Klaw is the second villain in the Marvel Champions Core Set, and he’s quite the step up from Rhino, but he’s one of the most interesting villains in the game to play against! In this article, we’re going to walk through the steps of setting the villain up to play. Remember that all this happens after your initial setup steps of picking the villain, their scenario, and choosing who goes first! For a full breakdown of the setup process, check out our full setup guide, but here’s the quick version:
Once that’s done, we can prepare Klaw for play.
1. Create the Encounter Deck
Take the relevant modular sets (the villain’s deck, the standard or expert encounter set, and whatever modular you’ve included), and shuffle them together with your hero’s obligation(s). For Klaw, the recommended modular set is the Masters of Evil set, but you can include whichever modular you’d like to play against to customise his deck.
2. Put any Setup cards into play
We now check to see if any cards in any decks – yours or the villain’s – have the Setup keyword. Note that this isn’t setup abilities yet, which are abilities that have Setup: with a colon, we’re specifically looking for the Setup keyword, which is usually followed by a full-stop (a period, for our US readers). Don’t resolve any other setup abilities yet. We’re about to get to those, and the order we resolve them in matters.
3. Main Scheme Setup
Klaw’s main scheme – Underground Distribution – has a Setup ability, which we now resolve: Search the encounter deck for the Defense Network side scheme and reveal it. Shuffle the encounter deck. Advance to stage 1B. So we first grab Defense Network and reveal it, putting it into play with its starting threat of 2, and resolving its When Revealed ability to place an additional 1 threat per hero on Defense Network. So solo this will start with a total of 3 threat, while in 4-player, it’ll start with 6 threat.
Once that’s done, we flip the main scheme to side 1B. This has a When Revealed ability on it, so we now resolve that ability: Discard cards from the encounter deck until a minion is discarded. Put that minion into play engaged with the first player.
As the minion is ‘Put’ into play and not ‘Revealed’, we don’t resolve any When Revealed effects on whichever minion we put into play, so for example, Weapon Runner won’t surge, but Armored Guard will still gain Tough from Toughness, as he still enters play (which is the trigger condition for Toughness, not being ‘revealed’).
4. Villain Setup
In Standard difficulty, Klaw doesn’t have any extra villain setup abilities, but if you’re playing against Klaw II in Expert mode, now’s the time to resolve his When Revealed ability: Search the encounter deck and discard pile for The “Immortal” Klaw and reveal it. Shuffle the encounter deck.
The “Immortal” Klaw doesn’t have any additional When Revealed effects on it, apart from starting with 3 threat per hero, but it does have a constant effect on it of giving Klaw +10 hit points. This means that Klaw’s current hit points will go up by 10, which will be immediately removed the moment The “Immortal” Klaw side scheme is removed. A quick tip here is to make sure you remove this before you advance the villain to the next phase, as if you take down Klaw without removing the side scheme, he’ll get the +10 hit points again on the next phase!
Klaw's health based on number of players
| Players | Standard | Expert |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 12 | 18 |
| 2 | 24 | 36 |
| 3 | 36 | 54 |
| 4 | 48 | 72 |
5. Draw Hands and Start Playing
You’re done with the villain setup! Now it’s time to draw up to your starting hand size, resolve your mulligans, perform any hero setup abilities, and take your first turn.
We hope you found this quick villain setup guide useful! We’re hoping to eventually put one of these together for every villain we can get our hands on to make it super simple to get rolling with even the most complex villains.
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Good luck with Klaw! And watch out for his attachments – you’ll want to remove those as soon as possible. The resource costs hurt, but their effects hurt more!
