Pop in your mixtape and get ready to save the Galaxy! We’re reviewing the new Marvel Studios Guardians of the Galaxy expansion for Marvel Legendary! 

In this expansion, our favorite band of heroes are back to take on Ronan the Accuser and Ego the Living Planet in what is perhaps the most challenging Legendary expansion yet!

In order to play this expansion, you must have the base Marvel Legendary game. As such, the following review will assume you have a basic understanding of Marvel Legendary. If you are interested in learning about Marvel Legendary, check out this post for an overview of the game. 

Marvel Studios Guardians of the Galaxy is an expansion with 100 cards.
This expansion features stills from the first and second Guardians of the Galaxy movies.

What Do We Think of this Guardians of the Galaxy Legendary Expansion?

The first Guardians of the Galaxy Legendary expansion is one of our all time favorites for the base game. That meant this Guardians of the Galaxy expansion was both highly anticipated by us and had a lot to live up to. 

We’re happy to report that it did not disappoint! This Guardians of the Galaxy expansion gets our seal of approval!

We highly recommend this expansion to Legendary fans. If you loved the original Guardians of the Galaxy expansion, we think you’ll enjoy finding ways to band these characters together again. They all work well with each other, combing excellently with their most frequent duo, but are designed even better than the original to integrate well with other heroes outside their core group.

If you are new to Legendary, I would recommend waiting on this expansion. It could prove to be a touch too frustrating for folks still learning how to build a well rounded deck to take on challenging Masterminds and Schemes.

Guardians of the Galaxy Legendary. Review of Guardians of the Galaxy Marvel Legendary expansion. Reviewing Guardians of the Galaxy Expansion for Marvel Legendary.

What We Like:

Challenging for Experienced Players

This expansion is perfect for experienced players! You really need to work hard to build a deck that is powerful enough to take on the masterminds Ronan the Accuser and Ego the Living Planet. 

In the last Guardians expansion we saw artifact cards and they make an appearance again in this expansion and they’ll be key in helping players win. Triggered artifacts are cards players can play in front of them to trigger different effects throughout the game when they do various actions. 

These cards are great when you are able to use them, but if you don’t build your deck wisely, they sit worthless in front of you. I love finding the ways to use the characters Star Lord and Gamora to cleverly trigger the artifacts to build up to powerful attacks. 

Experienced players will love the challenge of not only building a deck with the right cards to trigger these artifacts, but keeping their decks small enough to ensure the necessary cards find their way into their hands to do so.

Unique Masterminds

The first thing players might notice is that neither Ronan or Ego have victory points on their cards. Players don’t receive points for taking on the masterminds in this expansion but you still have to take them out to win.

Both Ronan and Ego start off looking like lightweights but you’ll quickly find that they are more than challenging foes. 

Tons of Characters!

This expansion manages to fit in a plethora of your favorite heroes and side characters from the films. 

Normally we aren’t huge fans of the split cards. While we like that these cards give you more options when you draw them, they can be small and hard to read and they stick out like a sore thumb in your hand compared to the vertically designed cards. 

That said, we are glad they are used in this expansion. There are simply too many amazing characters in this film franchise to leave anyone out. Many of these split cards give players thematic options, some where they can play nice with their fellow players or choose to play dirty and hurt them. 

Keywords

Excessive Violence and Excessive Kindness are fun keywords for this group of outlaws. Excessive Violence first appeared thematically in the Deadpool expansion and fits similarly well with this group. This keyword allows players to spend more attack points than needed to take down a villain. If they do, it activates cards with that keyword to give them a special bonus to use.

Excessive Kindness is new to this expansion. Seen most often on cards featuring Mantis and Groot, this works similarly to Excessive Violence except now players can spend more recruitment points to recruit a hero and activate cards with this ability. 

We love these keywords as they help you keep those last few attack or recruitment points we so often have from going to waste. 

What We Don’t Like:

Longer Playtime

Uncle Ben once said, “With greater challenge comes greater playtimes.” (Or something like that, can’t remember.)

The mastermind tactic cards tend to extend the playtime of the game. It takes a lot to beat these guys, especially as they get more and more powerful and it becomes nearly impossible to take them out. We were powerful enough to take out the villains in the city, but not enough to touch the Masterminds. This has led us to have quite a few slow crawls to an ultimate death.

We also did not enjoy the Inescapable “Kyln” Space Prison Scheme Twist. 

Thematically this was great and we were really excited. Heroes are “jailed” and enter the HQ face down. You have to spend one recruitment point to reveal them before recruiting them for their cost. During the game, when Twists come out, the heroes get shuffled and jailed again, forcing players to reveal them once more. 

This ended up being our least favorite scheme to date. We had to expend too much recruitment just to reveal the heroes only to not have enough left to add them to our hands. It extended the game’s playtime and tested our patience.

We like being able to build our deck — it’s a deck building game after all. We don’t want the available cards hidden so that we’re just taking a stab at whatever we reveal that we can afford.

One play was enough for us with this Scheme.

Movie Stills

The movie stills have never been a favorite look of ours. In fact, this is our first expansion with the movie stills — we’ve foregone the previous Spiderman expansion solely because it featured movie stills. 

While I wish Guardians of the Galaxy featured new, original comic art that matches the look and feel of previous expansions, I must say that I was surprised by how little the movie stills bothered me during play. 

The game is still great and the movie stills they chose honestly look pretty nice. The combination of comic art and movie still art wasn’t as big of an eye sore as I thought.

Undoubtably though, the movie stills will keep some Legendary purists away from this expansion which is a bummer because it’s great. 

Bring home the Guardians of the Galaxy expansion for your home.
Find this all our favorite Marvel Legendary Expansion on our Amazon Storefront

A special thank you to our friends at Upper Deck for sending us a copy of Guardians of the Galaxy for review.
As always our thoughts and opinions are our own.

If You Liked This Post You May Also Like:

Doctor Strange Marvel Legendary Review
Doctor Strange Thematic Decks
Why We Love Marvel Legendary