Understanding Timing in Marvel Champions

Timing in Marvel Champions is complicated subject that comes up pretty consistently, and it’s something that is definitely in need of some clarification, so let’s get right into it. In this guide we’re going to be talking about exactly how timing works, and look at some interactions from the core set that cause some real timing headaches.

Card Timing Keywords

There are five types of timing keyword that can exist on a card. In short, these are:

• Action – This is something that you can do during the hero phase.
• Interrupt – This is something that can happen before a triggering condition applies in any phase.
• Response – This is something that can happen after a triggering condition applies in any phase.
• Special – This is something that can only happen when specifically triggered by another effect.
• Resource – This is something that can be used to pay for anything that costs resources after declaring that you’re going to do it.

We’ll go into this in exhaustive detail in a minute, but that’s the basic version. In addition to these, you’ve got some restrictions that can apply to these keywords:

• Forced – A forced response or forced interrupt must happen at the next available opportunity, and takes priority over anything that is not Forced (for example, a Forced Interrupt always beats an Interrupt)
• Hero – Whatever the effect is can only happen in Hero form (for example a Hero Action).
• Alter-Ego – Whatever the effect is can only happen in Alter-Ego form.

These combined with the timing keyword will tell you exactly how a card works. Let’s take a look at each part of this in more detail to be absolutely sure how this works.

Actions

Actions are the simplest form of trigger – they happen when you make them happen!

Actions can be activated on your turn during the hero phase only. To put that another way, if it says Action on it, you can’t do it during the villain phase. This is important because it means things like:

• You cannot activate the Helicarrier to reduce the cost of Enhanced Spider-Sense during the villain phase (this one is an extremely common mistake, so look out for it)
• You cannot use an event like Haymaker to punch a minion in the face during the villain phase.
• You cannot use a healing action like Med Team or First Aid to heal someone before they die during the villain phase.

In order to perform an action, you pay the cost of that action (which is the resource cost of an event, and then any words written before an arrow ⟶, in the case of a card in play like Alpha Flight Station), and then the effect of that action happens. As previously mentioned, a Hero Action is an action you can only take in Hero form (for example, when you’re Spider-Man), and an Alter-Ego action is an action you can only take in Alter-Ego form (for example, when you’re Peter Parker). At the time of writing, at least, there are no Forced Actions, although that would certainly be an interesting card template.

Importantly, during the hero phase you can request that your teammates perform actions during your turn, and this is super important. Let’s say for example, you have a Hydra Mercenary engaged with you, and you have Swinging Web Kick in your hand. The Guard keyword stops you from playing the kick to attack the villain, but it’d be a huge waste to spend it on the Hydra Mercenary. But wait – your friend on the other side of the table has a Haymaker in hand that could kill the mercenary, freeing you up to swing! You can request that they perform that action despite the fact that it’s your turn, making your turn so much more efficient. As you won’t always have full knowledge of what’s in the hands of your friends, you can also play this as allowing them to suggest that you ask them to take an action, which is a little bit of a mental backflip, but will make things much easier.

Using basic powers (attack, thwart, and defence for your hero or allies), and playing allies, supports, and upgrades are not actions, so you can only activate those on your turn, and you can’t request them. The general rule is that actions will always say that they are actions, never just assume it’s an action because you can do it on your turn. Holding up actions until the end of another player’s turn is an extremely powerful tactic that you can use to great effect, and will dramatically increase your odds of victory, particularly with cards that have additional effects in certain circumstances like the overkill on Relentless Assault, which if it can’t kill a minion, should be played after some other damage has softened them up to guarantee that extra overkill damage!

Actions are the simplest form of trigger – they happen when you make them happen!

Actions can be activated on your turn during the hero phase only. To put that another way, if it says Action on it, you can’t do it during the villain phase. This is important because it means things like:

• You cannot activate the Helicarrier to reduce the cost of Enhanced Spider-Sense during the villain phase (this one is an extremely common mistake, so look out for it)
• You cannot use an event like Haymaker to punch a minion in the face during the villain phase.
• You cannot use a healing action like Med Team or First Aid to heal someone before they die during the villain phase.

