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The Sentry™
Card# MTU-017
While his stats aren’t much bigger than those of the average 7-drop, Sentry’s “Pay ATK” power can drastically hinder an opponent’s attacking options in the late game.
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| Deck Profile: Juan Manuel Velasquez Miranda |
| Jason Grabher-Meyer |
| May 08, 2005 |
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Every event I attend seems to have a bunch of X-Men fans playing Mutant Nation. While the effort put into these decks is often admirable, the reality is that it’s a choice often enthusiastically adopted by new players who aren’t quite sure what to do with the concepts the Brotherhood and X-Men teams deal in. All Longshot-containing, $10K winning builds aside, they’re usually pretty bad.
This isn’t one of those decks.
While some of the execution of Juan Manuel Velazquez Miranda’s Mutant Nation deck seemed debatable, the core concepts he employed seemed to be a winning combination. Here’s his decklist.
 X-Control
Characters
2 Dazzler
3 Destiny
1 Avalanche
4 Puppet Master
4 Quicksilver, Pietro Maximoff
4 Wolverine, Logan
2 Gambit
3 Rogue, Power Absorption
1 Nightcrawler, Fuzzy Elf
1 Scarlet Witch, Wanda Maximoff
2 Magneto, Eric Lehnsherr
2 Archangel, Angel of Death
2 Mimic
1 Storm, Weather Witch
2 Professor X, World’s Most Powerful Telepath
Plot Twists
4 Mutant Nation
3 Nasty Surprise
2 Finishing Move
4 Surprise Attack
4 War on Humanity
1 Foiled
1 The Mutant Menace
1 Ka-Boom!
1 Press the Attack
2 Acrobatic Dodge
Locations
1 Muir Island
1 Danger Room
1 Madripoor
The deck revolves around two essential concepts: the burn of Brotherhood and the control of X-Men. While other Mutant Nation builds attempt to dominate through combat, this deck does the exact opposite. It instead looks to stave off the opponent’s characters and prevent them from attacking while holding a Brotherhood-brand blowtorch to their more tender bits. Ouch. The theory itself is a bit more sound than the execution, some copies of Cerebro certainly wouldn’t hurt, but the deck is still definitely worth looking at.
 The control elements Miranda is employing are primarily Puppet Master and Gambit, which can be mirrored by Rogue, Power Absorption and Mimic. Like in an X-Stall deck, Wolverine, Logan can also be considered part of the control suite, and he’s joined by Destiny, as she can easily prove to be a strong deterrent to attack and can also provide some direct endurance loss. Storm also provides a strong element of control, limiting attacks and punishing opponents who don’t play carefully enough to consider (or learn) her effect.
The burn comes from Quicksilver, Pietro Maximoff, who can also be Mimicked. A plethora of plot twists add fuel to the fire, and the deck’s coup de grace is of course Professor X, World’s Most Powerful Telepath.
Beyond that the deck has several cards that are focused on staying alive. Muir Island, Danger Room, Madripoor, and Nasty Surprise all make your characters daunting presences to attack. Meanwhile Finishing Move, Foiled, Ka-Boom!, and Avalanche serve to take out key pieces of certain decks.
Overall it’s a great idea. Traditional burn decks get wrecked in combat that they aren’t prepared for and stall decks are too busy stalling to win until the late game. This is by no means a complete deck in my mind. It’s in need of testing and some key changes—I think I once called Muir Island “worse than Unus.” But I do think that this approach is correct, and that the ideas Miranda puts forth gives some hope for Mutant Nation decks not based around Longshot. |
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