Legendary Marvel Deckbuilding Game Orginized Play

[Dilvish the Deliverer]

So my friend has decided to run a Legendary Marvel Deckbuilding Games Organized Play event has his new opened store to help advertise his store and to show off the new X-men expansion for Legendary.  As he is newish to the game itself and to running events, I have been tapped to help come up with the format.  I myself haven't run any Upper Deck Organized Play events, but I have run and played in several other similar other events.  For those who play I would like feedback to see if I missed anything, or if anything is unclear.  I any one local (or semi-local) wants to play, let me know and I can post the information.

 

The most important thing to my mind was to make sure that the scenarios were balanced but still allow the players to have agency and be able to show off their skill.  As such, I have designed 3 scenarios (Scheme, Mastermind, Villains, and henchmen) and will be allowing the players to draft their own Heroes.  Normally all of these factors are determined randomly, which can result in games that can range from simple to practically impossible.  Since there will be exclusive cards up for grabs, I wanted to make it fair for everyone.  Additionally, as the theme of this Organized Play event is the new X-men expansion, I restricted all choices where possible to the cards provided in that set.  I also eliminated the "Driven Mad by Power- Phoenix" card from play as it will potentially break the game.

 

Link for the scenario and rules are here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Z9RIBps8TxOlmgRBKb8L-n3SSVOLbyfhFD9O5eKllD4/edit?usp=sharing

 

 

[Unit04]

How many people per game?  Legendary has issues at 5 players and many people feel it is really easy at 2 players.  

 

If you lose to the Mastermind, can you still advance?

 

What sidekicks (if any) will be in use?

 

Will you use any special sidekicks, bystanders or wounds from any of the other sets?

 

The chance that I'll be going is slim to none, but if you send me the info (or post it here) I'll certainly consider it.

[Dilvish the Deliverer]

14 minutes ago, Unit04 said:

How many people per game?  Legendary has issues at 5 players and many people feel it is really easy at 2 players.  

I built it assuming 4 to 5 players per table but it will depend on how many show up.

14 minutes ago, Unit04 said:

 

If you lose to the Mastermind, can you still advance?

Yes.  You just will count VP that you have earned.  Maybe have a penalty for letting evil win?  Its a thought.

14 minutes ago, Unit04 said:

 

What sidekicks (if any) will be in use?

Seth (the owner) is viewing this as a way to jump start the game so just the cards from the Core game and the X-Men expansion this time around.  So the new mutant sidekicks/bystanders.

14 minutes ago, Unit04 said:

 

Will you use any special sidekicks, bystanders or wounds from any of the other sets?

Just the X-Men set.

14 minutes ago, Unit04 said:

 

The chance that I'll be going is slim to none, but if you send me the info (or post it here) I'll certainly consider it.

It will be at the Comic Lounge in New London on the 298th at 5pm (iirc).  If people don't feel like driving it happens to be 2 blocks from the train station.

[Unit04]

14 minutes ago, Dilvish the Deliverer said:

It will be at the Comic Lounge in New London on the 298th at 5pm (iirc).  

 

I know you submariners use an 18 hour day when you are underway, but I didn't realize you changed the number of days in a month too!

 

Also, good luck with this.  And I feel somewhat responsible for getting you into this position, so I apologize for that.

 

ALSO also, check the boxes a few days in advance. It has only happened to me once, but I got a stack of miscut cards that had to be replaced.  You don't want to do that the morning of the event.    

[Dilvish the Deliverer]

On 7/7/2017 at 3:21 PM, Unit04 said:

 

I know you submariners use an 18 hour day when you are underway, but I didn't realize you changed the number of days in a month too!

 

Also, good luck with this.  And I feel somewhat responsible for getting you into this position, so I apologize for that.

 

ALSO also, check the boxes a few days in advance. It has only happened to me once, but I got a stack of miscut cards that had to be replaced.  You don't want to do that the morning of the event.    

This dann phone.  For some reason any time I use th after a date it likes to stick an extra number in there.

 

Thanks for the heads up about the cards.  My set is good (I'll be providing one set for use in the OP event, and the store will provide another), and I'll have Seth check his.

[Dilvish the Deliverer]

I was able to playtest the first scenario.  It seemed to have worked.  Some thoughts about the new set.

 

The Pierce is ridiculously good.  It came in handy for being able to defeat henchmen.  Pierce 2 allows me to defeat two henchmen for the price of one card.

 

Human shields really slow the game down.  We were fighting Arcade and he starts with 5 Human Shields.  Plus each one of his tactics and master Strikes add more.  Piece bypasses them but his VP cost is more than his Wounds so it's a toss up.

[Thes Hunter]

I'm trying to understand the full mechanism of the organized play. Do you come with your own deck? Or just play the game that is provided by you? 

 

If so, do people then choose what hero to add to the deck? And then play proceeds as normal where people buy the hero cards? (I.e. You get some of wolverines abilities but you might have some of cable and spider mans as well for example.)

 

Those are the bits I'm confused about.

[Dilvish the Deliverer]

35 minutes ago, Thes Hunter said:

I'm trying to understand the full mechanism of the organized play. Do you come with your own deck? Or just play the game that is provided by you? 

 

If so, do people then choose what hero to add to the deck? And then play proceeds as normal where people buy the hero cards? (I.e. You get some of wolverines abilities but you might have some of cable and spider mans as well for example.)

 

Those are the bits I'm confused about.

So, organized play is basically playing the game as a tournament.  Everyone plays, and either earn victory points or there is an option for a swiss-style where the player in 1st place gets 5pts, 2nd gets 4pts, 3rd 3pts, 4th 2pts, 5th 1pt anyone else gets 0pts.  Then the players with the highest number of points play in the final round for the prizes.

 

As far as the composition of each game, it's really up to the game organizer.  Per the rules out of the box, Schemes, Masterminds, Villains (and Henchmen) and Heroes are randomly selected.  When I was asked to assist in building the games for this event, I recommended building set scenarios in the interest of creating a level playing field.  Otherwise, you could have some players drawing an easy combination of Scheme and Mastermind and another table drawing a practically impossible combination.  To reward player skill, I recommended allowing the players to pick the Heroes for the game.

 

As far as the whole deck thing, the Hero deck is comprised of the 5 Heroes that you select (either randomly or hand picked) from those provided.  In this case we are only using the Heroes from the X-men expansion.

[Thes Hunter]

Now that makes a lot more sense.

[Unit04]

How did it go?  I am curious.  

[Dilvish the Deliverer]

It went well enough.  There were six people that showed up.  So we had two tables of three players each for the qualifiers.  The games took longer than expected (2+ hours for the first set) due to the all of the Human Shields.  So we just went off of the results of the first set of qualifier games as the OP didn't start until 6pm.  Lesson learned, set the start time earlier. 

 

My daughter got knocked out in the first round but was the #5 player so got the LE Thor card (as did I and we each got the Cosmic Cube card).  For the final game, one of the players all but guaranteed the win when he got enough Piercing to hit Mojo, the Mastermind, and rescue the 7 Human shields he had.  So Mojo is worth 5 VP, and mojo also make all rescued Bystanders worth 3 VP.  So with that one hit, Brian racked up 26 VP.  He managed to recruit all of good Piercing cards so he kept and continued to build his lead.  He ended up with 62 VP and the rest of us had 16, 15, and 15.  So he won the Loki card.  Alex won the drawing for the game mat, and my daughter won the X-men expansion used for the tournament, but as we already owned it, she told the owner, Seth, to draw again.  It ended up going to Brian's wife, whose name is escaping me.

 

We finally finished around 10pm.