CONTROLLING CHAOS

Maybe it’s good that we’re playing Aggression, because Scarlet Witch is all the rage right now.

Scarlet’s pack is coming fresh on the heels of the character’s starring turn in Wandavision, and Champions fans have a lot to celebrate from her arrival as well. She’s the final release of the game’s second wave, rounding off two pairs of characters (“the Bug Family”, and “He’s Fast She’s Weird”) that mark a huge leap forward in character design. By all accounts these four Heroes are excellent intersections of mechanics and theme, and we can only hope that future Hero packs live up to their standard.

Fittingly, Wanda is the most unusual of them all, but lucky for us her eccentricities have not left her with a lack of potency. As with my other published lists, this is designed to enhance and showcase what the character can do, and we can’t really talk about what Scarlet can do without first talking about… Acceleration Tokens!

OH GOD THEY’RE EVERYWHERE

Congratulations! If you thought Defender of the Nine Realms could burn an encounter deck quickly have we got a show for you. Go ahead, throw in the Electro modular set and see if you’re not tempted to spring for the fancy sleeves for your encounter cards. If you didn’t know how to shuffle quickly before, you gonna learn today.

Seriously, featured all across Wanda’s kit is encounter card burn, both to generate effects on her cards and as a penalty of sorts for the power level of some of her better stuff. This is naturally going to be plenty frustrating when you inevitably dump easy stuff into the encounter discard only to draw a devastating card yourself come the villain phase. Remember that the RNG falling this way is in no way Scarlet’s fault. Chaos is chaos, and statistically it’s just as likely that would have pitched a bunch of nasty cards for you and left you with an easy game.

The real penalty for all this encounter burn is those darn acceleration tokens. Champions games usually end faster than most people realize, but in longer scenarios the tokens can be a factor. It’s important for the player to have a plan to deal with them, even if that plan is just “don’t stall the game any more than necessary”. Scarlet can easily account for an additional 1 or 2 acceleration tokens all by her lonesome, and her only native tool for threat control, Hex Bolt, is it’s own complicated beast.

Your plan for acceleration tokens could take any number of forms, and out of all the aspects only Protection, with it’s propensity to drag games out, doesn’t directly help us formulate one. With this list I’ve chosen to go for the most unga-bunga plan of them all- eviscerate the villain so fast and with so much ferocity that the game ends before the extra tokens can become a problem.

SEEING RED AGAIN

Aggression can be a hard aspect to make work, and not every character is equally capable of playing a damage rush-oriented play style or compensating for red’s lack of threat control. Our other aspect options have good synergies too, although playing Justice/Witch does mean that we’re put in the morally precarious situation of potentially using Wanda’s children, Speed and Wiccan, to take hits for her. Much better to sacrifice her brother Quicksilver, which is still screwed up but does have the advantage of being, you know, canonical.

Anyway, we’re getting away with Aggression here because Wanda has a lot going for her in the damage department, but also because she’s a good candidate to run a very interesting kind of deck that’s emerged in the past few months- something lots of players have been calling “Red Leadership”

This deck archetype centers around Aggression’s really strong suite of allies and various ways to utilize them. As of this writing, Aggression has three Avenger allies, Spider-Girl, Hulk, and Wasp, that cost 2 or less. They also have characters like Brawn and Sentry that give the aspect some more reliable ways to control threat. These amazing teammates, along with Earth's Mightiest Heroes turning those cheap Avengers into hyper-valued readying fuel, have enabled strategies out of red that center around allies instead of attack events. Boot Camp, while pricy, slots very naturally into this gameplan and can be the lynchpin of some pretty terrifying boardstates.

This kind of deck can get expensive, and it can also be vulnerable to poor draws. Wanda’s got good answers available to those problems, and the result of all of this ends almost always ends up being reliable, sizable damage that can beat down villains at a relentless pace.

With these tenets as our foundation- hard-hitting allies and top-tier damage capacity- we’re ready to dive in. Given that a whopping two-thirds of her 15 is made up of the same three cards, it’s imperative that we understand those first.

