Expansion card questions: Can Luke Cage, with toughness, take a large torrent of indirect damage from a villain like Green Goblin in…

The first thing to keep in mind is that while assigning indirect damage, a character cannot be assigned more indirect damage than would cause it to be defeated (page 9 under “Indirect Damage”). This is assessed without accounting for interactions with other abilities. For clarity, I’ll make sure this bolded point is added under the “Indirect Damage” section during the next Rules Reference update.

Concerning Luke Cage specifically, you can only assign an amount of indirect damage to him that is equal to or less than his remaining hit points (it doesn’t matter if he has a tough status card or not). If, for example, you just put Luke Cage into play, he would presumably have 5 hit points remaining. Let’s say you then took 6 indirect damage; you could assign 5 of that indirect damage to Luke Cage, with the remaining 1 point of indirect damage needing to be assigned elsewhere.

However, because Luke Cage just came into play, he’d most likely have a tough status card. As damage is always dealt/assigned/taken in packets, his tough status card would prevent all 5 of the indirect damage assigned to him.