Marvel Legendary Game Setup Inspired by the Movie "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings"

Marvel Legendary is a cooperative deck-building game where players each build a team of Marvel heroes to defeat a villain, called the Mastermind. After watching the Marvel movie "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings", we were inspired to design and play a Legendary game based on the movie. To do this, we used heroes and villains from multiple Legendary expansion sets. Finding the right cards for Shang-Chi was easy! Shang-Chi is available as a hero in Legendary’s Secret Wars Volume 2 expansion. There are a couple of options to discuss when choosing the Mastermind.

The main antagonist in the Marvel movie is Shang-Chi’s father, Wenwu Xu. Did you know that Wenwu is an original character created for the Marvel Cinematic Universe? According to this site, Wenwu Xu is a composite character based on the various versions of Shang-Chi’s father in the Marvel comics: Mandarin, Fu Manchu, and Zheng Zu (alternate spelling: Zheng Zhu).

For our movie-inspired game setup, our first choice for the mastermind was the Mandarin along with the Mandarin’s Rings henchmen villain group from Legendary’s Revelations expansion. Keep in mind that these Legendary cards are based on the comics, not the Shang-Chi movie. Thus, the cards depict rings worn on the Mandarin’s fingers. In the Marvel movie, the rings were worn on Wenwu’s arms. Despite this difference from the movie, we still wanted to include the Mandarin’s Rings in our setup. The rings are led by the Mandarin, thus we selected the Mandarin for our Mastermind.

Legendary’s Secret Wars Volume 2 expansion offers an alternative setup, with the Mastermind called "Immortal Emperor Zheng Zhu". This Mastermind leads the K’un-Lun villain group (we already included this villain group in our original setup). Another reason why Shang-Chi versus the Zheng Zhu mastermind and the K’un-Lun villain group is a great choice is that it fits in well with the stories from the Marvel comics.

Thus, here are some other options to set up your Legendary game with Shang-Chi facing off against the Zheng Zhu mastermind:

1. Use our previous setup and simply swap the mastermind from the Mandarin to Zheng Zhu. You would still need the Revelations set if you want to use the Mandarin’s Rings as the henchmen villain group. In this setup, the Mandarin’s Rings would be 3 attack points, so they would be a bit easier to defeat compared to when they are 4 attack points when led by the Mandarin.

2. If you don’t have the Revelations set and are looking for a henchmen villain group instead of the Mandarin’s Rings, we suggest the Hand Ninjas henchmen villain group from the original Legendary base set, or the Ten Rings Fanatics henchmen group from the Marvel Studios Phase 1 base set.

We hope you enjoy these additional ideas to supplement our original post on how to create a Marvel Legendary game based on the Shang-Chi movie. Check out the post linked at the top of this article to find our affiliate links to the core games and expansion sets that we used, as well as strategies for how to help Shang-Chi defeat his father and win the game.

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