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I considered building a deck featuring the much-lauded press mechanic. The potential to bring out multiple characters without falling too far off curve presents some unique possibilities, but a straight press deck seemed a little too mainstream for my tastes. Moreover, press is such a powerful mechanic that it will see play in top-tier competitive decks for a long time to come. I decided instead to focus a bit more on the resource disruption theme of the Kree team. Don’t worry, though—there will still be plenty of press goodness in today’s deck!

Resource disruption has been around since the beginning of our esteemed game. Cards like Foiled and Have a Blast! were mainstays of decks that found competitive success in the early days of Vs. System. With the Superman, Man of Steel set, we were introduced to teams that actually thrived on resource hate. The Darkseid’s Elite team gets more powerful for every face-down resource your opponent controls, and the New Gods boast The Source, which is arguably the most powerful resource disruption card in the game. Though neither team has found any significant measure of competitive success, both are unique and fun teams to utilize in casual frameworks.

It seems to me that this may be the crux of the issue. Obviously, resource disruption has the potential to be very potent. If you drop a copy of Bastion or Dr. Doom, Lord of Latveria in your opponent’s resource row, it could be a situation from which your opponent might not recover. On the other hand, there is an equal possibility that you will help rather than hinder your opponent when replacing his or her resources. What if you miss out on Bastion or Dr. Doom and instead hit Savage Beatdown or Enemy of My Enemy? You’ve effectively wasted a card to give your opponent a valuable resource for later turns. Against a reservist deck, resource row hate would never be a winning proposition.

I considered for a while which team would work best in unison with the Kree to achieve a framework where resource row hate was advantageous for our build. I first considered utilizing a mono-Kree build with cards like Night Vision and Hidden Surveillance to help the cause, but it seemed like this idea was doomed simply because it would need multiple cards in place at once to work properly. Next, I naturally looked to Darkseid’s Elite and New Gods for their powerful resource disruption strategies. Once again, I came to the conclusion that neither team had a sufficiently reliable method of controlling the flow of cards that are placed in the resource row. Finally, I considered the possibility of teaming with the Injustice Gang. After all, replacing plot twists in the resource row with more plot twists wouldn’t be a problem if your opponents could never use the plot twists. Still, it seemed to me that the Kree could do better.

I did a bit of reading, going over some of my older articles. Way back in my first article (my submission for “Fix Fred’s Deck”), I mentioned a character named Lonar. This rarely seen New Gods character had a very interesting ability: he could effectively set your opponent’s deck so that you could get your card of choice on top. In unison with The Source, this ability had the potential to be outrageous. But as I said earlier, I wasn’t really ever satisfied with how the New Gods seemed to operate in the Kree framework.

It was shortly after this that I recalled another gem from the Man of Steel set: X-Ray Vision. This card was remarkably similar to Lonar, both in effect and in the fact that neither saw much play. Instead of sacrificing endurance, X-Ray Vision lets you exhaust characters to manipulate your opponent’s deck. Hmmm . . . the Kree excel at putting out multiple characters every turn, and this card exhausts characters to deplete your opponent’s deck? I smell a combo!

Our beloved alien Superman is going to share his X-Ray Vision with a few less beloved aliens—the Kree—to create a resource row menace that is sure to irritate more than a few opponents.

Let’s kick it off with our standard four copies of our featured card. While we won’t ever need more than one copy in play, we should have a few ways to make use of any extra copies that we draw.

Looking at our characters, we’ll start off with Lois Lane, Star Reporter in the 1-drop slot. As many of you may already know, I am a big fan of characters with alternate recruit costs; Lois Lane was one of the first characters that could be recruited without having to spend resource points. Perhaps more importantly, Lois Lane has an effect that is actually relevant. When she hits play, we get to sift through our top cards for a Team Superman character. Basically, Lois Lane will find use at nearly every turn, as her free recruit cost and limited character search are always useful.

