YMMV / Marvel Champions

• Awesome, but Impractical: The Spider-Man ally from Rise of the Red Skull. He has decent stats and basically one-shots a secondary scheme the moment he comes in... for the ridiculous price of five resources. Meaning that pretty much everyone cannot even play Spider-Man in hero mode, unless they have at least one card that's worth multiple resource or some other cards in play that generate them. For people like Thor or the Hulk, whose best hand size is five, he is essentially unplayable.
• Boring, but Practical: The Energy, Genius and Strength basic cards. The only thing they do is provide 2 resources instead of 1 when used to pay for other cards. They are so useful, you'll be hard pressed to find a deck that doesn't include them.
  • Economy cards like Avengers' Mansion (a player draws one card) or Helicarrier (a player's next card costs one less resource). They're pricey to play but provide value every turn and frequently an extra card or resource can significantly increase how much you can do in a turn, especially as any player can benefit from them.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Stuns. Hero mode is where you do most of the damage to the villain, but it's also when the villain and their minions can attack you. Keeping the villain stunned prevents them from attacking. It's no chance that Captain America and Doctor Strange, possibly the most stun-heavy characters in the game, are considered top tier.
  • Blocking with allies. No matter how low their health is, even a 1 hp ally will block the full damage from an attack (unless said attack has overkill). A common strategy is to use an ally until they have a single hit point left, then throw them in the way of an incoming attack.
  • Notably, both of the above are averted by the Ronan the Accuser modular playset: Ronan himself cannot be stunned, and Judge, Jury, Executioner will punish you for sacrificing allies. Also, the Stable keyword has been introduced in the game, and it makes villains immune to stuns.
• Funny Moments: Ms. Marvel's (Kamala Khan's) Nemesis is Thomas Edison, a clone of the real one accidentally spliced with cockatiel DNA. His Character Catchphrase is "I AM NOT A BIRD!" So of course one of his traits is simply "Bird".
• Game-Breaker:
  • The last scenario of the "Mad Titan's Shadow" campaign allows you to gain a special ally if you beat a side scheme. All such allies have a cost of 0. Unlike other campaign-specific allies, they are not removed from the game when defeated. Cue Make the Call, a 0-cost event that allows you to play an ally from the discard pile, provided you pay their cost. Basically, this combination allows you to play the ally up to 4 times in a row, essentially for free... and then you can do it again after you reshuffle your deck. Oh, did we mention that you can still play the ally normally, at 0 cost? And those are decent allies, too!
  • Goliath from the Rise of the Red Skull set. He's an ally with a simple special ability: you can give him +4 attack until the end of the current phase, but after that, he's gone. The keywords being until the end of the current phase: if you have a way to ready him, you can get multiple, super-powerful attacks. Now, Goliath is a Leadership card, and Leadership is full of cards that allow the player to make an ally ready and/or heal them (and one of those cards, Inspiring Presence, actually does both). With the right hand, you can easily get 3 or more 5-point attacks from Goliath, which is enough to one-shot a stage of most villains.
  • Doctor Strange is very powerful having a side deck of powerful invocations that he can use repeatedly with the right setup and allow him to spam powerful stun effects that limit the villain's actions.
• Goddamn Bats:
  • Any minion with the Guard ability (as long as the minion is in play, you cannot attack the villain). They force you to waste attacks, possibly including powerful attacks that you do not want to use on a minion. Partially mitigated by overkill attacks, where damage in excess to the minion's health is dealt to the villain.
    • Klaw's armored guards, who start out Tough, are worse.
  • Goblin Soldiers from the Mutagen Formula scenario. They are pathetically weak, at 1 Scheme and 1 Attack, but they have five hit points each, and deal 1 damage to the hero who defeats them. They essentially force you to choose whether you want to be constantly harassed or to waste a non-insignificant amount of damage to defeat them (losing 1 hp in the process).
  • Speaking of Mutagen Formula: Goblin Thralls. Again, very weak minions... but there's a ton of them in the encounter deck, and they all have Guard. Have fun wasting damage on the cannon fodder.
