Legendary: MARVEL DBG – Paint the Town Red

Description

Up until now, the Spider-Man universe hasn’t been well represented in Legendary and its expansions. In particular, this has proven to be problematic for Peter Parker in the main game. Since he’s been the only playable hero from that universe, he hasn’t been able to trigger any specific Spider-Man alliance bonuses. Paint the Town Red is the answer to that dilemma. As a “small box” expansion, you’ll get five new Spider-Man heroes to battle against Mysterio, Carnage and their cronies.

By adding this expansion to the main game, Marvel’s web-slinger can fight alongside Scarlet Spider, Black Cat, Spider-Woman and Peter Parker in the black symbiote suit. The black suit version of Spider-Man has always been my favourite, so having that in my collection was the main draw for me. Besides looking cool and having the Spider-Man alliance bonuses available to them, many of these cards come with the new Wall Crawl ability. When you recruit Wall Crawl cards from HQ, they go straight to the top of your deck instead of your discard pile. Recruiting these cards can help you build up your recruit or attack abilities in a hurry.

Their opposition has tricks of their own. Carnage and his Maximum Carnage cohorts posses the Feast keyword. When you fight them, you are forced to KO the top card of your deck. This could prove beneficial, as knocking out S.H.I.E.L.D. agents and troopers from your deck will help you in the long run, but the process may also cause you to lose some of your best cards. Mysterio is the surprise of the set, as his illusion gimmick can make him very difficult to beat.

Schemes are the true stars of Legendary and there are some good ones that come in this set. One of the most interesting ones is the attack on the Daily Bugle scheme. In this one, Henchmen cards are mixed in with the hero deck and take up spots in HQ as they’re drawn. Villains in the city can also populate HQ through Scheme Twists. On top of having to stop the Mastermind and battle the villains in the city, you must also dispatch of enemies invading HQ before they completely take it over. Of course, you can also mix and match schemes or any of this expansions components with any other part of the Legendary to create your own Marvel drama.

Legendary: Paint the Town Red is a solid expansion for Marvel’s deck builder. It injects some badly-needed Spider-Man content into the mix along with a few new gameplay wrinkles along the way. Compared to the Fantastic 4 expansion, I think that one brings more to the table from a gameplay perspective, but this one has characters you probably recognize and a worthy opponent in Mysterio. Of the existing expansions available, I’d say get save this for last unless you’ve already got the others or if you really want to add some more web-slinging action to your experience.