Despite the fact that I rank among the world’s worst offenders at failing to respond to emails, one of my favorite perks about writing for Metagame.com is the messages that I receive from readers. I suppose it might be different if the letters that I received were derogatory, but a great majority of the email I get is positive, constructive feedback. This makes my rapport with the good people of the Vs. System community quite upbeat and entertaining. It is also a nice source of material for the articles that I write.

I will proudly admit that many of the crazy combos I write about are the products of my own personal brainstorming. To be fair, though, I am only one man. And unless I had been born with the name Tim Batow or Jason Hager, my ideas were bound to have limits. This is where the Metagame.com readers have been a source of invaluable aid in keeping me moving forward. I have often had the opportunity to present deck ideas and combos that were submitted by clever players who wanted to see their ideas come to life.

Over the next few weeks, I will be featuring deck ideas that have been inspired by reader emails. I am hoping that these will be some of the most interesting decks featured on Breaking Ground to date, as I have put a great deal of time and thought into how best to make these ideas work.

Come Visit the Moon and Check Out the Terrigen Mists!

This week’s reader submission comes from Squire Kershner. Squire has been a longtime reader who often emails me with clever ideas and suggestions for upcoming articles. One of his latest brainstorms particularly caught my eye. The Heralds of Galactus set has several cards that have a very strong interaction with cosmic counters and their accompanying effects. The Inhumans team in particular has characters with some of the most amazing cosmic effects that the game has seen. Of course, a lot of these cosmic effects are based off the new cosmic—surge mechanic. This means that, barring any other effects, an Inhumans character with cosmic—surge will not get a cosmic counter unless it isn’t stunned at the start of the recovery phase. The payoff for reaching this point can be tremendous. The difficulty in reaching this point is just about as tremendous.

One trick that the Inhumans have at their disposal is Terragenesis. This ongoing plot twist allows Inhumans to sidestep the normal cosmic—surge requirements by enabling a discard that gives cosmic counters to recovering characters. With this card, Inhumans players can afford to be a bit more aggressive, as they can obtain valuable cosmic counters even if their characters become stunned.

Terragenesis can become an MVP in cosmic Inhumans decks. Characters like Jolen and Nahrees become completely ridiculous when they are always assured of having a cosmic counter while in play. Thing, Rockhead essentially boasts 5-drop stats for the cost of a 4-drop when he has a counter. And if you thought getting hit by Karnak’s effect once was bad, just imagine the brutality of getting hit by it two or three times per game!

Still, as well as Terragenesis supports the Inhumans characters, Squire had a different cosmic character in mind when he emailed his inspired combo to me.

Say hello to Jay Garrick ◊ The Flash

“FLASH! Ah-ahhhhh!”*

The Flash was, in my humble opinion, one of the more impressive cards to come out of Infinite Crisis—especially for Sealed Pack play. With a semi-decent deck, a player can easily shoot for a turn 6 kill in most Sealed formats. In Infinite Crisis Sealed, The Flash was one of the best cards in the set for accomplishing this goal. With even initiatives, a player could send The Flash into an opposing 6-drop for the mutual stun, then recover and ready The Flash to take down an opposing 4- or 5-drop. This two-for-one trade could turn the tide of any match and allow the attacking player to swing with his or her remaining characters for heavy amounts of endurance loss.

Squire recognized that there is an interesting synergy between The Flash and Terragenesis. While The Flash may get -4 ATK and -4 DEF every time he recovers, he could theoretically attack as long as he kept getting stunned (which is where that -4 DEF comes in handy!). When I read this, I thought it was too good an idea to pass up.

My initial draft of the deck utilized some clever combos that would allow The Flash to get the upper hand on any curve deck. One big combo was playing Epic Battle to help ensure that your opponent’s characters would stun The Flash back, thus allowing him to recover and ready. Of course, the +2 ATK he gets from Epic Battle certainly doesn’t hurt! Also, I had the notion to try Superman, Returned in the deck to give The Flash invulnerability for the turn. If you thought watching The Flash take down an entire board by himself was amazing, just imagine how much better it gets when you don’t take any stun endurance loss!

Unfortunately, as happens with many good ideas, I ran into a snag: off-curve decks. While the Epic Battle combo would allow The Flash to run roughshod over most curve decks, it did nothing against off-curve decks like Faces of Evil (which saw a remarkable resurgence at the Columbus $10K). The sad truth is that an off-curve player’s characters won’t be big enough to stun The Flash back. Since The Flash’s power relies on stunning to ready, this was bad news for the prospective combo.

Shoot. I was so close, too!

