As you might imagine, characters are very central to the game of Marvel. The characters will reduce your opponent’s endurance in large part or in whole. They bear the equipment and are the target of the vast majority of the effects generated by the plot twists and locations in the game. Furthermore, whenever your character has the chance to attack, he or she can go directly after any character of your choice that he or she can legally attack.

Let’s take Sabretooth as an example of interpreting the information on a character card. Characters appear in various versions, the implications of which will be discussed in later articles, and appear underneath their names, in this case Victor Creed. Sabretooth’s recruit cost of six is indicated in the upper left corner of the card. His team affiliation with the Brotherhood is indicated along the left-hand side of the card. Finally, his ATK and DEF values of 13 and 11, respectively, are shown in the lower left hand corner.

Since Sabretooth’s recruit cost is six, barring unusual events, he will not see play until the sixth turn of the game, since you need six resources in play and they can only be played once a turn. You can expect the sixth turn to be around the climactic part of a typical game of Marvel, with most games ending in that general time. Character stats do not increase linearly with their cost but instead exponentially. For example, a character with a cost of 2 might typically have ATK and DEF values that sum to five in comparison to Sabretooth’s whopping twenty-four. There is, in theory, no upper limit to a character’s cost, and let’s just say that the largest characters are big! This ensures that prominent characters emerging on later turns of the games have a profound impact on the struggle on the board. Thus, larger characters provide a means of catching up in the game and the very size of their stats is more likely to take a meaningful toll on an opponent’s endurance in just few turns late in the game.

Sabretooth doesn’t have flight or range, so he cannot readily attack characters protected behind front row character and can only attack from the front row. However, Sabretooth is one efficient fighting machine who can take down other similarly costed characters in combat. Given that you begin the game with fifty endurance, Sabretooth’s ATK value of thirteen is nothing to laugh at.

Besides being an excellent warrior, Sabretooth is a challenging foe to take off the battlefield, thanks to his regenerative properties. He can avoid being stunned at the cost of ten of his controller’s endurance. When he prevents stunning in this fashion, Sabretooth is exhausted and moved to the back row where he is therefore no longer a threat to the opposition this turn and susceptible to being stunned by a follow-up attack. Other characters, such as Wolverine and Nimrod, with an ability to heal themselves have similar powers in the game to avoid being stunned.

While the ultimate goal of the game is to reduce your opponent’s endurance to 0 before yours, the ability to sacrifice your endurance to keep a strong position on the board can be invaluable. Since, normally, only one character can be recovered each turn, any time that two or more of your characters are stunned at the start of your recovery phase, you will be losing a character from the board to your KO’d pile. The more characters you lose to the KO’d pile in this fashion, the less power and options you will have on the board for taking down your opponent’s endurance total. Sabretooth’s resilience is particularly useful in minimizing your losses when you do not have the initiative. If your opponent does not have characters with flying, Sabretooth is great for protecting an important character in the support row behind him since your opponent’s attacker may become stunned while you have the option of preventing Sabretooth from being stunned.

If you are staring down Sabretooth on your opponent’s side of the board, you should strongly considered directing your attacks elsewhere. In general, it is advisable for you to try to stun multiple opposing characters in a turn. Given how challenging it is to stun Sabretooth, it is often only going to be worth attacking him when you cannot stun two other characters on the board or when he poses a big threat for your opponent’s attack such that it is worth taking him out of commission for the turn. Occasionally, it will be worth attacking him if your opponent’s endurance is very low. However, your opponent has the choice to let him be stunned and even if he does save him, he is only taking 4 more endurance loss than would normally occur through the stun endurance loss.

Up tomorrow: The best training ground in the universe.