All images courtesy of Upper Deck Entertainment
Before Logan was Wolverine, he was Weapon X, a test subject whose bones were coated in adamantium, resulting in his jaded attitude and his signature metal claws. The latest Marvel Legendary expansion, from Upper Deck, focuses on Wolverine’s backstory, and the stories of the other Weapon experiments.
This review will analyze all the new cards introduced in the Weapon X expansion, and if Legendary‘s latest expansion is a smash hit like X-Men: Days of Future Past, or a miss like X-Men: Apocalypse.
Mechanics of Weapon X
This expansion only contains four heroes, rather than the typical five. This leaves room for the new Enraging Wound cards. The absence of a fifth hero is unfortunate, as it means you can’t play with these cards by themselves. You’ll always need to add an additional character.
As for the Enraging Wounds themselves, they’re fun enough. Contrary to their name, they’re not likely to enrage you at all. As Wounds go, these cards are pretty beneficial. They provide attack and recruit points and can be healed if you meet certain conditions. These Wounds can put you in some interesting situations. Do you try to make use of them, or do you prioritize curing them? They’re nothing revolutionary, but they add a bit of spice to the gameplay.
That brings us to the two keyword mechanics of the set: Berserk, and Weapon X Sequence.
Berserk
Berserk debuted in the 2017 X-Men expansion but now shows up on villains as well as heroes. The ability discards the top card of the active player’s deck, then the character with Berserk gains additional attack equal to the attack value of the discarded card. Your Berserk cards reward you for running lots of high-attack heroes, while villainous Berserk cards punish you for the same thing.
The sinister twist of this mechanic is that Berserk villains power up after you’ve chosen to fight them. This means that you can attack a bad guy, only for them to become too strong for you to beat. This is very punishing and makes you paranoid, which is absolutely the intent. You’ll learn never to target a Berserk villain unless you’re comfortably stronger than them.
Weapon X Sequence
Weapon X Sequence is brand new and leaves a strong impression. It’s a keyword that grants characters additional attack when cards have sequential costs. Heroes care about sequential costs among the cards you control. For example, if your hand contains cards with the values 0,0,3,2,4, and 6, then the numbers 2,3, and 4 are all sequential so your hero would gain +3 attack, one point of attack for each card in the sequence. Villains with this ability instead check for sequential numbers in the HQ and gain a corresponding attack boost. You can manipulate the bonus that these villains receive by deliberately making purchases that disrupt the sequence.
There is missed potential here, as these mechanics interact poorly. Heroes with Weapon X Sequence have low printed attack values, as they rely on the ability to make them stronger. Meanwhile, characters with Berserk want to reveal cards with high attack values to power up. There’s an inherent non-synergy here. You’ll groan with frustration when one of your Berserk heroes flips over a 0-attack value Weapon X Sequence card. On the other hand, you’ll sigh with relief whenever a Berserk villain does the same thing.
The mechanics not gelling well together, alongside the absence of a fifth hero, leaves this expansion feeling less cohesive than others. Nothing here is wrong, but it just doesn’t come together to be greater than the sum of its parts.
Heroes of Weapon X
Weapon X (Wolverine)
Here we have the poster boy of the expansion. Like every printing of Wolverine, this one interacts with Wounds. Violent Conditioning and Escape the Weapon X Lab both inflict Wounds upon you, while Raging Regeneration helps you to cure them. Infuse Skeleton with Adamantium forces you to put a card on your deck, an ability which, while a downside, lines up with the Berserk effects on Wolverine’s other cards to ensure that the top of your deck will be a useful card to flip into. This doesn’t give you the card draw of core set Wolverine, but it still provides plenty of power.
Weapon H
Despite having all of the oversized muscles that one would expect for a character with Hulk DNA, Weapon H doesn’t feel very powerful. Slice and Smash is over-costed as, even with Berserk potentially powering it up, two attack value on a five-cost card is a poor deal. Ultimate Killing Machine is strong if you can turn on its superpower ability, but otherwise unremarkable for an eight-cost card. Evolving Abilities is useful, since it can generate either attack or recruit depending on what you need, and The Future of Warfare also provides some useful deck stacking that Berserk cards need.
Fantomex
Fantomex is here to show off the Weapon X Sequence keyword. All of his cards have the keyword, and they all have sequential costs, ensuring that you can easily assemble a working sequence. When everything lines up you can have some massive blowout turns with Fantomex. Having a one-cost card grant you three or four attack feels awesome. This character makes you care about carefully curating the costs of heroes in your deck.
Marrow
Marrow is reasonably strong, despite the groan-inducing bone jokes in the flavor text of her cards. Bone Shards is a decently costed Berserk card. Hyper-Adaptive Skeleton lets your Berserk cards generate recruit as well as attack. Osteogenesis provides both card draw and the ability to rig the top of your deck with something useful. Marrow’s ultimate, Metabolic Overdrive, is great to play out at the start of a big turn where you have plenty of Berserk cards avalible. She discards all of the zero-cost cards at the top of your deck, and lets you choose the order you put the other cards back. This lets you ensure that all of your Berserk cards will be able to pump out the most power possible.
Masterminds and Villains
Weapon X contains three new masterminds and two new sets of villains. Like all of the recent Legendary expansions, these masterminds have both regular and epic variants. These masterminds are tough, but not excessively so, like Apocalypse or Thanos.
Omega Red loves inflicting Wounds, like a souped-up version of Mephisto from Dark City. He gets stronger if you have Wounds in play or your discard pile when you fight him. He also hurts you whenever you try to heal, ensuring that you’ll never be free of damage. While Omega Red has the highest printed power of any of the masterminds from this set, he’s fairly manageable. Just press through the pain, and run heroes that can turn the injuries that he inflicts into an advantage and you’ll have him on the ropes in no time.