After my despondency over The Flash’s ineffectiveness against off-curve decks, I had an epiphany in the form of Swan Dive. I have always liked this card and wondered if there was a way to get it to operate more effectively. The answer, it turns out, is that you have to use it combined with The Flash and Terragenesis. This little brainstorm not only turned the off-curve dilemma into an extremely favorable matchup, but it also provided options in curve matchups. With enough copies of Swan Dive, it doesn’t actually matter that The Flash’s ATK and DEF stats are dropping. The fact that he is a 6-drop is enough to ensure that we wreck our opponent’s board!

We’ve got the JSA, we’ve got the Inhumans, and now we’re adding in the Marvel Knights. Just for good measure, we’ll also splash the Secret Six for kicks (you’ll see why shortly). Our four-team combo deck will ensure that whether The Flash is facing characters big or small, he’ll be able to take a “dive” . . . and take out our opponent’s troops.

The Build

We have a plethora of 1-drops to discuss. Obviously, since we are going to be abusing Swan Dive, we’ll be featuring the Marvel Knights team rather prominently. This is certainly not a bad thing for us, as the Marvel Knights have some of the best cards in the game for enabling team-ups. The Marvel Knights 1-drop trio of Dagger, Child of Light; Micro-Chip; and Mikado and Mosha will be a prominent part of our deck. Dagger aids us in getting the amazing Midnight Sons from our deck. Micro-Chip is a potent addition that allows us to reuse our powerful 1-cost plot twists (like Wild Ride, for example). And Mikado and Mosha needs very little explanation; it is quite simply one of the best off-curve control cards in the game.

Joining our Marvel Knights 1-drops will be Fiddler. While he doesn’t have amazing synergy with the deck, he does have some rather decent combos within our build. Also, his free recruit effect and ability to fetch a character card from the KO’d pile can be randomly useful. Our main reason for including the short-lived Secret Six musician, however, is that he gives us an outlet to utilize effects that require having Secret Six characters in play.

Our final 1-drop is Mr. Mxyzptlk, Troublesome Trickster. Given the discard requirements of Terragenesis and some of our other effects, we certainly couldn’t be hurt by having a card that returns to our hand every turn. He is not a high priority, but having Mr. Mxyzptlk later in the game can give us the hand advantage that we need to fuel multiple cosmic counter replenishments.

Since our setup is so important in the early turns, we will usually want to underdrop on turn 2 with a couple of 1-drops. But if we find ourselves in an advantageous position, we might just want to get a 2-drop for our second turn that will give us a chance to control our opponent’s board a bit. For this we have a single copy of Wesley Dodds ◊ The Sandman. On turns when we control the initiative, The Sandman can shut down a large number of our opponent’s options. The duo of Mikado and Mosha and Wesley Dodds can create an almost stone-cold lock on turn 2 regardless of what our opponent plays. Most importantly, our opponent’s character won’t ready for the next turn, so we have one less attacker to worry about.

Turn 3 is when our setup starts to take shape. Black Panther, T’Challa is the centerpiece of many powerful aggressive decks. In our build, though, we are going to use Black Panther, King of Wakanda to find some select equipment cards to help us set up our combo.

Our primary target with Black Panther is Power Gem. Since we can bounce Power Gem back to our hand when the equipped character becomes stunned, it acts as a reusable pump. More importantly, it will usually be in our hand when we decide to bring The Flash into play. Having an equipment card that will give our win condition an extra +3 ATK while attacking a character is just as good as having an ATK pump plot twist. It is important to note, though, that Power Gem’s return-to-hand effect is optional; as long as our opponent doesn’t KO it, Power Gem will give The Flash +3 ATK on every swing.

Our other equipment card is a bit more subtle. Since hidden characters could ruin our plan of having The Flash swing on a bundle of opposing characters, we should have a way to send The Flash’s attacks into the hidden area. Thus, High-Tech Flare Gun is the call. The great thing about this particular equipment is that it is transferable. Once our equipment-fetching king finds us the Flare Gun, we can continuously transfer it to our largest character. If all goes well, it will still be in play when The Flash comes out, and he’ll gain a small ATK boost and the ability to swing at hidden characters.

Turn 4 gives us a couple of choice selections. Our preferred drop here is going to be Nahrees. Against aggressive decks, Nahrees can be quite helpful. Obviously, he is only truly useful once he gets a cosmic counter, but we will have a way of providing him with said counter as early as turn 4. This effectively allows us to negate one attack each turn. How? Let’s go back to Fiddler. Assume that our over-anxious opponent decides to send one of his or her characters after our tiny 1-drop. After the attack becomes legal, we can use Nahrees’s effect on the attacker. Then, we simply KO Fiddler to his own effect. The attacker would normally ready once the defender was removed, but with Nahrees’s effect, we don’t have to worry about that character attacking for the remainder of that turn or the next turn. Sweet!

