Kang on his epic mastermind setting. This was a mistake. While all the game’s mechanics worked out well and everything came together thematically, the difficulty level crushed us.
Kang constantly powered himself and the rest of the villains up while also slamming us with curses. Meanwhile, the scheme twists, which kept playing double villain deck draws, prevented us from ever getting a great handle on clearing the city.
We saw the great potential in the hero setup. Draw power would be the key to victory. Several heroes had great draw mechanics and some even had cards that would eventually give fight based on the number of cards drawn. One of the big keys to victory would be getting Ant-Man back to the hero-side because he opened up the most draw-potential to players. (Turns out Ant-Man is super important to an Ant-Man-based adventure).
Our first game came really close. Confetti hit Kang his second to last time, but then he simply pulled an Iron Lad into his mastermind tactics pile and the villain deck ran out next turn. Had she pulled his other tactic, she would have had an extra turn with no villain deck play, so there might have been a chance. We lost and felt bad.
So, we tried again… and again. The setup just kept finding ways to kneecap us. Early master strikes made the villains difficult to hit while also making Kang too big to take. Constant curses form Kang and certain members of the Intelligenica junked up our decks and made any KO gains we made were only really brining out decks back to their standard efficiency and never really thinning us out to better plays. Other times, scheme twists stacked and sent a flood of villains escaping at once.
We kept making progress only to see everything fall apart quickly. Scott in the movie says, “I don’t have to win, we both just have to lose,” and oh boy did we both lose a lot. Just the both of us though, Kang was fine.
Finally, we admitted that we had to lower Kang from his epic side to his standard side, shrink him down if you will.
This at least made Kang and the villains a bit more hittable and kept us from being bombarded with regular curses as much. With that slight bit of breathing room, this still very difficult setup became a tad more doable.
We were able to get our decks humming along like we wanted them to work. We both had excellent draw engines that found ways to deliver big hits.
The problem was that the villain deck still had a lot of nasty tricks. Every time we felt good about our position, the deck would put us back in our place. The biggest issue became keeping the city in check. Scheme twist could easily turn the tide of battle against us and allow villains to start escaping. During one turn, we hit a pocket of scheme twists that let three villains escape immediately. Just like that, we were one escaped villain away from losing.
Thankfully, our decks were delivering at this point and we were able to stay just ahead of the curve. Kang took two hits from both of us and finally met defeat. It took a few tries to finally win, but isn’t that the beauty of time travel, redos?
Final Results:
Chaos: 26 points, 2 captured Ant-Men
Confetti: 20 points, 4 captured Ant-Men
The Wrap-Up:
This is a challenging set up, but not impossible. It’ll just take a lot of luck or Kang needs to be on his easier side. Trading out the Stepford Cuckoos for someone with a bit more synergy with everyone else might be a good idea as well. She has some cool tricks, but they are a bit more conditional. When Chaos tried to incorporate her into his build, all her villain deck checks failed and she ended up just clogging his deck with non-draw, low-fight cards.
Even though we liked the movie, a lot of people found Quantumania a bit rough and tough to get through, so I unintentionally captured that aspect of it with my setup too.
Overall, this was a hard battle, but I still enjoyed it and I at least got in several game of Legendary, so that is its own win.
Chaos & Confetti 