Marvel Legendary is a fantastic deck building game from Upper Deck. We’ve already published a guide on how to play, but while knowing the rules is one thing, knowing the right heroes to pick is another. The game’s Core Set came out in 2012; some of these heroes have stood the test of time and are still going strong today, others haven’t aged well at all. Let’s dive right in and review the heroes from Marvel Legendary’s Core Set.
Black Widow
Black Widow is the most powerful hero in the Core Set, and it isn’t even close. She’s a bystander-based hero. The cards Mission Accomplished, Dangerous Rescue, and Silent Sniper allow her to rescue bystanders, while Covert Operation becomes more powerful based on the number of bystanders you have. It’s these final two cards that make Black Widow so powerful. Covert Operation has a default attack value of 0, but gains +1 for every bystander you’ve rescued, which means it has the potential to scale to incredibly high levels of power. Silent Sniper, meanwhile, allows Black Widow to immediately defeat any villain, or the Mastermind, if they have a bystander. Any card that allows you to kill the Mastermind immediately is always worth keeping an eye on, even if the conditions to use this are slightly fiddley.
Black Widow works best with other heroes that care about bystanders, like Jean Grey from Dark City and cards with the Savior ability from the Captain America 75th Anniversary set. Be careful using her with heroes that spend bystanders as a resource, like the cheering crowds cards from the Champions expansion. These characters are good at rescuing bystanders, but spending them weakens Black Widow considerably.
Captain America
Captain America is a very thematic card that’s great fun to build around. His theme is demonstrated by his two first two cards: Avengers Assemble grants a point of recruit for every different color hero you have, while Perfect Teamwork grants a point of attack for each different color. Caring about every color is a nice representation of Captain America leading the Avengers and bringing their diverse strengths together to make them more powerful. S.H.I.E.L.D cards are treated as their own distinct color, so these cards get more powerful if you have some agents or troopers knocking around. Diving Block protects you from getting wounds, while his ultimate, A Day Unlike Any Other, becomes more powerful the more Avengers you’ve played in a given turn.
What’s great about Captain America is that all of his cards are different colors, and are Avengers, so your deck will be pretty strong if you just use him. Doing this does contradict the message about teamwork his cards are trying to communicate though. Run him alongside other heroes with a diverse set of different colored cards. Notably Captain America doesn’t have any Ranged cards, so play him alongside characters that do.
Cyclops
Cyclops cards are powerful for their cost, but in return, they force you to discard cards. There’s a neat internal here. The card Unending Energy returns to your hand if it would be discarded. There’s no limit to the number of times that this effect can be activated in a given turn. Chuck it again and again to power up his two cards that require a discard: Optic Blast and Determination. Cyclops’s ultimate veers away from this discard theme. X-Men United gains +2 attack for every other X-Men hero you’ve played during your turn. This card starts with an already pretty impressive attack value of 6, so you’re sure to get some kills with it, without even having to build around it too much.
Cyclops works perfectly with Angel from the Dark City expansion. Angel is also one of the X-Men and rewards you for discarding cards, so you’re inherently rewarded for building a deck using those two heroes.
Deadpool
Deadpool is the only hero from the Core Set with no team affiliation. His cards, like his character, are unpredictable and wacky. Here, Hold This For a Second gives a villain a bystander, and gives you two recruit. Oddball is a two-attack card that gains +1 attack value for every odd-numbered hero you’ve played during your turn; since all of Deadpool’s cards are odd-numbered this pays you off for collecting his cards. Hey, Can I Get a Do Over allows you to discard your hand and draw a new hand of four cards. Finally, his ultimate Random Acts of Unkindness grants you six attack, puts a wound into your hand, and then makes every player pass a card from their hand over to the player to their left. The “strategy” here is that you gift your wound to someone else.
Deadpool works best alongside other heroes with lots of odd-numbered cards. Since Hey, Can I Get a Do Over makes you discard your hand you can also combo it with the Cyclops and Angel discard synergies discard above. Finally, Howard the Duck from Dimensions rewards you for playing heroes that aren’t on a team, so he pairs up nicely with Deadpool.
