About MCHREC

Inspired by EDHREC, a tool for playing the Commander variant of Magic The Gathering, MCHREC tries to offer recommendations for your Marvel Champions deck based on the hero and aspect you choose. MCHREC collects data from the API over at the MarvelCDB, and does some math to determine the most popular and synergistic cards.

What is Marvel Champions?

Marvel Champions is a "Living Card Game" produced by Fantasy Flight Games, in which 1-4 players cooperatively face off against the villains of the Marvel universe by playing as the iconic heroes we know and love.

Your hero deck is constructed - some cards automatically included by playing as your specific hero, with the other cards being chosen by you! For most heroes, you choose one of the game's four "aspects" and fill the remainder of your deck with only cards of your aspect or "basic" universal cards.

Synergy Scores

The synergy score for a card is a measure of how popular a card is for this particular hero, versus other decks of the same aspect.

It's calculated for each card per hero/aspect by first calculating the percentage of decks with the same hero/aspect and that card, and then subtracting the percentage of decks running it on average. A score of -100% synergy means every deck of your aspect runs it, except for decks with your hero. A score of +100% synergy is highly unlikely, but means that every single deck with this hero and aspect runs it, and no others decks do.

Every day MCHREC queries the new decks in the MarvelCDB, keeping about two days behind. To prevent excessive data usage for you, the user, this site displays only cards that have 3% use or higher with the hero/aspect of your choice. If you're terribly interested in seeing the most unpopular cards instead...let me know and perhaps I'll do that in the future!

What about heroes with unique deckbuilding rules?

There are so far two heroes of the game (Adam Warlock and Spider-Woman), who can (and must!) include cards of multiple aspects in their deck. Other heroes (Cyclops, Gamora, Cable, Maria Hill...) abide by a single aspect except for certain types of cards that be drawn from other decks. These heroes change the way that we process the data available to us.

For Spider-Woman, we pull all of the decks of both of her chosen aspects, and for each card we test them against other decks of its own aspect, while basic cards are tested against both sets. For example, a Spider-Woman aggression/justice deck will test aggression card synergy against other aggression decks, while basic cards will be tested against both aggression and justice decks.

For Adam Warlock, we pull every deck, once again testing aspect cards against decks of its own aspect, and basic cards with every deck in the game. This process is slow and inefficient and I could probably improve on the process.

For the other "aspect cheaters", we follow the ordinary hero formula, except each card not matching its deck's aspect is tested against decks of the card's aspect.

What about the Pool aspect?

Given a bit of work, MCHREC is perfectly capable of showing and handling the Pool aspect along with the others we know and love! Everything should work as expected, the only hero that handles a little differently is Adam Warlock.

I chose to code him to display and crunch numbers for all five aspects at once rather than letting you choose the one aspect you're not using. Maybe someday I will revisit his logic. As it stands, this means that popularity (not synergy) scores for Adam will be slightly less than their "true" values. Please disregard cards from your excluded faction.

Support

This website will always remain free to use and ad-free, and I will gladly continue hosting the site indefinitely. If you would like to contribute towards the hosting fees however, I have set up a Buy Me A Coffee page.