Thoughts on Avengers

[Digital Jedi]

Alright, it's been long enough now. Everyone should have bought there bosster packs and/or boxes (except this broke joker) and everyone who wanted too should have built there team-ups, tested there unique ideas and found some kind of way to team-up one of the affiliations with Brotherhood.

Now that a sufficient amount of time has passed lets see what everyone has to say about the set in general. I for one was deeply imressed upon by the Avengers affiliation itself. Leadership and Reservist struck me as one of the more unique and strategical effects added to the game so far. But I'm not seeing too much of Avengers by themselves. I'm seeing more Thunderbolts/Avengers team-ups in my area. Kang Council has already found a place in Brotherhood, and I guess that was to be expected with all his multiple copies of himself. And I haven't seen hide nor hair of a Masters of Evil deck, though that could just be my area.

What has everyone built so far and/or what have they run into in thier local meta so far? I'm way behind on this set and keeping up to date with it because of severe cash flow problems and a seeming lack of interest from my regular "sources" of cards. I've always been the "go to guy" when it came to collecting commons. Most people don't care about thier commons and they just sent them my way either for trade or just because they didn't want to deal with them. I also have a strict organizational system and I take all my commons with me to the shop, so whenver someone needs someting, I can instantaneously look up what they need and let them know if I have it or not. I was inundated with commons from sets prior to Marvel Knights, but since then the commons have been coming fewer and fewer with each set. Until now, the've stopped coming at all.

 

[helpoemer316]

Overall I think the set is really good. It's by far the best set to play sealed and draft by (yeah, I know people will argue for Green Lantern, but come on. GLC was a joke when it came to sealed play, you basically just took the best cards of each drop and threw them together to build your sealed deck, there's no strategy what so ever involved with that). It also introduced some meta changing cards (or so to speak I should say) like Null Time Zone. Avenger team attack decks didn't take off quite like I thought they would, but I've still seen some good variations, they can be quite the little nuisance after awhile.

Kang is pretty cool as well, I like how all of them are non-unique (since Kang always travled through time and worked with copies of himself to get the job done). And yep, you're right, teaming Kang up with Brotherhood has been the single biggest thing out of this set it seems. Lost Kang of Kang of City or whatever you want to call it is a great new deck archtype IMO. I've seen two variations of it though, first off the one that's made 10K glory being the Marvel Knights version, using Daggers and Midnight Sons to team up the Kang Council cards to Brotherhood, but this requires too much work IMO. Oh BTW, folks, for those of you who do not know the idea here. It's to team up Kang with Brotherhood, and then abuse Lost City by having multiple copies of Kang in your hand and Lost City on the field and having each Kang in your hand be basically a Clobberin' Time. It's sick if done right.

The better variation though IMO is the one where people just run a standard team up deck with a bunch of the Kangs, but run 4 of each Magneto as well (this means 4 of the 5, 7, 8, drop, giving you 12 each). 4 Genosha's as well to get that massive draw advantage. Cover Fire to help your defense quite a bit, and Longshot (yep vomit baby!) to vomit those Magnetos and Kangs out of your deck and into your hand. This variation can be just sick sometimes. And what's even worse is if everything goes right it can win by turn 5 or 7, depending on how patient you want to be. My advice is to go for a turn 5 win with the 5-drop Mag, team-up, Kang or two, and Lost City. CS does disrupt this some though since many people are scared to drop their low drop Kangs due to Flame Traps and the like going off, which can cripple Lost Kang right off the bat.

But yeah, overall there's a lot of innovation to be seen with this set, and once again this proves that the Marvel sets seem to be more in check then the DC sets. GLC was horribly designed in the fact that no one saw the Modern Age coming at the time. The designers only knew about the Golden Age, so it was designed to impact the Golden Age strongly, not the Modern Age so much with GLEE dominating for sure. MAV will definitely put a check on that and I can only see it working well both in the Marvel Modern Age (which will not be MMK and MAV for those wondering, there's another Marvel set that will come out before the next Marvel Modern Age PC) and the Golden Age.