Emma Frost
Emma Frost draws cards, both from your deck and from the villain deck. Mental Discipline draws a card and gives you one recruit. Cards like this are always worth running since they don’t actually bulk out your deck. They immediately replace themselves when you play them and they turn on any other cards that care about their color. Shadowed Thoughts is a two-attack value card that costs four. This is over-costed and its upside of granting you +2 attack value in exchange for drawing another card from the villain deck is both exceedingly risky and requires you to have previously played a covert card. Psychic Link is much better, letting every player with an X-Men hero in their hand draw a card. Finally, her ultimate, Diamond Form, provides a nice burst of power and recruit if you use it to take down villains or the Mastermind.
Emma Frost works best in setups with other X-men so that Psychic Link can be activated reliably. All of her cards are also different colors, helping you enable lots of different heroes.
Gambit
Gambit encourages a unique game plan based on manipulating the top of your deck.
Stack the Deck allows you to draw two cards and then put a card from your hand on top of your deck. This card is really powerful; at a cost of only two recruit it provides very cheap card draw. It also enables Gambit’s other cards. Card Shark and Hypnotic Charm both reveal the top card of your deck. The former allows you to draw it if it’s one of the X-Men, while the latter allows you to discard it. Both of these interact differently with Stack the Deck, letting you either get powerful cards back, or chuck useless S.H.I.E.L.D. cards away. Gambit’s ultimate, High Stakes Jackpot, gains attack equal to the cost of the card on top of your deck. This ultimate can go completely wrong if you’ve got a S.H.I.E.L.D. card sitting there, so it’s dependent on using Stack the Deck to reach its full potential.
Gambit can be a powerful hero, but he’s very dependent on making proper use of Stack the Deck in order for his strategy to work. You’ll need several copies of that card in order to make the deck sing. Daredevil from Dark City works great with Gambit, since many of his cards power up if you can successfully guess the cost of the top card of your deck. This guessing game becomes significantly easier if you know with total certainty what that card might be. The Paint the Town Red expansion also has several heroes that can manipulate what’s on top of your deck.
Hawkeye
Hawkeye doesn’t really have a central theme binding his cards together. He’s an Avenger with some tech and impulse cards. Quick Draw is by far the best thing he has to offer, granting one point of attack and some card draw. Take as many of these as you can get; there’s no downside to running them, and the small pinch of extra attack they provide can add up quickly. Teamplayer is a passable offensive card that you shouldn’t buy unless you’re running a build with lots of Avengers. Covering Fire can help you set the other players up for their next turns. Impossible Trick Shot gives you three bystanders if you kill the Mastermind with it, helping Black Widow out and loading up your victory pile.
Hawkeye works well with Iron Man, since they both enable one another’s tech synergies. Wolverine cares about running lots of impulse heroes and Hawkeye can step in and fill that niche if you’re just playing with base set cards.
Hulk
Hulk cares about Strength cards, which is appropriate considering that both they and he are bright green. Both Growing Anger and his ultimate, Hulk Smash!, become stronger if you’ve played a Strength card before them during your turn. Growing Anger gains a modest +1 boost, while Hulk Smash! gains a massive five additional points of attack, making it strong enough to take down any Mastermind from the base set. You can recreate that famous scene from The Avengers and just absolutely smash Loki around.
As well as caring about Strength cards, Hulk also interacts with wounds. Crazed Rampage provides four attack, which is pretty good, but balances this out by wounding every player. Unstoppable Hulk allows you to KO a wound from your hand or discard pile in order to get a +2 attack bonus.
You may end up annoying the rest of the table by running Hulk if you cover them in too many wounds. Be sure to play heroes that use wounds to fuel their effects to turn Hulk’s downside into an upside. Colossus from Dark City, Skaar from World War Hulk, and Wolverine from the Core Set all make great partners for him.
