Here's the last stop on the card review train for Marvel Origins (though the train is only parking at the station until the Spider-Man vs Doc Ock starter comes out late May/early June). I'll be reviewing the cards I haven't gotten to in the previous reviews. This means the generic Plot Twists and Equipment cards. Since there are so many of these, I'm going to be a bit briefer in my individual card summaries than in previous reviews.

If this is the first review you're reading, I rate cards based on their general usefulness but I call out when a card is particularly good in a specific deck type. Cards are split into "Great", "Good" and "Needs a bit of work". Cards that have a tremendous effect but that have a similarly tremendous cost or restriction on being played or that are only useful in limited circumstances won't make it into the Great category. Also, this is based on the metagame I've played in and decks I've seen so your tournament environment may be different. Now that we've gone over the ground rules, let's get started.

GREAT
Acrobatic Dodge - When you're being attacked, getting more DEF is tremendous. It's a very rare circumstance I'll want to stun an attacker more than I want to save my defender.

Advanced Hardware - The ATK bonus is nice, but the real appeal of the card is the direct damage aspect of the card.

Betrayal - With the prevalence of multi-team decks out there, being able to stun an opponent's character is tremendous. But the best part is even if he stuns the single off-team character, he still controls the character and is vulnerable until that character is KO'd.

Blind Sided - Being able to make your big bruiser's damage do breakthrough endurance loss is great. Wait until your opponent reinforces before using it and you've made them rotate a character for no effect.

Dual Sidearms - Range and bonus to attack for 0 attack. I love 0 cost equipment cards and this is a great one.

Flame Trap - A great early game equalizer. If you got a poor character draw the first few turns, this is a tremendous way to clear the weenies out and give you a chance to catch up.

Flying Kick - The great part of this card is it provides it's bonus for more than one attack. Using this on Sub-Mariner or Wolverine: Berserker Rage means you get the bonus for every one of their attacks.

Nasty Surprise - While it's not as good as having your opponent survive the attack, being able to get a little retribution is a close second.

Night Vision - Being able to see what comes next is tremendous. Combos well with Base of Operations and fantastically with Longshot.

One-Two Punch - Provides both ATK and DEF bonus. It's the total package. I wish it worked for defenders and the bonuses were higher, but I also wish I could win the lottery :-)

Overload - With the preponderance of pumping out there (Savage Land, New Brotherhood, Fantasticar, The Blackbird, Savage Beatdown, etc) this card can be used against almost any deck. It loses luster later in the game (when the natural ATK increases), but it works great against weenie swarms which seem to be everywhere (rant about too many New Brotherhood decks out there deleted)

Savage Beatdown - +5 ATK on the attack. It's the best Plot Twist pump for an Attacker out there.

Surprise Attack - Great direct damage card. Really great when you draw multiples in your opening hand.

Unstable Molecules - Gives a DEF bonus, lets you KO it to give you a turn-long DEF bonus and all this for 0 cost.

GOOD
Borrowed Blade - Gives a +1/+1 bonus for 0 cost, but it's not as sexy as the other 0 cost equip cards.

Burn Rubber - Good for decks with non-team characters or characters you don't plan on playing Marvel Team-Up (and other similar cards) on. In most other decks, it's only reasonably useful.

Charge! - Very good for all out offensive decks. Combine with Cyclops: Slim for lots of team attack joy.

Cover Fire - Good for a Doom or Sentinel deck don't pack it if you don't have a lot of characters with Range.

Fall Back! - If you can't take out all your opponent's characters, this is a good way to set up a defensive position (and gain a good DEF bonus). But it's generally better to just stun your opponent's characters in the first place.

Finishing Move - KO'ing a character is great, but you've got to stun them first and I'd generally rather stun more characters than to KO a specific one. There are times when the card's exactly what you want, but it's not the uber-card it's been hyped to be in the past.

Foiled - A great resource denial card, but it can mess up your resource curve. If you're going to play it, make sure you adapt to it with your character curve.

Greater of Two Evils - A Finishing Move you don't have to have a ready character for that fits in with a deck destruction deck. The downside is you have to wait until the recovery step to play it so your opponent has an opportunity to recover the target.

Ka Boom! - As with Foiled, this is a good card, but can harm you almost as much as it harms your opponent.

Kevlar Body Armor - The cost is high for +1 DEF bonus. Being able to save a character from getting stunned is good, but I think a 2 cost equip is a little expensive for the effect.

