Tag Team: Arthur's Legacy review

Arthur's Legacy is exactly what I want in a Tag Team expansion. Six new fighters with both a healthy mix of complexity and synergy with the first box? Sign me up. Having played with all the new fighters multiple times, no one feels like a flop in the way either the Fey Folk (obscenely weak) or the Golem (boringly straightforward) were. Perfect expansion, no notes. Okay, one note. It's marketed as a standalone expansion, and that's true in the same way you could play Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 with just the Ultimate characters, but would you want to? That's a whole lot of games with the same characters; Vergil with no Zero to have anyone else on his level; and Phoenix Wright with no MODOK assist to protect him. Six characters just isn't enough of a roster when you're playing with 4 every match. But folded into the main game? That's cooking with napalm.

The Green Knight’s whole schtick is that he's more powerful the lower his life is, but his starter card heals him back to full and knocks off 1 max health. In box, he feels like a juggernaut, with only an end-of-the-block-line Merlin tree activation and three of Morgan's cards able to stop it. Otherwise, you're left spinning your wheels until you can do double-digit damage in one round or, more likely, he just beats you to death. But with the full roster, there are more characters with cancels or that are built to just do too much damage (or hard counter an essentially solo fighter) for the Green Knight's value trades to matter. I'm mostly here for all the times I'm going to accidentally cancel Fey Folk's starting card instead of his, and just hand myself an L.

Perceval is the unga-bunga of the set. I know it says he's a 2 complexity to the Dragon’s 1, but that's a lie. His gimmick is that his attacks do damage equal to his power plus the number of his cards you've played, including the attack. So the game plan is to always pick his cards, jamming his attacks later in your deck and his other effects earlier. “But he has a card that only does anything if the two cards before it are his partner’s!” I hear you say. Put it early in your deck, right after his partner's starter card. Even if you never trigger it, it's +1 power for the round. If you ever have a draw where you're forced to take one of his partner's cards, you know where it goes. I avoid talking strategy in my reviews, but that isn't strategy; it's opening the door to letting my sister's particularly smart dog beat me. He's not a character for me, but Tag Team needs more characters like him and Golem if it’s going to get really big.

The Dragon’s more my speed, with his scales working as an interactive resource-management mechanic. Whenever he's successfully attacked, he’s forced to discard his scales to prevent the same amount of damage, keeping any over the damage prevented. And, yeah, you can play him as an uber-simple tank, but you're not going to do well with him. He's got cards that perform better the more scales you have, and cards that cash your scales in for big damage. Properly managing those effects is still relatively simple, but it still requires more thought than “see Perceval card, pick Perceval card”. I look forward to drafting a Dragon and Golem team against Andy and annoying him with how braindead but effective it is.

Morgan’s deck is all cards that only work as hard counters to opponents’ cards, and she has an innate ability to see what your opponent picked before choosing yourself to help with that. It doesn't matter; that still requires actually remembering what's going on in their deck instead of just working off vibes. I'm terrible at Mordred, and I'm terrible at Morgan. I'll eventually win a game with her just because her stuff is so strong when it does hit, but I'm not holding my breath.

Merlin is one of those characters that takes a while to get online, and then turns into a beast. But boy, can things go wrong while you're getting him online. Or even after, if you're an idiot like me. His starter card activates his tokens on the tree, and then moves one, and his other cards generally conditionally do one of the two. Whenever a token reaches the end of a line, it locks in, and he puts a fresh one off his character onto the tree’s center space. Merlin can do a whole lot, and has a whole lot of options, but you can also make terrible mistakes like starting down the direct damage path while you're receiving a beat down for the ages. Not that I've ever done that; that was just an example.

So. Excalibur. You know how some of the support characters in the base game felt more like a power outlet than a character? Excalibur takes that to 11, cause it's just a sword. It gives its partner power, lets them attack, blocks, and cannot die. Instead, it breaks and starts killing its partner. There's a couple of nice effects thrown in there, like triggering unblockable attacks, but mostly it just kills you. Serves you right for breaking Excalibur, jackass. You're why we can't have nice swords.