THE SPELLBOOK

Scarlet Witch’s consistent cardpool is a huge boon to her, with three crucial spells forming the majority of her kit. We’ll start with the easiest of those three to overlook, Magic Shield.

MAGIC SHIELD

This is the sleeper card of the pack, well-priced and far more essential than it first appears. Cheap damage reduction for a 10 HP Hero is rarely going to be bad, but Magic Shield has especially good utility for ally-heavy builds like this one.

Chump blocks are usually used as a high-value option for an ally’s final hit point. This means that even if the villain gets a low boost, the ally usually dies anyway, which can often leave you regretfully wishing you’d just taken that 2 or 3 damage and kept the ally around for something better. Wanda has a solution for this conundrum- it’s easy to miss that Magic Shield can protect any friendly character, AND crucially it can be popped after you know the final damage total. This combination, found on no other card in the game, means your allies can chump block as insurance against a big hit but also stay alive against a small one.

I end up using Magic Shield this way a lot, and it’s hard to overstate how effective it is. If Magic Shield can’t save your blocker, you just don’t pop it, and that means the hit was big enough that the block was high value and you still have Magic Shield. If it goes the other way, you keep a blocker on the board for next round. It’s a huge win-win. Having three copies of this card gives Scarlet the ability to take only the hits she knows she can afford to take, and this kind of flexibility feels thematic and natural to the character. It’s a fantastic card.

MOLECULAR DECAY

What’s the opposite of staying alive? It’s unfathomable amounts of death and destruction, and Molecular Decay provides exactly that. Similar to Repulsor Blast before it, it functions best against the villain. It’s often a questionable play against minions where the damage can either be dramatically over or frustratingly under the ideal number- this is part of why we’re including Lie in Wait, which can make minion math a lot easier (and also lets you feel like a mini-Widow with a bunch of board effects ready to go).

Like Magic Shield, we’ve got three of these. Given that it’s doing 5 damage at minimum, and usually something more in the realm of 8 or 9, this card by itself means Scarlet Witch has a lot of firepower on tap. Molecular Decay is your win condition, and it’s important to keep that in mind before discarding too many of them in favor of other things. Scarlet needs to end the game before those acceleration tokens get out of hand, and Decay is your bomb of choice for getting there.

HEX BOLT

The big boy. The iconic card.

You’ve got four of them, putting this in Wakanda Forever!/Always Be Running territory, and we know how integral those cards are to their respective Heroes’ playstyles. Hex Bolt is no different. It’s a huge part of your identity, and the two things that help us to control the encounter deck, Scarlet Witch's Crest and Chaos Control, are almost always best spent manipulating Bolt.

It’s also just a great card, providing more bang for the buck than most 2 cost events with the downside of not having total control over what exactly that bang is. Since it’s 10% of your deck, it’s very important to make good decisions about how to manipulate this card. Here’s a breakdown-

• Unusually for a draw effect, in practice the double-boost card draw is often the least desirable option. We’d rather get the meat of our turn from Hex Bolt itself, but at least the math is solid- even if you end up getting nothing but doubles Hex Bolt does at least replace itself, becoming something like a mini Nick Fury without the body.
• Just one boost up from the draw is the status effect, which conversely is almost always fantastic. Most players should very rarely be manipulating a triple boost down to a draw or pitching it, and in my experience, confusing the villain is almost always the best call.
• Why’s confusion so good? Well, we need to take what we can get- a closer look at Wanda’s kit tells us that Hex Bolt is our only means (outside of allies and THW) of handling threat. Yes, we have four of them, and yes, it’s potentially a knockout thwart event at 2 for 6, but nothing with Hex Bolt is ever guaranteed. Your most frustrating moments with Bolt will usually come from desperately wanting to remove threat with it and getting shafted by RNG. Because of this, I encourage you to resist the temptation to flex off of those single-boosts and use them to stay ahead on threat.
• The zero-boost damage option is a bit boring, but it’s there, it’s still fairly costed despite being a bit less valuable per-resource than threat, and it can help us close out the game. Try not to think too hard about how much you would have preferred that zero-boost to have been flipped on a villain activation…

