Chaos & Confetti

No Spoilers ahead!

Chaos here!

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse came out recently and we loved it (even if we had to question some characterization at some points).  Since I got to see a movie with many versions of my favorite superhero, I took that excitement into my favorite board game, Legendary: A Marvel Deck Building Game.

Despite Legendary’s massive library of characters, villains, and scenarios, I didn’t feel I quite had the right pieces to put together a game setup that echoed the events of the movie closely enough.  So instead, I’ll be putting together a Spider-Verse setup that simply has fun with the pieces that are available to the Legendary game system.

Here we go!

The Setup:

 Heroes:

• High Tech Spider-Man (Spider-Man Homecoming)
• Spider-Gwen (Secret Wars vol. 2)
• Spider-Man (base set)
• Spider-Man Noir (Noir)
• Ultimate Spider-Man (Secret Wars vol. 1)

Scheme: World War Hulk (World War Hulk)

Masterminds (all with four tatics):

• The Goblin, Underworld Boss (Noir)
• Mysterio (Paint the Town Red)
• Vulture (Spider-Man Homecoming)
• Zombie Green Goblin (Secret Wars vol. 1)

Villain Groups: 

• Goblin’s Freak Show (Noir)
• Sinister Six (Paint the Town Red)
• Spider-Foes (Base game)

Henchmen: Spider-Slayers (Marvel 3D/ Dimensions)

I have included sidekicks and new recruits as possible buys.

Setup Rationale:

Again, I couldn’t quite make a movie adaptation work out smoothly enough with so many of the big players missing: Spot, Spider-Man 2099, etc.  So, I instead grabbed a handful of Spider-Men from across different universes.  Miles (Ultimate Spider-Man) and Gwen were musts as was a more traditional Spider-Man.  Noir joined due to being in the first movie and then I grabbed Homecoming Spider-man because a live action variant seemed too hard to resist.  Also, I don’t play the MCU Legendary products normally, so this felt like a good excuse.

To mirror the team of Spiders coming together, I pulled a multiversal team of masterminds.  The World War Hulk scheme let me have a bit of fun with its rotating cast of masterminds..  Here we have a zombie, a noir universe counterpart, and an MCU villain.  Mysterio obviously represents the 616 universe, but he also felt appropriate due to having a history of multiversal shenanigans: Shatter Dimensions the video game, his MCU appearance, and his role in the original Spider-Men comic.

I rounded out the villain deck with a flood of Spider-Man villains.  Unfortunately, this is where I made a bit of a mistake that I would do differently if I played this setup again.  I upped the extra masterminds’ tactics from two to four to increase the game’s difficulty, since I knew the Spider-Friends would probably have good synergy.  However, to continue tweaking the balance, I threw in an extra villain group.  I hoped this would give us a few extra turns to deal with problems while also still giving us plenty of big foes to fight against.  I would recommend simply running the suggested number of villain groups and still keeping the extra tactics.  That would result in a pretty good difficulty balance.

The Game:

With every available hero only costing two recruit, Chaos and Confetti quickly started scooping up Spider-Heroes.  The plus side of the Spider-Friends is that most allow draws of cards that cost 2 or less, which meant both decks quickly developed great draw engines.  On the negative side, the cards themselves can be a bit weaker.  This meant that even when we played a slew of cards, we still weren’t pulling off massive hits immediately.

There is also the problem of possibly having the draw engine kneecapped once non-2-or-less cards enter the deck, such as wounds, S.H.I.E.D officers, or hero bystanders.  All three of those would eventually be forced into our decks at some point.

Both our decks featured a mix of Spider-characters, but Confetti ended up leaning a bit more Gwen’s city-space specific bonuses (patoring) while Chaos leaned into Miles’ draw and attack build.  

At first, it was all we could do to stay on top of the villains in the city.  The masterminds taunted us, both eventually we were able to start taking some hits.  Spider-Gwen ended up being our huge hitter, but the mob of Spider-Friends that caused big turns were effective as a whole.

Despite Mysterio starting the game, he quickly switched out and then refused to re-enter.  First we took down, The Goblin from the Noir universe.  Then, the Vulture had his wings clipped.  Zombie Green Goblin went next, and then Mysterio was finally forced into play.  By that point, we had no problem keeping the city clear and playing massive turns.  In fact, some of our turns were accumulating over twenty attack.  Mysterio refused to go down without a fight though.  His tactics replaced themselves and his Master strikes simply added more tactics.  

Had the extra villain group not been added, we might have sweated his delays more, but we ended up winning with a solid amount of cards left to draw and a few scheme twist left to pull.  

Our build left us quite overpowered, could we ever really doubt a Spider-Team-Up anyways?

Final Results:  Chaos and Confetti save the day and prove to be Spider-Heroes!!

Chaos’ Score: 81

• 20 bystander points
• 3 henchmen points
• 10 villain points
• 48 mastermind points

Confetti’s Score: 105

• 21 bystander points
• 3 henchmen points
• 25 villain points
• 56 mastermind points

Chaos’ Final Thoughts:

I really loved the theming of this game and it ended up being quite a bit of fun.  The balancing wasn’t quite right, but at least we ended up feeling really good about ourselves and not like we were throwing ourselves at an unstoppable wall (which sometimes happens in Legendary).  My main take away though is that Upper Deck needs to release some more expansions pronto so I can build more movie moments

Confetti’s Final Thoughts:

This was probably the most overpowered game of Legendary we’ve played… and I loved it! It was so fun to have my deck come together so well and we crushed all of the bad guys that came our way. It was a really fun scenario to play.