Today’s edition of Deck Clinic features a team close to my heart. (Not as close as the League of Assassins, but what team without ninjas ever could be?) Checkmate has become the team de jour for any just-crazy-enough idea that happens to benefit from easy access to locations, and this deck is no exception.
Submitter: Akugyaku on VsRealms.com
Characters
3 Jacob Lee, Knight
3 Black Thorn, Elizabeth Thorne
2 Sarge Steel, Knight
4 Serifan, Forever People
4 Ahmed Samsarra, White King
3 Invisible Woman, Sue Storm
1 Adrian Chase ◊ Vigilante, Street Justice
1 Commander, Military Leader of New Genesis
1 Metron, Time Traveler
1 Maxwell Lord, Black King
2 Huntress, Reluctant Queen
1 Takion ◊ Highfather, Josh Saunders
1 Sasha Bordeaux, Autonomous Prototype
1 Silver Surfer, Norrin Radd
1 Trigon, The Terrible
Plot Twists
4 Enemy of My Enemy
2 Threat Neutralized
2 Straight to the Grave
3 Revitalize
2 Lanterns in Love
Locations
1 New Genesis
1 Checkmate Armory
4 Brother I Satellite
3 Checkmate Safe House, Team-Up
1 Slaughter Swamp
1 UN Building
2 Brother Eye
2 The Source
1 Rook Control
Equipment
1 Catcher’s Mitt
2 Mobius Chair
Here’s my crazy deck. Move Serifan, Forever People (with cosmic counter) and Invisible Woman, Sue Storm to the hidden area, then use recovery effects on your visible characters. No damage ever! Takion ◊ Highfather, Josh Saunders skips to eight resources, then Silver Surfer, Norrin Radd and Trigon, The Terrible take over.
The concept is pretty simple: prevent early damage through a mix of reinforcement, invulnerability, and recovery effects before recruiting and protecting Takion ◊ Highfather, Josh Saunders on turn 6; skip turn 7; then recruit Silver Surfer, Norrin Radd on turn “7” and keep a tight grip on the initiative for the rest of the game. The finisher of choice for Akugyaku’s original build (if anything is needed on top of Silver Surfer) is Trigon, the Terrible, a huge beater that also allows you to steal all of your opponent’s locations at the start of the combat phase. Trying to accelerate the game while otherwise acting like a stall deck is an interesting concept.
As you may have picked up from my articles on the development of Deep Green, when you have access to a search card core as substantial as the Ahmed Samsarra / Brother I Satellite / Enemy of My Enemy one, you have to take a very different approach to building your curve. More emphasis has to be placed on your key earliest drops, but you can afford to skimp on later ones and run single copies of various, interesting, on-team characters because you always have access to your primary drops via Ahmed searching for Brother I Satellite. Akugyaku’s original build runs along the right lines: single copies of higher drops that can be searched out with Satellites once Ahmed is established, and higher numbers of the lower drops. I do, however, think there are some useful changes that can be made across the curve.
Curve-building for Dummies Kings
1-drops
The New Gods have only a single 1-drop, Soldiers of New Genesis, Army, which isn’t particularly appealing. The Fantastic Four have Invisible Woman, The Invisible Girl, who is probably not worth including without her hubby and A Child Named Valeria. Checkmate has Jacob Lee, Knight, whose alternate recruit cost makes him worth noting. Early drafts of Deep Green contained a copy of Jacob to help make Rook Control work more smoothly, and he may find a place here doing the same job.
2-drops
When building an Ahmed-enabled curve, special consideration needs to be given to the primary off-team 2-drop, as this will determine which characters you can access most easily on turn 4 with an Ahmed-fetched Brother I Satellite. In our case, the 4-drop we’re likely to want is one of the Fantastic Four, Invisible Woman, Sue Storm. As such, if there’s a Fantastic Four 2-drop that supports our game plan, we will want to consider including it. A quick look at the available options suggests She-Thing, Sharon Ventura. She has the 3 ATK / 3 DEF stats I always look for in a 2-drop and an ability that will actually do more to protect our endurance total than might first be suspected. The reason for this is that in Golden Age, one of the most substantial drains on our endurance total is actually not breakthrough endurance loss, but rather equipment like Advanced Hardware and Flamethrower, most notably in High Voltage. While She-Thing can’t prevent our opponent from activating once, she can ensure that our opponent won’t be able to take bites out of our endurance turn after turn. She also prevents a Good Guys opponent from getting maximum use out of Nth Metal and can remove Utility Belts that might interfere with Ahmed Samsarra or our various location payment powers.
