Welcome back to the inaugural Combo edition of Deck Clinic. When we left off, I’d settled on Poison Ivy, Deadly Rose as our key location searcher, which pushes us in the direction of location team-ups. There are two real options: UN Building and Checkmate Safe House. Our four-team requirement can be satisfied by one copy of each or three copies of Safe House. The initial plan will be to run four copies of the Safe House and two of UN Building, with the general plan being to draw into a Safe House and use Ivy to fetch a UN Building. A copy of Soul World will go in for now, to help out Straight to the Grave and keep our hand size up while we discard for cards like Valeria Von Doom, Heir to Latveria and put extra characters into play via Changeling’s power. This could be swapped out for Slaughter Swamp if the endurance payment proves problematic (or we find ourselves wanting more discard outlets to keep Dr. Light, Master of Holograms happy).
Turning back to one of our original concerns, we need to consider on which turn we will be planning to win most frequently. Everything we’ve included so far is geared towards a “non-interactive” win—that is, we aren’t seeking to disrupt anything our opponent is doing, rather focusing on our attempt to set up the combo. For now, I’m going to add two one-of options for taking the game to turn 5. The first answers a character that completely locks down our combo—Dr. Doom, Diabolic Genius—and comes in the form of Robot Destroyer, Army. This particular counterplan was noticeably used during the brief reign of the Light Show combo deck—which made similar use of Cosmic Radiation played from hand—with Dr. Doom being played for mirror matches (and by opposing decks). Robot Destroyer can stun Doom in build, in combat, in recovery, or whenever it needs to be done. The second choice is one for the games where we can take the odd initiative, and probably sets odd as our preferred choice of initiative.
The mystery card, which should give us ample opportunity to go off at leisure if we have the odd initiatives, is Battering Ram, Short-Lived Strongman. Recruit him turn 5, activate and KO him, and just wait for the recovery phase to tick around so that Jackal can go about his peculiar work in the radiology lab. Poor Floronic Man. All that cloning, all those weird experiments. That said, given the type of deck this is, I’m leaving these characters out of the initial test build. The first list is a “proof of concept” build with the bare minimum of additions above what’s necessary for the combo itself to function. If it works, we can start trying to fit in more insurance.
The final piece of the puzzle before I start trimming is a recovery effect to give us a better chance of going off on turn 4 by recovering Jackal. We want either Professor X unstunned, or a spare Cosmic Radiation to let us put a copy of the Professor into play; then we use the second Radiation to ready Jackal and the Professor and start the Floronic Man, Jason Woodrue loop. There are a few options. One is Rise from the Grave, featured in the original list, and the most straightforward choice. The two other interesting options are Ultimate Sacrifice and Team Spirit, both capable of recovering both a stunned Professor X and Jackal with one plot twist. The only question is how often we can meet the additional requirements for each card. For now I’ll add a copy of Rise, and we can work out from testing whether we want more copies of it, or whether we often have Rise in hand while also meeting the requirements for (and being in a position to benefit from) the more powerful mass-recovery plot twists. The last option is Muir Island
, which has the huge benefit that it can be searched out with Poison Ivy. One copy of the Island seems like a good backup plan. The final addition will be a copy of Doomstadt, Castle Doom, which can be searched out with Ivy to enable Boris if we have yet to draw Valeria or a way to search for her. The newer version is used because it has terraform on top of its other text.
So, let’s take a stab at a first, very rough list, simply adding four of each of the core cards and one copy of each of the recovery effects and singleton locations. For now we’ll leave out any other tech cards, such as the Robot Destroyer for Doom decks.
Characters
4 Valeria Von Doom, Heir to Latveria
4 Boris, Personal Servant of Dr. Doom
4 Professor X, Mutant Mentor]
4 Changeling, Kevin Sidney
4 Detective Chimp, Bobo T. Chimpanzee
4 Mr. Mxyzptlk, Troublesome Trickster
4 Poison Ivy, Deadly Rose
4 Deadshot, Dead Aim
4 Floronic Man, Jason Woodrue
4 Dr. Light, Master of Holograms
4 Jackal, Dr. Miles Warren
Plot Twists
4 Cosmic Radiation
4 Master of Puppets
4 Enemy of My Enemy
4 Straight to the Grave
1 Rise from the Grave
Locations
4 Checkmate Safe House
4 UN Building
1 Soul World
1 Muir Island
1 Doomstadt
Tons of cards . . . 72 to be exact. Most of the cuts will come from the characters; we currently total 44, and our 28 resources don’t need substantial cuts. (We will need to be character-heavy given the amount of underdropping, and Valeria recruiting for free.) We shouldn’t need four copies of UN Building; we’ll try two, and we can always tweak further from there. Two locations cut leaves us with ten characters to cut. The “luxury” cards are probably Detective Chimp and Mr. Mxyzptlk, with Deadshot being the easiest Secret Society character to get into play (exhausting Jackal in the build phase on turn 4). We’ll drop down to one copy of the Troublesome Trickster, leaving him available as a Straight to the Grave target and occasional recruit or discard-cost fuel. Detective Chimp will get the same treatment; we’ll drop to one copy for now, keeping our options open for later. That’s six of our ten cuts made already. The remaining cuts will be two copies each of Changeling and Deadshot, the remaining characters least central to the actual combo engine itself.