Last Stand - This is a "worst case scenario" card. If you can play this card, you're in a bad position. The effect is great, but I never plan to be in a position to play it and wouldn't put it in my deck.

Medical Attention - Recovering stunned characters is great. But this requires a ready character during the recovery phase and if your opponent's been good on the attack this rarely happens.

Not So Fast - The downside of this card is the paucity of targets. There are lots of good cards it doesn't work on (Savage Beatdown, Ka-Boom!, Flame Trap, etc).

Personal Force Field - With the recent ruling that equipment doesn't have an effect when the character is stunned, the Force Field is no longer blanket immunity from Finishing Move and similar "Target stunned character" cards. Good, but not great.

Political Pressure - If you play along the curve with the largest character you can play each time, you have no fear of Political Pressure. This helps cut down on swarm decks, but it's a dead card against someone who plays along a well-tuned recruitment curve.

Press the Attack - A great way to squeeze more attacks out of your guys. If you don't have lots of guys with Activate effects, you risk a Nasty Surprise when attacking to exhaust your characters.

Salvage - Lost your Blackbird? Fantasticar? Negative Zone? This is the best way to get it back. If you're not reliant on equipment or locations, you won't want this card. If you absolutely, positively need a particular equipment or location card, this is a great insurance card.

Team Tactics - A good way to do a team attack without risking your big guys getting stunned. It's also Cosmic Radiation compliant.

Tech Upgrade - This is the for equipment fishing. You can also trim the number of equip cards you put in your deck since you can use Tech Upgrade to grab them.


NEEDS WORK
Backfire - The -1 DEF effect is kinda ok. KO'ing equipment is good, but it depends on your opponent's deck and equipment isn't really that big in the metagame that I've seen.

Entangle - Discard a card from my hand and exhaust a big guy to exhaust a smaller guy? There aren't a lot of instances I'd rather exhaust the character instead of attacking them with my Flight characters.

Focused Blast - The more a character costs, the more I'd want to attack with them instead of using him for this. Great with Master Mold and with Cosmic Radiation-readied FF ranged characters, but not very good otherwise.

Friendly Fire - Team attacks are good, but not so prevalent that I'd pack this card.

Gamma Bomb - Too expensive. Won't see play before turn 7 and only then with help from Beast and Latveria. If you have Initiative it's the ultimate counterattack prevention.

Reconnaissance - Nice to see what's coming, but there are other cards I'd like to use instead. In the absence of a card that targets face down resources, it languishes at the bottom of the pack.

Relocation - Great in a mirror deck situation, but not so much otherwise.

Swift Escape - Returning a card to my hand is ok in limited situations, but if I've paid to get the character out there, I don't want to have to pay to put them out again. Ok if you chain it to a Finishing Move or Negative Zone, but not good in general.

But Wait, there's more

The observant among you may have noticed there are five cards missing from the above list. Marvel Team-Up and it's team-specific counterparts (Common Enemy, Heroes United, Mutant Nation and Unlikely Allies) aren't as much good or bad cards, but cards that are essential in specific decks and useless in others. If I'm playing a Brotherhood/X-Men swarm deck with New Brotherhood, packing Mutant Nation is a no-brainer. If I'm playing a straight up Doom deck, Mutant Nation is not a consideration. If you're playing a multi-team deck, you'll want to play the team-specific versions if you can (since you draw a card when you play them, they effectively thin your deck for each card you put in). If you're playing a whacky FF Negative Zone deck, you'll want to use Marvel Team-Up instead. It doesn't thin your deck, but gives you much more flexibility in who you can make teammates.

Big Finish

And that's it. As always, I look forward to hearing what you guys think. Feel free to repsond with your opinions and let me know what you think I got right, what you think I got wrong and why.

Next week I'll take a look at what I think are the top cards now and whether you can judge a card by its price on ebay.

My only disagreement in the whole article, for one instance (there are many more) lets say you have one down and one in your hand. Its turn 7 and you played 6 cost Doom last turn and your staring down the barrel of a big character. You play your monk, use its effect, swift escape, do it again, swift escape, do it again. Now Doom is at least at 19/18. Not too shabby, but I am a Doom player and I have used that combo many times.

One other ? about swift escape, can I activate Boris, play SE and get him back to my hand instead of him going to the bottom of the deck?

I disagree with the comments on Focused Blast.

