Final Showdown - X-Cutioner's Song

Finishing up this week's session reports on my solo Legendary campaign (as described here). This campaign centers around the content in Dark City. I decided I would limit my choices of heroes to exclusively the Dark City options.  Last time, the Mastermind was able to narrowly defeat me, and I didn't want a repeat of those events, so was excited for this last chapter.

Scenario 4 & Final Showdown: X-Cutioner's Song
Mastermind: Apocalypse
Villains: Four Horsemen and Streets of New York
Hero Villain: Hulk
Henchmen: Phalanx + Mr. Sinister, Mephisto and Kingpin Mastermind cards

**Note, I screwed up and forgot to add the phalanx henchmen, which I believe made this scenario harder, as the hulk hero cards were more common.

For this scheme, a hero set (The Hulk) is mixed into the villain deck. and the hero is captured like a bystander (there are no bystanders mixed in). This makes the villain harder (+2 attack). Defeating the villain does gain you the hero, so the Hulk was a nice addition to my setup. The scheme twists KO all the captured heroes (Hulks). When 9 non-SHIELD heroes are KO'd, you lose. To make matters worse a lot of the baddies KO cards. A lot of them have a "other players reveal and KO" actions in fights - in this version of playing solo, "other players reveal" means flip over cards from the hero stack - which is a guaranteed KO. I also got a nasty surprise when I attacked Apocalypse...

My hero setup was: Angel, Bishop, Cable, Domino, and Colossus. Turns out that Colossus and the Hulk played well with each other - I was generating a ton of attack pretty early on. Angel was doing his thing and I was drawing a ton of cards and it felt like things were going to be easy. I was wrong.

The Masterstrike cards with Apocalypse basically force you to put any non-SHIELD starter cards back on your deck. At least three time I basically had 0-1 cards left in hand. Wasted turns are never good. Then, I got more bad news. The first time I attacked Apocalypse, three heroes got KO'd. Ugh. I had to hope that crap wasn't going to happen the whole time. The second time I attacked Apocalypse the card revealed said that if it wasn't the last Mastermind card, rescue six bystanders and put the Mastermind card back in the stack! I got this card THREE TIMES. If my heroes had taken advantage of the number of bystanders I had, I'd have finished in record time as I had at least 25 bystanders rescued very quickly.

Unfortunately for me, this is what actually happened - I pulled a hand and ended up with 27 attack. There were two cards left in the Apocalypse stack. I pulled the card I wanted (ie, not the one that had to be last) and that card KO'd two heroes from "other player's hands". That brought the KO total up to nine and I lost the scenario with 15 attack left, which would have taken out the last card and won the scenario. So very close. Frustratingly close.

My deck ended up a mix of Colossus, Angel, Hulk and sprinkling of Domino. Maybe 1 each of Bishop and Cable. Interestingly, I did not end up with more than 1 card of cost 5+. Being able to draw a lot of cards that were doing between 3-6 attack each was plenty of offense. Colossus is a great hero if you have the ability to mitigate wounds. He will generate a lot of them, so you have to be careful if you use him in certain scenarios.

The campaign ended up being a 2-2 affair, but was fun. Working against Masterminds and villain stacks that I'm not used to playing while managing hero rosters is a pretty decent way to play Legendary solo. If you are interested in the solo rules - check it out on BGG.

Marvel Legendary continues to impress me each time I play it. The schemes are taken from major story lines and somehow have managed to capture the essence each time. I'm probably going to plow forward with creating my own four scenario campaign based on the Civil War set next. I'll detail it out so that others can play along if they want. Until next time - make mine Marvel!

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