We saw Vision’s card on the live stream yesterday. Here’s a quick run down an some initial impressions.

First thing to say is that these are my views based on a bit of time for reflection and obviously zero play experience. At a later date I’ll revisit him once I’ve had some table time with him.

Attacks

Man Solar Energy Beam is baller. We are used to seeing “ranged blasters” like Ultron, Captain Marvel or Iron Man rocking range 4 zero cost attacks. But as a beam attack, this looks like a significant upgrade. If you are using him as a ranged blaster, he holds up well in comparison, but for mid-late game he’ll be hitting 2 or more characters with one attack, and he gets a power for each attack, irrespective of if his attack does damage. Also it generates one power for each person under the beam – that’s an incredibly reliable power generation base. This rule is slightly confusing, but if it applied once to the whole action it would use the phrase “attack action”, like in Iron Man’s Friday AI. This is a great, great, base attack.

Synthezoid avenger has more power, but also messes with their dice maths.

4 defense becomes more like 2.5 and 3 becomes significantly worse than 2. It’s brutal.

A lot of Big Attacks are 7 dice. This is seven dice too, but the messing with defence makes it closer to 9 dice. Here’s a comparison at 3 def and 4 def:

Super powers

Vision has the exact same throw as Danver’s Special but at one cheaper power. For me, that’s a best in class throw. His other super power provides a reliable source of power to fuel it.

His spiciest ability is the way he makes up for his poor defenses. His phasing takes one of his defenses to 5 and leaves the other at two. For two power he can switch them round reactively. That’s a big defense.

Affiliation

Honestly, he can fit any of the three affiliations. The most exciting is probably Cabal – generating two power of each target under his beam is nuts. But then switching his phasing for one is really good too. As a high damage character, having access to a reroll makes him a good Wakandan, especially as he doesn’t have a big sink for all the power he is generating.

Move over, Carol

One thing that struck me is that he can be compared to Captain Marvel.

Attacks: his attacks are better. A beam vs rerolls. 4 with rerolls is better than 5 dice (as seen here), but the ability to target more than one character and generate power off all of them really makes up that difference. His big attack costs more, but does a lot more damage, though lacks that oh-so-useful wild Stagger.

Throw: same but cheaper and has more reliable access to power. He can easily move to claim an objective and spend his other action to start turn 2 on 4 power, allowing him to throw and have power left for Rapid Phase

Defense: with binary up, Carol goes to 5 physical def. Vision matches that for no cost. Against energy, Carol has a high base, energy absorption and then the option for Binary – she’s better against energy, no doubt. Against mystical, it’s down to if she has the power to Binary. But she doesn’t have reliable power generation that Vision has. They have the same health, so unless you are expecting a lot of energy attacks, Vision looks better on this measure.

Mobility: exactly the same. M move. Flight. No move and attack power.

Affiliation: both Avengers

Immunities: as well as the poison immunity Carol has, Vision is also immune to bleed.

It would be easy to say that Vision is a straight upgrade to Captain Marvel. He has more reliable power generation, attacks that are better when you factor in his energy generation capabilities, a cheaper identical throw, and defense that is at least comparable. The one thing that might have separated them was their affiliations, but they share the Avengers affiliation.

One place I would definitely take Carol over Vision is in the Origin Bomb scenario. Only having 2 energy defense makes him poor at claiming objectives off others.

I’m hesitant to say that though, but I’m really tempted to. Is this the first straight upgrade in the game? I hope we see a lot more energy attacks coming out that will give a good reason to field Captain Marvel. At least she has a niche, even if it’s quite a specialised niche: blaster that excelled against Energy attacks and a better drop in 25% of scenarios.