For a Kree deck, there is probably no more important slot than the 2-drop. Even though our deck is not totally centered around the press mechanic, we will be playing a lot of 2-drops to support the Kree’s focus on press. Given our deck’s theme, it’s probably no surprise that our first 2-drop is Lieutenant Kona Lor. Looking at this character, there just isn’t anything bad to say. She starts off with an effect that is very helpful for our deck. She also sports an impressive 4 ATK, which is very helpful when we want to swing up the curve. Finally, she has press, making the possibilities for swarming the board much more appealing.

Another key 2-drop is, of course, Dr. Minerva. Any Vs. System player will tell you that a problem with playing any kind of swarm deck is that your hand inevitably gets depleted. But we have a few tricks to deal with that problem. One of these tricks is playing characters that net us extra character cards. At 1, we saw Lois Lane in all her glory. Now we have the Kree equivalent, netting us a Kree card from the top of our deck. In addition, Dr. Minerva also boasts the press mechanic, making her a threat from an offensive perspective as well.

To round out our 2-drops, we have a couple of other Kree “pressers.” Obviously, we would love to play Kona Lor and Dr. Minerva as much as possible, but we cannot rely on those two characters alone to meet our particular 2-drop needs. So, we’ll also play two copies of Captain Att-Lass and a copy of Clumsy Foulup. Unlike our other 2-drops, neither of these characters has an effect that facilitates our deck’s theme. They both do, however, have press. If for no other reason, this makes them playable in our deck.

Our 3-drop star fits the mold of our favored 2-drop. Commander Dylon Cir at 3 is very much like Kona Lor at 2—impressive front-end ATK stats, a relevant effect for our deck, and press. It’s little wonder why we would want the good commander to lead an assault on our opponent. Of course, aggression may not always be the answer for us. In that case, we also have Colonel Yon-Rogg available to us. When our opponent puts a big defensive barrier like Katma Tui or Crystal Frost ◊ Killer Frost in front of us, we might not have the brute strength to break through. In this situation, Yon-Rogg can manipulate our forces to achieve a stun without us even having to attack. You gotta love those advanced military tactics!

Team Superman also has a couple of 3-drop heavy hitters. First is the always-imposing Superman, Red. Without his cosmic counter, Red is a bit small for a 3-drop, but that cosmic effect gives him a substantial boost when we attack with him from the front row. I guess the bottom line is that we play him because he’s an offensive threat. This sentiment is also true of our other 3-drop, Rose ◊ Thorn. Here’s the deal: you never want to play Thorn as a defender. In fact, you are better off just not playing a character than recruiting Thorn, as the combined damage you would take when she defends is greater than simply not having her in play. Of course, press is all about aggressive offensive tactics. What could be more aggressive than a 3-drop who jumps to 7 ATK / 7 DEF while attacking? After we use Thorn to clobber one of our opponent’s big guys, we can use an effect like Stargate to bounce her back to our hand so that she doesn’t become a defensive liability. Neat!

At 4, we start winding down our choices a bit. Presumably, following the standard press play tactics, we won’t be recruiting a 4-drop until turn 5. And with enough search tricks in the deck, we can afford to play only a few 4-drops and still be reasonably sure that we will hit our drops when we need them. First, we have Superman, Clark Kent. The fact that this 4-drop has the name “Superman” makes him playable in our deck (as it supports one of our search cards). In addition, his effect can put our opponents in a position where there is a lack of safe attacks that they can effectively make. Superman is a match for most other 4-drops and often big enough to stymie opposing 2- and 3-drops. With a little strategy, we can reduce our opponent’s attacks to near ineffectiveness.

Our 4-drop Kree character is none other than Admiral Galen Kor. It almost seems unfair to have a card that gets bigger for every character that we recruit in a turn, especially when we are playing a press deck. Galen Kor already has respectable stats at 6 ATK / 8 DEF, and when you factor in the fact that the Admiral can easily reach 12 or 13 ATK in the later turns, he seems positively broken. Never mind the fact that we also have a ton of other characters on the board!