On-team, I’m a big fan of Sarge Steel, Knight. Another 3 ATK / 3 DEF character, he doesn’t have the loyalty—reveal of Black Thorn, Elizabeth Thorne. His ability is also useful, whether it’s allowing our character with range to attack without stunning, or standing in front of Invisible Woman, Sue Storm to provide a wall of guaranteed-reinforced defenders.
Looking at the New Gods, Serifan, Forever People is certainly interesting. The global invulnerability he provides to our characters when we’re teamed-up can represent a huge chunk of endurance if we can sustain it. The problem is his tiny stats. At 2 ATK / 2 DEF, he’s unlikely to survive long enough to provide serious benefit against the more aggressive decks in the format. Although we can recover him and put his cosmic counter back with New Genesis, that can get extremely expensive in terms of cards. Vykin, Forever People is also interesting. He provides an alternate route for locking down problematic equipment and is also potentially devastating against the Teen Titans because he is able to lock down characters like Hank Hall ◊ Hawk, Agent of Chaos, Dawn Granger ◊ Dove, Agent of Order, and Tim Drake ◊ Robin, Young Detective. As with Serifan, the difficulty lies in keeping him around long enough, although his stats are better (range and 3 DEF make him substantially more durable than Serifan . . . at least he won’t be taken down unaided by 1-drops).
Turning back to Jacob Lee, he provides fuel for a card that came to mind when trying to think of how best to make use of Vykin and Serifan. The card in question is Children of Forever, which can be played in the recovery phase to return a New Gods character to hand before putting a character card with the Forever People version into play. This lets us put Serifan into play in the recovery phase leading into a late-game turn or deploy Vykin to lock down multiple 1- and 2-drops on turn 4 against Titans, High Voltage, or control and combo decks based around large boards of cheap characters. The difficulty is that we’d need to find a way to draw into Children of Forever reliably. Sadly, Checkmate, Fantastic Four, and New Gods don’t provide any options for searching out plot twists, so for now, that idea will be shelved as too card-intensive and fiddly.
Skipping back to 1-drops for a second, a single copy of Connie Webb, Knight is useful insurance to buffer our chances of hitting Ahmed and turning a Brother I Satellite into both Ahmed and a Checkmate character to fulfill his loyalty—reveal; all at the cost of 1 resource point and one draw. Realistically, she acts as a 2-drop most of the time, as that’s the turn on which you can flip Brother I Satellite to search for her.
3-drops
At 3, Ahmed is the only character we ever want to recruit. I’m a big fan of the “Ahmed or bust” plan, but the New Gods actually give us a peculiar and unique option as a fifth 3-drop. Quite hefty at 4 ATK / 7 DEF (although unable to attack alone), Sturmer, War Dog will earn a slot for a different reason: he can be discarded, along with another card, to search for a New Gods character card with a cost of 6 or higher. While I generally loathe including 3-drops secondary to Ahmed in decks built around him, Sturmer is an interesting exception because he serves double duty as what Ian Vincent likes to call a “walking plot twist.” The fact that he is discarded rather than removed from the game to search for a character means that, with Slaughter Swamp, he can search for multiple characters over the course of a single game (perhaps a copy of Huntress, Reluctant Queen early on, then Silver Surfer or Takion ◊ Highfather later on).
