It’s been a while since I’ve posted a deck, but after viewing October’s PCQ results, I felt that the Sinister Syndicate deserved a more thorough exploration. Here’s a deck that showcases the Syndicate’s strength right from the opening bell.

Sinister Speed

4 Hammerhead

4 Mysterio

4 Silvermane

4 Shriek

4 Speed Demon

4 Tinkerer

4 Tombstone

4 Vulture

4 Hired Goons

4 A Death in the Family

3 Flying Kick

2 Savage Beatdown

4 Spider Slayers

4 Doc Ock’s Lab

3 Lion’s Den

4 Goblin Glider

This is, without a doubt, the scariest deck I’ve ever played against. If you can’t find a 1-drop to put in its way, you’ll start to worry. If you don’t have a 2-drop to defend yourself with, you’ll begin to panic. Even if you do have a 2-drop, you’re not out of the woods.

Vulture is this deck’s preferred turn 1 recruit, and if you played Doc Ock’s Lab as your resource, you’ll end the turn with 52 endurance to your opponent’s 45. The optimal turn 2 recruit is Hammerhead. He’s often used to take down whatever the opposition recruited, leaving Vulture free to expand the gap between endurance totals. If your opponent was unfortunate enough to have missed his or her 2-drop, then the score at the end of turn 2 will be 56 to 33. That’s not an insurmountable lead, but it does make it very difficult for your opponent to stabilize. I’ve seen this perfect opening several times—usually from the wrong end of the equation.

Another favorite opening with this deck is a turn 1 Tinkerer. It’s fun to watch him grow larger with +1 ATK/+1 DEF counters. The Tinkerer route often calls for recruiting two 1-drops on turn 2 so you can keep the character advantage and keep the counters a-comin’.

And if you’re recruiting two characters on turn 2, why not supplement one of them with a Goblin Glider? Vulture is the best candidate for this, but anyone will do. If you haven’t drawn Goblin Glider, you’ve probably drawn Hired Goons. Either way, you won’t have any trouble getting through your opponent’s defenses.

The key to this deck, as you’ve probably guessed, is to overwhelm your opponent with characters that have been bolstered by aggressive plot twists. But how can the deck keep the pressure on when you use up your plot twists to stun characters that simply recover? I mean, you might need to use Lion’s Den on turn 4 to take down Blob, so how can the deck survive on turn 5?

The answer lies in the vastly underrated A Death in the Family. Vulture’s endurance gain helps you offset the cost of A Death in the Family, but even without such assistance, you can afford to play it. The sheer speed of the deck makes for short games, which means that your opposition won’t get a chance to bring out his or her big guns on turn 6 or 7 (when most decks go for the kill). Even with initiative and the score tied at 15 on turn 5, it’s unlikely that your opponent could generate enough breakthrough to end the game.

This deck spits out enough characters to provide constant reinforcement. If your math skills are up to the task, you’ll frequently need to decide whether it’s more benificial to reinforce or counterattack. Only Sentinel Swarm decks counterattack more often than this deck.

If you’re wondering about some of the character choices for this deck, wonder no more—I included every Sinister Syndicate character with a cost of 2 or less. It doesn’t really matter what they do as long as they can be made huge and violent. Expect this deck to do nothing but improve when new Syndicate characters get introduced in next year’s Marvel Knights set.

If you think the deck is vicious now, you should have seen it during early Web of Spider-Man development. Speed Demon had fewer restrictions. It was even (supposedly) possible to make a turn 3 kill, though I think Danny tried to concede before Brian could make the fatal attack—he didn’t want to live with the shame. Brian said the math would have given him the turn 3 kill, but Danny disputed that claim, quickly shuffling up his deck and calling out random numbers to mess with Brian’s verbal calculations. Fortunately, with Speed Demon's extra text, we won’t ever see a repeat performance.

Questions or comments may be sent to mhyra@metagame.com.

PS: A Vs. System player from Germany named Bjoern liked my random character generator so much that he turned it into a computer program. Every time you refresh that page, you get a new character¾pretty cool.