We have a couple of strategic choices for 5-drops that will supplement our deck’s attack strength (if not our resource disruption theme). Our first 5-drop choice is the Kree curve-hater himself, Shatterax. Against a curve deck, two facts will usually be true: our characters will often be attacking and defending up the curve, and we will be recruiting more characters than our opponent will in the late turns. Shatterax allows our characters to benefit from both of these facts, giving the characters we recruit in a turn a +2 ATK boost when in combat with a character of greater cost. This tends to make up for the ATK disparity that comes from the Kree not following the established curve. It really is unfair when we can recruit several smaller characters that are just as big as our opponent’s larger ones.

Our other 5-drop helps us deal with hidden threats. Korath the Pursuer is another great Kree press character for our lineup. Not only does he boast decent stats and flight, but he also enables our team to attack our opponent’s hidden characters. Obviously, this won’t be useful in every matchup, but against a hidden Merlyn, Deadly Archer or Ahmed Samsarra, Korath can be the difference between total board dominance and swift and certain destruction.

We will usually want to underdrop on turn 6, but in the rare case that we actually want to follow the curve, we have Superman, Kal-El. In a deck with lots of small characters, having the ability to give them reinforcement and invulnerability can be invaluable. In addition, Superman’s ability pretty much forces our opponents to attack him before they deal with any of our other characters. Given his size, this will usually mean a stunback on our opponent’s attacker. With a few defensive tricks or power-ups, we can potentially force a one-sided stun, leaving our 6-drop ready to deal with any additional attackers our opponents might have.

For the most part, we probably won’t have too many games where we go past turn 6. In the unlikely event that this does happen, though, we have a very potent finisher in the form of Ronan the Accuser, Supreme Public Accuser. This guy is so much fun! Nothing causes an opponent more pain and frustration than replacing all of his or her valuable face-up resources. Against a team like Checkmate or the Inhumans, this effect can be a game ender. Just like all of our replacement effects, Ronan the Accuser does have the potential to help our opponents more than hurt them by giving them access to extra cards, but as my good friend Rian Fike would no doubt say, this risk is well worth the potential reward.

Our plot twists are going to be our fundamental support for the deck. Obviously, if we want the Kree and Team Superman to work well together, we need to have a Team-Up for them. In our build, we’re going to rely on the power of Pressed into Service. This Team-Up can be surprisingly useful, as it will make all of our characters reservists while in the resource row. If we suffer any reciprocal resource row hatred from our opponents, we’ll have a way to ensure that we can get characters out of our resource row. Considering that we will be recruiting many of our characters multiple times, we should have little trouble effectively maintaining our resource row.

On to our character search. The Kree have an excellent location for character searching that we will discuss shortly. Still, we might want to have a little insurance to make certain that we hit our Team Superman drops. Therefore, we will also include a couple copies of Man of Tomorrow. Granted, this card is only useful for finding characters named Superman, but considering that we have Superman for our 3-, 4-, and 6-drops, it can go a long way toward getting our Team Superman characters into play and teamed-up with the Kree.

We briefly mentioned effects that bounce characters back to our hand when we talked about the 3-drop Thorn. When we find that we need to return multiple characters at once, a timely copy of Remnant Fleet could certainly be helpful. Standard game theory suggests that removing our own characters from play is bad strategy, but given the Kree’s ability to restore field presence with the press mechanic, bounce effects like Remnant Fleet can be quite beneficial. With a copy in hand, we can ensure that characters like Lois Lane and Dr. Minerva can be reused to good effect, or that a character like Thorn doesn’t become a defensive liability.

Our final plot twist is an amazing support card for our resource disruption theme. Trapped in the Sciencells has not received much acclaim from the Vs. System community, but it can easily accelerate kills against unsuspecting opponents by one or two turns. With enough effective disruption, a single copy of Trapped in the Sciencells can burn for increasing amounts of endurance each turn. Consider how effective this could be in multiples—we could easily burn our opponents for upwards of 10 endurance loss in each of the later turns. Considering that our opponents only have 50 endurance, a couple of 10-point hits can spell a quick end for them. Of course, we need to be careful that Trapped in the Sciencells doesn’t burn us out, as well!

