Hello, True Believers. This week’s exciting installment of the Deck Clinic will be hosted by me, Jason Hager. For those of you who aren’t familiar with me, I live in Huntington, West Virginia; I’m a college student at Marshall University; and I love this game. After I had some success with strange deck archetypes at the Pro Circuit level, the powers that be (Metagame.com) decided to give me the reins of this article series for a while. I sincerely hope you enjoy the ride.

On to the deck that needs a bit of tweaking. We will start our little experiment with:

Hank Pym’s Healing Touch

Created by JediJames84

4 She-Thing

2 She-Hulk, Jennifer Walters

4 Hank Pym ◊ Yellowjacket

4 Invisible Woman, Sue Storm

2 Medusa, Medusalith Amaquelin

4 Mr. Fantastic, Stretch

1 Thing, Heavy Hitter

4 Iron Man, Invincible

3 Thing, The Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Thing

2 Silver Surfer, Norrin Radd

4 Salvage

4 Tech Upgrade

4 Millennium

4 Signal Flare

3 Antarctic Research Base

4 Medallion of Power

4 Fantasticar

3 Framistat

Total: 60 cards

Overall Intended Strategy

Unlike the Fantasticar decks of old, this deck has a defensive gimmick. The intent is to use Hank Pym with the Medallion of Power to have a character in the hidden area that can easily KO an equipment on itself to recover some of the visible area’s more important fighters. All the while, Pym and his ability (that isn’t team-stamped) ride the bench and wait to turn your beaters into pseudo-Nimrods. That basic strategy is sound. One of the major problems with the old Fantastic Four Bumper Car decks was that they didn’t do anything on off-initiative turns. This new build allows you to have game on defense without having to add cards like Entangle.

However, you are forced to add several very narrow cards to a list that is otherwise focused. When I say narrow, I’m referring to how many different things a card can do for you. The Medallion does a simple job in this deck: it keeps your Hank Pym hidden, and it allows you to recover your all-important 4- and 5-drops, protecting them from KO effects and the natural wear and tear that those high-impact turns create. Teaming up isn’t necessary, as it only affects a few specific card interactions.

Here are the problems:

-          You have to naturally draw Hank Pym by the third turn or forego playing him at all (unless you are willing to under-drop for him, which I do not suggest).

-          The combo that you are forcing down this deck’s throat assumes that the characters that you are recovering are worth the effort. The offensive capabilities of this deck are suspect and are reliant almost entirely on dropping two or three ’Cars on turn 5.

-          Your Avengers characters are at costs 3 and 6, but other than that, you are abandoning all the benefits that team can give you. The Avengers, in my opinion, are worth more attention than that.

-          A card I typically mulligan for, Antarctic Research Base, isn’t fully represented in this deck. (This is true in both the number included and the tricks you can perform with it.)

-          There are far too many copies of the high drops in this deck, given that this team-up gives you the opportunity to play two different search cards that don’t make you lose endurance (Signal Flare and Avengers Assemble!).

-          You are playing a dangerous game—your alternate 5-drop is the same character as your intended 7-drop. It is just not worth the possibility that you would lose Thing, Heavy Hitter when you play Thing, The Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Thing. Would Curve Sentinels be willing to play Magneto, Master of Magnetism if it would KO their Nimrod? No sir. The allure of an 11 ATK/11 DEF alternative is big, but you don’t want your game to end up like the end of the movie Time Cop.

-          You are playing one of the most generic search cards, Tech Upgrade, and not utilizing it to its fullest. There is a bundle of missing equipment cards that would add a lot to the deck’s overall strategy and give you tricks your opponent may not expect.

-          There are no offensive combat pumps (other than power-ups) as tricks. When an opponent gets just 1 DEF bigger, you run the risk of failed attacks or taking a lot of endurance loss trying to use Mr. Fantastic, Stretch to move Framistats all over the board.

-          The Millenniums are dead cards until turn 6 if you miss Hank Pym on turn 3.

-          The 2-drops in this deck are just an afterthought. You will miss this drop very often, which makes me wonder if they are even worth it.

I make a lot of Fantastic Four equipment lists in my spare time, so when I looked over this list, the first thing I did was make a list of all the cards I’d like to have at my disposal. Then, over a friendly game of Ping-Pong, I told Anthony Justice the decklist I was going to be changing to see how close his changes were to the ones I’ve already recorded. His were eerily similar.

This is when I would like everyone reading to scroll back up to the decklist. Look at the numbers of everything included, and think about all the cards both of these teams have to offer. I want you to think about what you would do to this deck. Just imagine that a kid at your local hobby store came up to you with that pile of cards and wanted to take that strategy to a PCQ. He has always loved Hank Pym from the comics, and he wants his Pym Particles to win him an invite. If you were a good Vs. mentor, and you wanted to give him an honest opinion of what would make this deck at least one tier better, what would you say?

