We’ll review Messiah Complex, the deluxe expansion for the Marvel Legendary Deck Building Game.

The success of any good deck-building game is continued support with expansions. Legendary Marvel is no different. Each expansion adds new heroes, villains, and card abilities, keeping the game fresh.

Legendary has greatly benefited from its vast expansion library, but with Messiah Complex, the 27th official expansion, the question is: is it worth adding to your Legendary Collection?

We’ll break down what you’ll find in Messiah Complex, our thoughts on what it adds, and if we think Messiah Complex is an expansion worth getting.

The following review will assume that you have a basic understanding of Marvel Legendary since reading a review about its expansion. If unfamiliar, check out our post on why we love Marvel Legendary.

Messiah Complex is a deluxe expansion with 200 new cards in the form of 8 new heroes, 3 masterminds, 4 villain groups, 2 henchman groups,  4 schemes, 3 special bystanders, and 7 special sidekicks. The theme of the set comes from the Marvel X-Men story Messiah Complex.

Heroes and New Keywords

With no A-List Marvel heroes or maybe any heroes you’ve heard of, Messiah Complex may be overlooked. Luckily, not having big-name heroes is never a dealbreaker for a Legendary expansion because what’s important is that the cards’ keywords make you feel like the heroes you’re playing and generate exciting combos. 

The new keywords of Clone, Shatter, Tactical Formation, and the returning keyword of Investigate are great thematic choices for the heroes. 

Clone

Multiple Man, M, and the Stepford Cuckoos are heroes whose background deals with cloning/multiples. The power is also neat since it allows you to gain a copy of the exact card that was activated/recruited, thus jump-starting your deckbuilding by getting two cards for the price of one. 

Tactical Formation

The clone power also helps trigger Tactical Formation, a keyword that gives you bonus abilities if you played a certain number of a specific cost card this hand. We have enjoyed the shift in strategy these Cloning abilities have lent to our games. Filling your deck with the same card can lend to powerful combos when you pull them all together. However, you still risk having a deck bogged down by them if they come out staggered. This has created a fun challenge of trying to both clone the cards you need, while culling your deck of all unnecessary extras so the likelihood of pulling them together increases.

Shatter

Shatter is another new keyword that halves the enemy’s current attack when activated. A hero’s Shatter ability can be integral in taking down high powered Masterminds. We appreciate that the Shatter ability is limited and/or can be difficult to activate. The most powerful Shatter abilities appear on the Ultra Rare hero cards so they aren’t easy to come by. Due to this, each time you successfully use Shatter it feels earned.

Investigate

Investigate is a keyword that enables you to search the top two cards of your deck for specific cards. Find the right one, put it in your hand, come up empty; you get to control if those cards stay on top or go to the bottom of your deck. The heroes all work well together in this set since they are all about helping you gain the heroes you need into your deck and then manipulating your deck to pull off their cool character combos. Investigating allows you to increase the chances of pulling those combos off.

Messiah Complex Plays Well with Others

Messiah Complex introduces a new team affiliation, X-Factor. Luckily, the new team affiliation isn’t required to activate abilities making these new heroes an excellent addition to any team since they don’t need other X-factor heroes to be fully powered. 

Messiah Complex also adds in seven special x-men sidekicks. I love the variety these sidekicks add to the sidekick deck and will be playing with these sidekicks added every time. My favorite sidekick is Boom-Boom, which has three different card effects you can choose from when played. The more powerful the effect, the more it impacts what you can do after using it. 

Messiah Complex Villains

The villains in Messiah Complex also use the new and returning keywords to create challenging encounters. 

Both new henchman groups have the Clone keywords and overrun the city quickly. 

The villain group Clan Yashida brings back the keyword Chivalrous Duel requiring you to use only one hero to take them down. This keyword is challenging to overcome but possible since so many heroes have cloning abilities. 

Messiah Complex villains have one of my all-time favorite villain keywords: Prey. Prey is an ambush effect that places an incoming villain directly in front of a player. It creates immediate tension as that player must defeat that villain before the end of their turn or the prey ability triggers. Prey effects are similar to escape effects, but worse because the villain also enters the city instead of leaving. I enjoy the tough choice of either taking out a preying villain to avoid the prey effect or trying to clear up the city to stop villains from escaping. 

The Masterminds

There are three new Masterminds in this set, Bastion, Fused Sentinel, Exodus, and Lady Deathstrike. 

Exodus has the largest attack value with 32, but players can spend three recruits to half his attack value as many times as possible. Players need to build a balanced deck of recruiting and attacking power to defeat Exodus. 

Lady Deathstrike will prey on players, dishing out massive amounts of wounds if not dealt with quickly. 

Our favorite Mastermind of the set is Bastion. Bastion appears weak, with only a 4 attack needed to defeat him. However, all Bastion’s tactic cards are other Sentinels that ascend to become a Mastermind. Each Master Strike adds a bystander, a “Prime Sentinel” mastermind while giving a +1 attack to each Mastermind. Taking down Bastion quickly is essential, or his numbers will overwhelm the heroes since you could have to defeat the Mastermind up to 13 times to emerge victoriously. Do not underestimate this mastermind! 

One More Twist

Messiah Complex introduces a new type of Scheme cards: Veiled/Unveiled schemes. This scheme gives you the first part of the set-up and general danger the heroes face, but doesn’t unveil the whole scheme until midway through the game. This creates a cool reveal and a sense of dread as the scheme builds and you don’t know what awaits you. 

The scheme cards are double-sided. You can pair the front of one card with the back of another. Allowing you to make 16 unique schemes like Raid Gene Banks to…Unleash an Anti-Mutant Bio Weapon or Hack Ceberbro servers to…Control the Mutant Messiah. We liked how these schemes were new without being overly complicated. It creates a fun tension in the game that feels highly thematic.

One Thing to Note

While we love the Clone keyword for its interesting combo effects and strong thematic powers, it does create a lot of shuffling of the draw decks. You can usually do this during the other players’ turn since the Clone’ effect occurs at the end of your turn when recruiting. Still, it is something to be aware of since it may extend standard playtime with constant searching for heroes and reshuffling of the draw deck. 

Final Thoughts

Marvel Legendary is our favorite game, so any new content is always exciting, but our anticipation for this set was low since we didn’t recognize these heroes. However, these heroes are now some of our favorites after playing with the new keywords. We are excited to mix and match them with the rest of our heroes. 

The new keywords of Prey and Shatter are great additions to the game and we’d love to see them return in future sets along with more Veiled Schemes. We recommend this expansion even if you aren’t a huge X-men fan since the heroes are that fun to play and will integrate well with the expansions you already have.

You can pick up a copy of Messiah Complex here.

Find this and all our favorite Legendary expansions on our Amazon Storefront.

A special thank you to our friends at Upper Deck Entertainment for sending a copy of Messiah Complex for review. As always our thoughts and opinions are our own.

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