Iron Man
As you might expect, Iron Man is primarily a tech hero that synergizes with other tech heroes. He has a single card, Repulsor Rays, that breaks this pattern and rewards you for playing ranged cards, but otherwise, he’s pure technology.
Iron Man generates a lot of card advantage. One of his cards, Endless Invention, draws you a card and then an additional card if you’ve played a tech hero this turn. His ultimate, Quantum Breakthrough, doubles this effect, drawing two cards by default and four if you previously played a tech card. This makes Iron Man’s ultimate a bit unusual; unlike most ultimates, it won’t win the game by itself, but if your deck is reasonably developed then it should draw you enough cards to take down the Mastermind.
Since Iron Man is so tech focused Forge, a hero from Dark City that only runs tech cards, makes the perfect partner for him. In terms of other Core Set heroes though, he works nicely with Hawkeye who also has plenty of tech cards.
Nick Fury
Unlike the rest of the characters from the Core Set, Nick Fury isn’t an Avenger, an X-Man, or even one of the Spider-Friends – he’s an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. He gets better the more S.H.I.E.L.D. cards you run, whether those cards are basic S.H.I.E.L.D. heroes or other Nicky Fury cards.
High Tech Weaponry is a tech card that gets stronger if you’ve played a prior tech card, and is his only card that doesn’t interact with S.H.I.E.L.D. characters in some way. Battlefield Promotion allows you to KO S.H.I.E.L.D. heroes and then optionally recruit a S.H.I.E.L.D. Officer. Legendary Commander gets stronger the more S.H.I.E.L.D. cards have been played before it in a turn, making it great early in the game and alongside other copies of itself. Finally, his ultimate, Pure Fury, scales based on the number of S.H.I.E.L.D. cards in the KO pile. This makes it significantly stronger with higher player counts as there will be more S.H.I.E.L.D. characters in the game.
If you own the S.H.I.E.L.D. expansion, it makes Nick Fury significantly stronger. Not only does it add plenty of new S.H.I.E.L.D heroes for him to work with, but it also puts some more powerful cards into the S.H.I.E.L.D. Officers deck. The printing of Captain Marvel from the Revelations expansion is another S.H.I.E.L.D that he can work with.
Rogue
Rogue is a strength and covert character thematically designed around the concept of stealing the abilities of other heroes.
This is most cleanly represented by the card Copy Powers that enters play as a copy of a previously played card. Her Ultimate, Steal Abilities, has every player discard the top card of their deck and then plays a duplicate of each of those cards, along with providing a base rate of four attack. Like Nick Fury, this makes Rogue’s ultimate better in higher player count games. Finally Energy Drain and Borrowed Brawn care about covert and strength cards, respectively, becoming better if you’ve played other cards of their type.
The best way to build around Rogue is to get other Heroes that have powerful cards that you want to copy. She can help Black Widow rescue lots of bystanders and enable the Hulk’s strength-based synergies.
Spider-Man
Spider-Man is a difficult card to evaluate. Depending on how you’ve set up your Hero deck, he can be either game-breakingly powerful or a complete liability.
All of Spider-Man’s cards cost two recruit and they all allow you to reveal the top card of your deck and draw it if it costs two or less. When you’ve constructed your deck to support this, then Spider-Man becomes a devastating combo card, allowing you to draw through your entire deck in a single turn and gradually accumulate huge amounts of attack and recruit. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough other characters to support this in the Core Set alone. Only Wolverine, Gambit, Cyclops, and Black Widow have two-cost cards that can enable Spider-Man, and even then you need to luck into getting those specific cards in the HQ. Putting even a single 3+ cost card into your deck stops the combo in its tracks.
Fortunately, every printing of Spider-Man is built around this game plan, from Symbiote Spider-Man in Paint the Town Red to Ultimate Spider-Man from Secret Wars Volume 1. If you can set your entire HQ up with Spider-Man cards like this then you’ll be able to effortlessly bring down even the strongest Masterminds.
