The online world is the haven of many casual Vs. System players. Without any shadow of a doubt, casual players are the lifeblood of our game. It is all well and good that the current competitive metagame features a wide variety of deck types, but one need only look to the concoctions that the casual players of our game come up with to see the possibilities present in Vs. System play.
Favorite Cards? Too Many to Mention!
Recently, I found myself reading through a thread on the VSRealms.com forums entitled “What is your favorite card and why?” There were several posts on the thread expressing a wide variety of opinions, including my own. I mentioned my affinity for Garth ◊ Aqualad, as he bears a striking resemblance to a certain Vs. System player I know. I won’t mention his name, but his initials are Tim Batow.*
Reading through the thread, I came across a post by VSRealms.com stalwart WalterKovacs. Well known in the community for his informative and well-documented posts, WalterKovacs is always entertaining. He decided to share his favorite card in the game with the community, and his choice was the wholly unexpected Suicide.
I recalled Suicide from my many, many Marvel Knights drafts nearly two years ago. Back then, he was a decent pick at 4 ATK / 5 DEF—somewhat above average for the 3-drops from the set. In addition, he possessed a rather unique effect that was occasionally relevant and certainly aided in maintaining board advantage. When compared with other 3-drops that are currently popular in Vs. System play, however, Suicide comes up a bit short.
In true fashion, WalterKovacs gave a detailed explanation of the rationale behind his choice. WalterKovacs’s current pet deck is a Secret Society / Underworld / Manhunter deck that has the sole focus of running the opponent out of cards as early as possible. One of the core combos built into the deck is KO’ing Suicide to the effect of Manhunter Giant, then reviving Suicide via his own effect. If you throw in The Fall of Oa and Deadshot, Dead Aim, then every two cards that you discard to bring back Suicide will put six cards from your opponent’s deck into his or her KO’d pile. Not a bad trade when you consider that meeting your objective will give you all of the cards in your deck.
Given my proclivity to play cool and crazy combos, I decided that I wanted to find a way to play this deck myself. WalterKovacs’s build was more focused on finding ways to abuse a single opponent. I, however, had a multiplayer tournament coming up, so I decided to develop a build that would be effective against multiple opponents.
Yes, boys and girls, it’s time for another foray into cutthroat!
How to Deck Out Several Opponents Without Really Trying
Tom Magel, the owner and proprietor of Insanity Cards and Games, has an affinity for alternate formats. One of the things that I love dearly about the tournaments at his shop is that the format changes every week. Since he’s started up the alternating format tournaments, I’ve played in:
● Army only (all character cards must have the version “Army”);
● Odds and evens (all cards in the deck must be odd or even cost);
● Clone wars (only three character names allowed in each deck; all characters are non-unique).
Alternate formats such as these make deckbuilding fun and reward creativity.
Because so many of the players enjoy playing multiplayer games (a.k.a. “cutthroat”), Tom established a set of rules for multiplayer tournaments. In casual games, it’s easy for any one player to become overwhelmed since all of the other players could gang up on a single player. To combat this, multiplayer tournament rules limit the number of attacks on a single player to two per turn. Granted, a player can still be targeted with any number of effects—but with the limited number of attacks that are allowed, each player has a relatively equal chance to win the cutthroat game.
Given the restrictions placed on combat for the upcoming multiplayer tournament, I figured that I might be able to finagle a deck that would normally incur the wrath of every player—specifically, a variant on WalterKovacs’s deck depletion build. Let’s get Suicide to aid the Secret Society and Manhunters in putting every card in our opponents’ decks into their KO’d piles.
The Build
Given the deck’s intended engine focus, we obviously want to put the maximum four copies of Suicide in the deck. In order for our deck to be effective, though, we will also need characters from the Secret Society and Manhunters. One easy fix for this is playing four copies of Manhunter Clone. Not only does this 1-drop bear the stamp of both of these teams, but he also has an effect that is quite relevant to our deck. The fact that he has evasion is also important, as it means it will be exceedingly difficult for our opponents to get rid of him. It also bears mentioning that, under the cutthroat rules, we can evade Manhunter Clone after an attack becomes legal and count it as one of the two allowed attacks each turn.
Also at 1, we’re going to need four copies of Mr. Mxyzptlk, Troublesome Trickster. Considering that we will have a drain on our hand when we use Suicide’s effect, a character that bounces back to our hand each turn can assist us in maintaining enough cards in our hand to accomplish our goal.
