Greetings, heroes!

The Marvel Champions: The Card Game rules team is pleased to present to you version 1.7 of our online Rules Reference. This update is intended to document new rules that have been introduced to the game since our last update, address some areas of the rules that were not addressed previously, and add clarity in some areas that were previously unclear. All of these updates are intended to make your games of Marvel Champions play as smoothly as possible.

Today, we would like to discuss some of the more important changes of this update so that you know what those changes are and why they were made.

Defining the Environments

Earlier this year, we announced that a new concept of “game environments” was coming to our Living Card Games. In brief, before you begin a game of Marvel Champions, you can choose a game environment in which to play. Your chosen game environment determines what heroes and player cards you are allowed to use during that game.

This update provides us with an opportunity to share with you more specifics about what these game environments look like. We are establishing three game environments: the Current Environment, the Legacy Environment, and the Limited Environment. Here is a description of each, along with examples of what type of player each might appeal to:

Current Environment – “I’m new to the game” or “I want to play only with what’s new”

When playing in this environment, players can only use heroes and player cards from the core set and the most recently released Marvel Champions products. As of this update, this includes the following expansions and their associated hero packs:

• Age of Apocalypse
• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
• Civil War

With each update to the rules reference, this Current Environment will shift to include only the most recent products.

Playing within the Current Environment is the easiest way for a new player or group of players to get into the game. For long-time players, playing in the Current Environment presents an opportunity for them to test their creativity and skill by limiting the available player card pool. Veteran players will have to seek out alternatives to their most-frequently-used cards and experiment with cards they may not have tried previously.

Legacy Environment – “I want to play with my whole collection” or “I don’t want to change how I play the game”

If you just want to keep playing the game as you have always played it, the Legacy Environment is for you. In this environment, your player card pool includes every hero and player card you own. If you enjoy limitless options and want to build the strongest, most optimized deck possible, or just play the way you have always played, you can do so with the Legacy Environment.

Limited Environment – “I want to mix and match Current and Legacy” or “I want to challenge myself with a different approach”

If the idea of the Current Environment intrigues you but you want to come up with your own subset of Marvel Champions products from which to customize your decks, the Limited Environment is for you. This highly flexible environment gives you the opportunity to get really creative by choosing the products you want to limit yourself to. Just pick up to three expansion boxes and up to 10 hero packs to serve as your card pool.

For greater challenge and theme, try playing only with the contents of three waves of products. Do you love mutants? Go with the Mutant Genesis, NeXt Evolution, and Age of Apocalypse waves. Are Avengers more your speed? Pick the core set wave of hero packs, The Rise of Red Skull, and The Mad Titan’s Shadow. The possible combinations are immense!

Environments Q&A

We have received many questions from the community since we originally announced game environments, so we wanted to address the most common ones here.

Does the introduction of these new game environments mean I can’t use older content/expansions anymore?

Not at all! While we will continue to design new content for the game primarily with the Current Environment in mind, everything will always be compatible with what came before, and we encourage you to play with whatever brings you joy. Only limit yourself to what’s in the Current Environment if you want to!

Will FFG / a later expansion ever require me to play using the Current Environment?

Nope! Every expansion we release will be compatible with each of the environments detailed above. If you want to use cards from every era of the game, play Legacy. If you only want to use the newest cards, play Current. Or, if you want a mix of the two, try Limited!

Will Current Environment content always be compatible with Legacy Environment content?

Absolutely! Just like always, older content for the game will still be compatible with newer content, and vice versa. There’s nothing stopping you from mixing and matching as you see fit—in fact, we encourage it!

Does my chosen game environment limit which scenarios or modular sets I can use?

No, game environments limit only your card pool when it comes to your player deck. You are free to play any scenario using any modular sets, regardless of your chosen environment.

Uniqueness

Defining which cards represent the same character has been a challenge for this game because of all the different ways individuals in the Marvel universe are addressed. Some monikers are shared by multiple people, while some people have had different monikers at different times. And that’s without even getting into all of the multiversal hijinks!

The previous rules were able to define uniqueness in a way that worked for the game early in its lifetime, but as we’ve added more versions of the same characters to the game over time, those rules got more and more complex. With the release of Civil War, which introduced many more heroes as encounter cards, we’ve decided to give the uniqueness rules a major overhaul in an attempt to simplify them. No ruleset can perfectly ensure that the same character can’t show up in multiple places while allowing every group of characters who share a moniker to show up together. But we feel that these new rules strike a good balance between simplicity and storytelling.

