Black Panther Meets T'Challa

Expecting a comic pannel? We need to read the rules!

The Unique rule is simultaneously one of the simplest and most complicated rules in marvel champions. Thematically it shows that a character can only be in one place at a time, and lets characters that share hero names exist together still. Though it does get into weirdness with the likes of Daredevil and Spider-Woman who can’t exist in the same place as their multiverse variants, for reasons… And despite being a mechanical realization, it’s not really a balancing lever at all in the game excluding being a way to say max 1 per deck/max 1 in play that saves on text space. It’s even been broken before with Angel needing a whole new rule to prevent negative play experiences he could get trapped into.

Well, the rules have been broken again in Shuri’s pack, and there is no band-aid this time. Thanks to everyone who has argued about this in the Discord’s rule section and highlighting the absurdity. For those who don’t know, something interesting with Shuri’s signature ally is that its title (check the card anatomy page in your rule books to really understand what specifically I am referring to) is different from the Leadership ally Black Panther (T’challa). Because of how the unique rule is worded, these allies pass the test for existing in the same deck and in play, since no check is done beyond the title check if the cards titles are different. Despite both obviously being the same fictional character.

So, we are gonna make a deck utilizing this break before it gets fixed. The simple decision is running Heart of the Panther, since we now have two allies that work off of it, joining Ant-Man and Wasp's club. The second, and more interesting interaction here is going to be making T’Challa our sidekick, and then cycling the leadership Black Panther ally to grab Side-by-Side and really flex the readies for Shuri.

We'll skip the card by card with this bug in the system, but this is actually a lot more interesting than the typical affair that unique breaking would normally enable. Leadership Black Panther also can be used for a draw from tusk, or be a target from Okoye if you have some efficiency fixing you need to do and don’t want to run down an ally that you hope to stick around more. So there are other hooks for Shuri as well.

That’s all we have today, enjoy this before we get errata and the FFG police won’t let you play this way any more. Happy gaming.