Marvel OverPower Mission Control (1996) Review
If you found this because an eBay listing said “Marvel OverPower Mission Control Choose Your Card S” and you wanted to know what that meant, the short version is that two different things got stuck together in one title, and only one of them is a product.
Choose Your Card is not a mechanic
There is no Choose Your Card in OverPower. No card, no keyword, no rule. It is a seller format: the listing shows one photo, and a dropdown lets you pick which individual card you are buying from a list of what is in stock. The trailing S is almost always Singles, cut off by a marketplace title length limit.
This matters because that truncated phrase has been copied into enough listings and enough write-ups that it now reads like part of the game. It is not. If you are shopping, a Choose Your Card listing simply means you are buying singles rather than a sealed pack, and the useful question is which specific card you want and what condition it is in.
What Mission Control actually is
Mission Control is an expansion for Marvel OverPower, the collectible card game Fleer launched in 1995 for two players at around an hour a game. Mission Control arrived in early 1996, making it one of the earliest expansions the system got, and its contribution to the game was the Event card.
Event cards are unusual because they are played between battles rather than during them. In a game whose entire rhythm is attack and defend inside a fight, a card type that only functions in the gaps is a genuine structural addition rather than a power bump. That is the single fact worth knowing about this expansion, and it is the thing most listings and most write-ups leave out.
The system underneath, because the expansion means nothing without it
OverPower is worth understanding before deciding whether Mission Control is interesting, because an Event card is only as good as the turn structure it sits in.
A deck is four characters plus fifty-one other cards. Three of those characters go on your front line and one is held in reserve. Every character carries a power grid, originally Energy, Fighting and Strength, with Intellect added later when the DC set arrived.
The rest of the deck is built from a handful of types. Power cards are numbered one to eight in a given type and can be spent for attack or for defense, which is the core tension of the game: every card you throw is a card you cannot block with. Special cards are locked to one named character, with some printed as Any Hero or Any Character to keep them flexible. Universe cards are general purpose bonuses, and the popular teamwork cards among them count as a level six attack. Tactic cards cover doubleshot and artifact effects. Location cards serve as a homebase or a battlesite, which is to say the same card type covers both where your team lives and where a fight happens. Mission cards are the objective layer, and each player picks a set of seven.
Three ways to win, and two ways to lose a character
The win conditions are the part of OverPower that still reads as clever thirty years on. You can knock the opposing team out entirely, you can complete your own seven missions, or you can defeat all seven of your opponent’s. A game therefore has a fight running and a race running at the same time, and a player who is losing the fight is not necessarily losing the game.
Characters go down two ways. A Cumulative KO is twenty total damage, the straightforward route. A Spectrum KO comes from landing damage across three of the four power types, which means a player who cannot out-damage you can still remove a character by spreading attacks around. Those two clocks running in parallel are why hoarding one type of Power card is a bad habit, and why the card pool has room for cards that do modest damage in an awkward type.
Set Event cards against that and their value becomes clearer. A card type that acts between battles is a card type that acts on the mission race rather than on the fight, in a game where the mission race can win outright.
Where it sits in the line
OverPower ran to a reasonable number of releases, and knowing the shape of the line stops you buying the wrong thing. Catalogued in order, it goes: the Marvel OverPower base set, Powersurge, Mission Control, DC OverPower, IQ OverPower, JLA OverPower, Monumental OverPower, Classic OverPower, Image OverPower and X-Men OverPower.
Mission Control is therefore the second expansion, arriving while the game was still purely Marvel. Everything from DC OverPower onward widens the licence, which is the point at which Intellect joins the power grid and the character pool stops being a Marvel-only proposition. If what you want is the original Marvel flavour of the game, the base set plus Powersurge plus Mission Control is the whole of it, and that is a genuinely small target to complete.
The trap in a singles listing
Here is the thing that catches people buying from a Choose Your Card dropdown, and it is worth a paragraph on its own.
Special cards are locked to one named character. A Special printed for a given hero does nothing in a deck that does not field that hero. Some Specials are printed as Any Hero or Any Character and those are the flexible ones, but the majority are not, and a listing dropdown showing forty card names gives you no indication of which is which. Buying six good-looking Specials for six different characters gets you six cards you cannot legally use together, because a deck only fields four characters in the first place.
Power cards are the opposite case and the reason a beginner lot is cheap: they are generic, numbered one to eight, and every deck wants them. If you are assembling something playable rather than something pretty, buy Power cards in bulk, pick your four characters, and only then go hunting for the Specials that match them.
Buying it now
Two things to sort out before spending.
The first is what you are actually buying. Sealed 1996 packs exist but the pricing on them is driven by scarcity of intact packaging, not by what is inside. Singles are cheap, and a Choose Your Card listing is the normal way they are sold. If there is a particular Event card you want, buy that card. Opening sealed product to find it is the expensive route to the same result.
The second is condition, and it is the one people skip. Fleer cards from this era were glossy, and gloss shows every handling mark under a light. A listing photograph taken flat under a phone torch hides edge wear and corner softening almost completely. On a Choose Your Card listing the photo is usually a stock image of the card face rather than the actual card you will receive, so the condition description in the text is the only thing you have. Read it, and treat a seller who does not give one as a seller who has not looked.
Collectibility, honestly
OverPower never built the sustained secondary market that Magic did. Fleer ran it from 1995, Marvel Interactive took the licence over in 1998, and the line did not survive as a played format. Lazarus Rising Games revived the underlying system in 2024, using Edgar Rice Burroughs and public domain characters rather than licensed superheroes, with further sets announced since. That revival is worth knowing about for two reasons and neither of them is price: it means the ruleset has had a modern pass by people who wanted it to work, and it means anyone who likes the system can play it without hunting thirty year old cardboard.
That is not an argument against collecting it. It is an argument for collecting it for the right reason. The artwork is a clean time capsule of mid nineties Marvel house style, complete sets are achievable on a normal budget precisely because demand is soft, and there is no realistic scenario where a Mission Control common becomes an investment. Buy it because you want the cards.
Verdict
Eight out of ten as an expansion, judged against what a 1996 CCG expansion was expected to do.
Adding a card type that only works between battles is a real design idea rather than a stat increase, and it plays into a win condition structure that already had more going on than most of its contemporaries. What holds it back is everything outside the cards: a game that stopped being supported, a secondary market that never matured, and a product that today is most often encountered through marketplace listings so garbled that people think Choose Your Card is a rule.
For the wider context of where OverPower sits among nineties card games, the collectible card game overview covers the format’s history.
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