Romulus is a tricksy mastermind. He has some very interesting tactics, including one that creates a second mastermind. Taking him on is less about the heroes you play with, and more about how you interact with the HQ. Since he has Weapon X Sequence, Romulus’s attack will always be between 10 and 14. When playing against this mastermind, try to keep buying heroes in such a way that there’s never a string of cards with consecutive costs in the HQ. If you want to, you can set up the game so that it’s unlikely cards with consecutive costs will be in the HQ. Running some size-changing characters from the Ant-Man and the Champions expansions would be a good way of achieving this. These sorts of sneaky tactics are far from necessary to take Romulus down though.
Sabertooth is arguably the strongest of the three new masterminds. Thanks to the berserk ability, the eight attack value on this card is deceptive. Every master strike that Sabertooth reveals causes him to Berserk an additional time when fought. This means that, as the game goes on, Sabertooth gets stronger and stronger. You need to be very careful about who you recruit when playing against him; putting high attack value cards into your deck will only benefit him. Use characters that have low printed attack values, but abilities that pump up their stats. Fantomex is the best counter for him in this set. Domino, from Dark City, and other heroes with Versatile, also make great choices.
Both of the villain groups in this expansion are based around its two keywords. There are the Weapon Plus villains, who all have Weapon X Sequence, and The Berserkers who, unsurprisingly, all have Berserk.
The Weapon Plus villains are great fun to fight against. Their strength waxes and wanes, depending on the cost of the heroes in the HQ. One moment they’ll be incredibly intimidating, and the next they’ll be a complete cakewalk. Fighting them feels like solving a puzzle, and picking your moment to strike carefully is very rewarding.
The Berserkers are less entertaining adversaries. They activate the Berserk ability when you attack them, sometimes several times. This makes it very difficult to anticipate how strong they’ll end up, and it’s very punishing if you get it wrong, since many of The Berserkers KO your non-grey heroes if you don’t take them down.
The idea of villains who can turn the tables on you and defeat you when you attack them is interesting in theory, but frustrating in practice. There are ways of playing around the Berserkers. You can use heroes who rearrange the top of your deck so you can anticipate how powerful they’ll become, and you can avoid high attack value cards to stop them from getting stronger. Whether you employ these tactics or not though, The Berserkers are never fun to fight.
Schemes
Weapon X contains three schemes. The first of these schemes, Condition Logan Into Weapon X, is fine if unremarkable. Since the beginning of the game, there have been plenty of schemes that just function as timers, causing you to lose when twist eight is revealed. This is another variant of that tried and tested approach, which also punishes you a bit as the timer ticks on. Nothing about this scheme is very memorable, but there’s nothing wrong with it either.
Go After Heroes’ Loved Ones is very evocative. When using this scheme, you set aside a copy of the lowest cost card from each of the heroes you’re playing with alongside two bystanders. These bystanders represent their loved ones. They will gradually get KOed as the scheme advances, driving the hero first into a rage, represented by the Berserk mechanic, before ultimately removing them from the deck completely as they become too grief-stricken to continue fighting. This plays like a significantly easier version of Dark Phoenix’s notoriously difficult effect.
Wipe Heroes’ Memories is another scheme that manages to tell a story through gameplay very well. When a scheme twist is revealed, you need to turn a villain or a tactic card from your victory pile face down. If you can do this, the twist gets shuffled back into the deck, if you can’t then the twist gets set aside as a “total memory wipe,” and if four twists get set aside then you lose.
Wipe Heroes’ Memories impacts gameplay enough to shake things up, without being so impactful that it warps the game entirely around itself. Every player is forced to cooperate and try to ensure they all take on roughly the same number of villains. Everyone needs plenty of cards in their victory pile so that it if a scheme twist is revealed their memories won’t get wiped completely.
In terms of threading a narrative through the game, this scheme is also great. Using the victory pile to represent your “memories” of the all of the villains you’ve beaten is really clever. Even being defeated by this scheme feels satisfying. Since these scheme twists get shuffled back into the deck, if you run out of time eventually they’ll be the only cards remaining. Having several of them go off one after another, as you gradually flip your victory pile facedown, thematically losing memory after memory, honestly feels like something out of a horror game.
Two of these three schemes are very strong, and they’re definite highlights of the expansion.
Conclusion
Just like the military tests that give this expansion its theme, Weapon X is very experimental. Some of these experiments pay off. The new schemes are great, and fit well with the grim sinister science tone of the Weapon X labs. The Weapon X Sequence mechanic is also a highlight. It makes you consider deck building in a whole new way; you need to carefully consider both the composition of your own deck, and which heroes to leave in the HQ. This gives the game new depth.
Giving the Berserk mechanic to enemies, meanwhile, is an experiment which should not have been attempted. The lack of certainty about whether your attacks will succeed or not is ultimately more frustrating than it is fun.
If you’re a big Wolverine fan, and you’ve been waiting for Sabretooth to become a mastermind so you can have Logan clash with his biggest rival, then this expansion is definitely for you. If you’re not very invested in the Weapon X storyline, then this isn’t an essential purchase. Weapon X misses as many times as it hits and while, like all Legendary expansions, it’s a piece of a pretty great game, these definitely aren’t the most entertaining cards that Legendary has to offer.
For more Marvel Legendary content, stick with Card Gamer. We’ve reviewed both the heroes and the villains of the game’s Core Set, and we’ll have regular new content on the game every fortnight.