THE COMPONENT POUCH

The rest of her deck is solid too. Here’s a quick overview of what else Scarlet is bringing to a Halloween party near you:

• The aforementioned Scarlet Witch's Crest stabilizes your game a ton. You usually won’t play more than one Hex Bolt a turn, and having finer control over those plays turns an already great event into, usually, a slam dunk. Play it.
• Warp Reality is an Enhanced Spider-Sense that works for any encounter card. Which is to say it’s awesome. I hate to sound like a broken record, but given that we’re in Aggression, playing Warp to stop threat from hitting the table- a big side-scheme, or an Advance- is almost always it’s best utilization.
• Agatha Harkness is here as a support instead of an ally, which does frustratingly mean we can’t make her take hits for us even if we really really want to. Perhaps as an apology for this obvious oversight, the devs did at least see fit to make her incredibly good, giving us a great reason to go into Alter-Ego that we’ll expand more on later.
• Quicksilver is an interesting ally that’s especially good at providing something this deck wasn’t hurting for to begin with- damage. He’s still great, and his synergy with Earth's Mightiest Heroes (Use QS, ready him, use EMH) gives us our most reliable source of THW.
• Oh yeah, Chaos Magic, the crazy little 1x card we’ve kind of built around. Let’s talk about that one a little more actually…

NOW THAT’S CHAOS THEORY

If you looked at the cost curve of this deck and said to yourself “Wait a minute, did German really throw in a ton of expensive cards just because he thinks Chaos Magic is super good?”, the answer is, of course, no.

I did it because Chaos Magic is super fun.

Expensive cards are not bad in and of themselves, but they just present potential timing issues. The ones we’re using here have excellent return on investment, and they let us build a terrifying board of powerful allies that, in conjunction with Decay and Bolt, make for brutal turns. Any big ally (or Boot Camp) is a great choice to cheat out, but Molecular Decay can be a turn hog at 3 and is another great target. It’s important to note that we’re not relying on Chaos Magic to afford our big cards- think of it more like we’re making sure that Chaos Magic always has an excellent target when we see it. You can and should play the big stuff even without it.

BUT GERMAN YOU’RE RUNNING FREAKING HERCULES IN THIS DECK

Yes! Now Hercules is an exception, and should virtually never be played unless you can drop it for free with Chaos Magic or you somehow end up swimming in minions and have nothing better to play.

SO YOU WANT ME TO TRY TO GET A HAND WITH THESE TWO SINGLE COPY CARDS AT ONCE

I do! It’s incredibly fun, and with Boot Camp down, Hercules can nearly handle a Villain stage in solo by himself. He’s a meme card, but he does slot right into our gameplan and like, when else do you get to take Hercules out of the binder? I got a huge kick out of making him genuinely work in a strong deck.

WELL THAT IS DUMB I AM NOT DOING THAT

Totally understandable! There’s lots of alternatives- Tigra goes great with Boot Camp as a savvy commenter below has pointed out, and War Machine works too. You could also just sub that slot for basically anything, it might just be a little less cool.

I NO LONGER RESPECT YOU

That’s reasonable.

THE WITCHING HOUR

When you’re not busy trying to justify the inclusion of stupid cards, there’s a lot of tech that we’ve slotted to ensure a smooth game.

