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4 Justice, Like Lightning

4 Win-Lose Deal

4 Team Tactics

4 Null Time Zone

3 Marvel’s Most Wanted

1 Avengers Disassembled

Some percentage of the time, this deck will attack with 4-drop Dallas Riordan, use her payment power, and play Savage Beatdown on her. Deadly Conspiracy and Team Tactics will be used twice in succession, bringing her ATK to 60. Blind Sided will halt any efforts at reinforcement. Some percentage of the time, those seven cards that I mentioned will be drawn and will grant the Thunderbolts player an immediate win. Now, of course, there are many cards in the deck that don’t serve to power that combo. Removing them would yield a straightforward combo deck, perhaps even one where “some percentage” is high enough to make it viable in Golden Age. After a moment of thought, I came up with a version of the deck designed to win with those seven cards consistently on the fourth turn. Here’s the list:

Characters

1 Dallas Riordan ◊ Vantage, Ionic Inheritor

Plot Twists

And now we have a quick lesson in TCG design—lists like this one are why Vs. System decks must contain no less than sixty cards. To our seven degenerate cards, we must add fifty-three that aren’t quite as impressive. The purpose of these remaining cards should be, of course, to retrieve the seven we really care about as quickly as possible. Luckily for us, we can add duplicates of cards we already have. Here’s a revised list:

Characters

4 Dallas Riordan ◊ Vantage, Ionic Inheritor

Plot Twists

Now we have only forty more slots to fill. Already, though, some of these numbers might be annoying some of you. “Drawing more than one copy of Dallas is terrible, right? Do we really need four?” Well . . . let’s not worry about that quite yet. This is a work in progress, after all. Moving along, let’s consider what cards we should add. You’ll notice that all but one of the cards in our combo is a plot twist. Ideally, we want to add a card to the deck that lets us search for the plot twist of our choice; a recurring way to search for plot twists would be even better. Fortunately, there’s not much thinking to be done here, because there’s only one recurring method to search for plot twists in the game.

Characters

4 Dallas Riordan ◊ Vantage, Ionic Inheritor

Plot Twists

Alright, we’ve made a decision: Alfred Pennyworth will be the fuel for our combo engine. Unfortunately, Alfred doesn’t work alone. In addition, sometimes Alfred won’t be in our opening hand. There’s an easy solution, of course—one that many decks have utilized.

Characters

4 Dallas Riordan ◊ Vantage, Ionic Inheritor

Plot Twists

That’s looking a little bit better. Still, even at a scant thirty-eight cards, this deck needs more ways to find plot twists. Searching through a card database, we find that there aren’t all that many cards with that capability. The first card we come to is Dangerous Experiment. Exhaust a Sinister Syndicate character, you say? Lose endurance, you say? Sounds a bit too risky and a bit too difficult to integrate into the deck. Next, we find Kang, Kang Kong. This guy has some potential, but he uses resource points. We’re trying to utilize an Alfred engine and win the game with a 4-drop on turn 4, so there’s virtually no window in which to play him. In addition, his team-stamping makes his inclusion difficult. Finally, we come to Marvel’s Most Wanted. This card searches for all of our combo pieces, doesn’t cost resource points, and makes use of a team that we already play (there aren’t enough Thunderbolts characters to support it yet, but we can worry about that later). In it goes.

Characters

4 Dallas Riordan ◊ Vantage, Ionic Inheritor

Plot Twists

Moving on to other ways to search for plot twists, we find . . . nothing. That’s unfortunate. Our focus must go back to Plan A; that is, Alfred. Adding cards to ensure an early Alfred would go a long way toward reinforcing the consistency of the deck. We already have Bat-Signal in the deck, so what we’re looking for is a non–team stamped way to search for a 1-drop on the first or second turn. Fortunately for us, there’s a well-known way to do just that—the Midnight Sons engine.

1 Micro-Chip

4 Wild Ride

4 Midnight Sons

The general idea (for those who haven’t seen it in action before) goes something like this: On your first turn, play Wild Ride face down in your resource row and then flip it to search for and recruit Micro-Chip. On your second turn, play and flip a copy of Midnight Sons, naming the team of your choice. Use Micro-Chip to flip down Wild Ride, and then flip it up again to fetch any character in the game. As long as you have a Wild Ride on the first turn and one of the eight copies of either Midnight Sons or Dagger on the second turn, this incredible search is at your disposal. Let’s integrate it into the deck.

Characters

1 Micro-Chip

4 Dallas Riordan ◊ Vantage, Ionic Inheritor

Plot Twists

Things are looking a little better. Now, we’ll almost certainly be able to recruit Alfred by turn 2 on each and every game. Still, there’s more room. We are out of cards to search for plot twists, and we have enough cards in the deck that search for the card that searches for plot twists. Next on our menu are card-drawing mechanisms. Win-Lose Deal is an excellent one, and with Midnight Sons in our deck, we should be able to play it a fair amount of the time. There’s not much else in the way of card drawing that would be effective in this type of deck, so we move on again.

The final way to reinforce the combo in a combo deck is redundancy. Now, there are certainly no cards that could duplicate any of the pieces of our combo . . . except for Savage Beatdown, that is. There are many ATK pumps in the game, and though none match it for sheer effectiveness, several come close. We should add a few of those to the deck. Finally, we have combo protection. There are numerous cards that halt this combo in its tracks, and a few of them—Mystical Paralysis, Heroic Sacrifice, and some others—are plot twists. I suppose we should throw in a few copies of Fizzle. Here’s our new list:

Characters

1 Micro-Chip

4 Dallas Riordan ◊ Vantage, Ionic Inheritor

Plot Twists

4 Fizzle

Unfortunately, this list has sixty-seven cards. We want it to be sixty. Each card beyond sixty in our deck decreases the chance that we will draw one of the critical cards, and therefore makes the deck worse. The question becomes, what to cut? Working from the top, ten GCPD Officers seems like a bit too many. Actually, come to think of it, Micro-Chip also seems to be strictly better; with the full Midnight Sons engine in operation, all three of our teams should be teamed up most of the time. Micro-Chip can also serve to reuse a full sixteen of our plot twists. Looking at our last character, Dallas, take note of how much character search is in the deck. It’s essentially all there to get Alfred, and we’re bound to have some left over by the time we get to turn 4; we don’t need four copies of Dallas. Moving down to the plot twists, we can probably pare down a copy of Blind Sided (it’s truly awful if you draw two copies) and a few copies of Fizzle as well. The number of Fizzles in the deck is a metagame call; it could go from worthless to invaluable, depending on what your opposition is playing.

In any case, here’s the final decklist:

Characters

6 GCPD Officer

4 Micro-Chip

1 Dallas Riordan ◊ Vantage, Ionic Inheritor

Plot Twists

2 Fizzle