Storm
Storm has two themes: she’s a ranged hero that wants you to gather lots of ranged cards, and she also cares about the position of villains in the city. The card Lightning Bolt makes it easier to fight villains on the rooftops, while Tidal Wave makes it easier to fight villains on the bridge. Both of these cards decrease the attack value of villains in the spaces they mention by two. Spinning Cyclone allows Storm to reposition villains in the city, enabling both of her other cards by allowing you to place villains into spaces where they’ll be more vulnerable. Spinning Cyclone can also be used to move villains with powerful escape effects, and prevent them from leaving the city.
While Storm does provide some useful utility, with her ability to move enemies, her cards are made more expensive to account for this. Moving villains is novel, but isn’t hugely powerful and often doesn’t warrant the increased cost.
Storm partners up very well with her reprint from the Black Panther set who is another heavy ranged hero, along with Ice Man from Dark City for the same reason. If you’re interested in making a game where Storm’s ability to move villains really matters, Moon Knight from Paint the Town Red has cards that are more powerful when fighting villains on the rooftops. Additionally, Valkyrie and The Warriors Three from Heroes of Asgard become stronger when villains occupy certain spaces in the city.
Thor
This Avenger from Asgard encourages you to build up lots of recruit, which he can then convert into attack. Thor, at least in theory, allows you to attack the enemy while maintaining a viable economy capable of buying plenty of costly heroes.
Thor’s ultimate, God of Thunder, generates five recruit and allows recruit to be spent as though it is attack. Surge of Power generates two recruit and also three attack if you’ve produced eight or more recruit during your turn.
Thor takes a while to set up; it’ll take some time to be able to generate eight recruit per turn in order to activate Surge of Power. But once he’s going, he’s very powerful. Just make sure that the city doesn’t get swamped while you’re filling your hand with recruit cards that don’t help you fight back.
In addition to caring about recruit, three quarters of Thor’s cards are ranged. Because of this he can support Storm and other heroes that want you to play lots of cards of that class. Lady Thor, from Secret Wars Volume 1, serves as a reimagining of this card. She is more powerful overall, as her effects are enabled once you get six recruit rather than eight. All the same, Thor can still be fun to build around.
Wolverine
Wolverine is the only hero from the Core Set that only has cards from a single class; every single Wolverine card is an impulse card. Whether this is to reflect his impulsive nature, or just because impulse cards are the same shade of yellow as his iconic outfit, is hard to say.
As well as all being impulse, all of Wolverine’s cards also let you draw. Healing Factor allows you to KO a wound from your hand or discard pile to draw a card. Keen Senses lets you draw a card if you played a prior impulse card on your turn, while Frenzied Slashing draws you two cards under the same restriction.
Wolverine’s ultimate, Berserker Rage, draws you three cards and then gets +1 power for every extra card you’ve drawn during your turn if you played an impulse card before it. Sequencing is the name of the game with Wolverine, so ideally you’ll want to play Healing Factor, or an impulse card from another hero, first. This will ensure that none of Wolverine’s other cards lose access to their ability by being the first card out. You can then slam out the rest of your cards and keep drawing and drawing, overpowering the opposition through sheer weight of cards.
Wolverine synergizes well with himself; you can build a mean deck just by filling it with a bunch of Wolverine cards, since they all enable one another. In terms of Core Set heroes, Hawkeye is Wolverine’s best friend. While Hawkeye is primarily centered on technology, he does have five copies of the card Quick Draw, which is both impulse and draws you a card, working wonderfully with Wolverine.
Conclusion
There we have it, every hero from the Core Set reviewed. Now that we’ve looked at the game’s heroes, next we’ll be analyzing all of the villains that the Core Set brought us. After that we’ll be jumping from 2012 right into the present day by reviewing the recently released Weapon-X expansion.
Want to learn about the other Marvel card game? Check out our articles on Marvel Champions.