Sure, go ahead. I’ll wait on you.

Okay, I’m impatient—let’s compare builds now. When I construct decks, I start with all the cards I want in them, and then I slim the lists down. The current list is 70 cards, and I won’t play a deck that contains anything more than 60, so after a “quick” description, we’ll have to make the cuts. Here is what I came up with:

Hammer-Time

4 Rick Jones

4 Wyatt Wingfoot, Keewazi Adventurer

4 Hank Pym ◊ Yellowjacket

1 Thing, Ben Grimm

1 Thor, Odinson

4 Mr. Fantastic, Stretch

1 Monica Rambeau ◊ Captain Marvel

1 Iron Man, Invincible

1 Hulk, New Fantastic Four

1 Thing, The Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Thing

1 Hercules, Son of Zeus

4 Thor, God of Thunder

1 Silver Surfer, Norrin Radd

28 Characters (2 fewer than in the original decklist)

4 Salvage

4 Tech Upgrade

4 Avengers Assemble!

4 Signal Flare

16 Plot Twists

4 Antarctic Research Base

1 Metropolis

1 Avalon Space Station

1 Pier 4

7 Locations (4 more than in the original decklist)

4 Unstable Molecules

4 The Pogo Plane

4 Mjolnir

2 Medallion of Power

2 Fantasticar

1 Framistat

1 Light Armor

1 Chopping Block

19 Equipment (8 more than original)

Summary: 70 cards, one third of which are equipment (this is too many).

Here is the overall strategy shift:

Characters

1-Drops

None are represented in the original, and that’s not a bad thing. However, I gave the deck another terrific search card in The Pogo Plane. The deck’s preferred 2-drop is now a Fantastic Four 1-drop with the Plane on it. Which 1-drop for Fantastic Four character is best? It’s debatable, but I like Wyatt Wingfoot, Keewazi Adventurer. The real choice is between Invisible Woman, The Invisible Girl and Mr. Wingfoot. One important thing you should notice about the best decks in Vs. is how useful every card becomes as the game goes on. This means that in games in which you miss your 1-drop, it should be good for more than Signal Flare discard fodder even if you draw it on a later turn.

In the original decklist, She-Thing doesn’t satisfy this condition. She is just in there with the hopes of getting her early to hit a nice curve. I feel this is a pipe dream, and I’d rather utilize my 1-drops later as surprise defensive tricks (and working wonders with Avalon Space Station). An extra 1 DEF may not seem like a lot, but it works on attackers too, and you’ll be surprised at how often Wingfoot makes them whiff. Rick Jones, A Hero’s Best Friend, on the other hand, is a guilty pleasure of mine. He is in there for a few reasons, the main one being his interaction with the Pogo Plane. I’m listing only a single team-up, and on turn 5, you can play Rick Jones from your resource row and replace him with a Metropolis that you search for with Stretch’s free Pogo Plane. This is handy in a deck where your row sometimes gets far too crowded with things that need to live there. Rick Jones also exhausts for Tech Upgrade. The 1-drops have a nice reinforcement theme going, which is totally a coincidence.

2-Drops

A 2-drop has to be very good for me to play it. Either the ability it brings has to be phenomenal (Hounds of Ahab, Puppet Master, or Shimmer), or it has to be so important for the deck to hit the curve that it bends over backwards to have a 2-drop to help it dominate turns 3 and 4 (such as the Avengers Reservist deck). Neither character search card can be played on turn 2, so you have to naturally draw any 2-drop that you add to the deck. I think this is a page that should be taken out of the Curve Sentinels playbook. Be okay with missing your 2-drop—your later turns should overcome that handicap.

3-drops

Hank, he’s the man, the reason for this deck. But when is he not good? Against Terra, he’s abysmal. He’ll seldom survive to the point at which his ability matters. While every non-Ricochet 3-drop suffers from this affliction, the most proactive solution that this deck can support is Thing, Ben Grimm. While Ben doesn’t do much against Terra, he does fight her accomplices pretty well, by which I mean Hank Hall ◊ Hawk and Dawn Granger ◊ Dove. This is because of the deck’s ability to search for Framistat (with upgrade) and free equip it to Ben Grimm. This allows him to enter the turn 3 combat as a 6 DEF character that can KO his equipment to stun Dove directly, and on a later turn, he can help you turn off Press the Attack possibilities. This situation also comes up against Boris and Alfred. I’ve been known to play 2-cost equipment in FF equipment decks so that I can throw it at Shimmer before an opponent’s attack step. Ben Grimm also fills the important role of an on-curve Fantastic Four character, so that the Antarctic Research Base will trigger if you equip Thor, Odinson with Mjolnir on turn 4. With the character search cards that this deck has at its disposal, it’s important to have an Avengers character and a Fantastic Four character at each drop point so that you will be more likely to hit your drop despite which search card you draw.