4-drops
Invisible Woman, Sue Storm will stay because her global reinforcement effect will help get us to the later turns. With Serifan currently on the bench, there’s less justification for Commander, Military Leader of New Genesis. Replacing him will be Izaya ◊ Highfather, The Inheritor. He has better stats than Sue Storm does and his built-in recovery effect is powerful. Including Izaya also encourages us to look again at Vykin, as Izaya can recover Vykin at the start of recovery, enabling his payment power. Adrian Chase ◊ Vigilante, Street Justice has a powerful backup ability, but a concealed 4-drop leaves us open to quite significant amounts of breakthrough endurance loss. Elimination Protocol ◊ OMAC Robot, Army has stats as underwhelming as ever, but this deck is already looking like it will have quite substantial discard costs to keep it ticking over, and Brother Eye combined with OMAC Robots provides one route to recovering some hand size. We also need a certain number of Checkmate characters to satisfy Ahmed’s loyalty—reveal.
5-drops
At 5, there are a few intriguing options. The original list includes only Maxwell Lord, Black King and Metron, Time Traveler, but I actually think all of our main teams offer interesting possibilities here. Checkmate obviously gives us Annihilation Protocol ◊ OMAC Robot, Army, which is more fuel for Brother Eye to keep our hand size high. The Fantastic Four give us Thing, Heavy Hitter if we simply want a huge beater, although his loyalty is irritating. Mr. Fantastic, Stretch opens up a whole extra set of options in terms of 1-cost equipment; the most obviously interesting is Personal Force Field, which provides +3 DEF and reinforcement, though Fantasticar and the ability to move Knight Armor are worth remembering. Unfortunately, we’re unlikely to be able to search out 1-cost equipment, so Stretch’s cost-reduction power isn’t likely to be of use. The New Gods provide one other significant option at 5 in Scott Free ◊ Mister Miracle, Escape Artist. Although, as with Metron, he is hampered by loyalty and possesses slightly underwhelming stats, Scott Free’s cosmic power is extremely attractive for a deck aiming to stall out the game.
6-drops
At 6, Takion ◊ Highfather, Josh Saunders is obviously the drop of choice, allowing us to skip straight to 8 resources and Silver Surfer. Huntress, Reluctant Queen will do her usual job of negating plot twists aimed at our characters. There’s one other 6-drop that I want to include, one that I think will be necessary against the other controlling and stall decks in the format: Asmodeus, Duke of Hell, in a cameo appearance from the original Deep Green list, will allow us to choose whether to keep the game on turn “6” for a few turns (against slow decks) or skip straight to turn “8” (against more aggressive decks lacking in 8-drops or higher).
7-drops
At 7, Akugyaku included a token copy of Sasha Bordeaux, Autonomous Prototype. Although Sasha can be searched out reliably, I’m going to bench her for this deck in favor of Thing, The Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Thing. While Sasha usually has a minimal impact on the board, TELBET can almost single-handedly turn around games. If we need for some reason to search out a Checkmate 7-drop, an Annihilation Protocol ◊ OMAC Robot with boost is perfectly serviceable.
8+ drops
At the top end, I have no problem with Surfer. Trigon and Onslaught both seem like decent options at 9, although there is one difficulty in that neither has a team, so we can’t search for them without Straight to the Grave. As we don’t have any conventional card drawing, we run the risk of missing our post-8-drop. While there are no on-team options, Professor X, Mental Master has proved his worth in multiple decks and Dr. Light, Arthur Light provides an amusing possible alternative. However, with the addition of Asmodeus, our game plan essentially splits into two options on turn 6. Against aggressive or swarm decks, we want to kick the game up a turn with Takion ◊ Highfather and overpower decks unprepared to take advantage of that many resources. Against slower, more controlling decks, we now have the ability to keep the effective turn number static, or even drop the effective turn number with Asmodeus and Cosmic Radiation. As such, our second higher drop will be Ghost Rider, Danny Ketch, who is more suited to wrecking aggressive decks.
Looking back over our curve, it seems like we have a potential problem. Our best New Gods 5-drop, Scott Free ◊ Mister Miracle, Escape Artist, has loyalty. Given this, the first draft of the deck will run the full four copies of Vykin, Forever People at the 2-slot, which should combine with Izaya at 4 to give us good odds of being able to make a New Gods character with loyalty on turn 5. While Annihilation Protocol is a very strong character, it’s not at its best in a deck that is primarily defensive. If it turns out that we really need She-Thing’s higher ATK and equipment-removal power, we can take the other approach of moving back to four copies of She-Thing and rebalancing the 4-drops to make it easier to recruit our loyal 5-drops (by moving to two copies each of Invisible Woman and Izaya, for example).
