For some context, my regular playgroup very frequently plays games with either a flavor or mechanical theme to them. We largely play expert with two of us really getting into deckbuilding, usually playing Heroes/Aspects we haven't touched as much or have ideas we want to try, and a third player usually taking a deck he likes the look of from MCDB. Basically, we're confident players but not pushing things to anything absurd.

Until this weekend. We just finished up another game, and were thinking of what else to do for our probably last game before Mutant Genesis. Me and other deckbuilding buddy were talking about decks we were interested in building despite knowing the the decks are quite "bad".

Then it hit me. For a while I've long thought about what the weakest possible encounter would be, and I had settled on Standard Absorbing Man with Streets of Mayhem. This leaves Absorbing Man with twice as many Environments, but now half of them don't give him a trait for his card bonuses, and he doesn't get a bonus to his attacks half the time. The deck has no minions, only 3 side schemes, and only one "tax" card with ball and chain. The Streets of Mayhem Environments also are likely to help the heroes more than the villian when they show up.

When I joked about being interested in throwing truly terrible decks against it, my group ran with it. One player is pretty fond of Adam Warlock, so we convinced him to play the decklist consisting of some of the worst Solo Champions league cards voted by the community. I played the popular Banner only Hulk deck with the baked in challenge of never flipping to hero form (admittedly not made to be bad, but still having 12 unplayable cards and 2 un-spendable resources is not great). Our last member went out of his way to make the worst 50 card Valkyrie Protection deck possible with no griefing/no including unplayable cards. We mean including all-stars like Height Advantage, Beat 'em Up, True Grit, the works. It was horrendous.

Then we got into gameplay. Flight of the Valkyrior and Anticipation were played turn 1 (Shadows of the Past will grab minions right?) and never resolved all game. 3 Alliance Cards were drawn together, all equally unplayable. A single Surveillance team was are only playable source of threat removal for three turns. Eternity was actually played AND resolved. We saw True Grit played for 1 thwart, on two separate occasions.

Absorbing Man had some great moments too. All 3 copies of Omni -Morph duplication came up in one villian phase, none of them having an affect since Absorbing Man had no traits. Secret Lair was exploited far better for our goals than the Villian's. He drew Both Avalanches early in the game and this was HIGHLY concerning when we assessed are Thwart outputs.

We eventually did it though. I finally got enough SHIELD cards in play to make Homeland Intervention feel great. The Adam Warlock player got his Hero Specific kit out to reliably make plays, and our Valkyrie player untwined themselves from their Obligation to finally land the deciding blow.

In my constant search for weird Marvel Champions games, this is one of my greatest finds. Happy to have played this game in all it's terrible glory, and probably a idea we'll revisit in the future. Cheers.