Rhino is the first villain in the Marvel Champions core set. In this article, we’re going to quickly walk through the steps of setting this early, classic villain up to play to make it as easy as possible to get rolling. Remember that all this happens after your initial setup steps of picking the villain and their scenario, as well as 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 our villain.
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). In Rhino’s case, he comes with the modular set Bomb Scare, but you can choose to swap this out for any other modular encounter set you own!
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.
In Rhino’s default deck, there aren’t any Setup cards, so unless you’ve added a different modular set, we can move on, as you probably don’t have any hero cards with the Setup keyword.
3. Main Scheme Setup
Side 1a of Rhino’s main scheme The Break In! Simply has the instruction to flip it to stage 1B, so that’s what we do first. Stage 1B of the main scheme is also very simple – we can see that it comes in with no threat, and that it has no When Revealed: abilities, so we skip on to the next step.
4. Villain Setup
If you’re playing Standard Rhino, he doesn’t have any When Revealed: or Setup: abilities, so we can skip those for now, but if you’re playing Rhino expert, now’s the time to resolve the ability on Rhino II – Search the encounter deck and discard pile for the Breakin’ & Takin’ side scheme and reveal it.
So we put Breakin’ & Takin’ into play with 2 threat. Because we were told to ‘reveal’ it, we also trigger its When Revealed effect – adding the number of players in additional threat to the scheme. This means with a single player, Breakin’ & Takin’ is going to end up with 3 threat, while with 4 players, it’ll have 6.
The last step is to set the villain’s hit points, which works much the same way – Rhino has 14 times the number of players in hit points on Normal, and 15 times the number of players on Expert. So with two players that’s 28 or 30 hit points, and with 4 players, that’s 56 or 60 hit points in total.
Rhino's health based on number of players
| Players | Standard | Expert |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 14 | 15 |
| 2 | 28 | 30 |
| 3 | 42 | 45 |
| 4 | 56 | 60 |
5. Draw Hands and Start Playing
You’re done with setting up Rhino! 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 Rhino, and watch out for his Charge! You’ll want to make sure you’re able to flip to alter ego until you’ve got someone ready to tank it without dying!