In order to perform an action, you pay the cost of that action (which is the resource cost of an event, and then any words written before an arrow ⟶, in the case of a card in play like Alpha Flight Station), and then the effect of that action happens. As previously mentioned, a Hero Action is an action you can only take in Hero form (for example, when you’re Spider-Man), and an Alter-Ego action is an action you can only take in Alter-Ego form (for example, when you’re Peter Parker). At the time of writing, at least, there are no Forced Actions, although that would certainly be an interesting card template.

Importantly, during the hero phase you can request that your teammates perform actions during your turn, and this is super important. Let’s say for example, you have a Hydra Mercenary engaged with you, and you have Swinging Web Kick in your hand. The Guard keyword stops you from playing the kick to attack the villain, but it’d be a huge waste to spend it on the Hydra Mercenary. But wait – your friend on the other side of the table has a Haymaker in hand that could kill the mercenary, freeing you up to swing! You can request that they perform that action despite the fact that it’s your turn, making your turn so much more efficient. As you won’t always have full knowledge of what’s in the hands of your friends, you can also play this as allowing them to suggest that you ask them to take an action, which is a little bit of a mental backflip, but will make things much easier.

Using basic powers (attack, thwart, and defence for your hero or allies), and playing allies, supports, and upgrades are not actions, so you can only activate those on your turn, and you can’t request them. The general rule is that actions will always say that they are actions, never just assume it’s an action because you can do it on your turn. Holding up actions until the end of another player’s turn is an extremely powerful tactic that you can use to great effect, and will dramatically increase your odds of victory, particularly with cards that have additional effects in certain circumstances like the overkill on Relentless Assault, which if it can’t kill a minion, should be played after some other damage has softened them up to guarantee that extra overkill damage!

Interrupts

Interrupts do what they say on the tin – they interrupt a triggering condition and apply their effects before that condition gets to happen.

What do we mean by this? Let’s take a very simple interrupt event, Emergency and use that as our example. Emergency triggers when the villain schemes, and that’s what I refer to as our triggering condition. Every single interrupt should have some kind of condition written in, and that’s your window to say “I’m going to interrupt and do something”.

In this case, because it’s when the villain schemes, you go into the villain phase, the villain activates, checks that you’re in alter-ego, and decides to scheme. During their scheming, you can play Emergency, and it’ll happen before the threat is placed. In this case, that makes a lot of sense, because Emergency says that it modifies the scheming that’s currently happening – you wouldn’t be able to play it afterwards, it would’ve already happened. That’s why it’s an interrupt, and not a response. You play it during the condition and resolve the interrupt before anything else happens, going back to resolving whatever was happening after you’re done, interrupting the sequence of events.

Let’s look at another nuance to interrupts that matters on a fairly regular basis, using the card Webbed Up. This is the first Forced effect we’re going to talk about in this lengthy chonker of a guide. Being a Forced Interrupt means that you have to trigger it the very first time the triggering condition is met. This means that you cannot decide to skip it and activate it later the way you could with Emergency, it has to happen. The triggering condition here is “When attached enemy would attack”, so the very first time they attack, your job is to point out that the effect has to happen. Not only that, but Webbed Up has what some people refer to as a replacement effect – it includes the word “Instead”. This means that not only does the trigger happen, but it replaces the entire attack. So you’re forced to interrupt it, and the attack does not happen. This means you can’t respond to that attack! Then, the enemy gets stunned, just for good measure, so their next attack will also be replaced (as stunned works the same way). Brutal.

You can interrupt the same trigger with as many interrupts as you want. This comes in handy for things like stacking up defence events to ensure you don’t take damage, for example playing Expert Defense and then immediately following it up with Desperate Defense. You’d then defend against the attack and get the benefits of both cards for a total of +5 DEF, ensuring that massive game-ending hit doesn’t connect.

