Spider-Man - Always Be Swingin’ (Aggression)

With 46 cards in the deck, you know this is the kind of deck I (Zach) could only build while Steven was out of the office. With him on vacation, I sat down for a Marvel Monday to try out The Rise of Red Skull campaign solo on stream.

As I was building my deck, I had the second stage of Crossbones sitting on the table. I couldn't get over the fact that he only had 14 hit points. The vast majority of my games of Champions have been 2-player and I had suspicions that my evaluations of cards - specifically the aspects and heroes - were skewed by this fact.

I decided on Spider-Man. Not only is he my favorite hero to play, but I also felt like he is commonly one of the overlooked heroes because of his relatively decent stat lines. On the stream, I looked at Spider-Man using both the Aggression and Justice aspects before ultimately settling on Aggression.

Why Aggression? There's no question that Spidey isn't great at Thwarting. Justice seems like a natural pick for Spider-Man to keep control of the game long enough to win but this really comes down to either fixing a weakness or reinforcing a strength. However, he has an incredible draw ability while he is a hero - all but guaranteeing he has a six-card hand in his hero form.

Combined with his 3 Defense and cards like Backflip and Enhanced Spider-Sense, he can easily spend most of the game as a hero. If he is spending most of his time as a hero, he really isn't in need of much Thwarting. I get a sense that Spider-Man Justice is actually quite good, but it's probably better in 2 or 3-player games where he can both soak attacks and help fix the board by removing threat.

Again, I kept seeing that 14 hit points on Crossbones. Looking at Swinging Web Kick and cards like Skilled Strike or Toe to Toe, I kept wondering if I could win fast enough to not even really need to control the game. I ended up playing the first two games of the campaign on stream so far, so I'll let the games speak for themselves.

A bit of a spoiler though. If someone had bet me whether or not I'd become absolutely obsessed with a Spider-Man Aggression deck even two or three months ago, I would definitely have bet against it. Here we are though, here we are.