One final thought: If at all possible, we’d like to get a few copies of Mr. Mxyzptlk, Troublesome Trickster into the deck. It looks like we’ll have quite a substantial number of discard costs in the deck, and there’s only so much work that Brother Eye can do.
So, a first draft of our curve:
1 Connie Webb, Knight
2 Mr. Mxyzptlk, Troublesome Trickster
4 Vykin, Forever People
1 Sarge Steel, Knight
4 Ahmed Samsarra, White King
1 Sturmer, War Dog
3 Invisible Woman, Sue Storm
2 Elimination Protocol ◊ OMAC Robot, Army
1 Izaya ◊ Highfather, The Inheritor
2 Annihilation Protocol ◊ OMAC Robot, Army
1 Maxwell Lord, Black King
1 Metron, Time Traveler
1 Scott Free ◊ Mister Miracle, Escape Artist
2 Huntress, Reluctant Queen
1 Takion ◊ Highfather, Josh Saunders
1 Asmodeus, Duke of Hell
1 Thing, The Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Thing
1 Silver Surfer, Norrin Radd
1 Ghost Rider, Danny Ketch
That’s 32 characters, with a couple of caveats: We don’t currently have any character-based 1-drop hate (such as Mikado and Mosha, Angels of Destruction or Roy Harper ◊ Speedy, Mercurial Marksman) and we currently have only 13 Checkmate characters. This is about the minimum we can safely afford to run in a deck based around Ahmed Samsarra, as we will need another Checkmate character in hand to satisfy his loyalty—reveal. While it should be enough, it makes any further cuts of Checkmate characters shaky and will have to be kept in mind if we start changing things later.
Location Selection: Building the Toolbox
Moving on to resources, there are a few cards that I consider essential in an Ahmed-based deck. Brother I Satellite, Checkmate Safe House, Brother Eye, Enemy of My Enemy, and Slaughter Swamp are all irreplaceable, and the single copy of UN Building that was so useful in Deep Green will stay, given the splashed characters and three primary teams.
The next thing we will need is an insurance policy for Ahmed. The most popular insurance card for Ahmed so far has been The Science Spire, but that’s not an option we have available, sadly. We will play The Alley to stop Total Anarchy and Fatality, Flawless Victory from taking us on combat-phase trips to Frowntown, and we already have Huntress to stop targeted plot twists, so we do have some insurance. Given the prevalence of Terra, Tara Markov in Golden Age, however, a single copy each of Dr. Fate’s Tower and Cloak of Nabu will also be necessary. Threat Neutralized is a little underwhelming and takes up a lot of space in the deck, but I’ll keep it in mind for later. New Genesis can allow us to recover with a KO effect on the chain, and Yancy Street can protect all our stunned characters from targeted effects. I consider The Alley a necessity, and New Genesis seems more flexible than Yancy Street, allowing us to trade cards in hand for characters on the board. Plus, the cosmic counter is particularly useful for Scott Free ◊ Mister Miracle.
There are other locations we’ll be including. Rook Control and Coast City provide a powerful pair of effects for forcing our opponents to attack in an order they’re not happy with, as well as providing the option of moving key characters to the hidden area by recruiting Ahmed hidden and switching them over. The Source really has the potential to catch our opponents, stripping out key plot twists on any turn from 3 onward. After we use one, our opponent will probably head too far the other way, playing around more copies of The Source for the rest of the game. That psychological advantage is part of the appeal of the card and means that we won’t actually need to have a second copy in our deck for our opponent to play around it.
