Cardboard Corner: Review of "NeXt Evolution" expansion for Marvel Champions

Marvel Champions has made it. It has gotten through the difficulties of launch, through the obstacle course of gaining momentum, and is now flying high. Sales have been great through dozens of hero packs and six deluxe campaigns. But some may say that now is when the going really gets tough. How to sustain success? Let's see how the seventh deluxe expansion, NeXt Evolution (2023), handles it.

NeXt Evolution returns to the lore of the X-Men introduced in the previous deluxe, Mutant Genesis. Nothing unique to this expansion, I struggle with the lore. It's the same as last time, and the time before, and the time... The heroes of the moment sit around relaxing; bad guys commit surprise attack; heroes jump into action and one by one thwart the villains' nefarious scheme; heroes win. NeXt Evolution is exactly the same; just replace old faces with new. I know Marvel Champions is not a vehicle for story, just hero vs. villain scenarios with story pasted on. It's still difficult for me to muster the energy necessary to create a story introduction when it has become so repetitive.

Not breaking any molds, NeXt Evolution contains two new playable heroes and five new villain scenarios. The new heroes are Cable and Domino. Cable takes the mechanism of player side schemes and implements it in character-centric fashion. His special ability allows him to ready once per round when he defeats a side scheme, not to mention his hero cards have a number of player side schemes to ensure he has a chance at activating it several times per scenario. Switching to Vegas-style, Domino's special ability takes advantage of wild resources. Playing with the top card of her deck virtually revealed, Domino can switch it with a card in hand, not to mention her most powerful event cards do extra damage based on the number of wilds on the top card. Neither hero may be well known to casual Marvel fans, but both adaptations in Champions are exceptionally powerful—and fun to play.

The five scenarios are linked by a common thing: the kidnapping and rescue of Hope Summers. Needing to be rescued in the opening scenarios, she joins one player's ally squad, but if killed, players lose. This means she sits around doing nothing til the last round of the scenario in which she gets her 2 ATK in, and takes consequential damage. I strongly feel more could have been done from a campaign perspective to make her more interactive.

Looking at the five villain scenarios, the opener gets the now obligatory multi-villain scenario out of the way. Featuring the Marauders, players will need to take down three of the seven (in random, sequential order) to win. These villains mostly theme-less, the needle of each leans a little toward ATK or SCH and forces players to choose between two negative effects. They have zero flavor beyond. The second scenario is a random villain—one of the four villains not killed in the first scenario. With Hope Summers attached as hostage, players to deal with large amounts of threat if marauder minions are allowed to stick around.

The third scenario is likely the best in the box: Juggernaut. He lives up to his name. Like a rampaging bull in a phone booth, players have trouble escaping his charging attacks in the tight confines of the scenario, regardless hero or alter ego. Dealing extra amounts of damage when attached, designers do an excellent job making the big guy's helmet thematic. Mister Sinister, the the fourth scenario, is classic Champions. He starts off relatively standard, but as the main scheme progresses, which it will, he slowly builds more and more psionic powers to the point he becomes quite formidable. And the big boss is Stryfe. His main mechanic centers on card types in hand. His standard attack is quite low, but he gets +X based on the type of card the player has the highest amount of. Six events in hand means +6 ATK. Success often based on card draw, the more diverse a card base, the better the chance of success. Overall it's a swingy scenario that can end surprisingly quick if you do draw those 6 events and snag a 3 or 4 boost.

The largest “new” mechanic NeXt Evolution explores is player side schemes. Firstly, they are integral to the campaign; one begins in play each scenario and is the means by which players get card bonuses. And secondly, as mentioned, Cable's special ability is based on them; he has multiple in his deck. And on top of this, each hero features several player side schemes in their pre-con decks, not to mention the heroes released separately in parallel to “NeXt Evolution” likewise have such cards in deck. I am of two minds about player side schemes. On one hand they add flavor to the game. Players are rewarded, both practically and thematically, for investing in defeating them. On the other hand, they add the necessity of being able to produce more Thwart, aka more powerful heroes, not to mention adds more stuff to the table. In other words, it's a change that necessitates power and complexity creep, which I'm not a fan of. More in a moment.

I have a few complaints about “Next Evolution”. The first is Stryfe. As the final boss, one expects him to be uber-difficult, which he is. Balanced he is not, however. Stryfe is just extremely, extremely difficult, if not impossible, for certain types of decks. Running an event-based deck? Don't bother. He will be doing +5-6 plus boost per turn. And the worst is fighting your way through four campaign scenarios only to arrive at Stryfe to realize your deck has close to 0% chance of beating him. Not the greatest time to start thinking about tweaking your deck...

My second complaint is the afore-mentioned complexity creep, and the cumulative negative effect it is having on Marvel Champions. By comparison, FFG's other cooperative card game Arkham Horror adds new mechanisms each campaign release. They rarely re-use those mechanisms in subsequent releases, however. Marvel Champions just keeps piling them on. New mechanisms increase, the number of keywords grows and grows, and villains and heroes have increasingly complex abilities. Games today are increasingly long chains of “First this, then that... then that... then that...”. And when you reach the end of that chain and realize you forgot one effect, you go back and calculate again—even worse when you realize a turn later. More and more mental RAM is spent on processing table state than making tactical decisions. Children may not have been masters at early Marvel Champions, but you could give the average 10 year old the box and they could figure it out. Give them NeXt Evolution as a first experience and undoubtedly there would be mistakes galore. And the complexity bogs down game flow. Where two-player scenarios used to take 30-45 minutes, you now need 60+. I prefer zapping baddies to grinding out event sequences, which is what the game is becoming.

The third complaint is a knock-on effect: heroes and the relative degree of power they have in comparison to prior heroes. Cable, for example, is a lesser known Marvel hero. Casuals are likely not aware of him. Yet he busts out the ATK and THW in greater quantities than Spiderman, Ironman, and many of the well-known heroes before him. Cable fans will disagree, but to me it doesn't feel right. You want to see the most well-known hereos be the most powerful. The meaning of “special” is shifting too quickly underfoot to the latest heroes.

But don't let my layman's complaints turn you off this campaign expansion if you enjoy Marvel Champions. NeXt Evolution, while having its challenges, does not drop the game's ball. Players get fresh content that adds enough new stuff to evolve the game while staying true to its first principles. If anything, Juggernaut is a ton (ha ha) of challenging fun. I prefer more streamlined scenarios, but there will undoubtedly be players who enjoy the increasing complex board states that must be navigated. If you're buying for kids, make sure they have an understanding of the core box and maybe one or two of the early deluxe boxes before tackling this one.