Another Friday, another First Impressions! If you missed Thursday’s stream, we got two exciting card reveals in Hulkbuster and Kamala Khan – better known as Ms. Marvel.
This one is again a bit late as we got multiple reveals yesterday but that just means I got some extra time to think about Ms. Khan’s card halves. For those of you who aren’t familiar, Kamala Khan is an Inhuman who gained her powers after being hit by a Terrigen Bomb. After that fateful day she possessed the power of Morphogenetics – the ability to stretch and grow. But is Ms. Marvel a Miss Marvel or a Hit Marvel? Let’s dig in.
A french vanilla stat array with 3/4/3 is deceptively huge in my books – alongside her inhuman reroll passive thats almost equivalent to 4/5/4 with no defensive tech, not shabby for a 3 threat character. But other than that she ticks all the boxes for a bog standard 3 threat. Sizes and speeds aren’t shown in this slice but its 2/4 and medium on both respectively.
Her only attack (on this half) is a nice twist on a common builder – 4 dice range 4 wild push, but this time towards instead of away. This by itself positions her in a unique place in 3 threat slots of having aggressive displacement on an attack rather than defensive. And combined with her innate reroll passive this is reasonably likely to get the trigger. Not much else to say here other than a big thumbs up!
3 power to get into her big (strong) form is a reasonable cost, you can do it r2 guaranteed as long as you start in r4 of a target to hit with your builder. But more on big Miss Marvel later.
The bog standard “long range 3 threat throw” on Ock and Storm, but AFAIK this is the first time we’ve seen it on someone with a flat builder. And a flat builder means that you can do this r2 guaranteed if you have someone in range to attack, regardless of how bad you whiff. And any round, even if you spent down to 0, you can double tap throw guaranteed. This plus the push on her builder makes her a VERY solid control piece.
Poison immunity and Inhuman reroll passive round out the card pretty well. We already talked up the value of the rerolls in both the stats and builder section so I won’t harp on it too much here other than to reiterate one final time that it’s cash money.
Now, on to her Embiggened half (we’ll skip the repeat passives)!
This might look a bit disappointing at first, especially compared to her normal form’s builder with all its cool bells and whistles but with all the rerolls Kamala has in this form it basically hits like a Master Swordsman Steel Rush from Zemo without the medium advance or bleed, but for free rather than for 4. The medium advance won’t even be fully missed because to make this attack you transformed for some distance, and at the end of the turn you’ll transform again for some more. Hop off a point, double High Five, transform back onto it will surely be a bread-and-butter pattern for Ms. Marvel.
The core of why this half works. Basically, reroll 2 on every attack (unless you’re fighting other Size 4 characters, but why would you be doing that?) is a MASSIVE damage boost to the vanilla High Five attack. Also no matter what you always snap back to normal which exemplifies her hit-and-run patterns transforming forwards and backwards as the fight demands.
Finally the last piece of the puzzle. Schick mentioned this during the ministravaganza reveal talk but this is at the heart of Ms. Marvel’s design. On her normal half she plays a secure focused control game mostly focused on displacement. On her embiggened half she plays an extract focused aggro game and this piece is key. For those who don’t know, if you’re a medium move stick away from a target (just a bit short of range 3) you can pick up extracts from dazed characters. Thanks to Polymorph, Ms. Marvel can pick up tokens from ANYONE she attacks with her truckasaurus hands.
And normally I don’t cover the box’s tactics in a segment like this but Miss Marvel is relatively quick to cover compared to Hulkbuster and they did us the kindness of giving us both the tactics so why not? First off we’ll take a look at A Better Tomorrow.
Holy mobility, Batman! This is almost a miniature Rainbow Bridge. R3 (or more!) placement on Ms. Marvel and Miles is huge for two power each, and unlike many big move effects THEY CAN HOLD EXTRACTS WHILE DOING THIS. So you have a r3 place on two characters that can be done out of activation to fly them halfway across the board with extracts. Another trick is to use this to get two attacks out of Embiggened Marvel round 1 while transforming back onto a center point. Are either of those tricks good enough? Unsure. The game is VERY tight on tactics slots for your team nowadays and a cool/cute mobility/opening trick isn’t whats needed. But its definitely worth dojo.
And another massive wall of text, this is a combo card with Captain Marvel allowing Ms. Marvel to emulate her personal hero. By virtue of Carol not being good I don’t consider this card good but the one thing that gives me pause is how powerful these effects are. This is infinite range and out of activation (for Ms. Marvel) which leads to some interesting stuff. Like Danvers Special into a chain throw to ruin a short mover’s day. Or Embiggening on a point to push multiple enemies off. I hate to say “itll be proven in the dojo” like I did with A Better Tomorrow but the answer is the same, less the fact that the other character needed is Carol not Miles. This is PROBABLY a dud but if you’re insisting on playing Captain Marvel you could do worse than this tactic.
All in all I think Ms. Marvel is an interesting addition. Her cards are niche but powerful and she bills herself as an attractive 3 threat roleplayer – wherever she ends up being affiliated you will be happy to play her in the 3 threat slot. Will you be splashing her in other affiliations though? Less sure. She does some pretty unique stuff so she might get the nod in certain situations here and there (control shells looking for unaffiliated control 3s). Will she take Season 6 of the TTS League by storm? Doubtful. But I expect a solid number of glowing reviews of Kamala shining in the right circumstances by some true believers.
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