We’re going to lead with our best foot forward with respect to our locations. Stargate is—in a word—amazing! The goal of any Vs. System player is to find cards that work well in unison with specific strategies. Stargate is a search card that has amazing synergy with the press mechanic. We certainly won’t have enough characters to recruit a fresh compliment of them every turn, so we need effects that can return them to our hand. Stargate not only bounces our characters, but it also gives us a search in the bargain. Consider the potential of a Stargate / Dr. Minerva combo: we return Dr. Minerva to search our deck for a character, then recruit Dr. Minerva again to get a free character with her effect. That’s a brutally efficient combo that can help us hit our curve and keep our hand intact.

Another powerful Kree location that we want to play four copies of is Hala. Consider that we will usually be recruiting multiple characters in the later turns. Hala then becomes an ATK pump for an attacker or defender of our choice. As turns progress, Hala obviously becomes more powerful. While our build may not have as many solid ATK pumps as more aggressive decks, having a reusable pump in Hala gives our build enough strength to contend with just about any deck in the environment.

Moving on, we have a couple of locations to support our resource hate theme. For the Kree, we have Planet Weapon. Here is a card that can really create problems for our opponents. Not only does Planet Weapon supplement our resource hate theme, but it also inflicts damage whenever our opponent replaces a resource. Double duty is welcome in any card, so we will gladly add Planet Weapon to our deck. Also doing double duty is Daily Planet. The building seems like an innocuous home for Metropolis’s finest newspaper, but it is also an adept resource hate card that can effectively aid our deck. First, we can glance at the top cards of our opponent’s deck. If we see anything that can help our opponent, we can get rid of it to prevent further mischief. Second—aided by our knowledge of what’s on top—we can use our resource disruption cards to place those cards into our opponent’s resource row. Imagine the cries of anguish from our opponent as we drop Mystical Paralysis into the KO’d pile, then force him or her to place Reign of Terror in the resource row! Hee hee hee!

Our final card is an equipment card that fits our theme to a tee. How good is Reality Gem? While it might be dangerous to give the Kree an Infinity Gem, the fact is that it is the perfect card for our resource hate deck. Unlike many of the newer resource disruption cards, Reality Gem can target any resource. This means that nothing our opponent plays is safe!* Moreover, we can use Reality Gem multiple times. Once the character that Reality Gem is equipped to becomes stunned, the equipment returns to our hand, ready for more shenanigans. Reality Gem doesn’t have the timing versatility that other resource hate cards boast—being playable only during your recruit step—but it makes up for this with a higher threat level than most other resource disruption cards and can see play many times in a single game.

No more questions. No more lies. It’s time for our opponents to see what kind of havoc the Kree and Team Superman can wreak on their resource rows:

This Kree variant probably won’t kill as quickly as other press builds. It might be wise to go with odd initiatives for the deck to shoot for the turn 7 kill. Of course, it’s entirely possible that the Kree press mechanic, combined with the burn of Planet Weapon and Trapped in the Sciencells, will allow you to win much earlier than that. Use judgment when selecting the initiative.

Stargate is probably your strongest mulligan consideration, but it would be rather difficult to give up an opening hand with a Team-Up and a good early curve that would facilitate the use of X-Ray Vision. As potent as resource disruption can be, it’s usually better to have a lock on getting your characters in hand for the late game.

A possible consideration for the deck is The Infamous Seven. You might find that you need to supplement your defensive prospects for the turns when you don’t control the initiative. Since most of the characters in the deck have range, placing them in the back row won’t be a problem. Of course, if you are working on a Golden Age variant of the deck, Cover Fire would probably be a better choice.

To quote the words of the immortal Forrest Gump, “That’s all I got to say about that.” I’m done and gone. I’ll see you back here next week for more extrapolations in deck theory on Breaking Ground!

Michael Barnes (AKA 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 disruption effects that you might have for Michael can be sent to him at BigSpooky1@hotmail.com.