Legendary - Tips & Strategies

We recruit heroes from the HQ for a reason. They are more powerful than the twelve SHIELD heroes our deck starts with. Generally, our decks will be more successful if we draw our recruited cards more often. The best way to do this is by KO’ing those twelve starting cards as soon as possible.

If the HQ contains any hero card which has a KO ability, that card must be your top priority. Also scoop up any cards that have required class or team symbols to trigger said KO ability. Optimally, you want these cards recruited before the first reshuffle after turn two. If you can KO some SHIELD cards during the second pass through your deck, it will become exponentially stronger with each reshuffle, increasing the opportunity to draw and play the culling card even more frequently.

This strategy will be the best way to purge your deck of all, or most, of the starting cards and enable you to put together some amazing combo hands capable of smashing any Mastermind!

Legendary is a great game, even when playing solo. However, I’ve found that games with one player (and even two) seem unbalanced in the heroes’ favor, because the player are able to obtain powerful cards at a quicker pace than the villains. After 7-10 turns, the heroes reach a critical mass where you’re unstoppable.

To offset this, we’ve experimented with the following house rules to slow down the heroes’ “power creep” for games with one or two players.

1. Scheme Twists
When a Scheme Twist is played, all players also receive one Wound, in addition to its regular results.

2. Master Strike
When a Master Strike is played, in addition to its regular results, all players also receive Wounds equal to the number of Master Strikes that have been played. (Example: One Wound each for the first Master Strike, two Wounds each for the second Master Strike, and so on.)

3. Mastermind Strength
Masterminds require four successful fights to beat as usual. However, their strength is increased by +2 each time. For example, the Red Skull’s power starts at seven. Therefore, seven power would be necessary to fight him the first time, then nine, then eleven, and thirteen for the final battle.

These additions have made the game much more challenging when playing solo. I hope they can help add an interesting twist for other players as well!

I posted a tip for the randomizer app on the Apple App Store earlier. We have now officially made a house rule that ALL games of Legendary played must be setup using the randomizer. It really cuts out any strategy of synergy between heroes, and really forces the players to play smart… and cuts out any ill feelings of experienced advantages.

Bystanders, inherently, do nothing but give you Victory Points. If you are playing a purely cooperative game (and therefore don’t care about Victory Points), they are, therefore, essentially worthless (unless you have specific heroes that interact with bystanders). If you have the Dark City expansion and Villains, you might want to build the Bystander deck entirely out of the special Bystanders that come with those. If not, agree on a house rule that gives Bystanders some utility when you gain them. My favorite is to have them let you KO a card from your hand or discards. This gives you a reason to pursue Bystanders if you are playing a purely cooperative game.

Black Widow has a card that gives “+1 attack per bystander in your victory pile.” Black Widow cards are already geared towards collecting bystanders to help this card, but if you combine it with Spiderman’s Web Shooters which is cheap and lets you rescue a bystander every time you play it, this combination can lead to a large smack from Black Widow.

An interesting alternative to bypass the lame (only 5) heroes rules is to instead take 10 heroes. Shuffle all those cards together and then divide the deck in half and only play with half of it. This gives you a ton more variety, you aren’t sure exactly what to expect, but it might make you think twice about missing out on a certain card when it comes up. Really adds some extra spice to the game.

When setting up a game, I far prefer to match the Mastermind to at least two or three of the Heroes they regularly face. Some Masterminds and at least a few Villains are most appropriately matched to specific heroes.

For example, Loki can work against any hero team, but one of the heroes should be Thor. There certainly isn’t any rule that says Thor has to oppose Loki, but to me it just makes everything else make more sense.

This also applies to some Villains. The Blob, for example can only be defeated by a player with an X-Men hero.

This is a combination of design-flaw break-down and heart-felt advice.
Firstly, let’s break down the problem we’re hoping to avoid:

1) Every player’s starting hand can have a maximum of four Fight power, a minimum of zero, and an average of two. As there are twelve cards total, and six cards per hand, it takes two full rounds of play (each player revealing the top card of the Villain Deck, placing any Villains or Bystanders, resolving Master Strokes/Scheme Twists, fighting Villains, buying Heroes, and passing the turn) before you will draw or play anything that will change these numbers.

2) Without the expansions, the weakest villain in the deck requires 3 Fight power to defeat. There are five City locations and an Escaped Villains pile. Every turn, the top card of the Villain Deck is flipped, and Villains are placed in the right-most City location, pushing any previously-revealed villains to the left, towards the Escape pile.

3) If all three players draw the statistically-likely “Two Fight, Four Buy” starting hand, it will take six turns (two rounds) before the first player has a chance to actually fight a villain and twelve turns (four rounds) before they are actually guaranteed to draw something they didn’t start with. With four players, the initial dry spell is eight turns. With five, it’s ten.

4) Some of the Villains, Schemes, and Master Strokes deal heavily in “Escaping Villains” and may introduce a “Lose Condition” if too many are pushed off of the City before the Mastermind is defeated. Even without those effects, each escaping villain forces you to KO a Hero card and discard a card from hand if they had a Bystander hostage. This puts strain on the Hero Deck(which forces a team loss if it is exhausted, and the size of which does not reflect the number of people playing).

The end result is:
Having more players in the game increases the difficulty immensely, sometimes to an insurmountable degree.

My recommendation to counter this is:
After becoming familiar with the ebb and flow of the game, each group should read the Mastermind and Scheme very carefully before deciding how many players should participate, and how many should sit out for a session. Alternatively, you could increase the number of players to challenge yourselves on any particular Mastermind or Scheme, in addition to the other difficulty options.

On the Apple App Store there is a randomizer app called Legendary Randomizer. It’s great for starting games when you no longer care which heroes you play or which villains you destroy.

When I first got this game, it was really hard to feel the coop or sense of danger for that matter. To remedy this, I followed instructions to up the difficulty, adding more scheme twists, upping the mastermind’s hp etc.

While I still feel the coop is a little bit lacking, you will find some situations where you will need to make decisions to benefit the group instead of being out for yourself.