Legendary is one of my favourite games and the game I play the most by far. We play fully cooperative every time. Competing against other heroes for most points doesn’t fit the theme imo. The game does play the best with expansions. It is also easy to adjust the difficulty based on mastermind, scheme, villains and heroes selected.
I’d usually recommend one of the larger expansions as an initial purchase. Dark City is always a solid purchase as it adds enough that is new, without over complicating, and has bosses such as apocalypse who is very difficult to beat.
The game is definitely more interesting as a co op with expansions due to the inclusion of things that change JUST victory points into useful things. Bystanders being the major sticking point for this.
I skipped to your final thoughts as I have owned this game for several years. I have most of the significant expansions and several of the small expansions. The biggest reason this game does not see the table is that it does not make me feel like I am a superhero. It is a fine deck builder with tons of options (if you have the expansions), but I have never felt like I was the superhero. It felt like I was in charge of some superheroes, which is why I like Champions far more than Legendary. When I fight a boss in Champions, I feel like a superhero. This might be heresy for the Legendary fans, but Marvel United does a better job of making you feel like you are playing as a super. Obviously, my main problem is subjective so your mileage may vary.
Legendary is very flexible. The co-op part tends to be more important during tight situations or difficult setups. For the most part everyone either wins or loses. The player with the most VP is the most Legendary not the only winner or I guess the biggest winner lol (unless there's a Scheme idr that changes that). Solo is fun imo but I do prefer 3 or so
One of my favorites, I own everything except MCU set. I wish there was a storage solution, but thankfully can use the big box expansions as storage. I understand what he says about lack of cards in the hq, but I never saw that as an issue. I also agree the base set is pretty simple. The expansions really change things up for heroes, schemes and masterminds. I know there are heroes that reset the hq, just can't think of who does it right now.
I played a lot of Marvel Legendary and we modified the rules quite a bit to balance it out for player counts and to ramp up the difficulty level as a cooperative game. After your review and thoughts, I am tempted to get it out again and try some games as competitive. I do wish that the game provided more agency as opposed to just making the obvious choices.
I had also had issue with the 5 card market too but in Dune Imperium. So I suggested two house rules: 1)increasing the market from 5 to 7 or 8. OR 2) any market card slot left untouched after all players have had their turn, gets refreshed. Since there is no real "ROUND" in Legendary, AND there's no choice in which cards to use for fight or recruit (like Imperium) then No.1 is probably going to be more useful. But hey, you could do both and churn thru those options. And those expensive cards will soon come around again!
It would be hard to house rule extra hq spaces. some cards refer to hq spaces under hq and some scenarios expand hq to 7 (or lowers it to 3). Refreshing hero deck too often could result in it being empty which could be a draw or a loss.
@@CoreyMarinoGames ahhh that's right: if hero deck is emptied then heroes lose! But...i did kind of meant to imply that the "replaced" cards are put on the bottom of the Hero deck or create a discard pile, then reshuffle once needed. As a result of making the game easier u can increase the difficulty to compensate. OR...a player can spend 1 unused recruitment point to yeet one HQ card, then refill the space as normal. Keeps the pressure on of a diminishing deck BUT allows a bit more agency to find cards u want during a dud turn! What do u think?
@@fan-i-am That could work. There may be an already existing keyword that does something similar. I don't think it is necessary and 5 spots on the HQ, plus sidekicks/special shield agents is plenty.
Always wanted to get this game, today decided to start with the bundle of Villains and the base game from your site :) Now I want to try finding the rest of the stuff, at least what Upper Deck doesn’t have listed on their site…
21:03 About feeding your deck with cards available with less agency. I haven't played Legendary but I did play Star Realms which you have mentioned you liked and I feel exactly the same way for Star Realms. Choose a color to specialize in to get combos and then buy that if it appears on the market row if you have the money for it. If you can't, buy the best other option available. Rinse and repeat. Do you feel there is more agency in Star Realms ?
I have all the expansions to Marvel Legendary with the exception of the Captain America one which is nearly impossible to find affordably these days and the Spider Man Homecoming expansion because the art is different from literally the entire game. My game group loves lighter games so I have to find games like this that can be light but also ramp up complexity if wanted. It’s a great game for me and my group. The Villains version is exceptional in my opinion. Plus it comes with a neoprene mat that fits in the box. Always a crowd pleaser to have the mat fit in the box. 😁
Legendary is one of my top 10 of all time, I totally agree with you that the base game is too easy, this is one of the reasons I don't play against the base game masterminds. The expansions do indeed add the needed difficulty. In my game group we only play as a full coop, never did the semi/competitive. With some of the expansions, they add another deck of "sidekicks" which adds another purchase option, which may help with the options you mentioned. I think the main complaint about the art, is for the base game, in which every hero and the exact same art on all the cards, from the first expansion they changed it, so each hero has 4 different card types, and each one has it's own art. About the recommendation, you said "Thunderstone advanced" did you try "Thunderstone quest"?
I think you forgot that the setup and the teardown is a pain in the neck once you have more than one expansion anyway... Really wanted to like it but I prefer it in digital format instead which we don't have (tts counts I think, but vassel was better way to play there but they don't have support for expansions anymore
Just a random thought about creating a semi fixed card market.. I wonder if it would work to have each hero available to buy a card from at all times rather than the big deck. You could separate each hero deck into two equal piles and shuffle it so you always have 2 options to buy from for each hero? I sold the game a little while ago so can't test to see if this works, but it could be interesting to try
My play group handles the sometimes-stagnant market in one or two ways based on how we want to play: Pay X (agreed upon amount) of recruit points to cycle a card out of the market for a fresh one. Another option is to have everyone pick a hero and start with a two common cards from that specific superhero in the starter deck, which ends up driving them to build around that hero more aggressively.
I bought Marvel Legendary when it first came out and played it coop. It was waaaaay too easy and anticlimactic. So I had to sell it despite the deck building being probably the best of all coop deck builders.
I’ve been into that game for a while now and I still like it. My biggest complaint is both that the base game is to simple and that the mechanism to up the difficulty is based on key words. So especially if you play his game once every couple months, you end up spending your time researching what those damn keywords means. The list is out of control and many of them are very similar in effect. That being said, I still play and enjoy the game. Marvel Champions has not replaced it in my collection.
