It’s official. The Arkham Inmates just became competitive.

Ever since the Justice League set came out, there has been buzz about the potential to lock opponents out of the game with Justice League of Arkham by forcing them to empty their hands before they can play a resource.

The deckbuilders of the world put their heads together and figured it out. On Thursday, Josh Wiitanen was happy to talk about the process of putting the deck together, if not to mention a single card that actually resided within the deck.

The Donkey Club is fast positioning itself as the premier deck design think tank in the game of Vs. today. After Crisis came out, Anthony Justice declared that he was going to “go into the tank” for ten days in an effort to build the best deck for Pro Circuit San Francisco. A series of emails buzzed around the team, all of which followed the same sentiment that could be summed up in two words: “I’m in.”

The result is one of the most complicated decks in the game, but one with a huge amount of raw power. Following on from the X-Faces deck of Pro Circuit Atlanta, The Killing Joke goes off curve in a big way, but it benefits from a much wider toolbox of utility characters to choose from.

In essence, the core of the deck revolves around playing Justice League of Arkham enough times on turn 4 or 5 to run an opponent entirely out of cards, and as a consequence, resources. One of the key tools for this is Hope, the innocuous Revenge Squad 1-drop that can flip ongoing plot twists face down at a whim (and the cost of a KO). With Dr. Light, Master of Holograms to get her back once, and Slaughter Swamp to get her back a second time, a lock can be maintained with relative ease. The really fun part comes in the setup.

Of the sixty-card decklist, twenty-five cards allow for some sort of search through the deck. In some cases this will be Poison Ivy, Deadly Rose, who can just fetch locations. In others it will be Enemy of My Enemy, which can only find characters. X-Corp, Amsterdam can only find Team-Ups. Between the three, more or less everything is searchable more or less all of the time. The cards that are fetched will be some combination of those necessary to complete the combo and a toolbox of answers to the various cards in the format that can threaten the deck.

Some of these answers include Phantom Zone, Roy Harper ◊ Speedy, and the ever nifty Mikado and Mosha, but other answers are key elements to the deck’s victory, too. Slaughter Swamp (as many players are just finding out) is not handy only when it’s returning characters to your hand. While it might sound a little counterintuitive for what is, in essence, a discard deck to fill an opponent’s hand, it can be devastating to bounce Dr. Light, Master of Hologram's target in response to the activation. Ultimately, when you have merrily filled up your own KO’d pile by virtue of various cards with discard costs, Deadshot, Floyd Lawton can finish off Dr. Light whenever necessary. But until that point, Slaughter Swamp does double duty in the combo deck.

The discard costs bring us to the final element of the deck and the one that is possibly most responsible for making The Killing Joke as powerful as it is—self recurring characters. Between Mr. Mxyzptlk, Troublesome Trickster and The Phantom Stranger, Wandering Hero, discard costs move from being legitimate costs that genuinely threaten your overall hand size to being simple speed bumps that can be driven over fast enough to launch your vehicle (like in Starsky and Hutch).