I've written a few reviews on Legendary expansions. For all intents and purposes, I was done buying for the game, but this one brought me back. What you get: 9 Heroes: 3 Guardians Of The Galaxy, 5 Avengers, 1 Unaligned -Nebula: Probably the least powerful hero in the set, but effective with some strat, and she combos well with Gamora! -Yondu: My favorite art and card-wise of the set. Mid-powered, solid, versatile powers. -Phyla-Vell: very strong. -Adam Warlock: strong set -Quasar: another strong set -Captain Mar-Vell (the Kree dude, not Carol Danvers). With Quasar very shard oriented. -Nova: good set -Moondragon: Danger Sense focused, good theming -Ronan The Accuser: Contest of Champions focused 3 Masterminds (with 2 villain groups) 2 independent Villain groups, 2 Henchmen Groups and 4 Schemes -The Grandmaster (a la Thor Ragnarok), Magus (evil Adam Warlock), The Beyonder -The Black Order (a la Avengers Endgame), The Celestials (AWESOME!) 3 special bystanders (one each). One of them has the cat from the Captain Marvel film. Oh and one cardboard sheet of shards, identical to the Guardians Of The Galaxy expansion. Thoughts: I've been iffy on the last few expansions. I picked up Venom and Revelations and was so-so on both, and thus decided I was pretty much done with this content. What brought me back was that this was an extension of my favorite set: Guardians, and in this I was not disappointed. There's a lot to like here, thematically, mechanically and cumulatively. You have a good combo of MCU and comic book additions. Nebula and Yondu are both welcome newcomers, while Quasar/Mar-Vell and the other cosmic level heroes just work well story-wise with most the other heroes in the game IMO. Art is overall great, especially Yondu and Quasar. Shards return, scaled back in power a bit, and are still a lot of fun, albeit a bit fiddly. Danger Sense returns, a good mechanic from one of the worst expansions, and opens a lot of options. The new mechanic is Contest Of Champions, which, though mainly designed for multiplayer, works fairly well most of the time. We get another rare 7 point uber-Mastermind in The Beyonder -very nice, and The Magus is an engaging challenge. The Black Order and the Celestials are the best optional villain sets in awhile, and really add a pop of unique flavor to your game. Schemes are a good spread: one that works with everything, two character focused, one mechanic focused. Among the better groups of Schemes of late. Overall I recommend this one highly. It's connection to Guardians makes it fell more special, more thoughtful, than most of the other small box exps, and in both art and content it is one of the better ones. It feels cohesive but not too self-contained to merge with the existing roster. I will say that some heroes' reliance on shards means if you put one with four non-shard heroes it may not work as well; conversely using ALL shard heroes skews very powerful in your favor, particularly with some of the OG Guardians. But hey, that's what Epic Beyonder is for! Here is, in my opinion, the ranking of small box expansions among those I own: 1. Guardians Of The Galaxy - still king, Guardians are a blast and THANOS! 2. INTO THE COSMOS - yep, that high! 3. Fantastic 4 - Galactus! 4. Paint The Town Red - Good, but spiders are limited in scope. Moon Knight though! And Mysterio. 5. Ant Man - uneven, but Ultron! And Ant Man himself is great. 6. Captain America 75 - Winter Soldier (and the neat Man Out Of Time) saves a very uneven expansion. 7. Venom (God I bought a lot of these things didn't I...) - Only if you LOVE Venom and Carnage. 8. Revelations - more bad than good, sadly... Hope this helps someone. Have fun deckbuilding!
