Marvel Legendary: Into the Cosmos

New keywords

• Shards. These are tokens that you can spend to get +1 Strenth. You will gain them from card effects. There are a couple provided in the box, the ammount is supposed to be unlimited, but expect to run out of them. You can pretty much use anything as substitute for them though, and we would recommend that you buy some nice replacement tokens in form of chrystals. As you can stack up Shards, they are very powerful indeed when it comes to taking down masterminds. Great stuff!
• Burn [x] Shards. This is a new mechanic which lets you use your shards in other ways than just for raw strength. Like drawing cards for an example. A very welcome mechanic.
• Danger Sense. This keyword returns from the Spiderman Homecoming set. This mechanic let's you look at the top cards of the villain deck and get plus attack per villain revealed. A bit fiddly, but can be very useful in terms of knowing what is in store the next two rounds.
• Cosmic Threat. This keyword makes the enemy weaker if you have the right type class on of heroes when attacking the villain or mastermind who is the target. In fact, they get -3 strength per card you reveal, which is A LOT. But, the bad guys which this keyword is generally very powerful (approx 10+ for Villains and 20+ for Masterminds), so these has to be taken down with the right team. Thematicly cool. It would have make little sense to have bad guys on a cosmic scale as weak as "normal" bad guys, and it wouldn't have been any fun to make them invinsible. So this is a nice compromise, so to speak.
• Celestial Boon. The Celestials are very strong opponents, but they will generate great rewards when defeated. They will grant a permanent buff for the rest of the game, like +1 card per round etc. I like this one a lot, one of the best mechanics in a while.

• Contest of Champions. When cards with this keyword takes effect, players will reveal a card from their hand/discard pile, and the villain/mastermind will reveal the top two (typically) cards from the hero deck, and then compare the cost of these cards. The winner(s) gets rewards and the loosers gets punished. Sure, this increases interaction, but it's fiddly and slows down the pace in a bad way. Boo.

Masterminds & Villains

• The Beoynder -With 21 Strength on normal level, and24 on Epic level, this guy is hard, but not as hard as you might think. He's got Cosmic Threat on cards that costs 5 or more (6 or more on the Epic version), so totally doable in late game, but no way before that, and on some schemes then it might be too late. He leads From Beyond a villain group consisting of huge number bad guys with Cosmic Threat. Some of them can even destroy City Spaces if you let them escape...
• The Grandmaster leads Elders of the Universe and they love to put on Contest of Champions a lot. As im not a fan of the mechanic itself, im not a fan of this Mastermind.
• Magus -Adam Warlocks evil future version of himself which gets stronger if the villain in the city has any Shards on them, so fighting him revolves around managing the city villains with those said Shards. Of course, he leads the Universal Church of Thruth and these guys gives Shards to every other Villain in the City when they enter as a Ambush effect. Nice, eh?

We have a two more Villain groups i want to mention, Celestials which are super powerful cosmic being that are very hard to kill without having their Cosmic Threat weakneses ready. But, if you defeat them, they grant you Celestial Boons which are permanent effect that stays for the rest of the game. Very, very cool. But be very careful, if they escape, they might give you a negative effect for the rest of the game. Last, but not least, we have the Black order of Thanos in which villains like Proxima Midnight and Corvus Glavie are in, which are hella-nasty, using Danger Sense against you. Awesome!