My own personal Avengers picks are sort of ruining a couple of Marvel tactics games

I love Uatu, the Watcher. I love to reference him in conversations. I like to use him in elaborate Marvel-themed analogies when winning arguments. I love to put him in articles, although he often gets edited out. Uatu is one of my favourite Marvel characters. I am Uatu 4 Life.

Now, if you play Marvel Snap, the collectible card game based on Marvel’s heroes, you’ll know that there’s an Uatu card in there. He’s interesting, too. Uatu comes with one cost, two power, and when he’s in your deck he reveals the right-most location to you at the start so you can plan ahead a little. Uatu’s one of the first cards people generally get to play with, and he speaks in a cool voice when you use him, and the reveal effect is nice and dramatic. But there’s a problem. He’s not a junk card, but he’s a card you should probably move past pretty early on in most cases. There are better cards out there that do more useful things and give you a bit more bang in the early game.

Here is my specific problem, though. As an Uatu mega-fan, I am never going to not use him. And this means that my deck basically has one fewer functional slots than most people’s decks. Call it fan tax: a seat is always reserved for Uatu, and so my other cards have to work around him.

I was discussing this with a friend this week after Eurogamer’s Katharine Castle published a great interview with Jake Solomon, formerly of Firaxis, and the man who lead the team behind Marvel’s Midnight Suns. Like Marvel Snap, Midnight Suns is another Marvel-themed tactics game in which you choose a load-out of your favourite heroes and get in fights. There are cards in play, but you have to consider character placement in 3D levels, rather than at three different locations as in Marvel Snap. You also have a whole other half of the game where your heroes house-share between missions and bicker, watch TV, go on walks and even start a book club.