Rogue Champions- Aggression Support and Upgrade Review

Marvel’s Champions has grown over the years since its initial release. Each aspect now has a large pool of upgrades to choose from when building your deck. Last month we started a look at Aggression by running through the 11 unique Allies. This week we’re diving into Support, Resources and Upgrades. We’ll rate the cards on the following scale.

Rating Scale

Excellent (Good in any deck)
Situationally Great (Good in most decks but very good in certain decks)
Okay (Not a bad choice but not necessarily the best choice either)
Situationally Good (Except in certain deck builds not a great card choice)
Bad (Generally just a bad card choice)

Resource

The Power of Aggression
- Rating: 4. Situationally Good
- If you are playing with a lot of Aggression 2+ cost cards, this can be handy.
- It takes up valuable space in the deck and won’t help pay for your costly hero specific cards.
- The wildcard resource it generates can be useful against villains with a lot of upgrades that you need to spend specific resources to discard.

Support

Tac Team
- Rating: 3. Okay
- Play Tac Team and use it…tactically.
  - Hit enemies when you need to do two damage to kill them.
  - Damage an enemy to avoid a retaliate.
  - Note that it is an Action. This means while it’s in play, another player can call on you to use it when most opportune, it doesn’t need to be your turn.
- The three cost is a lot, especially when you think about an ally could cost that, deal damage over a few rounds just the same and then block for you.
- Works well as support for Tigra when there are lots of regular minions that have high health. Hit them with Tac Team, Tigra finishes them off and heals.
Hall of Heroes
- Rating: 3. Okay
- Heroes that do a lot of damage but have trouble getting cards, such as She-Hulk, Hulk, and Thor.
- Great against minion-heavy decks, such as Ultron.
- With the clarification of what “You” means, this card does not generate counters when your allies kill stuff. Only your hero.
Boot Camp
- Rating: 2. Situationally Great
- Play this early and the extra damage it generates adds up dramatically.
- Any Leadership Voltron set up by another hero will love having this played on them.
  - Tigra from Aggression loves this as she can then kill three health minions indefinitely.
- This is almost great in every deck, because almost every deck is going to be playing allies. But there are some that specifically use allies for other things or build their deck more for upgrading the hero, so you’d never want to waste the resources to play this for those.

Upgrades

Combat Training
- Rating: 1. Excellent
- What’s better than buffing a hero’s basic stats?
- Every non-thwart focused hero will make good use of this.
- Overkill builds get a special note as this makes overkill more likely to occur.
- If you’re playing Aggression, you’ll almost always want this.
- Whether or not you take one or three copies depends on who else is on your team.
Enraged
- Rating: 5. Bad
- Killing allies faster generally isn’t helpful. The extra consequential damage will do that.
- She-Hulk ally does more damage the more damage she has on herself. Putting this on her lets her punch for three first time, then punch for five and then die.
- If it cost zero resources, it might be worth playing to get max usage out of an ally in one round and then use them to block.
Battle Fury
- Rating: 3. Okay
- Readying your hero is a very handy thing to do.
- That it is an upgrade rather than event works in its favor. You can play it whenever you draw it, and wait to use it on a turn you’ll get the most benefit from it.
- Hall of Heroes encourages your hero to attack minions directly. With this you can do that and then get another activation out of your hero.
- Hulk, Thor, She-Hulk, Groot are all heroes who can have a lot of health (if you count Growth-Counters as health on Groot). They can afford to take the damage from this card.
Jarnborn
- Rating: 1. Excellent
- One physical resource for two bonus damage every time you attack is decent value.
- No restrictions on where that extra two damage can go and it is not an attack. This means it can bypass any kind of retaliate or cards that respond after an attack.
- Mean Swing can be used with this to boost your attack damage when you don’t have the resource to spend to trigger Jarnborn.
  - For a long time this was the only weapon available outside of a hero set.
Counterattack
- Rating: 3. Okay
- This card can be very resource efficient. One resource for high potential damage. Most villains don’t usually do less than three damage in a single attack.
- Play this right after a villain draws an upgrade that boosts their next attack and you can spend one resource for nine damage. You just need to survive that attack.
  - You need a high health hero who can absorb a big attack without fear of going down, such as Thor, Groot, She-Hulk, buffed up Iron Man.
  - Downtime in play is a nice help to recover the damage you just took.
- I never like playing this because I prefer to avoid taking damage through defending, defense cards, ally blocks stuns etc.
Martial Prowess
- Rating: 2. Situationally Great
- Continuous resource generation is always handy.
- As most Attack events that require a specific resource want physical, even many non-aggression events, this fulfills that requirement in addition to just generating a resource.
- Ms. Marvel and Gamora get special use out of this due to their heavy reliance on events.
- This isn’t handy for every player, as there are some heroes who have events that feel like Attack but aren’t so wouldn’t be able to use it. You’ll probably only need to take one copy for yourself unless playing with specific heroes who would want one too.
Brute Force
- Rating: 4. Situationally Good
- When facing an enemy with Tough and you have a powerful attack, it can suck. Being able to pierce that can be handy.
- Unlike some other upgrades, you can’t choose when to use this. So no playing it early and holding it until the villain gets tough.
  - There aren’t many enemies that reliably get tough, nor hero decks that can’t find an ally or something to tap the villain to remove the tough before an attack.
- Hulk, who focuses on high damage attacks, benefits from having this available so he doesn’t waste a five damage attack on clearing tough.
Lie in wait
- Rating: 3. Okay
- Three damage will outright defeat a good number of minions. Even those it doesn’t kill will then be in one shot kill range after taking this cards damage.
- Combo with a teammate with Hawkeye Ally for picking off five health.
- Villains or modular sets with that awkward seven health minions. Knocking them down to four immediately to get them into the killing range.
Follow Through
- Rating: 4. Situationally Good
- Overkill is a rare ability so finding usage for that extra excess damage can be difficult.
  - Into the Fray allows damage heavy heroes to do thwarting. Three Follow Throughs in play make that thwarting worthwhile.
  - Hand Cannon gives you Overkill on demand.
  - Moment of Triumph is enhanced dramatically with Follow Through.
- Rocket is your hero designed around excess damage.
- When used with these situations, the bonus excess damage Follow Through generates is amazing. But getting use out of excess damage requires a very specific build.
Hand Cannon
- Rating: 1. Excellent
- Overkill is hard to come by and all too often you have a minion you want to kill but you’ll waste a bunch of damage by using your big attack on it. This lets you do both.
  - Guard minions are especially fun to Overkill.
- Mean Swing can be used with this weapon when you don’t need the Overkill and want to save a charge.
- In addition to spending the charge, you also need to exhaust Hand Cannon. So no playing it and then using someone like Quicksilver or Captain America to make multiple Overkill attacks in a round.
- While it is Restricted, it is not unique so you can get multiple out at once.
Godslayer
- Rating: 2. Situationally Great
- Bonus damage when attacking the main villain, or one of a handful of special minions.
  - Kang has a lot of unique minions (by unique we mean that are Kang himself)
  - Anachronauts, also coming in the Kang pack, is a modular set with unique minions.
  - Likewise, any set that is light on minions works well with Godslayer as most of your attacks will be against the villain.
- Unlike Hand Cannon it has no charges, and unlike Jarnborn it doesn’t require a resource for each use.
- Three is a high price to play this, particularly if you are going to be forced to make many of your attacks against generic minions.