Hello everyone! If the title of this post seems familiar, it's probably because I did a similar review a while ago for Drax, a hero in a similar circumstance for me based on my tastes for the game. It is a little different this time though, for one, a lot of people actually like The Hood! The Hood recently ranked number 6 on Hall of Heroes favorite encounter community poll, where as Drax sometimes struggles to make it into the top 6 Gaurdians heroes by community standings.

Though he is still a divissive set. My complaints for him I'm sure are just piling on with the other comparisons of his "Foul Play" ability to just being the surge mechanic but called another name. I remember my 4-player group making a couple of attempts against him at Standard II where he would go through the encounter deck twice by turn 3 on more than one occasion. Would hate to see this on Expert II! To date I still only have one multiplayer win against The Hood (It's hard to convince my play group to go for more after those circumstances haha).

His unique relationship with Modular sets is obviously his big draw though. He almost strikes me as a parallel to Spider-Women in how you can build the deck in a way no other character can. The amount he's able to include let's you make some really thematically and mechanically unique scenarios not really possible with other villians. Sure you can always include above the number of recommended modules in a given encounter, but that often takes away from the villian cards in the scenario, where as The Hood is able to slot them in just fine.

For example my playgroup wanted to go against all the Hydra modulars (and a few nemesis sets) together and it was a blast to see all of that realized in a way that worked well. It was our first win against The Hood in multiplayer despite having to defeat around 15 Hydra Soldiers! I once tried facing Standard/Expert II Hood with Infinity Gauntlet in solo using the "easiest" modular sets I could, and piloting (pretty much) Brian-V's Wild Tutor deck against it. Ended up going 2-1 in a best of three and it might have been my favorite set of solo games to date!

It would be nice to see more villians in the future that also work as frameworks for Modular sets. Maybe something that works off of keywords in Modular cards or looks at the specific types of encounter cards that come up. That's about all I have here. Let me know what you guys think of The Hood, and happy playing!