An added bonus to her destruction of protect tiles with red: cascade possibility.
Also, do the destroyed tiles do damage? It says they don’t generate AP, but sometimes we have to guess whether they do harm (see She-Hulk, whose red is working as intended but needs the text rewritten).
Against people who put out strike tiles easily, there may be a case for 5 red, but it’s very situational. On the other hand, she has less HP than Hulk but needs more damage to trigger her yellow – I think that threshold might need some tweaking. I think 5 black is a no-brainier, but I’m not certain 5 yellow is the obvious pick people think it will be.
Regardless, I like the character and the design intent, and look forward to her release.
Also, what happens first, damage or protect destruction. If damage happens first, it will be disappointing to sometimes cast it as a 1-damage shield destroyer.
It seems 5 black is a must for a cheap stun and a somewhat useful black ability.
On defense, 5 yellow seems a no brainer cos people tends to hit harder. I can see the AI will use red regardless how many protect tiles are out there.
On offense though, the only time 5 red is useful is when fighting falcon or bullseye. 3* spidie caps at 4 protect tiles. And I doubt Cap will be able to put more than 3 protect tiles at one time, given most people build him as 3/5/5.
For red, it’s either 3 or 5 covers, 4 is just meh~~
Same for black.
So the viable builds are either 5/5/3 or 3/5/5 imho.
Some math:
8500/695 = 12.23
Normally passive won’t do anything when you got knock out. So potentially CM can take at most 12 hits to generate AP, provided no Fake Healing TM is applied.
LV3: 4 x 12 = 48 red max
LV4: 5 x 12 = 60 red max
LV5: 5 x 12 = 60 red max, 3 x 12 = 36 black max
By the way, does anyone have the art they supposedly sent out?
Let’s see if this works…
I think you’d run her as 5/3/5 if you intended to use her situationally as a protect tile buster (e.g. playing against Spider Man, Bullseye or Falcon- imagine the cascades likely to shake out after busting all of Falcon’s protects!) and 3/5/5 if you intended to use her as an everyday kind of character, mostly as a red and black AP battery who should get triggered even more easily than Hulk.
Personally I think I’d consider using her situationally as a protect tile buster. At the moment we really lack these kind of rock-paper-scissors decisions in choosing which characters to use except maybe for using Falcon against characters who rely on special tiles and using Punisher against characters with stupidly high HP numbers. The only trouble is that there are currently no scary characters with protect tiles to bust. Do you really NEED a special anti-Spidey, anti-Bullseye, anti-Falcon (sort of) character?
If her ability busted strike tiles she’d arguably be top tier straight away (or if it busted countdowns she’d arguably be the best character in PVE hands down). So close…
Edit: oh yeah, and she’s anti-Loki too. Memo: if you’re letting people get off the Patch-Loki combo and you bring Captain Marvel to bust the newly created protect tiles YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG.
Speaking as a frequent victim of overscaled Bullseye, yes we do 
(He just annoys the hell out of me!)
Her yellow passive looks stupid (idea is fine, but the numbers is what makes it silly), taking 275 damage at lvl 40, how often does that happen unless it’s a big hit from a power or critical tile match up. Then at max level 648 damage taken before it procs. Basically means she needs to be hit by a very big power or a critical tile match up before she generates any AP for either red or black.
But if it works like Hulk’s anger by generating multiple times when she takes very big hits, then it may be worth putting points in right now. But from the way it’s worded I don’t think it will proc multiple times if say she was hit by Thor’s call the storm. There’s not much that hits that high on a standard tile match up which for me means that this ability may be used even less than 5% of the time if at all.
Her most useful ability for me has to be her red by far. There’s nothing more annoying than having to remove all of Bullseye’s protect tiles that are scattered everywhere
Call the storm is only 1 hit, even though they changed the way it was phrased.
there’s only one thing that annoys me about bullseye, and that’s the stupid little smirk on his face when you’re fighting him. I take great satisfaction in killing him.
pertaining to the subject at hand, i’d definitely do 5 yellow, after that…kind of depends on where you use her, personally i wanna be able to take out ALL strike tiles…but then again only spidey, bullseye and Falcon are really capable of putting out more than 2 or 3 at a time.
For some reason, there’s ALWAYS a match purple on the board when you’re facing Bullseye. About less than 10% of the time that he doesn’t match purple at all.
Carol’s red for me can be extremely handy for the likes of Falcon, ***Magneto, ***Spider-Man & Loki (when he flips your strike tiles).
Passive looks great. Actives are underwhelming. Should be decent on defense. 5/3/5, will rarely use her black.
I don’t really understand the arguments for 5 red. She already destroys 3 protect tiles at level 3 which means level 5 is only really a counter for falcon and maybe the occasional PVE Bullseye. How many other protect tile creators put out more than 3 with any regularity? I would argue none except falcon as previously mentioned. Plus then you are gimping either of her other abilities for a fifth level which seems incredibly underwhelming at best.
