by jbabel
Overall good review and I agree with your overall assessment.However:
- The first and most obvious thing is the opening deck of ten cards. The basic super power “kick” which is always available for purchase to all players has a cost of 3 power. However if a player is unlucky and draws all three weaknesses in one of their two opening hands, then they have one turn where they cannot purchase anything unless they get lucky and a two cost card pops up in the line-up. The two cost cards are pretty infrequent so a lot of times a player can do nothing on one of their first two turns.
I feel is offset in that your other hand in a 2-5 split is the 5 power hand. 5 is the magic power number that many of the more versatile cards sit at (locations!). Being able to snag one of these kinds of cards early can sometimes greatly accelerate your deck. And if you got lucky and got a kid flash or lasso in the other turn then so much the better.
and
Secondly there are 5 Location cards in the game which stay in front of a player and allow them to draw cards when they play a certain card type. These cards are extremely powerful and since they are so rare if one player gets one early on in the game it gives them a massive advantage. There is also no way for the other players to destroy or discard these cards from the other players area.
massive advantage is a bit much, but if you dont like them being 'lucky' or swingy try searching these forums, there are a couple nice variants that make locations universal cards (like events in Ascension)
speaking of Ascension:
- Thematically I don’t like the single resource system and the fact that defeated villains go into your deck to help you. I would have much preferred the Ascension style two resource system where defeated villains are simply worth points. That is a minor quibble but one that just always strikes me as odd.
If you want to play a 2 resource deck builder, play Ascension, DC is meant as a lighter, quicker game than Ascension, not Ascension with a DC skin (not to mention faster to set up)
- Lastly the specific heroes are extremely imbalanced. Some of them are really strong, others are mediocre and some are downright terrible. This means that if you pull a weak hero you are already at a huge disadvantage to start the game.
Again there are numerous threads about this but overall most people feel the heroes are pretty balanced. (i dont think you'd find many people who would say they are 'extremely' imbalanced).