Widow's Gauntlets are the glue that makes her Signature package sing. This low-cost Resource generator may only target a specific type of card, but the combination of the 8 Preparation cards included in her kit plus her Hero ability to ping for 1 damage each time she triggers one keeps this spicy. Add in some Aspect and Basic Preparations, and between 25% and 50% of your deck can be Preparations.

Comboed with her Safe House to keep drawing those Preparation cards over and over, Widow consistantly says "no" to the Villain over and over while chipping away at their hp.

Finally, these Gauntlets make some of the "meh" Preparation cards like Target Aquired and Espionage excellent, as they are played for "free" and also do a damage when triggered.

For Widow, this is an "S" tier card. Play it as soon as it comes up, it powers her entire engine.

Just...awful.

Okay, if you look at Black Widow and the cards she shipped with, at the time it seemed like she was the precursor to some new development in Champions. All the preparation cards, the Spy designation, Agent Coulson being so expensive and so specific...we definitely thought (particularly with Spider-Woman coming out three months later) that there were going to be some awesome Spy builds in our future.

And then...bupkis.

So here we are, 2 years after Widow's release...still waiting for redemption.

This is dramatically more painful for Widow players because she has two copies of this card, and they affect exactly nine cards that aren't specifically in Widow's deck. And of those nine: 1 is Leadership, 2 are protection, 2 are Aggression, 2 are Justice and 2 are Basic.

So this card sort of forces you to include specific cards in order to maximize it's efficiency.

Look, I've built decks that hinge on a combination of three cards, so I don't consider this card a failure. My problem is that since it is a hero specific card, it invariably influences any deck design with Widow. The same is true of Ms Marvel and several other heroes. But Widow just has fewer overall options, because literally only two preparation cards have been released outside of Widow's actual expansion.

A protection in Valkyrie and an Aggression in Wasp.

At the end of the day, Widow has enough Preparation cards in her hero deck to make the gauntlets meaningful, but their limited use in the larger card pool just serves to draw attention to the fact that FFG gave up on Spy heroes almost immediately after giving us one.