Disappearing Act

Intro

When I started playing Marvel Champions, She-Hulk was one of my favorite heroes to play. Having a character that could take advantage of their alter-ego to such an extent was and still is a ton of fun. Since then, there's been a lot of characters that have come out and encouraged changing forms every turn, but with little things their alter-ego could do. Reducing an ally cost by one. Allowing you to replace cards in your hand. Little things that didn't do much but were helpful.

At this point in the game, there’s a lot of heroes with an archetype of staying in hero form as long as possible, never needing to go back to alter-ego other than for a quick recovery. We’ve had characters with some good alter-ego abilities, but we haven’t had a character that really shines in alter-ego and has a kit built to stay there if needed.

Then Gambit released.

Gambit’s Kit

Gambit is arguably as good in alter-ego as he is in hero form with the right build. He can realistically stay in alter-ego if he wants and manage to mitigate threat while getting a ton of bonuses for doing so.

• His Thief Extraordinaire ability allows him to thwart in alter-ego with better numbers than in hero form. You can also know the number of boost icons on the next encounter card or skip over a boost ability that you don't want to deal with. You can strategically use this along with The Thieves Guild to remove more threat and get an extra card if you get the last threat off the scheme.
• Creole Charmer allows him to thwart in alter-ego. Thwarting the last threat on a scheme allows to confuse the villain which might be one of the best alter-ego abilities in the game!

What about the rest of his kit?

Gambit isn’t the strongest hero in terms of his basic attack power. But that doesn’t matter. He’s slowly building up for something more. He’s got Molecular Acceleration, a resource card with the added benefit of adding a charge counter to Gambit. Then each turn he has his Charge de Card ability. In tandem, he’s saving up power for three fantastic event cards;

• Charged Card: Attacking for up to 7 HP while also gaining ranged, piercing, and overkill.
• Royal Flush: Attacking for up to 9 HP across 3 different enemies. Also gains a charge.
• Natural Agility: Defending for as many charge counters as you have. Also gains a charge.

He also has a fantastic base defense of 3 with a few supports. Ready up after defending with no damage with Gambit’s Guild Armor. Deal 1 damage to an attacker with Gambit’s Staff.

Gambit's Versatility

There’s a ton of different ways to play Gambit.

• Focusing on attacking with an emphasis on staying in hero form, using stat bonuses to make him more powerful and adding events.
• Focusing on thwarting with an emphasis on staying in alter-ego, getting bonuses for clearing schemes and loading up on the X-men alter-ego supports.
• Focusing on defending with an emphasis on staying in hero form, leaning into defense responses and upgrades.

With all of these something was missing. You weren’t able to utilize other aspects of his kit as much. I wanted to flip just about every turn to try to make the most out of his kit.

Leadership for Gambit

Leadership decks can get repetitive. I want to do things as the hero! When I play leadership, it normally follows the same couple of steps: Get out allies, upgrade the allies/get out supports, chump block to stay alive. Repeat while you chip away at the villain.

I saw an opportunity to try something a little bit new. I looked for a way to utilize Gambit’s alter-ego abilities, card charges, and defense bonuses. I also wanted to utilize some of the X-men supports and lean into a somewhat thematic deck.

Here’s what I ended up with:

A leadership deck focused on getting out X-Men allies as easily as possible, utilizing their enter play abilities and sacrificing them to deal damage to the villain while flipping more or less every turn. No chump blocking, because Gambit can take it. Gambit builds up the charge counters in the meantime, waiting to attack.

The Deck

The staples of this deck are a few key cards.

• Sneak Attack allows you to play an ally for a single resource and discard them at the end of the turn.
• Command Team allows you to ready up allies to get their health down and get more thwart/attack power per turn.
• Uncanny X-Men allows you to play each X-men hero for one fewer resource and adds to their HP.
• Go Down Swinging allows you to deal damage to an enemy equal to the printed resource card of an ally at the cost of discarding the hero.
• Utopia allows you to ready up an ally or hero when an X-men character enters play.

Other than that, I loaded up on allies with good enter play abilities and added The X-Jet for a wild resource.

Deck Strategy

This is a setup deck with a little bit of a different playstyle as the game progresses.

Generally, you’ll be flipping every turn (or as often as you can), confusing the villain as much as possible and getting a charge counter on Gambit every single turn. You’ll defend as Gambit unless you absolutely cannot, playing Natural Agility for extra charges. You’ll be defending or healing and letting everything slowly build. You’d be surprised how little you need Thief Extraordinaire for thwarting power. Allies will slowly get stronger and become more impactful as the game progresses.

Early Game

• Mulligan for one of the more useful supports.
• Confusing is important. Creole Charmer and Professor X are helpful.
• Get out your supports whenever possible. Uncanny X-Men is top priority with The X-Jet, Utopia, and Cerebro prioritized in that order. Use Forge to get them out quicker. The Thieves Guild is not top priority but can be good to get out.
• Play Sneak Attack to get an ally to help out briefly. Professor X and Beast are particularly useful early on. Beast can recur Molecular Acceleration to build the charges even faster.
• Gambit’s upgrades are decent but there are better cards to play most of the time. Gambit’s Guild Armor is far more useful than Gambit’s Staff.
• Don’t feel obligated to use your charge counters if you don’t need to. Sometimes it’s better to leave them for defense events or keep them saved up for Royal Flush. You might even play Charged Card without utilizing the charge counters.
• You don’t need to focus on damaging the villain much at this point.

Late Game

• Play Command Team to help cycle through allies faster. You can have them out simultaneously. As your supports are up and running, you’ll start to realize you need the extra power that readying up multiple times get you and you’ll be running into ally limits.
• Sneak Attack isn’t as useful once Uncanny X-Men is out, but if you can combo with Command Team and Go Down Swinging, it can seriously change the trajectory of the game.
• Utilize Utopia to ready Gambit and either attack, recover, or use Thief Extraordinaire to keep removing threat. You can use on allies if you need to cycle through them faster too.
• Use Cerebro and Pixie to get allies into your hand so you can cycle through them quickly. If you have charge counters, playing Rogue for 0 cost is always good.
• You’ll be able to start getting some decent damage on the villain now, though you’ll mainly be focusing on thwart and clearing the board. I find that by the time stage 2 is completed, stage 3 is only a turn or two away.
• Utilize Charged Card or a high-cost ally with Go Down Swinging for massive damage output when you need it.

Synergy

• Sneak Attack, Command Team, and Go Down Swinging allow you to play an ally for low cost, diminish their HP and deal extra damage before the phase ends.
• Pixie and Cerebro get allies in your hand to play Sneak Attack or Go Down Swinging.
• Molecular Acceleration and Charge de Card turn Rogue into a 0-cost card.
• Utopia and Sneak Attack allow for your allies and hero to ready more often even though the ally is only there for the phase.
• Thief Extraordinaire and Longshot allow for you to know whether or not you’ll be able to take advantage of his response.
• The X-men characters having such high costs means that Go Down Swinging is much more impactful.

Other Card Considerations

• Last Stand: A good card but requires allies to be ready to utilize. Had this in for a long time but ended up scrapping. Much better in late game than early game, but by then I hardly needed it. Could utilize more scrapping of allies at certain points, but I’m not sure what I would take out of the current deck to compensate.
• Moira MacTaggert: Another good card, but only could utilize the extra card draw every other turn and was rarely worth the cost unless it was one of the first supports I got out.
• Whatever new X-Men allies release could be worth adding. Angel and Mirage are the most replaceable.