Part 1
Welcome back to Deck Clinic. When I left off yesterday, I’d just put the finishing touches on a first draft of the character selection for this week’s submission, a sneaky Inhumans / Hellfire Club concealed deck. We’re aiming to get maximum value out of the powerful concealed characters available to both teams while setting up near-indestructible walls of visible muscle like Shinobi Shaw, White King and “The” Donald Pierce, White Bishop to stop our opponent from hurting us back.
As such, we have a few priorities for resources.
- Concealed enablers. This deck will, to some extent, live and die based on its ability to ensure that its characters can move freely from the hidden area to the visible area and vice versa.
- Pumps. The deck’s “thing” is its almost unparalleled ability to brickwall attacks on turns 5 and 6 with the one-two punch of Shinobi Shaw, White King and Donald Pierce, White Bishop. Significant DEF pumps, in particular, will help out a lot when it comes to achieving that objective.
Let’s break each of these categories down in a little more detail.
Search Cards
Join the Club is the first inclusion, to the tune of four copies. Combined with Lockjaw, Inhuman’s Best Friend, Join the Club should be good enough—although we would really like at least a single copy of The Great Refuge for San to search out on turn 2 to ensure that we hit Crystal on turn 3. Nevertheless, working with restrictions is a great deckbuilding exercise. If you never challenge yourself to work with restrictions, then you can get too used to cards like Enemy of My Enemy and may find yourself floundering if you have to work without it (such as in Modern Age when Marvel Team-Up rotates in and pushes The X-Men into Silver and Golden Age only).
The single copy of Attilan from the original list will stay, and I’m tempted to find space for a second copy. Its ability to set up multiple locations over several turns makes it arguably a better target for San than either The Hellfire Club or Himalayan Enclave, or even Shaw Industries. Remember that you can activate Attilan to set a location or plot twist on top of your deck, then replace a face-up copy of Evil Alliance to put that card straight into your resource row ready to be used (or flip and activate Attilan in response to an effect that will replace one of your face-up resources).
Power and Wealth is tricky. It’s a strong card, but it has a very steep additional cost, particularly since we likely won’t be teamed-up with Hellfire Club until turn 4 or 5. Three copies will certainly be more than is comfortable. In the end, I think that we’re better off working with Attilan rather than forcing other cards (like Hellfire Club Initiate) into the deck to support Power and Wealth. Removing Power and Wealth makes the second copy of Attilan a no-brainer.
Concealed Enablers
The big change here will be the exchange of Extended Family for Evil Alliance. The three copies of Nahrees and one copy of Karnak are not enough to justify running what will otherwise be a significantly weaker Team-Up, and Evil Alliance is far more useful in multiples, allowing spares to be “burned” to improve board position. Two copies each of The Hellfire Club and Himalayan Enclave feels fine, or if anything it feels maybe one copy light in total. There is also the possibility of a single copy of Deadly Game to search out with Power and Wealth and Attilan, providing a one-card option for the Shinobi/Donald switch on turn 6.
Pumps
Just to refresh your memory, the original suite of pumps (not counting incidental pumps like that on Himalayan Enclave) for the deck was as follows:
3 Army of One
2 It’s Slobberin’ Time!
3 Blue Area of the Moon
3 Shaw Industries
I have to say that I’m already having to stop my itching fingers from adding the fourth copy of Army of One—and I don’t think I’ll be able to hold out very long. While It’s Slobberin’ Time! is undoubtedly a brutally powerful card, Army of One’s more reliable +2 ATK / +2 DEF—and more importantly the ability to use it on defense—push Army into the four-of camp for me. Blue Area of the Moon is nice, but I don’t think I’d add the third Blue Area before the fourth copy of Shaw Industries, which is another cornerstone of the deck. After all, despite having location search available in the form of Attilan and San, the more locations we draw into naturally the more we can use Attilan to fetch more copies of cards like Army of One to make life even more difficult for our opponent. Turning one copy of It’s Slobberin’ Time! into the fourth Army of One and the third Blue Area into the fourth Shaw Industries tightens up the core pump cards considerably. The last copy of It’s Slobberin’ Time! is surplus in my view, and can be dropped to give us a free slot; the second copy of Attilan and additional copies of San and Lockjaw mean that we should be hitting a more complete set of pumps in more games anyway.
