Armed and Dangerous
Announcing the Winter Soldier Hero Pack for Marvel Champions: The Card Game
“Bucky was a skilled fighter before the arm. With it, he’s downright scary.” – Steve Rogers
As a young man during World War II, James “Bucky” Barnes served as the loyal sidekick to Captain America. When an explosion took Bucky’s arm and left him on the brink of death, he was captured by Soviet soldiers, fit with a cybernetic replacement arm, and brainwashed into serving as an assassin. Decades later, Captain America helped Bucky remember his past, and now Bucky seeks to atone for the horrors he was forced to commit as the Winter Soldier!
Fantasy Flight Games is thrilled to announce the Winter Soldier Hero Pack for Marvel Champions: The Card Game!
A fierce fighter with absolutely lethal combat skills, Winter Soldier blitzes into battle with this expansion pack, which introduces him as a new playable hero alongside his fifteen signature cards. Paired with a pre-built Aggression deck to maximize his attacking efficiency, you’ll be able to use Winter Soldier’s skills at taking down enemies from the moment you open the box. This pack also features a bonus modular encounter set featuring Blizzard of the Thunderbolts!
Lethal Protector
As a skilled soldier that was trained relentlessly as a deadly assassin, Winter Soldier has an aggressive playstyle that manifests in his ability to, in a sense, attack and remove threat at the same time.
Central to his whole kit is his Cybernetic Arm (Winter Soldier, 2), which Bucky Barnes (Winter Soldier, 1B) can search for and put into play at the cost of a single resource. The arm serves as a resource generator for his Attack events, and it can also boost the damage that those events deal. This naturally pairs extremely well with Winter Soldier ’s (Winter Soldier, 1A) Lethal Protector ability, which lets him remove 2 threat from a scheme whenever he attacks and defeats an enemy. He can trigger this ability any number of times in a round, which means you could defeat one minion with a Metal Punch (Winter Soldier, 5), defeat another with a basic attack, then take out a third with an Arm Block (Winter Soldier, 4) in the villain phase, and you’ll have removed a total of 6 threat without thwarting once!
The rest of Winter Soldier’s kit is also focused around attacking enemies. Don his Winter Mask (Winter Soldier, 10) to net you a card draw when you take an enemy down, then utilize Silent Infiltration (Winter Soldier, 8) to keep your momentum going while confusing an enemy as a bonus. If you need to stall the villain or soften up a particularly tough minion, you can stun them with an Electrical Discharge (Winter Soldier, 6)—since the Cybernetic Arm generates a “wild” resource, you can always use it to ensure you get the full effect! When there are no more minions to hunt, Bucky can retreat to Safe House #30 (Winter Soldier, 7) to help him search for new targets and get him an extra card, ensuring that he has all the tools he needs when it’s time to go back on the offensive.
Speaking of going on the offensive, Winter Soldier’s pre-built Aggression deck certainly helps bring the pain to the villains’ forces. Use Spoiling for a Fight (Winter Soldier, 16) to pull a minion from the encounter deck and ready up your hero, then trigger Aggressive Stance (Winter Soldier, 17) to also grab an Attack event to take that minion out. If you need a little help paying for that event, you can use Man on the Wall (Winter Soldier, 19) to reduce its cost based on the number of minions engaged with you. Finally, when you’re ready to roll, call on Captain America (Winter Soldier, 12) to ready up for another attack, then team up with him as Super Soldiers (Winter Soldier, 22) and take the enemies down!
Whiteout
As we mentioned earlier, the Winter Soldier Hero Pack also comes with a modular encounter set featuring Blizzard!
Just like his fellow Thunderbolts, Blizzard (Winter Soldier, 34) is a formidable Elite minion with double-digit hit points. His specialty revolves around controlling the battle and blocking the heroes’ attacks, making him especially problematic for aggressive characters like Winter Soldier. Whenever Blizzard attacks, he summons a copy of Encased in Ice (Winter Soldier, 35) and attaches it to the target. This attachment blocks all of that character’s attacks until they manage to break free, putting a significant dampener on their damage output in the meantime. To make matters worse, whenever Blizzard attacks a character that is already encased, he stuns them, freezing them in their tracks for even longer. Add in the Slippery Conditions (Winter Soldier, 36) he creates to slow down your allies, and any hero team may find themselves struggling to weather this storm!
As an Elite, Thunderbolt minion, Blizzard’s encounter set can be used as part of the Thunderbolts scenario in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. That said, it is still a modular encounter set in its own right, which means you can always add Blizzard into any scenario for some added challenge. Can you stop him from putting your heroics on ice?
Deadly Efficiency
With his skills at taking down enemies while removing threat at the same time, Winter Soldier is a formidable hero and a potent addition to any team. Look forward to taking on the agents of A.I.M. with Winter Soldier when the Winter Soldier Hero Pack arrives this June!
You can pre-order your own copy of the Winter Soldier Hero Pack (MC54en) at your local retailer or online through our webstore today!
Written by Peter Schumacher