To determine if two cards “match” for the purpose of uniqueness, you compare them in one of two ways:

• If neither card is an identity and neither has a subtitle, you simply compare their titles to see if they match. For example, two copies of the Jarnbjorn upgrade (Thor, 99) match each other, as do the Jessica Jones ally (Core Set, 59) and the Jessica Jones minion (Civil War, 185).
• If either card has a subtitle or is an identity, you compare its subtitle or alter-ego title to the other card’s title, subtitle, and alter-ego title (if any). If any of the three are the same, those two cards are considered to match. For example, the Black Panther identity card from the core set (Core Set, 40B), the T’Challa ally from the Black Panther hero pack (Black Panther, 2), and the Black Panther leadership ally (War Machine, 12) are all considered to match.

There is one “matching” situation where we chose to explicitly allow multiples of the same character to be in play, and that is when comparing identities to villains. Because villains do not have subtitles or alter-ego titles, they will not match up with an identity except in a few rare cases, namely those like Nebula and Vision where the title of a villain (or leader) matches an alter-ego. Since the rules allow you to play Captain America against Captain America or Magneto against Magneto, we decided that you may have Nebula fight Nebula and Vision fight Vision, leaving it to the players to decide whether they want to allow these matchups at their own tables.

Quick Notes

The following updates are important enough to note, but don’t require in-depth explanation:

Choose (Option): We have simplified the rules around what is a valid option for “choose” effects on cards (especially encounter cards). Rather than requiring players to choose an option they can “fully resolve” or “most fully resolve,” which can be ambiguous in certain circumstances, players can now choose any option so long as that option has at least one valid target.

Ownership and Control: The rules did not previously address certain situations where cards enter out-of-play areas under the control of someone other than their owner, such as the Cosmic Entity event cards from Mad Titan’s Shadow or encounter cards in the Mysterio scenario from Sinister Motives. We have now enumerated the conditions under which a card will revert back to its owner’s control. In all other cases, control of the card remains constant. This means that a Cosmic Entity card that is resolved as a boost card is discarded to the encounter discard pile, not its owner’s discard pile.

Referential Ability: Our previous update to this section shut off some card interactions that were an intended part of the design, such as Pyromaniac (Mutant Genesis, 134) searching for and revealing the Pyro minion (Mutant Genesis, 75) when a card with that same name is also a part of that same encounter set. To enable these interactions once more, we have removed the requirement that the named card belong to the same encounter set and instead added a separate level of referential abilities that looks only at encounter cards for encounter card abilities or player cards for player card abilities.

Note that there is still a level for identity-specific cards, so you cannot ready your Venom ally (Sinister Motives, 190) using your Run and Gun event (Venom, 5).

Reveal: We have established a stepwise process for revealing encounter cards in order to clear up any timing questions related to the reveal process.

Errata: Most of the card errata in this update are technical in nature, made to keep cards functioning as intended under the current rules. Below are a handful of notable errata:

• Magneto’s main scheme cards (Mutant Genesis, 141-143): The order of resolution in the Forced Responses on these main scheme cards created rules issues when the Magnetic card being revealed placed additional magnet counters on the main scheme, triggering the ability again before the magnet counters from the first trigger could be removed. These effects now remove the magnet counters before revealing a Magnetic card.
• Suit Up (Age of Apocalypse, 17): The previous wording of this card raised rules issues about how to determine whether an upgrade could attach to a particular ally. To avoid these issues, we have changed the card to fetch an upgrade that can attach to any ally.
• MACH-IV (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., 156): This minion’s effect of not allowing characters without the Aerial trait to defend his attacks was intended to include allies, but allies do not technically “make basic defenses” as they do not have a DEF stat.
• S.H.I.E.L.D. Deputy (Winter Soldier, 33): Some copies of this card were printed without the “Max 1 per character” limit, which the card should have.

Those are the main changes we wanted to highlight in this update, but there may be others that may impact your understanding of the game. As always, if you have a rules question you just can’t figure out, you can send it to us through our rules contact form: https://www.fantasyflightgames.com/en/contact/rules/.

Until next time, keep saving the world!

 

Written by Tony Fanchi