Responses

Back on responses, the main thing you need to remember is that everything happens after the trigger. Only once all effects and interrupts have happened related to that triggering condition do you get to respond. You can respond as many times as you want to a triggering condition, so if you have three copies of Counter-Punch in your hand, the villain attacks you, and you defend with your hero (through either your basic defence power or an event labelled Defense), feel absolutely free to repeatedly punch them in the face! You can even respond to a response which is in turn responding to an interrupt which is interrupting an event if all the conditions are met. Don’t worry, that’s what we’re going to talk about specifically later.

Special

Special abilities are weird exceptions that only tend to happen on identity-specific cards. The core set’s only example of a Special ability comes in Black Panther’s kit, and it’s the core of his gameplay.

Special abilities can’t be activated at will, and technically they’re not really a timing thing, because their timing is reliant entirely on the timing of whatever causes them to happen, but I’m going to talk about them here for completeness. Black Panther has a package of identity-specific upgrades like Vibranium Suit, which all have the Special keyword. Alone, these upgrades do absolutely nothing. What makes them work is the event Wakanda Forever! (and yes, you have to yell it every time, that’s a secret keyword for any card with an exclamation mark, honest), which tells you to resolve your Special abilities. This is true of every card with Special: on it – you only resolve them when another card specifically tells you it’s time to resolve them.

Resource

The last sort-of timing-related keyword we’re going to look at here is Resource.

A resource is something you use to pay a cost.  You declare that you are going to play a card, you pay resource costs by discarding cards and playing resource abilities, and then the card’s effect happens. This is relevant in the core set primarily for Iron Man players with his incredible support Pepper Potts. Pepper has a resource ability to help you pay, but there’s some really important considerations. First is that the resource ability happens before anything touches your discard pile. This means that you can’t discard a double resource like Energy, then exhaust Pepper to generate resources from that energy again. This is because resource costs are paid simultaneously. This also means that the event you’re playing also can’t be checked for resources, as it’s not in the discard when resources are generated.

Resource abilities can be used whenever you would pay a cost. This means you can use a resource generator to pay for interrupts and responses during the villain phase.

Image: Mockingbird being played. Energy below it with Pepper Potts exhausted to show they are paying for that event. A haymaker in the discard, with an arrow pointing at its resource. Basically showing that she looks at the discard and not anything else being played.

Let’s Get Complicated

Hopefully this has helped to clarify when cards of different types are played and activated. There’s a lot of depth here, so to illustrate this I want to throw in this needlessly complex gameplay example to demonstrate how and when all of these cards are played and resolve. By necessity, this uses cards not available in the core set, as thankfully they kept things relatively flat in the starter set, so you may not recognise all of them, but if you can follow this interaction, you can be pretty sure that you understand how cards work. Work through it step-by-step, and make sure you understand why we were able to play cards at specific steps. There’s no rush, so take it slow and read the cards. Ready? Let’s get complicated.

The Breakdown

Here’s the play-by-play. When this starts, we’re in the villain phase against Ultron stage 2. Threat has already been added, and our first hero, Spider-Man, is about to be attacked, and for reasons we’ll explain later, there are already three Ultron Drones in play. Fortunately, through some eldritch means to help us illustrate this, our hero has infinite resources and cards available to him.

