Thor is the third hero pack for Marvel Champions and comes as a full playable deck with the Aggression aspect. Thor is a tricky beast to play, especially when used solo due to his lack of threat control, however against a minion swarm he’s incredible. Let’s take a look at his cards and then we’ll get to some final thoughts.
Thor/Odinson
Thor himself is a decent attacker with a goodly chunk of hit points allowing you shake off most attacks. His thwart of 1 is pathetically low and is really his downfall although his hand size doesn’t help at just 4, so having other resource generation is going to become necessary quickly. His special ability will help compensate for this as whenever you are engaged by a minion you draw two cards, limit once per phase.
On the flip side we have Odinson, with recovery 4 and the ability to search your deck and discard for Mjolnir. Like Captain America’s shield this allows you to discard Mjolnir during setup and then pick it back up for an opening hand of 6 or to spend it as a resource to power up cards like lightning strike, only to recover it later when you return to Asgard for a breather.
Signature Cards
There's a lot of good cards in Thor’s signature deck. Asgard gives you an increased handsize to compensate for Thor’s pathetic 4, while the two copies of God of Thunder will generate an energy resource for you every round while in Hero form, combined these cards really help overcome Thor’s weaknesses.
Defender of the Nine Realms is a 0 cost event I particularly like which will seek out a minion, triggering Thor’s response and remove 3 threats from a scheme. Given that Thor lacks other ways of dealing with the scheme this card is vital to your strategy.
Hammer Throw comes into the game as a powerful 8 hit attack that gains overkill, allowing you to splatter a minion and continue right on into the main villain. Lightning Strike, when combined with Mjolnir and a lot of lightning resources can hit every enemy on the board ignoring Guard.
Thor’s signature ally, Lady Sif, is not cheap to get into play but she readies Thor/Odinson upon arrival meaning you can double heal or double attack that round depending on your need.
Aggression Cards
Thor’s pack brings with some interesting new additions. Hercules works perfectly with Thor as his cost is reduced by 1 for each minion engaged with you, while Valkyrie enters play to deal 2 damage to a minion, 3 when using an energy resource to pay for her, which Thor is not short on.
Hall of Heroes is another card designed to help Thor overcome his card draw weakness, it gathers tokens whenever you destroy a minion and then you can turn them into card draw but only in Alter Ego form.
Jairbjorn on the face of it, seems like a great card, allowing you to spend a physical resource to deal 2 damage to any enemy after an attack, but with Thor’s lack of card draw I found myself, quite often, unable to use it or that the resource could be better spent on cards like Hammer Throw.
Nemesis Set
Naturally Thor’s nemesis is Loki, the trickster god and he brings with him a pair of Frost Giants. While relatively easy to defeat, Loki has the ability to respawn after being killed by revealing the top card of the encounter deck looking for a treachery card. His side scheme however is much more potent. It has an acceleration icon and enters play with Threat 2 + 1 threat for every Asgard card in play and if you’re doing it right, you’ll have a lot of them. As I mentioned Thwart is Thor’s weakness so clearing this card before it costs you the game can be tricky.
Thoughts
Thor is good at hitting things, really good at it actually, however he needs some time to build up and in a solo game he often wont get that chance. I’ve played and beaten all current villains with Thor but none of them came easy, with the exception of Ultron who was a cake walk. Green Goblin I had assumed would be simple as he throws minions at you like they are party favours but the threat accumulation simply overpowers Thor's ability to kill everything.
For almost every Villain I ended up needing to deckbuild with Thor rather than using the prebuilt deck. A tag team of Thor and Hulk (aggression Ally) proved to be pretty potent on the killing front, but still lacked any thwart for dealing with the scheme. For most of the scenarios I leaned heavy on the Justice aspect, especially against the Wrecking Crew. Meanwhile I also tested out a Protection Deck which with a DEF boost and healing makes Thor practically unkillable, regardless of how many minions spawn, but it also lacks enough threat control to make Thor vivable as a solo hero.
Final Thoughts
Thor, as built, is a great hero for two player, he’ll mop up minions and take the fight to the villain, so long as someone else plays threat controller. However in solo you’re going to need to experiment with some other aspect cards to get the most out of this hero.
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