Our first deck fits neatly into the second category; it never quite managed to break out in the Marvel Modern Age format in which it was first tried. Let’s take a look at Morlock evasion.

Silver Age Morlock Evasion

by Devon D. Clark

Characters

4 Tommy, Runaway

4 Tar Baby, Adhesive Ally

3 Leech, Inhibitor

4 The Creeper, Jack Ryder

1 Caliban, Mutant Bloodhound

4 Storm, Leader of the Morlocks

1 Hump, Servant of Masque

4 Marrow, Gene Nation

3 Scaleface, Dragon Lady

1 Callisto, Morlock Queen

Plot Twists
4 Retribution

3 Good Samaritan

3 Meltdown

4 Backs Against the Wall

4 Shrapnel Blast

4 Bloodhound

3 Mutant Massacre

3 War of Attrition

Locations

3 The Hill

One of the forgotten teams of the last Marvel Modern Age format, Morlocks never made the huge splash that the Squadron Supreme or Avengers did. The Morlocks were overshadowed by Squadron Supreme, X-Faces, and Mental at Pro Circuit Atlanta. For my own part, I underrated Morlocks partly because the Modern deck I spent the most time on was a reservist build that could cripple Morlocks by revealing a 2-cost character from the resource row with Anne-Marie Cortez. That would turn off Shrapnel Blast and Backs Against the Wall (the two most powerful tricks in the deck) and leave them needing an unstunned character to use Mutant Massacre in the recovery phase to break out.

Current Silver Age is a completely different animal than Marvel Modern, of course. When you start to look at what Morlocks stand to gain from the increased card pool in Silver Age, the first thing that has to be discussed is staring you in the face: the Spider-Friends, the original evasion team. The Spider-Friends have some interesting characters with evasion and some great plot twists, particularly those focused around protecting their characters.

Although there’s scope for a two-team deck, the Spider-Friends are not well suited to the kind of aggression we’re looking for, and I have a feeling that the deck would drift to a more controlling strategy. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it is a different deck. I’m going to work on a nearly mono-team Morlock build, possibly splashing for particularly useful off-team characters with evasion that can be searched out with Bloodhound.

The original build is aggressive and designed to trade stuns early only when you are sure of gaining board advantage. It selectively evades to ensure a full complement of attacks on your later turns with the initiative. The one thing I don’t want to do is run thirty-two characters and twenty-eight pump cards and try to force aggression and offense at the expense of stability. In Silver Age, the benchmark short-curve aggressive decks (Mexican Hardware Store, Fate Squadron) are very fast indeed, so we need to be careful not to try to build a Morlock Hardware Store and instead focus on the extra unique options provided by the team. In particular, Morlocks can do something neither of those other aggressive decks can do: they can brickwall an attack, most easily on turn 5 or later with Marrow. Brickwalling another aggressive deck with Marrow on turn 5 when your opponent has the initiative should set you up perfectly to attack for the win on turn 6.

Character Selection

The first thing I want to look at is the curve of characters that will provide the backbone for the deck. We will be biasing very strongly toward evasion characters for obvious reasons, as only evasion characters can be searched for with Bloodhound. We also want to make sure we don’t end up with a curve that is likely to have problems actually playing Morlock-stamped resources, which means splashing only for particularly powerful or unique effects.

1-drops

On the surface, Silver Age looks extremely hostile to 1-drops right now; there is plenty of hate flying around. However, 1-drops with evasion are able to dodge much of that hate. In Silver Age, Mikado and Mosha is the most common anti-1-drop tech, and not the much more threatening Roy Harper ◊ Speedy. Needless to say, Mikado is less than impressive against evasion characters; it is only capable of forcing you to evade at a time not of your choosing.

