Ops Room

Ops Room

What is interesting about Ops Room is that it is one of the rarified "spend a counter" cards where each counter does more than a single point of whatever effect it allows. Up there with Command Center. The Douglas, Med Team and The Night Nurse.

Honestly, banking three resources to prevent three damage is pretty okay. Not sure I would include in many decks. But we also get to remove a threat each time we use it while possibly triggering the many '...after taking no damage' cards in Protection? No brainer.

This is the backup that makes sure your Protection deck ticks that one extra damage prevention over the top to justify those upgrades. And swiped some threat at the same time. And Protection is very weak on thwart, so this card exceeds it's cost valuation.

MacGhille · 322

In Harm's Way

In Harm's Way

This is an unusual card to add to the solo hero repertoire., allowing a defense-heavy character to dish out damage while thwarting.

With the right characters (Spider-Man, Ghost Spider, Nightcrawler, Silk etc.) this is five damage and five thwarting with an Armored Vest and Innate Reflexes. Not sure on the cost curve for cross ability effects, but 5/5 for 3 feels pretty solid.

In multiplayer, this would likely be even more effective, as your partner could field a range of allies handling numerous contingencies while allowing you to be broadly effective for minimal cost.

MacGhille · 322

Get Their Attention

Get Their Attention

Get Their Attention is a continuation of Marvel Champions long-standing tradition of conditional threat removal in the Protection aspect. We had Not Today!, Jump Flip and True Grit previously.

This is an alternate step for Protection, as the 'quid-pro-quo' of previous cards in this aspect has been removed. Overall, Protection does a low-mid job of handling threat, likely because the idea is that the enemy is attacking rather than scheming, so there are more opportunities to thwart a reduced number of threat.

MacGhille · 322
I find it more in line with "powerfull punch". And in that regard, I feel it fails miserably. The cool thing about powerful punch is that if used against minions it can kill many of them. This makes it really good for things like change of fortune decks. It also works as a defense in the sense that if nothing is attacking anymore, the threat has been defended. If it's the villain that's attacking, for heroes with good health or recovery, or that can gain tough easely, it can redirect an attack to an ally to put some work into the villain. Since this kind of defending has a lot of tools to pile on damage like that, with flow like water, innate retaliate, electrostatic armor, it allows to double down very efficiently into this idea of trading damage with the villain. You take the damage, but the villain takes 7 damage back too, it's a good trade if you have resources to recover that health. This doesn't do that, it spreads your rewards with intervention. So you trade some speed for some control. The thing is, there are less tools to double down on that, and speed creates some control of its own by opening the option to just skip one last round of problems by blitzing the enemy. — Selven · 1
The one good thing I see about this card though, is that it's an interrupt to initiating an attack. So, if I understand the enemy attack substeps correctly, it would change the target of the enemy as it initiate the attack. Meaning, the enemy doesn't initiate an attack against their previous target, this makes it so that the original target of the attack is always you, instead of you becoming the attacked/defending player. So, I think the wording allows Peter's "Spider-sense" or new Ally Hulk fury counter ability to trigger. — Selven · 1

Innate Reflexes

Innate Reflexes

I guess we just found the automatic include for any Protection deck.

Seriously though? A 2ER bump of +1 to DEF that you can guarantee is in your starting hand? Wtf is happening at Fantasy Flight?

I am a HUGE fan of Spider-Man (Peter Parker) and especially Ghost-Spider protection decks. Ghost-Spider taught me how a hero can literally live in the defense during the Villain phase. With Armored Vest, you will get a +2 bonus to already impressive 3DEF characters, which nearly negates Villain damage in the early to mid game.

And I cannot stress enough how powerful the 'Starting' keyword can potentially be. We spend thousands of words in our deck write-ups describing how to handle a mulligan to get the right hand. Now we can guarantee certain cards? And one of them is a +1 to defense for 2ER? I'm frankly astounded they didn't overcost this card for that feature.

I probably shouldn't have put that out in the universe, now 'Starting' cards will be 3ER minimum.

That said, this isn't a silver bullet. Spending your exhaust to block damage can obviously be a detriment, so for the "Actually..." crowd, let me make clear that I am simply advocating that if you're going to build a deck around your DEF stat, Innate Reflexes is clearly a 'must-have'. I honestly think it's now an auto-include in any Protection deck.

And I love it.

MacGhille · 322

Innate Reflexes

Innate Reflexes

I think this card was meant to either be unique or have a limit of 1 max per player.

If we're able to start the game with +3 def it would be broken.

Did FFG forgot to put either the unicity or the limit ?

Mzero · 3
It's in the rules for Starting found in the Fear No Evil rulebook — Stretch22 · 2449