1. Our villain activates against Spider-Man. Seeing he’s in hero form and not alter-ego, Ultron initiates an attack.
2. Ultron has a Forced Interrupt which triggers when the attack initiates, so Ultron immediately puts a drone in play, and gains +1 ATK for each drone in play before anything else can happen. There are now four Ultron Drones in play, so that’s +4 ATK for a total of 6 ATK. Ouch. But we’re not even close to taking that damage yet.
3. Spider-Man himself has an Interrupt ability on his identity card, Spider-Sense, so he now draws a card – it’s Powerful Punch. This must resolve after Ultron’s interrupt, because both interrupt the attack, but Ultron’s interrupt is forced, so it gets priority.
4. Powerful Punch is an Interrupt event that cares about attacks being initiated, so we can immediately punch the villain in the face before anything else happens.
   • Notice how we resolved three different interrupts on the same triggering condition, but resolved the Forced interrupt first (because we have to). Despite the fact we only just drew Powerful Punch, we were still allowed to play it because we still haven’t progressed beyond the triggering condition of the villain initiating an attack.
5. As a defense card was played (Powerful Punch has Defense on it), we can then trigger a response – Flow Like Water – which is an upgrade in play that you’re going to see a lot of in this example, because its triggering condition is “After you play a DEFENSE card”. So we hit him for another point of damage.
6. Now that we’re done responding to that step, we have to decide whether we want to defend against the attack. Technically, we’ve already defended against the attack, but that’s a lot of damage coming in, so we exhaust Spider-Man to use his basic defence power.
7. It’s interrupt time! We just declared a defence and we have interrupts available to us that care about that. We declare that going to play Desperate Defense.
   • We could’ve played it in response to Powerful Punch, but we’re playing it here to illustrate that we get to pick and choose when to respond, provided we meet the triggering condition of defending via the hero power or a Defense event
8. So now we pay the resource cost for Desperate Defense. This time, we’re going to pay with a special resource – Defensive Energy. We pay and interrupt paying our resource cost, drawing a card before Desperate Defense resolves.
9. Desperate Defense resolves, and our DEF stat goes up to 5 for this attack, and because we played a defense event, we can respond with Flow Like Water for another point of damage.
   • Hey look, we’ve responded to a response! That’s another thing you can absolutely do before moving on to the next step. Protection gets pretty wild with the right cards.
10. Ultron is dealt a boost card with 3 boost icons on it. As he turns it face up, we see that it’s a 3 and decide to interrupt once again., this time with a Preemptive Strike. Surprise! Instead of the attack dealing 3 extra damage, Ultron once again gets punched in his smug robot face, for 3 damage as that was the value of the boost.
11. Because that was another defense event, Flow Like Water is once again able to respond for another point of damage.
12. So Ultron’s attack now resolves. His attack is 6 (remember all those drones from earlier?), there was no additional damage from the boost because Preemptive Strike replaced the boost, and our DEF is 5, so as it is right now we’re going to take 1 damage, which means that Desperate Defense won’t let us ready up. Oh no!
13. No sweat. We just so happen to have an Energy Barrier already in play. We interrupt taking the damage, and reduce it by 1.
14. Because of that, Spider-Man will take 0 damage from the attack. Desperate Defense was already played, so we continue resolving its effect from earlier – we took no damage, so Spider-Man gets to ready himself up immediately.
    • Readying up happens immediately before anything else happens, as there was no timing keyword involved. It was played earlier, so we resolve it as soon as possible.
15. As no damage was taken after defending against an attack, another condition is met – we can draw a card in response by exhausting Unflappable, and remove 1 threat by exhausting Hard to Ignore.
    • As they both have the same response timing, we get to decide in what order we want them to resolve in, and it doesn’t matter much, but you should almost always draw first in case you draw additional responses.
16. The attack is finally over, and now we do one last thing – we respond to the attack by Counter-Punching Ultron for 2 more damage, because why not? The attack being over means that we get to respond to the entire attack. We could not have played it earlier, because Counter Punch’s condition is “After your hero defends against an enemy attack”. We don’t resolve this until after the entire attack is completed. So if we’d been defeated by this, we never would’ve been able to Counter-Punch back.

That’s… a lot, I know. But this is the essence of playing Protection, and it’s important to know exactly when you can play each and every card in your arsenal! With a little practice, this kind of timing resolution will become second nature, and you’ll be able to use your knowledge of card timing to work your own way through complex interactions without ever having to Google anything.

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