We’re also going to play a copy of the 4-drop Dewoz. Hopefully, we’ll be able to do a decent amount of damage before The Flash ever hits the board, but we may find ourselves in an unlikely situation where we need to keep our mid-game drops around to attack on turn 6 after The Flash clears the board. Since we will always be recruiting Black Panther in the visible area (as neither of our equipment cards have concealed—optional), we might just have to use Dewoz to move him into the hidden area. This can obviously have a negative impact on our endurance. Still, there will inevitably be situations where we need more attackers to win the game after our attacks with The Flash.

Our final 4-drop is included to give us powerful attack options for several turns. While we control the initiative, Moon Knight is a very formidable 10 ATK / 7 DEF. In that regard, he can be great for following up attacks after The Flash has done his damage. In the event that we are stuck with the odd initiatives, we might not want to play The Flash on turn 6. Fortunately, Moon Knight’s boost allows him to double as a 6-drop in times of need. All in all, Moon Knight is a formidable attacking force that can do a little extra damage for us when we decide to go on the offensive.

Our 5-drop may well be one of the lynchpins of our combo. While we could conceivably stun The Flash multiple times in a turn and still win despite the stun endurance loss, it would be far better for us to have a way to minimize the damage that we take. That’s where Superman, Returned excels. Invulnerability is a powerful mechanic when applied to large characters. The stats of most large characters already decrease the amount of breakthrough endurance loss that they allow when compared to smaller drops. If we remove stun endurance loss from the equation, then the overall loss becomes almost nothing. Consider our deck: If we stun The Flash four times in a given turn (not unlikely considering our build), we would normally take 24 endurance loss. That’s nearly half of our beginning endurance! But with a single activation of Superman, that amount drops to 0 . . . zip . . . nada . . . nothing! He may not be an offensive or defensive dynamo, but Superman is just what we need to make Mr. Garrick a force to be feared.

Since our combo is centered on our 6-drop, you might think that we really don’t need another character at 6. Our other 6-drop, though, is important for reasons besides attacking. Given the importance of certain ongoing plot twists in our deck, Scandal is a reasonable addition to our build. She has the ability to search out any of our Team-Ups, Terragenesis, and ongoing plot twist tech cards we might have (which we undoubtedly will). And, in a pinch, she acts as another replacement 6-drop for those games where we are forced into the odd initiatives. Setup is the key to any good combo deck, and Scandal can provide us with many of the pieces that we need to make our combo go off smoothly.

To quote Jason Grabher-Meyer, our lone 7-drop will probably never see “the light of play.” Still, The Phantom Stranger, Wandering Hero is helpful for several reasons. Just like Mr. Mxyzptlk, The Phantom Stranger can provide us with the means to hand advantage in later turns. While he doesn’t automatically bounce back to our hand like Mxyzptlk, The Phantom Stranger can easily be retrieved by exhausting a couple of characters. Also, JSA is one of the primary teams in our build, so The Phantom Stranger is useful as a power-up. Overall, he’s a solid choice for us.

Moving on to our plot twists, we certainly want the maximum four copies of our theme card, Swan Dive. Since this card puts us solidly into the Marvel Knights team, we also want four copies of Midnight Sons. We’re playing four copies of Dagger, so we might as well play something to fetch with her. In addition, we’re going to include another Team-Up in the form of Extended Family. We don’t have many characters with cosmic counters, but we want to make sure that those we do have get to keep those counters. For Nahrees, Extended Family can give him a counter a full turn early, allowing him to keep some of the bigger threats at bay as early as turn 4. For The Flash, Extended Family can be a failsafe should we miss or lose Terragenesis or run afoul of Scarecrow, Fearmonger. One more thing—Extended Family can team-up our various teams, as well!

ATK pumps will be somewhat important for our combo to go off successfully because we want The Flash to do as much damage as possible. We’ve already mentioned how useful Epic Battle is with The Flash. This global pump helps to ensure that our opponent’s characters will be up to the task of taking down our speedster, thus allowing him to recover and ready for more beats. Another good ATK pump for our deck will be Flying Kick. Since Flying Kick is a turn-based effect, it gives The Flash +3 ATK every time he swings in. This can certainly be valuable for subsequent attacks as our fast man starts to lose his steam. Finally, we are playing a single copy of Mob Mentality. Strictly speaking, this card is not as good as Flying Kick. Both plot twists give +3 ATK, but Flying Kick also provides the bonus of flight. So why do we even want a copy of Mob Mentality? Because it is an ongoing plot twist! This little trait makes it an ATK pump that we can search for with Scandal, giving us insurance that we will have at least one pump available for The Flash.

