So now that we have the list of decks, let’s assign some level of efforts to them.
Clockwork [villain deck]
I honestly have no idea how to handle this deck. Its entirely possible to have it be a big supers slugfest (that was kind of what the original fight looked like) but time travellers have the possibility of leading to interesting mechanics (the Cauldron’s Mistress of Fate basically plays out like Groundhog’s Day, while Marvel Champions’ take on Kang the Conqueror involves the heroes getting split up into different time periods fighting different incarnations of Kang and having to regroup) and I feel like Clockwork warrants at least exploring that possibility.
LOE: High
Jason Quill [hero deck]
There are two paths to take with Jason: play up the nanites or play up the science adventurer. You could go with both, but I would be worried that if you attached mechanics to either, you would leave yourself a bit bare there. I currently have one that goes all in on the nanites, but I think it doesn’t show off enough of Jason’s character and will likely go much more into the science adventurer route with the nanites just being something that are there but don’t have a lot of mechanics around them.
That said, I do kind of want there to be a mechanical hook to Jason in case I ever feel the need to make a deck for the evil version of Jason from the future, that way I can make that villain a riff on Jason’s existing mechanics.
LOE: Medium
Grasscuter One [villain deck]
Bill’s rebranding of Carbine as the mercenary group of the Grasscuters instantly sparked a lot of ideas for me. And I have the basics of a deck already drafted for their leader, Grasscuter One. Currently, there’s an effort among the Playtest Group to make villains for the Vengeance Mode of play (where instead of fighting a single villain, you fight a team of three-to-five villains) that aren’t a pain in the butt and scale horrendously, but Vengeance mode is perfect for relatively one-note villains and I think GC1 qualifies there.
Really, the biggest challenge here is going to be fluff and theming. I have styled GC1 as a former Chin follower and most likely a Charade nemesis, so I’m probably just going to need to run some stuff by Dave to make sure they fit his vision for the followers of Achilles.
LOE: Low
Bonus Round: Environments
Environments are simulantously very easy and very hard. They’re easy in that you can just slap a bunch of mechanics together and call them a deck, and they fall right in line with what already exists out there both canon and fan-created. But they are difficult in that it means they live and die by theming.
And the Menagerie’s fights tended to not matter too much about where they took place at. It says a lot that when I think of strong ideas for environments, a particular museum and an under construction skyscraper come to mind more clearly than anywhere the Menagerie went.
Oakland Cemetery is on the easier end: Ghosts. Lots of ghosts and ghost adjacent things.
St. Lucia Medical is a mixed bag: I can pull some stuff from the Menagerie’s fight with the Trio, some stuff with Silver Streak while he was laid up with the mental whammy put on him, and also cheat in Doctor Liljenquist from CWC. That might be enough, but we’ll see.
Downtown Halcyon is simultaneously too big and too small: so many things that I could include, but so few of them canon. After watching the finale of season four of Young Justice (four years after hearing about how much I should watch the show and I finally watched it over the course of last month) I’m thinking about stealing some ideas and concepts from that to flesh this out a bit. I’ll keep things vague for spoiler reasons, but hopefully I’ll have something to show off in a couple weeks.
That said, if you ever feel the desire to start making custom content for Sentinels, I wholehearted recommend starting with environments.