MUN: General Thoughts

I know, I know. Boring. You've seen everyone post their thoughts on MUN. You're sick to death of it, I'm sure. You've already seen that I enjoyed MUN draft quite a bit. You hate me. Well, I love you, so I'm going to talk in brief on my MUN impressions anyway.

First off, I have to say: Crime Lords. Hell yes, Crime Lords. I think that they did a really good job making a truly defensive team, and what few (read: one) deck I've been able to build from what MUN I could afford has been a severely bastardized Crime Lords/SHIELD army deck. UDE did a great job making army decks feel fresh in this set, by the way - I've never enjoyed playing them until now, but with cards like Maria Hill, Dum Dum Dugan, and Squirrel Girl feeding the fire, I think there are some cool things to be done.

Anyway. Crime Lords is now a fun, defensive team. They do curve and they do army - strangely, at least in my cheap-as-possible deck, army/stall - and they introduce some fun ideas. The sheer power of their reinforcement tricks now makes them formidable, and their army is fed by insane, cool cards like Underground Laboratory, potentially one of the most powerful draw effects in the entire game.

SHIELD seems to be, at least the core team, is almost entirely army based. Yeah, between the potent rush of DCL and the insane armies of MUN, things are getting fast. The cards I mention above are a few commons that feed their army theme beautifully, and cards like Nick Fury certainly don't hurt. They're fast, they're reliable, and they're brutal. Watch out for SHIELD.

Nextwave is like Shakespeare, but with lots more punching.

The Warbound are interesting. I enjoy a good 'I Stand Alone' team, but I haven't enjoyed the feel of the Warbound. Part of it stems from a long-held complete apathy towards the Hulk. Part of it stems from the sheer amount of rares necessary to play a decent build of it all. It takes a lot for me to swallow a such a rare intensive build, and they don't have it.

Negative Zone is fun. I know there were a lot of complaints about the lack of content, but the team does well with what they've got. The multiple non-unique Negative Zones were a great idea, and while some of the Legend content is lacking - Thanos' sole legend card seems to be something of a joke - they are still a fun, coherent team.

Illuminati: waaaaaaaaaaay too rare intensive. Not a chance. Awesome idea, not NEARLY enough content available for the average player to give it a shot.

Thunderbolts are great. First off, how awesome is Thunderbolts Mountain? Soooo awesome. And the preview article for it was a masterpiece of modern english literature. Otherwise, though, they're still an interesting team. Radioactive Man is brutal, and the team's resource acceleration trick, all preview-pride aside, is a great trick that I suspect we'll be seeing quite a lot of.

Avengers is amazing. They're one of the sets best success stories. The team is versatile and hard-hitting, with great legend support and a variety of tricks that can be used to beat-face, as well as the return of their team-attack theme. That has me really excited, as I loved Avengers Team-attack before - and while they've sadly been severely depowered, the theme has also been paired with the best Avengers in the last...well, ever: the Young Avengers.

Alpha Flight is actually Omega Flight, and they're strategy of playing a huge number of plot twists is straight-forward and fun. But it's nothing special, and like many mini-teams, feels like a little bit of a waste, since you can't really play a mono-team deck with them - you're forced to team-up. I love the fan-teams, but I hate that they're all mini-teams that are almost unplayable.

The set is fun, but is hampered by a miniscule print-run with far too many cards, the best of which are all but impossible to find for anything resembling a reasonable price. Still, it's a vast step up from Marvel Legends, and the Legends they picked here - Captain America, Iron Man, and Hulk - are far more worthy than those of MVL (though there were the occasional bizarre choice - Baron Strucker, anyone?).

More on MUN soon, as I try and build an Avengers team-attack deck - and fail miserably. Though, a BYOT golden age one would be a LOT of fun...