Moving to turn 2, we’ve already mentioned the combo with Deadshot, Dead Aim. Characters with alternate recruit costs are always good, but this one is especially potent with our strategy. Also at 2, we have another representative from the Secret Society that helps us with “decking” our opponents. James Jesse ◊ Trickster is very similar in effect to Manhunter Clone. However, Trickster is unique in that he gives the “deck-depletion-stun” effect to all of our characters. With enough stuns on our side of the board (several fueled by evasion), we can put a significant number of cards from opponents’ decks into their KO’d piles each turn.
Our third 2-drop is none other than Poison Ivy, Deadly Rose. It’s a foregone conclusion that we’re including the lovely Miss Isely in our build. There are a number of choice locations that we’ll want for our deck, and Poison Ivy is one of the best cards in the game for fetching those locations. Moreover, the fact that Poison Ivy has the Arkham Inmates team stamp is relevant, as some of our late drops are also from that team.
We’ve already discussed our 3-drop at length, and we’re going to forego playing any 4-drops. Since we have multiple low drops that are extremely important for setting up our game plan, we would rather underdrop on turn 4 than follow the curve. At 5 we have Manhunter Giant, the Manhunters’ decking machine (literally). Once we hit our full combo on turn 5, we should be set to burn through a significant portion of an opponent’s deck with Manhunter Giant and Suicide. Against an opposing deck that already plays deck depletion or draw effects, we could easily deck out an opponent on turn 5. At the very least, though, we should have no trouble sending the entire contents of any opponent’s deck to the KO’d pile by the start of turn 6.
Considering how many of our opponents’ cards we’re going to be sending to the KO’d pile, we should probably find room for a single copy of Mephisto, Soulstealer. There are only a few cards in the game that can remove opposing character cards from the KO’d pile, and Mephisto is probably the most powerful of all of these. Mephisto not only disrupts our opponents’ ability to effectively recur character cards from the KO’d pile, but he actually gains a bonus when we use his effect. With an average of 30 character cards in a deck, Mephisto can become very, very big when we finally do deck out an opponent.
Our 6-drop is primarily in the deck as another search outlet for us—this time for ongoing plot twists. Since one of our key characters for the combo, Deadshot, has the Secret Six team stamp, we can play Scandal to fetch the ongoing plot twists that we need for our combo to work effectively. Scandal can also be an effective attacker should the need arise. To be a searcher for the all-important The Fall of Oa, however, is Scandal’s real calling in our deck.
Our 7-drop is going to be Two-Face, Split Personality. He doesn’t really do anything for our decking theme, but he is a sizable character with the Arkham Inmates team affiliation. His effect might be useful if we have the initiative on turn 7, but the real reason for his inclusion is to facilitate our 8-drop, The Joker, Emperor Joker. While Mephisto and Two-Face give us outlets to win by attacking, The Joker is going to be an absolute victory condition for us.
As far as plot twists go, we’ve already stated that The Fall of Oa is our win condition. Not only is it a tool for decking out our opponents, but it also gives us an amazing source of hand advantage by allowing us to put our deck into our hand.
Our other plot twists will support our deck depletion theme in one fashion or another. Considering that Underworld will be one of our primary teams, we should consider playing four copies of Gravesite. There are pros and cons to playing this card. On one hand, Gravesite does allow our opponents the opportunity to cycle through the cards in their decks to set up optimal hands. On the other, the fact that Gravesite forces our opponents to burn through their decks is also beneficial to us. Besides, Gravesite also allows us to cycle through the cards in our deck, and it gives us a small source of endurance gain too.
Our character complement includes at least two characters from five different teams. It seems only right that we try to get some Team-Ups to get all of these different forces working together. Since we are working toward a deck cycling theme, it’s fitting that we use Funky’s Big Rat Code as our Team-Up; we get all of the benefits of a Team-Up with an additional deck depletion effect. With four copies in our deck, we have the potential to put twelve additional cards from an opponent’s deck into his or her KO’d pile without having to exhaust or KO any of our characters.
Certainly we can’t have a reliable deck without an effective character search card. Fortunately, Secret Society has one of the best in Straight to the Grave. In a perfect world, we would naturally draw into every character that we needed. This will usually not be the case; thus, since we will have plenty of recursion outlets available, we can use Straight to the Grave to find any character that we may need from turn 2 onward.
