Resources

There are a few cards that are almost mandatory. The first is Club Dead, and given that our primary game plan involves flipping this in every game, we’ll be wanting four copies. Slaughter Swamp is the next certain inclusion, turning our relentless deck depletion into a resource to be mined for characters.

Funky’s Big Rat Code is the next shoe-in, providing the obligatory Team-Up and the non-obligatory (but very useful) three-card shot of deck depletion. The last card in common with the original list is Gorilla City, providing a saucy combination of ATK pump and deck depletion to further feed our KO’d pile–dependent effects.

Next, I want to look at the main search card that will be supplementing the deck depletion / Slaughter Swamp strategy. The first option, as Aniodia expected I might suggest, is Straight to the Grave. While it may be true that the original build of the deck would frequently deplete itself enough to use Slaughter Swamp as a “virtual search card,” Straight to the Grave is a big part of why you can afford to skimp on the higher drops in the deck; without it, you lose a lot of the benefit of having relatively techy characters like Asmodeus, Duke of Hell and Blackheart, Son of Mephisto. Rather than running three copies of Gorilla Grodd, Simian Mastermind and being likely to hit one, we can run a copy each of Grodd, Asmodeus, and Blackheart and be likely to have our choice of these very different, very powerful characters. In addition, in a list with a relatively high number of one-of characters, Wake the Dead becomes increasingly tricky to manage as an actual character search card; it only really does its job if a copy of a character you’re running multiples of ends up in the KO’d pile and you don’t have a Slaughter Swamp to get it back. Replacing it with Straight to the Grave should directly improve our chances of hitting our curve.

The other option for our search card is the Secret Society–stamped Mysterious Benefactor. This plot twist allows us to exhaust a Secret Society character to search for a leader card, a category that conveniently includes Dr. Sivana, Gorilla Grodd, and Ultra-Humanite, Evolutionary Antecedent. With a little tweaking, we could certainly run a leader character at each point on the curve to support Mysterious Benefactor, but this would mean running a search card that can only find part of our preferred curve and might often find only second- or third-choice characters. As such, Straight to the Grave will be my recommended search card.

Having added Straight to the Grave, my next inclusion is one that supplements and complements both Straight to the Grave and our location suite. Quadromobile will give us reliable access to the various powerful locations in our deck, while also providing some redundancy when it comes to retrieving character cards from our KO’d pile. The fact that you will frequently get an extra 2 to 4 endurance loss out of the +2 ATK is a pretty nice free bonus on top of that. With the Quadromobiles will come a copy of Checkmate Safe House, providing a location Team-Up that we can Straight to the Grave or Quadromobile for in case we don’t draw Funky’s Big Rat Code.

The last card I want to add is a combat trick, and there are a couple of options here, both from the Underworld team. The first is Black Magic. In this deck, Black Magic is very close to It’s Clobberin’ Time!, with neither restriction being all that troublesome. The second option is Strength of the Grave, which on the positive side has much greater flexibility than Black Magic and greater potential power in the late game. On the negative side . . . Well . . . okay, it’s great; any card that has the potential to slap our opponent with upward of +5 DEF out of nowhere when he or she tries to trade characters is a card I want in my deck. Four copies please.

Final List

Characters

4 Manhunter Clone, Clone of Paul Kirk

4 James Jesse ◊ Trickster, Giovanni Giuseppe

4 Steel Wind, Cyborg Cyclist

4 Dr. Sivana, Thaddeus Bodog Sivana

1 Quakemaster, Robert Coleman

4 Blackout, Master of Darkness

2 Witch Woman, Linda Littletrees

2 Scarecrow, Fearmonger

1 Mephisto, Soulstealer

1 Mephisto, Lord of Hell

1 Gorilla Grodd, Simian Mastermind

1 Asmodeus, Duke of Hell

1 Blackheart, Son of Mephisto

1 Ultra-Humanite, Evolutionary Antecedent

1 Psycho-Pirate, Roger Hayden

Plot Twists

4 Funky’s Big Rat Code

4 Straight to the Grave

4 Strength of the Grave

Locations

4 Club Dead

4 Slaughter Swamp

3 Gorilla City

1 Checkmate Safe House

Equipment

4 Quadromobile

Just in case you can’t get ahold of Straight to the Grave, here’s a quick stab at a version of the deck using Mysterious Benefactor. It takes some advantage of the fact that Mysterious Benefactor can search for a leader of any affiliation, and includes Professor X, Headmaster and Martian Manhunter, J’onn J’onzz.

Characters

4 Manhunter Clone, Clone of Paul Kirk

4 James Jesse ◊ Trickster, Giovanni Giuseppe

3 Steel Wind, Cyborg Cyclist

1 The Wizard, William Zard

4 Dr. Sivana, Thaddeus Bodog Sivana

4 Blackout, Master of Darkness

1 Lex Luthor, Criminal Genius

1 Professor X, Headmaster

2 Scarecrow, Fearmonger

2 Mephisto, Soulstealer

1 Martian Manhunter, J’onn J’onzz

1 Gorilla Grodd, Simian Mastermind

1 Asmodeus, Duke of Hell

1 Blackheart, Son of Mephisto

1 Ultra-Humanite, Evolutionary Antecedent

1 Psycho-Pirate, Roger Hayden

Plot Twists

4 Funky’s Big Rat Code

4 Strength of the Grave

4 Mysterious Benefactor

Locations

4 Club Dead

4 Slaughter Swamp

4 Gorilla City

Equipment

4 Quadromobile

When playing the deck you’ll have a lot to think about. Particularly with the Straight to the Grave version, you may have to get used to planning at least a full turn ahead when it comes to your resources. If you want to use Straight to the Grave to search for a location to get back with Quadromobile to put in your resource row on the next turn, you’ll need to recruit the equipment this turn in order to get the location into your hand during your next recruit step. You will need to be constantly aware of the contents of your KO’d pile in order to stay on top of how much fuel you have for Strength of the Grave; to know if you need to activate Slaughter Swamp and chain Gorilla City to it to have ten cards in your KO’d pile when the Gorilla City activation resolves but before Slaughter Swamp fetches one of those cards back; or any number of other possible timing tricks. You’ll need to think about which cards are the safest to put back into your deck with Club Dead and Strength of the Grave.

In addition, the copious amounts of deck depletion and Straight to the Grave makes it easy to add tech characters, particularly higher up the curve. All in all, this adds up to a deck with a lot going on, a lot of options for tweaking, and a lot to keep tabs on in play. On the positive side, once you get used to keeping track of all these extra factors, I’m sure you’ll enjoy playing with your new undead pals!

If you want your deck to be featured on Deck Clinic, email me with the list at vsdeckclinic@googlemail.com. Try to give me an idea of what you want the deck to do (even if you can’t quite get it to work), and I’ll do my best to smooth out the kinks.

Tom Reeve is a member of the Anglo-Canadian Alliance (like the Rebel Alliance, but with public transport instead of X-Wings) and would-be professional layabout from London, England. While his love of all things ninja has resulted in an arguably unhealthy affinity for the League of Assassins, that particular quirk turned into a healthy plus with the birth of the Silver Age deck Deep Green, with which teammate Ian Vincent took home the Pro Circuit San Francisco trophy to dear old Blighty.