For 1-drops, our starting point is running the bare minimum with four copies of the 2 ATK / 1 DEF (and usually free) Tommy, Runaway. This seems like a missed opportunity; if Electric Eve is good enough for High Voltage, it’s certainly good enough for me, and Eve presents an opportunity to sneak in for a surprising amount of extra damage over the course of the game while enabling earlier and more reliable Shrapnel Blasts and more powerful Retributions. Artie, Arthur Maddicks is less exciting, but the extra value this deck in particular can get from hitting a 1-drop makes a couple of copies worth running. The aim, really, is to spend a resource point on a non-Tommy 1-drop in as many games as reasonably possible (that is, without taking up too much space in the deck). Tommy can come down any turn from 1 onward without disrupting our curve, much like Amelia Voght, Acolyte is often best recruited after turn 2. Also, Bloodhound can be used from turn 2 onward; the 1-slot is the one drop cost we can’t support with a search effect. This is the first serious change from the original list; the Morlocks benefit greatly from keeping cheap characters around into the late game, making cards like Shrapnel Blast and Backs Against the Wall more flexible and increasing the potency of everything from Marrow to the burn effect of The Alley.

The only splash character that I considered here was Rocket Racer, Robert Farrell. However, the need to team-up to use his primary ability makes him somewhat unattractive, as does the relatively high amount of flight in the format that can render his reinforcement power ineffective. Also, the ever-popular Mikado and Mosha is able to force him to evade before an attack on a front row character concludes.

2-drops

At the 2-cost slot, Tar Baby, Adhesive Ally is perfect. A 3 ATK / 3 DEF body with an increasingly relevant ability, Tar Baby can be evaded with anything from Dr. Light’s activated power to a Slaughter Swamp activation on the chain to put a serious crimp in our opponent’s plans. Leech, Inhibitor is smaller and can’t stop Slaughter Swamp or Brother Eye, but he can negate Dr. Light’s activated power, adding Ahmed Samsarra, White King; Merlyn, Deadly Archer; Katma Tui; and Gorilla Grodd (among many others) to his hit list. Turn 2 also gives us our first Spider-Friend option in Black Cat, Master Thief. Her ability to shut out critical plot twists, in particular Enemy of My Enemy, can steal wins from an opponent who suddenly can’t search for characters. On the not-so-good side, Black Cat is very small, and it’s not hard to force her to evade, which turns off her ability. Against curve and short-curve decks, searching for Black Cat is like buying a lottery ticket. Sometimes you’ll have the initiative on turn 2 and will search for and recruit Black Cat, and your opponent will completely fail to make a character for the next few turns. The rest of the time, your opponent will hit his or her curve naturally and all Black Cat will do is cost you 2 endurance a turn for as long as you keep her around.

3-drops

At 3, The Creeper, Jack Ryder is attractive for more than just his card drawing. He’s also the only 3-drop with both evasion and 5 ATK. The top Morlock contender is Caliban, Mutant Bloodhound, who can open up the hidden area against decks packing Hellfire Club characters or effects like Rook Control. The fact that his ability affects your entire team and doesn’t target an opposing character is also helpful, as it means that your access to the hidden area can’t be denied by Cloak of Nabu or the brickwalling of a single attack. The Spider-Friend Ricochet, Johnny Gallo is also interesting, but he suffers from a very low ATK value and an ability that, while useful, can be turned off by stunning him. As such, we can’t rely on it when we most need it: to protect our stunned characters from KO effects.

However, we need to take the environment into account before writing off Ricochet, as in Silver Age there are good reasons to include a copy. The main one is Deep Green. Deep Green is built to brickwall attacks and control the board, and a few cards in particular make Ricochet more attractive: Merlyn, Deadly Archer (although with The Alley in play, we can evade with Merlyn’s ability on the chain to stop our character from being KO’d) and Spider-Man, The Amazing Spider-Man, who can prevent us from getting even a single attack through from turn 7 onward. If there’s a deck we’re unlikely to take down on turn 6, it’s Deep Green, and we need something to allow us to attack after that. Against Deep Green, if we have the odd initiatives, we should be aiming to drop Callisto on 6 and then Ricochet and another 4-drop on 7, preventing Spider-Man from exhausting any of our characters. With the even initiatives, it may be worth under-dropping for Ricochet on turn 6 and then recruiting Callisto on 7. Against the various X-Statix decks, the ability to turn off Zeitgeist also makes Ricochet worth a slot.