Don’t forget IM 35! He puts out 4 (!) protect tiles at 5 yellow! You really want 5 red for Carol!
Lazy Bullseye coming our way?
In short and after discussing with Phantron to me the only two options are
4/5/4
or
3/5/5.
If you want the red dmg you have to go at least to lvl 4, I think lvl 5 red is a waste. If you have yellow to at least 4 you are basically going to be spamming the skill anyway. However, aside from IM40, Captain Marvel is a red/black battery, as such you are going to want to exploit that as much as possible. The balance of this character is her red. It’s cheap enough but does small enough damage that her yellow isn’t broken.
Her red if not to level 4 will only do about 893 dmg. At the cost of 7 red that’s one of the worst red dmg abilties in the game. On defense the only way Marvel won’t hurt you with her red is if you are running someone with less red AP, there is currently only one, Magneto. If you get at least 1 strike tile out then Psylocke ties, however her red isn’t much to boast either.
Red: Honestly anything more than 4 red is a complete waste of Covers. If you have a spammable spell like Photonic Blasts will be, then destroying 3 protect tiles each casting is probably more than enough, blowing them all up seems like a waste. Of the shield guys, BP, Cap America, Bullseye, Falcon, Spidey, Fury, Mags, IM35 I don’t see any of them other than Bullseye or Falcon getting more than 3 tiles out against you at any one time, IM35 can but i’m not too worried about him.
Black: How can you not want this at level 5. Big dmg, and a 2 turn stun for 9black AP? Sign me up. The draw back is you give the enemy a 53 strength strike tile, okay, that’s fine by me. especially since I can lock down the most damaging target anyway for 2 turns.
Yellow: This will be interesting 695 dmg to activate seems like a lot, but if you get into a fight with Daken, it won’t take much to get this going. Offensively this is a gem. You can run a much better red user with her but have her in ta higher attacking spot and enjoy. With her black being so good, I think you want to have this skill maxed.
Summation. Regardless of build, she is going to be an offensive powerhouse due to her black and feeding someone’s red, but she will be a defensive liability as the AI will use her red early and often doing little to no damage. People will just wait last to attack her as not to trigger her passive. She’s almost the exact opposite of Hulk but with the same kind of passive. Hulk sucks on offesne but great on defense and Captian Marvel will be great on offesne but terrible on defense. All in all not a bad character. She a unique color combination so I won’t complain. I think she will go well in a lot of teams, but if I was to build the most offesnively powerful team with her, you want her I would go, Captain Marvel/Sentry/Daken,C.Mags or Human Torch.
In all instances you want Captain Marvel in the 1 spot so she will tank the red, black and yellow. The reason Sentry is in there is he is the only character that has a good active yellow in third cover position to ensure Captain Marvel tanks it, otherwise I would have said Thor, but then he would tank yellow. Daken would of course pair amazingly with Sentry, but his strike tile generation would at least help make Captain Marvel’s red a little more potent. C. Mags would be a good option because it would give you the rainbow and well, he’s Magneto. Human Torch would actually go well in this because of his insanely powerful red, that if you played this well, could cast it at 8, get back 2, have Marvel generate 5 red, and you are already back to 7, you could cast her red, or wait for one more and cast Fireball again.
Oh my God why!!! That’s one of the top black’s in the game per AP, the only one maybe better is Human Torches or Storms since those are DoT skills, but as a one time use this is tops, and it stuns the guy for 2 turns. All for 1 measly 53 enemy strike tile. Also if you aren’t going to use her black then go 5/4/4. You sill get all the benefits of yellow, and your black will hit harder when you do use it. 3/5/5 I think is the best build, her red be damned, although I do think 4/5/4 can be argued for her since you can at least max out the red damage that way, you just cost yourself the black battery portion of yellow.
4/5/4 is what I was leaning towards, for similar reasons. Black at 5 for more stun is a given. On yellow, generating 5 red towards a 7 AP skill is great. Generating 3 black towards a 9 AP skill is merely useful. If you give up the black AP, you can have a more damaging red firing more often. This doesn’t take into account other people’s skills, of course.
That’s not how Hulk works. Only multiple hits generate multiple tiles. But if you’re up against a strike tile team and they hit you with a berserker rage and then do a double match that cascades into a third match, you just got four tiles out and are probably about to utterly destroy at least one enemy. In a similar case, if Captain Marvel survived all those hits, she’s getting up to 20 red and 12 black for her trouble.
It really seems strange how high her damage trigger is though. About 40% higher than Hulk’s while having about 75% his total health. She can probably get about half as many uses of it before falling over as compared to Hulk.
I just figure you’d be better off running her with a better red user (ideally HT but LCap would be a possibility as well). As long as you do that, 3/5/5 plays better because you don’t care about using her red and the free black AP helps jump start her best active.