Protection just became playable in expert true solo, instead of being mostly random.

Hard to Ignore, Unflappable, Not Today, Desperate Defense, Never Back Down and Riposte will be a lot more effective, especially against a stage 3 villain.

This will not only be a huge boost to heroes with a basic defense of 3 (like Groot) it will also open possibilities with protection for many heroes with a basic defense of 2. Wolverine is an obvious choice, but there are others.

New possibilities for Angel too, who won’t have to rely on his Archangel persona to have a basic 3 defense.

Other multi-form heroes, like Ant-Wan, WASP and Phoenix will benefit from this. Protection is already an attractive option (contrary to most heroes, they don’t have to be in alter-ego to benefit from ‘Perseverance’ as they can always switch in an alternate hero form), but the stronger starting defense will make them a lot more effective in the villain phase.

What is interesting about Ops Room is that it is one of the rarified "spend a counter" cards where each counter does more than a single point of whatever effect it allows. Up there with Command Center. The Douglas, Med Team and The Night Nurse.

Honestly, banking three resources to prevent three damage is pretty okay. Not sure I would include in many decks. But we also get to remove a threat each time we use it while possibly triggering the many '...after taking no damage' cards in Protection? No brainer.

This is the backup that makes sure your Protection deck ticks that one extra damage prevention over the top to justify those upgrades. And swiped some threat at the same time. And Protection is very weak on thwart, so this card exceeds it's cost valuation.

This is an unusual card to add to the solo hero repertoire., allowing a defense-heavy character to dish out damage while thwarting.

With the right characters (Spider-Man, Ghost Spider, Nightcrawler, Silk etc.) this is five damage and five thwarting with an Armored Vest and Innate Reflexes. Not sure on the cost curve for cross ability effects, but 5/5 for 3 feels pretty solid.

In multiplayer, this would likely be even more effective, as your partner could field a range of allies handling numerous contingencies while allowing you to be broadly effective for minimal cost.

Get Their Attention is a continuation of Marvel Champions long-standing tradition of conditional threat removal in the Protection aspect. We had Not Today!, Jump Flip and True Grit previously.

This is an alternate step for Protection, as the 'quid-pro-quo' of previous cards in this aspect has been removed. Overall, Protection does a low-mid job of handling threat, likely because the idea is that the enemy is attacking rather than scheming, so there are more opportunities to thwart a reduced number of threat.

I guess we just found the automatic include for any Protection deck.

Seriously though? A 2ER bump of +1 to DEF that you can guarantee is in your starting hand? Wtf is happening at Fantasy Flight?

I am a HUGE fan of Spider-Man (Peter Parker) and especially Ghost-Spider protection decks. Ghost-Spider taught me how a hero can literally live in the defense during the Villain phase. With Armored Vest, you will get a +2 bonus to already impressive 3DEF characters, which nearly negates Villain damage in the early to mid game.

And I cannot stress enough how powerful the 'Starting' keyword can potentially be. We spend thousands of words in our deck write-ups describing how to handle a mulligan to get the right hand. Now we can guarantee certain cards? And one of them is a +1 to defense for 2ER? I'm frankly astounded they didn't overcost this card for that feature.

I probably shouldn't have put that out in the universe, now 'Starting' cards will be 3ER minimum.

That said, this isn't a silver bullet. Spending your exhaust to block damage can obviously be a detriment, so for the "Actually..." crowd, let me make clear that I am simply advocating that if you're going to build a deck around your DEF stat, Innate Reflexes is clearly a 'must-have'. I honestly think it's now an auto-include in any Protection deck.

And I love it.