Rogue Review- Protection Upgrade, Supports and Resources

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. Previously, we’ve reviewed Aggression cards and Justice cards. This week we’re going to start our dive into Protection.

Among my play group, Protection is often disregarded as lackluster. It can feel kind of one note. But you don’t have to play Protection purely as a group tank. You could lean more towards a healer, focus on damage through retaliation, even work up a group of allies.

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)

Resources

Power of Protection
- Rating: 3. Okay
- This is your standard double resource for protection cards. Like all of them, its value is directly tied to what else you’re taking. A bunch of 0-1 cost defense events? Worthless. A bunch of allies and 2 cost events? Worth considering.
Preservation
- Rating: 1. Excellent
- Heals can be rare in this game. Getting healed as a cost for paying for something else is excellent.
- Wildcard resources are always handy.
- You can only ever take one so it’s easy to drop into any deck.

Upgrades

Armored Vest
- Rating: 1. Excellent
- Character stat increases are always handy.
- This one might not be as generally useful as increased attack or thwart, but it is also cheaper to play.
Indomitable
- Rating: 2. Situationally Great
- This is almost a staple card for protection. Readying your hero for one resource is tremendous value.
- The only reason you wouldn’t bring this is if you were going for a form of protection that relied on events rather than defending.
Energy Barrier
- Rating: 3. Okay
- Damage reduction that also serves as damage delivery.
- The damage it deals does not have to go to the source of the damage you took. In fact, if you do damage to yourself, it can still trigger. She-Hulk and Venom pay attention.
- Works well in combination with cards like Desperate Defense, Unflappable and Hard to Ignore that have triggers if you take no damage. If you’re one off, you have the option to trigger Energy Barrier.
Defensive Stance
- Rating: 3. Okay
- Preventing three damage is nice.
- It being an upgrade allows you to play it and leave it until you need it.
- Very useful for protectors that don’t want to exhaust to defend.
Unflappable
- Rating: 2. Situationally Great
- Bonus cards always come in handy. The two conditions on the card do limit who can get use out of this card.
- First, you need to defend. With the rule clarification that said, most Defense keyword cards qualify, meaning you can defend without exhausting, helps this one a lot, upgrading it from probably a 4 rating.
- Second, taking no damage can be tricky, even for a tank character, depending on the villain. Some villains have very swingy damage, which makes it hard to gauge how much you need to block.
Electrostatic Armor
- Rating: 2. Situationally Great
- This grants your hero almost Retaliate.
- It doesn’t work unless you defend, unlike retaliate, but it does work against the Ranged keyword.
- Unlike Energy Barrier, it doesn’t rely on charges, and unlike Unflappable it does not exhaust, so it’s especially useful for those heroes that can ready and defend a lot.
Nerves of Steel
- Rating: 4. Situationally Good
- Resource generation is usually quite good. But unlike Attack and Thwart’s resource generating cards, Defense cards are harder to pull off.
- You have to build a specific deck style for this to become useful.
Dauntless
- Rating: 4. Situationally Good
- Retaliate 1 is great to have.
- Needing to keep your HP at or above max is quite tricky in this game.
- Groot loves this card, as his growth counters serve as ablative armor, keeping his health at max for much of the game. Iron Man too has a lot of health upgrades, meaning he can be above his original max regularly.
Hard to Ignore
- Rating: 2. Situationally Great
- “Free” threat removal can give your protection tank style character a second role in the game.
- Great for heroes that like to flip a lot, giving them some more control over the threat they’ll generate on alter-ego.
- You can play three of them for three threat removal every time.

Supports

Med Team
- Rating: 4. Situationally Good
- Healing can be hard to come by so having a card that can provide some on demand healing sounds great.
- In reality, the three cost makes it hard to justify playing it much of the time.
- It shines when you are paired up with a Voltron Leadership hero or other critical ally. The ability to heal allies and increase their function can be game changing.
The Night Nurse
- Rating: 1. Excellent
- The Night Nurse provides half the healing of the Med Team at 1/3 the cost.
- She cannot be used on Allies though.
- Her ability to clear status effects is her more valuable function though. Hulk gets stunned and going to have a worthless turn? Call for an action and clear it.
Defensive Training
- Rating: 5. Bad
- I am sure there is a combo where this breaks something but I have yet to find it.
- It only costs one, but you can only field two and use each twice before discarding. It can only be used in Alter-Ego and the card you rescue from the discard pile is shuffled into your deck.
- There’s a lot of limitations for only an okay effect.