Ultron is the last villain in the Marvel Champions core set, and he’s got some extra bits and pieces that can make his setup a little confusing for new players. 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 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). With Ultron, the recommended modular set is Under Attack, but you can swap in any modular set you’d rather play against if you want to adjust the scenario.
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
Ultron’s main scheme side 1A – The Crimson Cowl – has a Setup ability: Put the Ultron Drones environment into play. Shuffle the encounter deck.
Ultron Drones is an interesting type of card, an environment, which is put in play and will sit there menacingly providing a static effect for the entirety of this scenario.
We then advance to side 1B, and that has a When Revealed ability: Each player puts the top card of their deck into play facedown, engaged with them as a DRONE minion.
Drones are defined by our Ultron Drones environment, so the top card of your deck is now a 1 ATK, 1 SCH, 1 health minion that you’ll have to deal with to put your cards back in your discard. Remember: We’ve not resolved any hero setup abilities yet, so if your hero brings in a specific card and you can’t find it, it might be a drone already!
4. Villain Setup
Ultron doesn’t have any specific villain setup in either Normal or Expert, but we do still need to set his hit points, so we should do that as the last step of our villain setup.
Ultron has a hefty 17 hit points per player in Standard difficulty, and 22 hit points per player in Expert. This means that with 2 players he’ll have 34 hit points in Standard, and 44 in Expert, and with 4 players in Expert difficulty he’ll go up to a whopping 88 starting hit points!
Ultron's health based on number of players
| Players | Standard | Expert |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 17 | 22 |
| 2 | 34 | 44 |
| 3 | 51 | 66 |
| 4 | 68 | 88 |
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 Ultron! If his drones get you down, bring a Leadership player with Hawkeye and Squirrel Girl (Captain America Hero Pack*) – they’ll help you to clear things up at lightning speed!
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