Our Favourite Wolverine Decks – Marvel Champions

This deck is one for Wolverine stans who don’t care about anyone else. The deck is made entirely from cards available in the Core Set* and Wolverine’s Hero Pack*, so it’s great for anyone just starting out with the game.

The goal of the deck is simply to keep threat down while swinging in at the villain for massive damage with Wolverine’s attack events! Justice is a bit of an unusual choice for Wolverine, but Surveillance Teams, For Justice!, and The Power of Justice are all fantastic threat-control cards that are all available in the core set, and they let him keep the threat under control while still doing what he does best – tons of damage.

This deck is one for fans of the X-Men who don’t want to pick up a bunch of different hero packs and non-X-Men boxes just to make decks for their favourite X-Men. The deck consists purely of cards from the following packs and boxes:

• Marvel Champions Core Set*
• Wolverine Hero Pack* (for obvious reasons)
• Mutant Genesis Expansion*
• Rogue Hero Pack* (Most of the cards)
• Storm Hero Pack* (Literally only Endurance, which is a nice safety net, but not crucial if you don’t own or want Storm)

The goal of the deck is simply to survive while dishing out tons of damage. This is actually a powered-down, budget version of my own personal Wolverine deck, which we’ll talk about next, so if you want the real deal check that one out!

This Protection deck for Wolverine is my personal favourite deck… perhaps in the entire game. It’s based loosely on a deck I used to play extensively for Ant-Man, but with many changes made for Logan to shine.

This deck requires the following packs and cards in addition to the Wolverine hero pack itself and the Marvel Champions Core Set:

• The Galaxy’s Most Wanted Expansion* (for Fighting Fit and Dauntless, which are fairly core to the deck)
• Sinister Motives Expansion* (for What Doesn’t Kill Me, which can be replaced by First Aid if necessary)
• Doctor Strange Hero Pack* (for Night Nurse only, which can potentially be replaced by just about any other healing effect)
• Drax Hero Pack* (for Hard Knocks only, which can potentially be replaced by just about anything else you fancy)
• Rogue Hero Pack* (for Armor and Preemptive Strike, which are both extremely valuable but can be replaced by another 2-cost ally and other damage reduction effects respectively)

This deck revolves around two main things – taking hits, and giving back as good as you got. Your objective playing it should be to mulligan hard for Adamantium Skeleton to get the extra health online as early as possible. This allows you to spend your health more freely without as much risk of death, as well as activating Fighting Fit and Dauntless. You can find a full writeup of this deck over on the decklist on MarvelCDB.

Aggression and Wolverine go together like a claw and the villain’s face. If I’m honest, I prefer Protection Wolverine to Aggression by quite a large margin, but Wolverine can be extremely fun for just tearing into the enemy. In addition to the obvious Wolverine and Core Set boxes, this deck requires:

• Nova Hero Pack* (for Honed Technique and Fluid Motion, which are both absolutely essential to this deck)
• Gamora Hero Pack* (for Clobber and Angela, which we don’t recommend dropping)
• Mutant Genesis Expansion* or Gambit Hero Pack* (for Professor X, who is extremely useful)
• Galaxy’s Most Wanted Expansion (for Looking for Trouble and Bug, which are both useful but not irreplaceable)
• Ant-Man Hero Pack* (for Moment of Triumph, which is useful for healing, but non-essential, especially if Looking for Trouble is cut)
• Hulk Hero Pack* (for Toe to Toe, which again, loses value when Looking for Trouble is removed)

The goal of the deck is to keep minions under control and go for the face. You’ll probably notice from the list above that there are a bunch of cards that are only really valuable if you run and use Looking for Trouble. Looking for Trouble is an extremely dangerous card that requires you to know whether there’s a minion you want to hit somewhere near the top of the encounter deck to be worthwhile, as unnecessarily accelerating the encounter deck is a risky business. That being said, being able to guarantee a minion makes your other cards that much more useful, and it allows you to draw extra cards with Berserker Frenzy if it lives to attack you.

If you’d rather not play Looking for Trouble, as it’s very much a Marmite card, I’ve also built a quick (and, I’d note, relatively untested), much safer version of this deck. Notionally, this deck should work, but if not taking risks, I’d honestly recommend just playing the protection deck instead!

Overall, this is probably one of the trickiest decks to play well that I’ve built in a long time – Honed Technique relies on you spending specific resources to get value, and Fluid Motion means that the sequence of your attacks really matters. But once you pull it off, the sheer damage numbers that can come out of this deck are actually insane, and it’s not impossible to start hitting for 20+ damage in a round once your upgrades are online. Ouch!