Marvel Champions is one of our favourite board games, and while we’ve written a general buying guide for the game, if you want to expand your collection as cost-effectively and efficiently as possible, expansions are generally the way to go.
Pretty much every expansion will contain:
- 5 villain scenarios
- 4-7 modular encounter packs
- 2 heroes with (typically bad) preconstructed decks, including new cards
- A replayable campaign mode experience with associated special cards
This means that they add a ton of value – the villains can be played with different modular sets from your collection, the modular sets can be used with your old villains, the heroes can be built in a million different ways, and the campaign provides a structured challenge that you can work through while experiencing the game in a different way.
There are currently 7 expansions for the game, and there’s a few different orders you might want to consider buying the expansions in, so let’s take a look at your options. We’ve gone with 4 main variants of this list:
- Standard order: the best content, starting with the easiest
- X-Men first: All the X-Men content before we explore other stories
- Avengers and Guardians: Avengers first, transitioning into Guardians. The two teams work together a lot better than you’d think, and MCU fans will be familiar with these characters.
- Into the Spider-Verse: Spider-People first before switching to the standard order.
Before we dive in, a quick disclaimer:
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Standard Order
This is the order we would recommend for players who want the whole shebang, the complete experience, and are intending on buying everything. It escalates in difficulty and quality where possible, letting you turn things up as you develop your collection, and stop at any time if you need to without missing out on the best content:
As you can probably tell from their 2, 3, and 4 placements, the X-Men wave of expansions is extremely high quality. The main reason we put the Rise of Red Skull first is because it’s essentially a perfect transition from the core set* into expansion play, using modulars from the core box with villains that aren’t a massive leap above the likes of Klaw and Ultron.
X-Men First
The X-Men are some of the most popular characters in the Marvel universe, and you can absolutely focus on them first. So this order essentially allows you to dive straight from the core set into the world of mutants. The initial order is fairly obvious:
Despite being later expansions, Fantasy Flight Games clearly understood that a lot of people would want to jump in on those expansions. From here, we go back to our standard recommended order:
While this affects your difficulty curve, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with doing so, as this allows you to play lower-power characters without worrying too much about them getting crushed.
Avengers and Guardians
The Avengers are obviously the core of the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) for a lot of people, and the focus of the core set. If you want to continue the trend, this is the way to go:
These two expansions give you Hawkeye and Spider-Woman, while The Mad Titan’s Shadow brings in Spectrum. The second hero in the box is Adam Warlock, and that makes a great transition point to the Guardians of the Galaxy, who also have a healthy collection of standalone hero packs, like Starlord*, Drax*, Gamora*, and Venom, Space Knight*.
While we’ll make no attempt to hide the fact that we dislike Guardians of the Galaxy and regard it as the weakest expansion due to its unfair difficulty and over-reliance on “gimmick” encounters, it’s also where you’ll find Rocket and Groot, who are beloved for a good reason. From here, it’s just a case of clearing up the rest of the content:
These can be bought in whatever order appeals best – the X-Men boxes are all solid, but Sinister Motives is no slouch and lets you dive into the Spider-Verse, which you might enjoy conceptually.
Into the Spider-Verse
Lastly, it’s time for the Spider-Fans. Sinister Motives is a great expansion, but it doesn’t really connect with the others cleanly. For people who want to get into that, we recommend the following order:
While the Rise of Red Skull isn’t necessarily about Spider-People, it does feature Spider-Woman as one of the two heroes of the set, and it helps to build your collection in advance of diving straight into Sinister Motives, which is one of the harder campaigns. From here, it’s back to the standard order:
Conclusion
The short version of this article is that the first expansion you should buy should be The Rise of Red Skull* or Mutant Genesis*, depending pretty much on whether you grew up with the X-Men cartoons!
Whatever you choose to go for, remember that it’s also a good idea to augment your collection with heroes you like the look of if you can. Each hero pack* contains cards worth having, new deckbuilding options, and new synergies, and some later expansions can be quite tough on expert difficulty!
We hope that this helps you to pick up the best expansions for you and your team, and if you find it helpful we’d love it if you could support us, whether that’s through sharing our articles and resources on social media and Discord groups, browsing with your adblock turned off for a bit, or donating to us directly using the handy widget. Every little helps us to keep the site online, and let us write about the games we love. You can also follow us over on Ko-Fi, where you’ll find all our latest updates, as well as printable campaign log sheets for some of these expansions!
Good luck with your new expansions!
