Newest review on this is 5 years ago? Damn.

Well, let's see where we're at now.

Cosmo can use this with no penalty at all if you're playing Magik.

We have some more allies who get more value out of each attack like Dust and Two-Gun Kid.

We have Iron Lad who can exhaust another ally to add their matching power to his. Enrage Wasp, play Iron Lad, and he swings for 6 at a time while only taking one consequential damage.

X-men have Team Strike to use a bunch of allies at once without them taking consequential damage.

Cannonball can ignore the consequential damage from this if you have at least 3 aerial cards in your hand.

Fastball Special deals damage equal to the combined ATK of the characters, and it can now be recurred with Dynamic Duo.

It's not a good card to just throw into any deck, but it does have a lot more use than it once did.

The greed lord inside me wishes this card had toughness. On its face this card is.. not great. 5 ER for 4 ER return (2 activations and a block, assuming no counter). If you attack the turn you play him, and the villain attacks you thereafter, you get 4.5 and if you wait a turn cycle before attacking, 5.5. Not great.

That being said.. as others point out, this card is essentially a win-con in decks that can afford to play out a 5 ER do-nothing and sit on it whilst he builds counters.

That scenario is most likely in scenarios where the hero has other forms of survivability, innate or otherwise. Provided you can survive the tempo loss of playing him out early-game, it's a fun card.

Just popping in to say, you know what this card reminds me of? It reminds me of Rain of Arrows from the Lord of the Rings LCG (they both exhaust a character you control with a specific characteristic to deal damage to each enemy engaged with one player). But Bombs Away is much better, because Rain of Arrows only does 1 damage (which is even more inconsequential in LOTR than it is in Marvel Champions) while Bombs Away does a pretty significant amount of damage and helps you win because it damages the villain too.

This is a very small thing, but I wish the action was an attack so it would trigger Bucky's ability for killing minions. Instead, you get an unfortunate anti-synergy where using this to kill minions misses Bucky's ability completely.

That's not to say you shouldn't use it as Bucky though. After all, it can bring down a minion with 5-8 HP so a basic attack from Bucky can finish it off. But it's not quite as consistent as it could be.

Besides that, this is a pretty good card. The initial play to get Captain America's Shield is going to be 3 ER in total. That's between playing this, paying a physical resources, and paying another resources to play the Shield.

For that 3 ER, what you get is:

• +1 DEF
• 1 Retaliate
• The ability to pay 2-ER to deal 4 damage once per turn for the rest of the game.

The last thing does requite a physical resource, but you're playing Leadership which means you better be playing Clarity of Purpose. This should be no problem to fulfill consistently.

3-ER would justify the first two abilities alone, being only 1-ER more than Ronin while letting you have allies. It would also justify the third ability alone because 4 damage every turn trivializes minions for the rest of the game. The fact that you get all these abilities is just a nice bonus.

The weird thing about it is that it's not a very leadership card, and therefore doesn't play well with most Leadership things. If you think about it, this is a Protection card tacked on to an Aggression card, only in Leadership for thematic reasons.

2 thwart with no consequential damage? I don't think we've seen anything like that before. That more than makes up for the acceleration token because you can alternate thwarting the main scheme and thwarting (or attacking) something else every other turn. And him being able to find Dagger (and her turning off Cloak's downside) is just a bonus. I guess whether or not this sees play is a good test of "will people use allies just for their stats."