Other
By “other,” I mainly mean “The Outside World.” The Hellfire Club equivalent, Absolute Power, was always a powerful card with pretty painful restrictions: 4 threshold, play only if you control one visible character, and only exhaust hidden characters (which could be a problem if your opponent can attack into the hidden area). The Outside World fixes a lot of those problems: it requires only a single exhaust, does not require you to be teamed-up with the character to be recovered, and needs a largely face-up resource row. Given the number of locations in our deck and the fact that we’re likely to want to use The Outside World most often on turn 6 to recover Shinobi Shaw and move him to the hidden area to let The Donald work, this doesn’t seem like a critical restriction. Three copies should be plenty.
All of these changes leave us with two open slots. There’s certainly an argument for running additional pump cards, which would probably mean Power Struggle or It’s Slobberin’ Time!, but I think we’d get more mileage out of some different additions. The first is not, as you might expect, a copy of Power Play. While Power Play is certainly powerful, I don’t think it’s a necessary card; it’s only useful on one initiative and only on turn 7. Today’s singleton plot twist will be Exploiting the Flaw, allowing Shinobi or Donald to batter the top of our opponent’s curve into the ground single-handedly (if Shinobi picks up a few extra +1 ATK / +1 DEF counters in the bargain).
The last slot will be a copy of Soul World, which provides another location with terraform to keep the resource row looking pristine. It can also remove the potentially serious problem of discarding characters like Donald and Sebastian early to Join the Club or Lockjaw with no way to get them back.
Note, by the way, that a build running The Great Refuge would keep its hand size higher throughout the game and would probably be able to run Slaughter Swamp
rather than Soul World. Given the greater ability of a build running Refuge to keep cards in hand, there’s another tech singleton (searchable with Attilan) that might be considered worthwhile—Reality Gem. Though it’s too discard-intensive for the final build I’m suggesting today, the Gem nevertheless provides a nice reusable hit of resource disruption.
Final Build
And so on to a final build. Remember that if you’re looking to take this out for a spin and have access to Enemy of My Enemy or The Great Refuge, you may want to consider the best way to incorporate those into the deck. It isn’t as simple as just replacing four copies of Join the Club with four copies of Enemy of My Enemy; San is a hugely powerful card in this deck, and Enemy of My Enemy is incapable of searching for him on turn 2. Think carefully about what the deck really needs to hit on which turn, and in what stage of the game you’ll likely be able to use The Great Refuge properly (remember to check the threshold costs on your other locations, in particular). It may be that the right mix (with all three search cards available) is somewhat eccentric-looking, balancing the power of Enemy and the hand-size growth of The Great Refuge with the ability of Join the Club to fetch San on turn 2.
Here’s the final build:
Characters
4 Lockjaw, Inhuman’s Best Friend
4 San, The Alienated One
2 Friedrich Von Roehm, Black Rook
4 Crystal, Elementelle
2 Mastermind, Dark Dreamer
3 Nahrees, The Negative One
3 Madelyne Pryor, Black Rook
3 Shinobi Shaw, White King
1 Karnak, The Shatterer
3 Donald Pierce, White Bishop
1 Mr. Sinister, Supreme Geneticist
1 Sebastian Shaw, Black King
Plot Twists
4 Evil Alliance
4 Join the Club
4 Army of One
3 The Outside World
1 Exploiting the Flaw
Locations
4 Shaw Industries
2 Himalayan Enclave
2 The Hellfire Club
2 Blue Area of the Moon
2 Attilan
1 Soul World
The final build of the deck should benefit from a more consistent curve, along with the ability to make better use of the powerful synergies between the Inhumans and the Hellfire Club. When compared to the mono-Hellfire deck, the Inhumans build has a few key advantages. The consistency provided by San and Attilan, along with the redundancy of The Hellfire Club and Himalayan Enclave (particularly the ability to get both working together), should give the team-up build a noticeable edge. So should the significant improvement of The Outside World over Absolute Power.
Before closing, I should remind you that I’m always looking for submissions for future Deck Clinic articles. Send your lists along to vsdeckclinic@googlemail.com for a chance to see your pet deck get the Clinic treatment!
Tom Reeve is a member of the Anglo-Canadian Alliance (like the Rebel Alliance, but with public transport instead of X-Wings) and would-be professional layabout from London, England. While his love of all things ninja has resulted in an arguably unhealthy affinity for the League of Assassins, that particular quirk turned into a healthy plus with the birth of the Silver Age deck Deep Green, with which teammate Ian Vincent took home the Pro Circuit San Francisco trophy to dear old Blighty.