• High-Tier Scrappy: Dr. Strange is seen as overpowered, able to spam stuns and not having enough downsides to make up for his powerful invocation deck.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: The Galaxy's Most Wanted campaign is widely regarded as far too difficult. Where other campaigns gradually rise in challenge here the majority are exceedingly difficult, with Ronan, Nebula and the Collector all being exceedingly challenging and the campaign advantages not doing enough to counteract the crushing difficulty.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Phoenix is just underwhelming. Most of her cards require her to be Unleashed in order to be decent, but God forbid you draw her Weakness while Unleashed (or just good ol' Shadow from the Past): it puts Dark Phoenix in play, which might as well be a mini-boss, and she comes with the Consume the World side scheme, which acts as a secondary lose condition for the players and cannot be removed! With such donwnsides, you might expect Phoenix to be overpowered in order to compensate... but instead, she's merely okay in the best of times, kinda weak otherwise.
  • Hulk is widely considered the worst character in the game. He has a horribly low hand size, which conspires with absurdly high-cost cards to make it basically impossible for him to play more than one card per turn; he's forced to discard his whole hand at the end of every Hero Turn, preventing him from saving cards that he couldn't play for later; and he has an Interfere stat of 0, meaning he's powerless to stop schemes. Only through sheer luck can the Hulk do anything useful.
• Magikarp Power: Iron Man is pathetic without his suit, his hero mode having ridiculously low stats and a hand size of one. Fully suited, he becomes a monster: tanky as a hulk, with the ability to deal damage left and right, multiple activations per turn and the ability to remove threat from multiple schemes. Oh, and did we mention that his hand size can go up tu seven? The problem, especially in a solo game, is getting there...
• Obvious Rule Patch: The "stable" keyword makes a villain immune to Stun and Confuse. Surely it has nothing to do with the fact that most high-tier decks are full of stuns...
• That One Boss:
  • One word: Thanos. He cannot be stunned or confused, draws extra Infinity Stones from the infinity deck, gets extra boosts... Inevitable indeed.
  • The Collector is one of the most universally hated villains. The reason? Every time a card comes out of play, he gets it, and if he gets too many cards, he wins. You can get cards back from him, but it's expensive. To make things worse, the Collector flat out murders certain heroes, such as Black Widow, or some types of decks, such as most Leadership builds, because those depend on putting cards in play that will eventually go in the Collector's collection.
  • Following the trend of "cosmic villains are the worst," we have Nebula. The abundance of Impulse cards in her deck means that she can go from an empty board to a frighteningly busy one in one activation, getting tons of bonuses from her technique cards and then triggering all of them for one devastating villain turn. Perhaps even worse than that, though, is that she comes with the Space Pirates encounter set, which is full of minions with Rapid Strike (minion immediately attacks when they come out) who destroy cards from your deck or hand whenever they damage you. No one will ever say she's the weakest sister again.
  • Ultron mainly does one thing: it takes cards from your deck and puts them in play, face-down, as drones (minions) under its control. This can devastate combo-based decks (that is to say, most of them), because it literally pulls the comboing cards out of the deck, and those won't come back until the drone is defeated and the deck reshuffled (defeated drones go to the player's discard pile)! There's a reason Ultron is considered one of the most dangerous villains in the game.
  • Goblin from the Mutagen Formula scenario. Not only does he hit hard and put threat on his scheme whenever he deals damage, but he deals each player two encounter cards on stage II and three encounter cards on stage III. Meaning that, if you play expert mode, you're going to start the game with two encounter cards per player to resolve. Hope you like being abused by an imaginary character.
  • Believe it or not, Rhino in solo games. Rhino is supposed to be the simplest, easiest boss in the core set, and he is... unless you're playing alone against him. The problem is that, being the simplest boss, he only has to complete one scheme to win... and it actually doesn't take that much threat for him to do so. In a solo game, a bad activation can turn a game from "There's a bit of threat on the main scheme, but it's totally manageable" to "Wait, did I just lose?"