Black Widow has become one of my favorite Marvel heroes. Yeah, that's because of Winter Soldier and the Avengers. No, I've not bought any of her comics. I'm kinda afraid they'll be bad, as the core of what makes Black Widow interesting to me is too subtle for the vast majority of comic book writers, who generally have the subtlety of a crowbar to Robin's back. So I was pretty excited to see her pack coming out. This review covers playing Black Widow's deck straight out of the box and what my thoughts on playing that pack were. I'm not going to cover too terribly much what I thought of Black Widow's basic cards, nor am I going to get more specific than what it felt like to play this deck. I played this deck with my Spider-Man Protection deck, upgraded with some of the cards from this pack. I did not modify the Black Widow deck in any way, shape, or form. I played the duo against the Risky Business scenario. I got trounced.
So, Black Widow brings in a new mechanic: Preparations. You pay the cost as normal, and it stays on the board until the trigger on the card has been met, at which point you get the effect. Black Widow's character abilities work off of playing and triggering Preparations. While there are other cards in her base selection that allow Black Widow to be offensive, the vast majority of her cards are either Preparations or making it easier to play Preparations, which aren't usually that expensive to begin with.
The game with my Protection Spider-Man deck did not go well. Risky Business was a bad deck for Protection Spider-Man to begin with, given how relatively little of what's going on with Risky Business has to do with attacking itself. I probably should have gone with Thor, to help Black Widow get the time she needed to set up. I did not. And the game suffered on account of that. Black Widow as she comes out of the tin does not have the offensive power to balance out another defender.
That being said, Black Widow's deck is absolutely boss at handling threat. There's several preparations that help keep the threat level down, not to mention that Black Widow has alter-ego cards that allow her to manage threat as well. Threat was never really a question throughout the game.The problem was capitalizing on damage, and Black Widow's default deck doesn't allow for that to happen.
Now here's the kicker, far as I'm concerned: I wouldn't change too much of this deck, not yet. Black Widow's deck is built for Preparations, and there's not a whole lot of those in the game, not yet. So I'd keep Black Widow in her Justice aspect default for now. I really like her style of setting out traps which go off on a set of requirements, as well as her versatility. I don't think the pack allows you to really expand the character outside of the aspect she was packaged with, but time will tell on how much the designers play around with the concept of Preparations. Black Widow probably won't work too well without them.
I like Black Widow. She's got a clever mechanic as well as a flexibility that hasn't been seen in any character up until this point. I don't think that flexibility works out to deck customization for her at this point, but her deck as it comes out of the box works more than good enough to where I'd be OK with just slightly modifying it, just for now.
It's all up to FFG now, isn't it?
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