• Piercing Strike is here because hardly any of our damage, Hex Bolt notwithstanding, is in small enough amounts for Tough not to be annoying. Giving up THW to ping with Scarlet’s ATK is almost always a bad idea, so Tough can suck. This is obviously a worse way to spend 2 resources than Hex Bolt, and a lot of times you’ll choose to pass on it, but it can help pave the way for your allies to beat the snot out of something back alley style. It can also help land a Decay.
• As for our allies, building those up is our bread and butter, and Boot Camp means we’re prioritizing teammates with high health. Sentry and Thor are some of your very best plays, and those two (plus Quicksilver) usually form the backbone of the line while other characters float in and out.
• Hulk is great too. He does have a really good chance of killing himself with all these mental resources, but at 2 cost he’s good enough value even if he just does 3 (or 4 with Boot Camp!) and eats it. You might want to make sure you really need that damage before risking him though- Hulk just sitting around and blocking for you has a TON of synergy with Magic Shield and he can routinely handle 2 or 3 attacks by himself.
• Hulk’s defensive value might get even more ridiculous with a couple plays of First Aid, which is routinely a 1 cost for 6-8 damage play in this deck.
• The other Basic staple we’re running here, Earth's Mightiest Heroes, can help us close a game quickly but actually for us it mostly gets used to help Scarlet handle more threat. It’s a great multipurpose tool. Remember that Quicksilver loves to hang around all game, staying topped off with First Aid and being your EMH battery.
• The resource generators- Quincarrier, Helicarrier, Avengers Tower- are important set up pieces that you try to prioritize early given the deck’s high cost-curve.

On that note, I wouldn’t normally even play Avengers Tower, but with Boot Camp encouraging us to go wide and a full slate of Avengers, it’s very sensible. If you find it too clunky and want some more threat control, I actually recommend swapping it for Brawn, an excellent ally who got cut because he clashed with Tower. I was pretty torn about that but the advantages of going four wide with Avengers proved to be too much, and another means of resource generation was helpful.

BRITA: MARVEL CHAMPIONS EDITION

A warning to those who would pilot this build- many of the cards I’ve been hyping here are pretty pricy, and that high cost curve means the deck can have some unusual lines of play.

I previously mentioned the possibility of timing issues with our expensive cards, and I wanted to talk about why I think they’re mostly not an issue for Wanda- she has access to more card filtering than any other Hero. Filtering, the act of drawing cards and then choosing and discarding some, is particularly good for more expensive decks like this one. Playing lots of cheap cards can give you flexibility, but I think cost curves are fundamentally motivated by an attempt to avoid bad timing. If your hand has a high chance of being clogged with expensive things, your options are more restricted, and you likely won’t be able to afford to do enough to stay in games.

Strong filtering, though, gives you way bigger windows to choose when and how to pay for the pricy, awesome cards. It also helps to find your most important pieces fast- see Iron Man, who has a fairly lengthy and expensive setup that is greatly smoothed by his Alter Ego filter ability.

And by some distance, Wanda has access to the best filtering in the game.

• Hex Bolt usually would rather trigger one of it’s other effects but it’s draw potential can be really clutch in tight moments, enabling you to transform a rough hand into a relevant one.
• Agatha Harkness and Superpowered Siblings give your Alter Ego side a ton of juice to dig for and acquire cards, and you should be cognizant of when you can afford to flip down for that juicy twice-filtered 7 card hand.
• Finally, it’s really the “Mystic” neutrals- Spiritual Meditation and The Sorcerer Supreme- that take it over the top, letting us chew through our deck rapidly and get our cards down in the right order without losing the board.

All this filter will get you encounter cards from decking quite quickly, but along the way you’ll usually have your pick of the litter in terms of what to play. How you choose to play things out is mostly up to you. I personally encourage getting Boot Camp and one of your big allies down early. Remember, we’re trying to consistently beat the Villain down with big hits, and much of our damage will come from our fearsome team of allies.

CONTROL YOUR FEAR

While not a true rush deck, this build does put a heavy focus on damage, and can put it out more consistently than most decks I've seen. It struggles the most with big side schemes, and this is where those full ally boards and Earth’s Mightiest Heroes will give us the flexibility we need to keep the villain under control while we continue the onslaught.

I’m not sure at all that this direction is the best way to play Scarlet Witch- merely the one that stuck out to me most, that seemed most tailored around her many strengths. Wanda is one of the most formidable Heroes we’ve seen so far, and the pure flexibility of her signature spells will often be enough to carry the day. Plus, she’s just fun, and I think a lot of players will connect on a mechanical level with Scarlet’s motifs of accelerating the game and disintegrating everything in her way.

There will be no shortage of great experiences to be had with the Witch as Champions soldiers on. This one is just mine.