4-Drop

Okay, I lied. You don’t have to alternate at every drop. In fact, I’m daring to play only a single copy of my 4-drop here. A major goal of this deck is to make sure you hit your 4-drop, because Thor, Odinson is the reason that this deck can win. You can even Tech Upgrade for your 4-drop—how cool is that? And come on, he’s a god. Along with the chance he’ll be armed with a hammer, your 4-drop will often be a 10 ATK/7 DEF deity with flight, range, and invulnerability while attacking. On turn 5, when Stretch starts to go nuts with Pogo Planes, you will often get a chance to team-up, get out Pier 4, and drop a second hammer on Thor. If you add a Fantasticar into the mix, you have a character that’s well worth recovering with Hank Pym’s concealed medallion. This situation is much more impressive than 4-drop Invisible Woman, Sue Storm, even if she is packing a Framistat.

Along with the bonus of having a very aggressive character at your disposal, you don’t have to include six total 4-drops, like the original decklist suggests. You can instead play only one copy and put in four copies of Mjolnir. This equipment card doubles as copies of your 4-drop and has an alternate use. You can’t Tech Upgrade for Invisible Woman, you can’t have a second copy of her trigger the Research Base, and you definitely can’t discard Invisible Woman to get your resourceful 8-drop. If you find his additional reveal cost to be a problem in your testing, increase the number of Avengers characters in your list. For now, though, this feels like enough to satisfy him, especially since Rick Jones can be revealed from your resource row, where he prefers to live.

5-drops

Stretch is obviously your preferred 5-drop. However I put a copy of Monica Rambeau ◊ Captain Marvel (a.k.a. Rambo) as a back-up drop if you are in a situation where you have Thor, God of Thunder or Mjolnir and Avengers Assemble! in your hand but have yet to draw either Mr. Fantastic, Stretch; Signal Flare; or a Fantastic Four character to discard to Signal Flare. If you Assemble for her, she will be a 10 ATK/10 DEF, which is nice, and she also allows you to play Unstable Molecules on 4-drop Thor so that he team attack with Rick Jones, ensuring that Thor gets a second massive attack. The problem with Rambo is that if you play the Avengers side of the curve (Hank Pym/Thor/Rambo), then you will not control the Fantastic Four character required to have the Base trigger, and you will also end up with a lot of equipment in your hand that you can’t play. She is not you’re A plan by any means; I’m smelling a cut around this area.

6-Drops

Iron Man is the preferred 6-drop, because of his interactions with equipment. However, just like other drops, Signal Flare only gets him if you’ve teamed up. The best alternative drop is Hulk, New Fantastic Four. While I’m sure many of you took a quick glance at my decklist and thought I was willing to play the Avengers Hulk with only five leaders in my deck, I am not. It is tempting, but because the Fantastic Four version is the best option for 6 that’s not Iron Man, I am not willing to replace my 6-drop with my 7-drop. Again, Time Cop.

7-Drops

Same drill here—the best of both teams that don’t replace important characters. Thing is preferred here, even if he might replace your 3-drop (this situation comes up when people start Finishing Moving your drops above 3, allowing Thing to survive much longer than he would in a typical game). Hercules’s ability is a pipe dream. However, with so many search cards, it’s not unbelievable that when your hand starts to develop as you draw a bunch of cards with Research Base, you might start Assembling or Signaling for Rick Jones to make him trigger. He’s just a big vanilla beater who also happens to be a mythological god.

8-Drops

Silver Surfer, Norrin Radd is preferred here. His ability is superior to Thor’s, but Thor isn’t in this deck so that he can be put on the board. He runs your Avengers Assemble, otherwise the search card would not be worth playing. He’s a leader. While his leader ability is theoretically devastating, I have yet to have it matter in a game. Even our X-Statix Hulk/Thor-8 deck wasn’t really able to use him for the extra ATK bonus. He keeps Mjolnir from turning into a dead card; you can “hammer” for a character to reveal for your Odinson, or you can “hammer” for a power-up. With the possibility of playing out Avalon Space Station, you are able to cycle him through to use all of your Avengers Assemble! for the very late game.

Character Thoughts

Not too shabby. The new list is more efficient, and you are now getting more bang for your buck. Quality over quantity is what I am going for here. One of the most interesting parts of building a two-team deck is deciding which team owns which drop.

1-drop: FF 4 / Avengers 4

2-drop: N/A

3-drop: Avengers 4 / FF 1

4-drop: Avengers 1

5-drop: FF 4 / Avengers 1

6-drop: Avenger 1 / FF 1

7-drop: FF 1 / Avenger 1

8-drop: FF 1 / Avengers 2

(The first listed is the preferred drop.)