It's basically a solid D.D damage plot twist. You'd rather attack? I suppose so. But I'd rather have them do the full attack, rather than try to rely on breakthrough, stunn damage, and give my opponents a chance to boost their characters =/. I could end up stunning my own character too.

Focused Blast would be AMAZING if it dealt your ATK value. But it deals your COST.

With the resource curve as it is, the only characters worth using it on would be 3 drops or less - MAYBE 4 depending on the character. Any higher character and you're either wasting your attack or leaving yourself WIDE open...

My only disagreement is with Relocation. It allows you to remove your opponent's pesky locations without losing one of your own as Ka-Boom! forces you to. Even if you can't personally use the location you're gaining, you've still managed to remove it from THEIR use, and you haven't lost a resource as a result..

I think nightvision and surprize attack should be in the good colum at best.

I think ka-boom and burn rubber belong in the great catagory because ka-boom is way better than foiled and burn rubber allows you to not only reinforce your target guy, but if your being attacked at a precived weakness in your defence you can move a character to block or to surprise reinforce which is a tactical nightmare.

I think last stand, kevlar, and press the attack should be in the needs help section as all are almost unplayable.

I think backfire, relocation and swift escape need to be bumped up to the good, backfire is at least a -1 combat trick and possibly more, swift escape has ways of getting crazy with a certan senator and destiny and not to mention doom evil genius or ramma tut-it's not great but there is no draw back built into this card to get this effect and the effect is usefull to some decks so that is a good card in the kinda decks that use it

Thats just where I woulda put things

The coments about swift escape earlyer in this thread are not legal I don't think. For one thing if your using your tibetan munks to power up doom you must be in the attack phase which means you can't recruit the monks right away to use them again. The other thing is that Boris has been errata'd so that you put him on the bottom of your deck as part of the activation, so if you swift escape him you haven't paid the activation cost of his effect and nothing happens. But swift escape has other uses as I have stated above.

DOOM!!!: Both scenarios you state are illegal. Boris has been erratta'd and the Tibetan Monks need Doom to be in an attack (which means you're out of the build phase :-)

JetSetNeo: If Focused Blast did ATK as damage, not cost as damage, it'd be great. As it is, it's just ok.

Kergillian: Relocation vs Ka-Boom. . . Perhaps it's just my view of Ka-Boom. My view of Ka-Boom is taking out a resource (and it just happens to be a Location). The disruption of my opponent's resource curve is the primary reason to play Ka-Boom. Relocation doesn't provide that disruption. It denys the use of a Location (and if that Location is Lost City or Xavier's School or Doomstadt, that's a pretty good disruption) but it doesn't provide the resource denial as well.

WarMachine: Night Vision + Longshot (and here I'm giving away my deck cycling tech :-) and the fact you get to see everything your opponent draws are what make NV a great card. I'm still not convinced about Swift Escape, but maybe I'll see a deck that will change my mind.

"your" deck cycling tech? I would think that any competent player who has a copy of the spoiler could figure out what to do with nightvision, longshot and base of operation.

Billy z.

Greater of Two Evils doesn't target a character. It is awesome when your opponent has but a single stunned character, tho. However, like you say in your review, if they have Muir Island or another way to recover their only stunned character, then the Go2E fails.
And just to be clear, they don't get to use the one free recovery to recover their character when you play it.

I have to disagree on Surprise Attack. Why would you want multiples of a card that has no affect on the game state. I can't see why you would want to use one of your cards to do what is essentially nothing.

Dunsel: Surprise Attack reduces your opponent's endurance either by 5 or by 3. It's the Lightning Bolt of Vs. If you're playing a direct damage burn deck, I don't see why you wouldn't include it (unless you simply don't have room for it).

Lightning Bolt hits creatures too, and it's three out of twenty if you want to go to the head. Three out of twenty that hits creatures is quite a bit different from either three or five out of fifty to the head. Lightning Bolt to the head is still card disadvantage that has no affect on the board. I don't remember seeing many Lava Axe at the Pro Tour.

Relocation so rocks! I know this because I was destroyed by it at the KNoxville PCQ. I was playing Fantastic toys. He took my reasearch base, which shut me down. What about Ka- Boom you say, that would have been better? No. Ka-Boom doesn't hurt because I can Salvage and most of my characters are low cost so the resource slow down doesn't hurt. But he stalled my deck while he kept right on building steam. I think it is a great card.

IMHO,
Foamy