No Breaking Ground deck would be complete without some search cards. Obviously, the Marvel Knights team simply screams Wild Ride. Ironic that we would play Superman to protect our endurance and then include a plot twist that depletes it. Still, it is a very strong search card that enables us to set up our plays for the endgame combo. That kind of power is worth the investment of a few measly endurance points. Additionally, we have a couple copies of Straight to the Grave. In practical terms, this card will not usually help us hit our character curve (barring us having a copy of Fiddler in play), but it is nevertheless a nice card for us because it gives us easy access to Mr. Mxyzptlk and The Phantom Stranger.

Finally, we round out our plot twist selections with our ongoing plot twist tech. First up is Terragenesis. This card isn’t tech, so to speak, as it is an integral part of our core combo. Still, it is really only useful when we decide to attack with The Flash, so we really only want it in play for one turn. Thankfully, Scandal allows us to play just a single copy and still hit the combo reliably for our kill turn. Another great target for Scandal is Null Time Zone. Going into our attacks with The Flash, we don’t want our speedster slowed down by effects like Finishing Move or Heroic Sacrifice. Null Time Zone gives us a bit of protection from plot twist effects that might keep The Flash out of action. It won’t be a card that we need for every game, but in certain matchups, Null Time Zone can be the one thing that keeps The Flash up to speed.

“Here we are! Born to be kings, we’re the princes of the universe!”** Our cosmic characters are aching for a cosmic combo—let’s show them what we’ve come up with.

The Swan, The Flash, and The People from the Moon (60 cards)

Characters (32)

4 Dagger, Child of Light

2 Fiddler, Isaac Bowin

4 Micro-Chip, Linus Lieberman

1 Mikado and Mosha, Angels of Destruction

1 Mr. Mxyzptlk, Troublesome Trickster

1 Wesley Dodds ◊ The Sandman, Golden Age Gunman

4 Black Panther, King of Wakanda

1 Dewoz, Dark Reflection

1 Moon Knight, Mark Spector

2 Nahrees, The Negative One

4 Superman, Returned

2 Jay Garrick ◊ The Flash, Golden Age Speedster

4 Scandal, Savage Spawn

1 The Phantom Stranger, Wandering Hero

Plot Twists (26)

4 Epic Battle

3 Extended Family, Team-Up

2 Flying Kick

4 Midnight Sons

1 Mob Mentality

1 Null Time Zone

2 Straight to the Grave

4 Swan Dive

1 Terragenesis

4 Wild Ride

Equipment (2)

1 High-Tech Flare Gun

1 Power Gem, Infinity Gem

I suppose it is a foregone conclusion that we will want to take the even initiatives with the deck, though it is certainly possible for the deck to operate effectively on odds because The Flash can recover anytime he becomes stunned, not just while he is attacking. With Epic Battle and The Phantom Stranger to aid him, he should be able to fend off any opposing baddies. Still, we would prefer to have him bringing the hurt on the offensive on turn 6 rather than trying to fight an uphill defensive battle.

Like most Marvel Knights team-up decks, this one wants to get Wild Ride and Midnight Sons online early. To that end, Wild Ride should be your mulligan. Once you have a Marvel Knights character in play, you can flip Midnight Sons and use Wild Ride to find any character in your deck. Straight to the Grave can act as a backup for our search, but it’s only effective when we have Fiddler in play. For the most part, Straight to the Grave is primarily an enabler for us to get our “free” cards (Mr. Mxyzptlk and The Phantom Stranger) into the KO’d pile for our use and abuse.

And that does it. Thanks to Squire Kershner for this week’s great combo idea. I’ll be back next week with another clever combo submitted by another clever reader. If you have a combo that you would like to see featured, send me an email with your ideas. Who knows? Your innovation may be the next deck idea to be featured on Breaking Ground!

* For those who missed the reference, it’s “Flash Gordon” by Queen. I recently got a copy of Queen’s Greatest Hits. Every time I hear this song, I sing out in a very loud voice, “FLASH! Ah-ahhhhh!” As a result, my co-workers have taken such drastic measures as walking the length of the office to avoid having to go past my cubicle.

** Yeah . . . another Queen lyric. Sorry about that. That’s the last one in the article. I promise. Would I lie to you?

Michael Barnes (a.k.a. BigSpooky) is an avid Vs. System player who is a founding member of Team Alternate Win Condition (TAWC). When he isn’t concocting crazy deck ideas that no sane person would think of, he occupies his spare time working as an accountant in Dallas, TX. Any questions, comments, suggestions, or Bohemian Rhapsodies that you might have for Michael can be sent to him at BigSpooky1@hotmail.com.