4-drops

At the 4-slot, the Spider-Friends have two main interesting options. The first is Spider-Man, Peter Parker. He has average stats, but two abilities that help you stun back on defense and avoid stunning back on offense, and a payment power that can protect your stunned Spider-Friends characters from targeted effects. Unfortunately, that means a team-up, and we are unlikely to want to run four or more copies of a Team-Up to enable one ability. Will O’ The Wisp, Jackson Arvad is eminently more splashable and has an ability that we are otherwise almost completely lacking: flight. One thing we can’t currently do is break up formations to work around reinforcement, and being able to search out Will O’ The Wisp if we need him will be useful. The fact that he should be the size of a 5-drop by the time we attack on turn 6 helps as well.

On-team, we have Hump, Servant of Masque and Storm, Leader of the Morlocks. Both are fine cards, although Hump has seen less play in the past, partly due to his restrictive additional recruit cost and partly because, in the Modern environment, Storm’s ability to prevent evasion endurance loss could stop other aggressive decks from bleeding you to death with evasion and breakthrough endurance loss. That ability to keep your endurance total up against aggressive decks like Mexican Hardware Store and Fate Squadron is the primary reason for making Storm our primary 4-drop, as she takes the pain out of evading to enable Backs Against the Wall and Shrapnel Blast. Also don’t forget that she gives adjacent characters the Morlocks affiliation, thus allowing Ricochet to reinforce, be reinforced, and be targeted by Shrapnel Blast and Retribution or protected with Backs Against the Wall. Hump, Servant of Masque is simply immense, although you won’t be able to recruit him in every game due to his requirement of a Physical discard. He is, however, a great character to drop off-initiative on later turns if you need to under-drop (with the initiative on turn 7 alongside Ricochet against Deep Green, for example). He is also a Physical Mutant himself for Caliban and a Morlock for Bloodhound and the various Morlock-stamped resources.

5-drops

I see no reason for our lone 5-drop to be anything other than Marrow, Gene Nation. In a deck with Shrapnel Blast and cheap evasion characters, Marrow can threaten some quite enormous DEF values on turns when you don’t control the initiative, leaving your opponent with no good options for attacks. Even with only enough stunned characters to play a single copy of Shrapnel Blast, Marrow balloons up to 16 ATK / 15 DEF. The threat of a second, particularly if you’ve been drawing extra cards from effects like The Creeper’s, may be enough to force a team attack, which is itself open to being punished by Backs Against the Wall. White Tiger, Hector Ayala is the only other real option, but he just doesn’t seem to have anything to recommend him over Marrow in a deck dedicated to keeping a full board of characters with evasion around.

6-drops

At 6, if we have the initiative, we generally want to be playing Scaleface, Dragon Lady, whose enormous ATK value and built-in Blind Sided are perfect for a deck that wants to end the game on turn 6. That said, we will still be including a copy of Callisto, Morlock Queen, as making a slightly worse 6-drop is significantly better than making no 6-drop at all. Callisto is also significantly better off-initiative than Scaleface. If we have the odd initiatives, we need a specific set of resources available (at least one Backs Against the Wall, to start with) to avoid taking massive breakthrough. We would be better off recruiting Callisto.

7-drops

And finally, if we’re not pressed for space (unlikely, I know), it would be nice to include a copy of Ape, Metamorph, as there are controlling decks in the format that may resist our best efforts to pound them into mush with a crazy dragon woman; these are exactly the decks against which we may be able to sneak a win with his payment power (Electric Eve and Leech satisfy the Energy requirement). The most likely reason not to include Ape is simply a lack of space. Still, turn 7 shouldn’t be a problem, as we can play our second 6-drop or drop further down the curve for Hump and a 2- or 3-drop.

A first bash at the character roster came out like this:

4 Tommy, Runaway

4 Electric Eve, Live Wire

3 Artie, Arthur Maddicks

4 Tar Baby, Adhesive Ally

3 Leech, Inhibitor

1 Black Cat, Master Thief

4 The Creeper, Jack Ryder

1 Caliban, Mutant Bloodhound

1 Ricochet, Johnny Gallo

3 Storm, Leader of the Morlocks

1 Hump, Servant of Masque

1 Will O’ The Wisp, Jackson Arvad

4 Marrow, Gene Nation

3 Scaleface, Dragon Lady

1 Callisto, Morlock Queen