Other Resources
As for plot twists, three copies of Enemy of My Enemy will be the starting point. We have a minimum of splashed characters; can team-up easily, using Satellite to hit our drops; and have Sturmer as a supplemental search card. After that, our consideration is a way to ready Takion should we need to do so in the turn 6 recovery phase after using New Genesis, Izaya, or some other recovery effect. The two contenders are Press the Attack and Cosmic Radiation, and without being able to guarantee enough non-stunned characters to run Press the Attack, Cosmic Radiation is it. If Takion actually reaches the recovery phase ready, each copy of Cosmic Radiation we draw lets us put another resource into play, giving us the possibility of skipping straight up to 9 or even 10 resources. On the other side of the fence, against stall decks, we can actually use Cosmic Radiation with Asmodeus to take the effective turn number down. Cosmic Radiation is also useful with Annihilation Protocol and Ahmed, making it a pretty nice fit for the deck as a whole.
Knight Armor, which was included in the original Deep Green deck, will stay for similar reasons; it is a permanent DEF pump that can also prevent stunbacks very efficiently. At the moment, I don’t have any of the recovery plot twists included in the original list, and I’ll have to see how the deck looks as a whole before I get a feel for whether or not they’ll be necessary. A quick look at the list I have so far suggests one immediate change: Metron, Time Traveler for Mr. Fantastic, Stretch. The ability to use Knight Armor on multiple attacks in a turn or move Cloak of Nabu in response to targeted effects seems much stronger than Metron’s cosmic plot twist negation, and Stretch also doesn’t have the problem of loyalty. Also, having Stretch would give us a New God and a member of the Fantastic Four at both the 4- and 5-drop point on the curve.
At the moment, the 2-drop slot is still a little up in the air. Probably the biggest reason for this is that although Invisible Woman, Sue Storm is nominally our primary 4-drop, she isn’t actually significantly better than Izaya. The endurance that Sue Storm saves by preventing some breakthrough (probably not all that much, given our high-DEF characters, Knight Armor, and cards like Coast City to ensure that we can manually reinforce) can also be saved by Izaya recovering an extra character for the next turn. A New Gods 2-drop also gives us earlier access to The Source, which could be important in some matchups. Our flexible approach to the 4-drop, combined with our desire to recruit characters of both teams, indicates that we can run a single copy of the 4-drop we can more often search for with Brother I Satellite, and multiple copies of the other one. This should give us the greatest chances of having our best choice of 4-drop for the situation in which we find ourselves. The only real reason to change this is if we decide that our drop of choice at the 2- and 4-drop slot will always share a team. That is, if we decide that She-Thing with Invisible Woman, Sue Storm, or Vykin with Izaya are just better for our purposes; this is something to keep an eye out for in testing.
At this point, we have enough to go on to put together a first draft of the deck.
First Draft
Characters
1 Connie Webb, Knight
3 Mr. Mxyzptlk, Troublesome Trickster
4 Vykin, Forever People
1 Sarge Steel, Knight
4 Ahmed Samsarra, White King
1 Sturmer, War Dog
3 Invisible Woman, Sue Storm
2 Izaya ◊ Highfather, The Inheritor
1 Elimination Protocol ◊ OMAC Robot, Army
2 Annihilation Protocol ◊ OMAC Robot, Army
1 Maxwell Lord, Black King
1 Mr. Fantastic, Stretch
1 Scott Free ◊ Mister Miracle, Escape Artist
2 Huntress, Reluctant Queen
1 Takion ◊ Highfather, Josh Saunders
1 Asmodeus, Duke of Hell
1 Thing, The Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Thing
1 Silver Surfer, Norrin Radd
1 Ghost Rider, Danny Ketch
Plot Twists
3 Enemy of My Enemy
4 Cosmic Radiation
Locations
4 Brother I Satellite
3 Checkmate Safe House
1 UN Building
2 Brother Eye
1 The Source
1 Slaughter Swamp
1 Coast City
1 Rook Control
1 The Alley
1 New Genesis
1 Dr. Fate’s Tower
Equipment
3 Knight Armor
1 Cloak of Nabu
Check back tomorrow to see what changes come in after some initial testing, some more discussion on the balance of New Gods and Fantastic Four characters, and last but not least, play tips that showcase some of the more interesting interactions in the deck.