I’ll admit it—I was floored by Brian Eugenio’s deck at last weekend’s $10K LA event. The message board responses were, for the most part, the same reaction that I had: “He runs how many characters?” At only 22 characters, the deck sometimes lives and dies on Avalon Space Station, a fact that I neglected to mention in the event coverage because of the 8-drop Head Cold that was assaulting me.*

I’ve actually been itching to write about Avalon for a while, and Eugenio’s deck tipped the scales for me. The Station sees plenty of play in Big and Medium Brotherhood decks, so it’s not like I’m whipping something from the dusty part of the trade binder, as I often enjoy doing. Still, there’s so much more to this unsung hero of a location than what is generally acknowledged.

It permits brilliant abuse of The Exchange. All you need is one high-drop character and a Station with which to bring it back, and you can utilize The Exchange for virtually anything it’s compatible with for the duration of a game. Beyond that, once you need that 7- or 8-drop, you can fish it out and recruit it as normal. The two big challenges of using The Exchange, and thus arguably New Gods as a whole, are addressed here. You get a renewable source of The Exchange’s conditional discard and you get to use it without robbing yourself of a character you’ll need later on. This combo (and a lot of others, plus a great deal of skill) got Eugenio a Top 8 finish in LA.

Essentially, Avalon lets you do two things—it can grant hand advantage and it can help you manage the cards you have. While the former is easy to understand (Brotherhood character + Avalon + some discarded cards = one card becoming two cards every turn), it’s the card management aspect of Avalon that is under-explored in most metagames.

First up, Avalon makes it far easier to power up on a reliable basis. Once you get a second copy of a character in hand, you can execute two power-ups on the first turn you use it by powering up, activating Avalon, and taking it back. You then drop it again for a second +1 ATK/+1 DEF. After that (once the character is in the KO’d pile), you can always bring it back if you need it again. Because any observant opponent is going to notice this option, the character that you can power up becomes a lot less desirable to tangle with. You get a psychological advantage when you’re on defense, and you’ll have more offensive options while attacking.

On top of that, Avalon lets you reuse discard effects on low-drop characters. Marvel Knights gave us some great characters with effects that require the characters to be discarded from the hand. A Golden Age Marvel Knights deck can drop the same Dagger twice to search for two copies of Midnight Sons in the early game, solving the Knights players’ problem of needing to tightly limit use of team stamped cards for fear of getting stuck with dead draws. Corkscrew can slow down games like crazy, effectively cutting two cards from both players’ hands the turn he’s drawn and stripping each player of half of his or her cards whenever an opponent misses a recruit after that point. Even Vanessa Fisk and Tryks can be paired with Avalon—a -2 to an incoming attacker’s ATK or a +2 to all of your concealed characters is often worth the card or two it will cost you in the long run.

Beyond the new hotness, there are several cards from previous sets that work the same way. Arkham in particular benefits from Avalon, with both Harley Quinn and Query and Echo being highly playable. The threat of a +4 ATK for an attacker or +2 ATK/+2 DEF to anything on your side of the board makes a combat-challenged team a whole new Beast. Add The Penguin to the mix for when you really need to get serious, and you’ve got an effective (albeit costly) +6 ATK or an It’s Clobberin’ Time! that ignores attacker/defender status. The cards it eats can be crazy, but it’s a nice way to expend hand advantage from Arkham Asylum, Blackgate Prison, and Kidnapping.

Other discard costs also become easier to play in a fashion similar to The Exchange. In short, the cards being discarded for Flame Trap or Have a Blast! just aren’t as much of an issue when you’re dropping characters you don’t currently need and can retrieve later.

At the same time, Avalon provides fulfillment for KO’d pile thresholds on its own. Need a way to get Jean Grey into the KO’d pile? Just trade her for anything that you want in your hand instead of in your KO’d pile. For this reason, Avalon Space Station is very easy to rotate into X-Stall, where it could take the place of X-Corporation.

It combos incredibly well with Weapon of Choice, too. Even if you don't like what your opponent gave you, you're still able to rotate the card for something else.The first one reads as implying that Weapon discards the card not put in the hand, when it doesn't.

So, where do these tricks fit best? Curve Sentinels can use Avalon pretty effectively, turning the “soft” card advantage from Reconstruction Program into extra copies of non-army characters in the mid and late game. It also allows you to change your choices of what to Reconstruct, should your ideal recruitment pattern alter from what you’d anticipated. While Curve Sentinels can be viewed as an extremely linear deck with a rigid curve, I’d argue that that’s no longer the case. With Hounds of Ahab practically giving the average Curve Sentinels deck a new win condition, there will be many times when a Hounds and an off-turn drop is a more desirable play than hitting the curve. Jack Garret made this decision in the finals of $10K LA, and the pressure it put on Josh Wiitanen was a big part of his win.

On top of that, smart Curve Sentinel players are becoming very aware of the rising popularity of Betrayal. Against someone packing two or three copies of it, recruiting Magneto is often akin to signing your own death warrant. If you haven’t seen a double or triple Betrayal end a game against Curve Sentinels, there just isn’t a way to describe it accurately. “Purple robots crying and on fire” comes sort of close. Anyway, my point is that Avalon Space Station can help you retrieve sentinels you played earlier in order to give the deck an alternate turn 7. While you might be able to accomplish the same thing with Reconstruction Program, using Avalon doesn’t give your opponent the tip-off that you have multiple power-ups at your fingertips—it leaves him or her wondering, and a hesitant opponent is good for you. Besides, if you decide to recruit Bastion or Nimrod again, you dodge having to commit a Program to doing so. That means you can instead use it to get back three army sentinels and keep building your card advantage.

So, where does Avalon Space Station belong? Well, nowhere near Ka-Boom!, for starters, so if your metagame is packed with it, then Avalon likely isn’t for you. But aside from that, it could be great in Curve Sentinels, and it continues to fuel new tricks in progressive X-Stall. It’s great in any deck that is slightly below par in combat and thus can benefit from the power-up potential it provides. It’s also very good in anything that has a lot of discard to manage. If New Gods variants become an important part of the Golden Age metagame, expect Avalon Space Station to be a big part of the puzzle.

As for the future, keep your eye on this card as more mechanics are introduced that require discarding or careful character management. In short, every deck can likely benefit from Avalon Space Station, but the issue is deck space. That said, consider what it can do for you the next time you build a new deck. You might be surprised.

-Jason Grabher-Meyer

Do you have a favorite card you think is underplayed? Tell me all about it at Jason@metagame.com.

* It was using Blind Sided, and everything.