Great! I’ll compile a comprehensive list of house rules commonly used by the Marvel Champions community to create a more balanced and enjoyable experience for solo play with one hero. I’ll include official recommendations as well as widely accepted community tweaks that stay close to the core rules.

I’ll get back to you soon with a structured summary of these house rules, citing sources from BoardGameGeek, Reddit, and YouTube.

House Rules for One-Hero Solo Play

Marvel Champions’s rules do allow a single-player game – the Core Set’s solo rules explicitly support “playing by yourself as a single hero”. In practice, one-hero (“true solo”) games run much faster than multiplayer but can feel extremely swingy – one turn you crush the villain, the next you might lose on a bad draw. To make solo one-hero games more consistently challenging (but fair), many players adopt informal tweaks. As one experienced fan noted, since Champions was designed for 2–4 players, “it’s your game – you can play it with any ruleset you like”.

Deck-Building and Hero Tweaks

• Balance all roles: Build your deck to handle damage, thwarting, and defense simultaneously. A single hero must cover every role, so include cards (or allies) for each.
• Limit Allies: Restrict each deck to 3 Allies total (plus any signature ally). (Leadership decks may use up to 5 Allies.) This encourages more varied card choices and prevents over-relying on chump-blocking.
• Boost weak heroes: Some heroes with a 4‑card hand are underpowered solo. A common house rule is to give Hulk and She-Hulk a 5-card hand instead. For Thor, start the game with Asgard already in play (treat it as a setup card); this nets Thor a 5-card hand in hero form. (These changes bring those heroes closer in power to others.)

Gameplay and Difficulty Tweaks

• Remove “Advance” (with tradeoff): Many solo players remove the extra-scheme Advance encounter cards to avoid crippling threat spikes. If you do this, compensate by boosting the villain’s HP by ~5–10 points, since one-hero decks can otherwise burn bosses down too quickly. (This keeps combat tense without the instant‑loss risk.)
• Use appropriate difficulty: The game’s encounter sets have Standard vs Expert modes. For true solo, consider playing on Standard difficulty (or removing Expert cards) if Expert feels overwhelming – there’s no rule against choosing the easier mode for a balanced challenge.
• Surge rules (optional): A popular house rule (not official) is to limit Surges to one per villain phase, preventing chain Surges that can instantly defeat a lone hero. (This isn’t in the rulebook, but many find it makes one-hero games feel less random and more strategic.)

These tweaks keep the core game intact while smoothing out one-hero quirks. For example, raising hand sizes and capping allies directly address the action/economy imbalance noted by reviewers. In short, Marvel Champions can be played true solo (as the rules allow), and these house rules reflect the community consensus for a fair yet still exciting one-hero experience.

Sources: Official rules and community discussions.