Rise of the Red Skull: Zola (Solo Basic)

 

Constraints of Review

I am using the prefabbed decks that come with the box to see how they handle solo play. I do not have the option to do group play by and large, so please take everything you read here with the knowledge that I have no idea how it relates to group play and probably won't for months. When I do get to do group play I'll let you know what I think then. Because I will be playing with everything out of the box, as-is, I will be doing the whole thing on Basic difficulty. I'll go through the box again on Solo Expert and will write up something for that, then.

What is This?

This is the first major expansion for Marvel Champions the Living Card Game. It includes five villains (Crossbones, Absorbing Man, Taskmaster, Zola, and Red Skull) and arranges them in a campaign format. Fight the villains in order, upgrading your deck with campaign cards. It's a pretty simple set up, but simple can be very good. We'll see.

Last Time...

Spider-Woman finally did better against Taskmaster than Hawkeye, finishing him in a game. She rescued White Tiger. Hawkeye took Taskmaster down in two games, getting Moon Knight as an ally.

 

Zola

Oh my goodness this guy was fun. Zola's shtick is multi-layered: he has Retaliate 1, kidnaps an ally of yours, and also starts building minions, which leads to Zola milling his own frickin deck. The minions take three rounds to build... most of the time. Zola has cards that can speed that process up unexpectedly. Every time I turned around Zola's deck was appreciably smaller, ratcheting up the tension as that extra encounter card came roaring down the tracks at me. The constant Retaliate is also further augmented by the side-scenario Under Attack, which can bump that up to Retaliate 2, which essentially means game over if you don't take care of that immediately. Zola also buffs all his minions with some of the nastiest upgrades in the game, throwing around Guard like its cotton candy, buffing hit points, and making his minions scheme and hit harder.  I don't remember any of the buffs being removable other than just killing the minion, which can be quite a chore. Literally the only way I found I could win was to try to make each individual hit as big as possible  so as to get pinged for one hit point less often and then to know when to weather a dogpiling form Zola and his minions so I go all in for burst damage. Zola is tense and is probably the best time I've had so far... but I haven't played Red Skull yet.

Spider-Woman actually had a marginally easier time with Zola. Yes, I lost the first game, but I found that Spider-Woman's core card set made her versatile enough to deal with a lot of Zola's shenanigans. But then again I never ran into minions who'd both been upgraded to have Guard and 7 HP, so maybe that's not the fairest thing to say of my experience. Spider-Woman dealt with the constant threat build up really well, had higher HP than Hawkeye, and dealt big enough burst damage to be able to survive the second fight without needing to flip back.

I think Hawkeye got the rougher end of the deal, game-wise. For whatever reason a lot more minions came out, stretching my early game resources past their limits and giving me choices that I found truly impossible to figure out. While having Hawkeye's bow meant that he didn't take damage from Retaliate I found that to be a small comfort, as Spider-Woman's amped HP was almost one and a half times Hawkeye's. There are a lot of minions in this deck and Hawkeye just doesn't deal with that sort of thing very well at all, even with his explosion arrows, since these are easily the toughest minions in the game. I lost the first game because of two Guard minion jerks with 7 HP, who gunked things up so badly that I couldn't get the burst damage that I had out at Zola. The second game I prioritized bursting and ignored my allies; they couldn't deal enough damage fast enough and definitely couldn't take enough hits against the oncoming horde, so why bother? I loaded up all the arrows and just shot and shot and shot and shot until Zola was a charred confused corpse.

Conclusion

Out of the four I've fought so far Zola has definitely been the most intense. There's multiple plates juggling, almost all of which eventually funnel into powerful minions who laugh at your feeble attempts to kill them. Retaliate 1 means you have to be more judicious about landing blows when everything in you wants to just ping this dude to death. And watching Zola deck himself lent a unique feeling of dread. Playing against Zola on Basic reminded me of Expert Green Goblin: there's always all this crap going on and you're wondering if you can truly handle it all. I look to the future Expert run with true dread and excitement.