Our final plot twist gives us a great offensive and defensive boost for the later turns. After we use The Fall of Oa to deplete the deck of our first opponent, we can use the character cards in hand to fuel the Manhunter Giant / Suicide combo to deplete the decks of our remaining opponents. This will undoubtedly put a bunch of character cards into our KO’d pile. From this point, we can use Strength of the Grave to provide ATK and DEF pumps for our characters as needed. Not only can this Underworld plot twist be an amazing source of boost for our characters, it also allows us to replenish our deck. Once we’ve moved our character cards back to our deck, we can exhaust a character to The Fall of Oa to put them back in our hand.
Looking at our locations, we’re going to add a couple more Team-Ups to the mix. Specifically, we’re going to play UN Building. As mentioned earlier, we’ve got five distinct teams in the deck; having a card that can team up three of these teams makes perfect sense. In addition, this is a Team-Up that can be fetched with Poison Ivy's effect.
For our deck to be most effective, we will need more methods of recursion. Certainly Gravesite will allow us to sift through our deck for additional cards, but the downside to this is that we will be forced to pitch cards to the KO’d pile as part of the effect. In addition, we need to have recursion tools to effectively utilize Straight to the Grave. Thus, we’re going to play four copies of Slaughter Swamp and an additional two copies of Soul World. With six character recursion locations, we should have little problem returning character cards from the KO’d pile.
What about other cards that we might want to get back from the KO’d pile? Well, we have yet another tool in Infernal Gateway. This location provides us with the third piece in our loop. Go back to the Strength of the Grave combo that I mentioned earlier. After we have returned all of the character cards to our hand, we can use Infernal Gateway to return Strength of the Grave to our hand. We can even discard three of the character cards that we have in our hand to recur Strength of the Grave, making our combo a true loop.
Suicide and our selection of deck cycling characters have arrived, and they are ready to deplete the decks of all the opponents we face! Let’s take a look at our multiplayer powerhouse:
Characters (34)
4 Manhunter Clone, Clone of Paul Kirk
4 Mr. Mxyzptlk, Troublesome Trickster
4 Deadshot, Dead Aim
4 James Jesse ◊ Trickster, Giovanni Giuseppe
4 Poison Ivy, Deadly Rose
4 Suicide, Chris Daniels
3 Manhunter Giant, Army
1 Mephisto, Soulstealer
4 Scandal, Savage Spawn
1 Two-Face, Split Personality
1 The Joker, Emperor Joker
Plot Twists (16)
4 Gravesite
4 Funky’s Big Rat Code, Team-Up
4 Straight to the Grave
2 Strength of the Grave
2 The Fall of Oa
Locations (10)
2 Infernal Gateway
4 Slaughter Swamp
2 Soul World
2 UN Building, Team-Up
Initiative choice is largely irrelevant, as you generally don’t have the luxury in multiplayer formats to take actions that require initiative. Of course, the deck operates outside of the normal attack and defense framework, so you don’t need to worry too much about whether or not you have the initiative. If you do get the choice, though, you should opt to take the initiative on turn 7. The initiative choice in multiplayer will change depending on how many players are in the game.
A good mulligan condition is probably for Gravesite, as a single copy will allow you to see an extra card every turn. Of course, if you have a strong opening hand with several of the combo pieces, it might be tough to let that go. The best advice I can give is to use good judgment.
For those of you who don’t play much multiplayer, there are certainly options for one-on-one with this deck concept. In his post on VSRealms.com, WalterKovacs gave some neat combo ideas using Skinner or Mark Shaw to facilitate your character discards so that you can set up the aforementioned Strength of the Grave / Infernal Gateway loop. In addition, you could terraform a copy of Planet Weapon into play to force your opponent to lose a resource every turn. With enough ingenuity, it is certainly possible to take this clever combo to a competitive level.
That’s all for this week. Many thanks to WalterKovacs for the combo inspiration. I’ll be back again next week with a look at a Future Foes discard build from the Legion of Super Heroes set. Until then, take care!
*I also mentioned that Barnacle was starting to grow on me. Curse you, Alex Tennet!
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 cutthroat combos that you might have for Michael can be sent to him at BigSpooky1@hotmail.com.