So, our 60 card first draft:
Characters
4 Valeria Von Doom, Heir to Latveria
4 Boris, Personal Servant of Dr. Doom
4 Professor X, Mutant Mentor
2 Changeling, Kevin Sidney
1 Detective Chimp, Bobo T. Chimpanzee
1 Mr. Mxyzptlk, Troublesome Trickster
4 Poison Ivy, Deadly Rose
2 Deadshot, Dead Aim
4 Floronic Man, Jason Woodrue
4 Dr. Light, Master of Holograms
4 Jackal, Dr. Miles Warren
Plot Twists
4 Cosmic Radiation
4 Master of Puppets
4 Enemy of My Enemy
4 Straight to the Grave
1 Rise from the Grave
Locations
4 Checkmate Safe House
2 UN Building
1 Soul World
1 Muir Island
1 Doomstadt, Castle Doom
Solitaire test draws are a good way to test the reliability of the basic concept. Basically, they let you know if your deck is working properly uninterrupted before you complicate things further by adding an opponent. Think of it as the first of a series of tests a deck needs to pass in order to be worthy of play. I’ll run a quick five games against a blank opponent, and check how consistently the deck can go off on what turn.
Game 1: Turn 4 kill, with Rise from the Grave in the row.
Game 2: Turn 5 kill, Rise from the Grave in hand.
Game 3: Turn 4 kill, no recovery available. Could have gone off turn 5 with Rise from the Grave available.
Game 4: Turn 4 kill, with access via Boris and Ivy to Rise from the Grave, Muir Island, or a second Cosmic Radiation.
Game 5: Turn 5 kill, Rise from the Grave in hand.
Well then . . . that’s a little more consistent than I was expecting. Build phases with decks like this are not for the faint-hearted, and some of those wins involved more time spent planning turns than you can expect to have in a tournament, so extensive practice is advised if you plan on taking a deck like this to an event. I took a few notes while I was playing the games out, mainly focusing on characters that underperformed.
The weakest link seemed to be Detective Chimp, who I never found I actually wanted in play. The only team affiliation that could be tricky to team-up with was Secret Society, and exhausting Jackal to put Deadshot into play provides a neat, efficient answer to that problem. Given the option of someone to search for, I never found myself searching for Chimp. As such, he will come out for another copy of Mr. Mxyzptlk, who, although rarely searched for, is a very welcome draw thanks to his recursion power.
The next five test games will be played assuming my opponent stuns two visible characters on turn 3, three on 4, and four (if appropriate) on turn 5. This simulates (somewhat clumsily) a match against a generic curve deck that doesn’t run anything dramatically disruptive like Roy Harper ◊ Speedy, Mercurial Marksman or Dr. Doom, Diabolic Genius.
Game 1: Combo available turn 5 after a pretty bad start, but without a recovery effect. Turn 6 sees both recovery effects available with the combo ready to go.
Game 2: Same as above. The combo was assembled by turn 5, but a recovered Jackal had to wait for turn 6.
Game 3: Combo available turn 4, combo available with a recovery effect turn 5.
Game 4: Combo available turn 5 with Muir Island and Rise from the Grave available.
Game 5: Combo available turn 4 except for the Secret Society team-up. Go off turn 5 with recovery backup.
Initial testing indicates that an opposing curve deck hitting its full curve will slow us down by around a turn—primarily when Poison Ivy and Dr. Light are stunned on turn 3, making us do more work to set our resource row up. I very rarely found myself actively searching for Mr. Mxyzptlk, with Deadshot almost always providing our Secret Society character to team-up (with Jackal exhausting on turn 4 to put him into play from our KO’d pile). That said, he was extremely useful when drawn, offsetting discard costs (Enemy of My Enemy; Valeria’s alternate recruit and triggered power) and being a 1-drop with a needed team.
Another thing that became clear is that our resource row was our most vulnerable point. In the original list, Teamwork protected the Team-Up cards in our resource row. However, that still leaves Master of Puppets vulnerable to replacement, which leaves us with a vulnerability that we can’t easily work around. Given that vulnerability, I’m going to make a change that should give us some extra consistency: removing three copies of Checkmate Safe House and one UN Building for four copies of Millennium. The extra card-drawing (particularly when flipped in the resource row with Valeria in play) should help increase the probability of going off quickly without actually increasing our vulnerability to resource-replacement effects. Have a Blast! will still slow us down a full turn in most instances, as we go and look for a second copy of Master of Puppets. Millennium, importantly, can also simply be played directly from our hand to draw a card, which is a noticeable improvement over Checkmate Safe House given how crowded our resource row can become. The copies of Funky’s Big Rat Code in the original list would be an alternative here, providing one drawn card and four in the KO’d pile for later use, but I’m going to stick with Millennium’s strict card advantage.
One last addition I will make is the Robot Destroyer mentioned earlier, replacing a copy of Mr. Mxyzptlk. Battering Ram seems not to be as necessary; we’re just as well off underdropping on turn 4 or 5 to ensure our recovery effects and, preferably, some level of redundancy. An extra Cosmic Radiation and a copy of Professor X in hand, for example, allow us to play around the Professor being dealt with via Mikado and Mosha on the turn we want to go off. The Destroyer can also deal with characters other than Dr. Doom, like Terra, Tara Markov and the various versions of Roy Harper that can be saved to stun our characters while we attempt to go off in the recovery phase.
It may be that the plan against most decks (other than hyper-aggressive ones like High Voltage) is to play deliberately for the turn 5 win, which often means recruiting Floronic Man and a 1-drop on turn 4; KO’ing him to fetch back something like Enemy of My Enemy; and then recruiting Jackal (and sometimes a 1-drop) on turn 5 with more backup and easier access to recovery effects.
I’m ambivalent about the final list below. On one hand, it’s relatively easy to disrupt. It’s fragile, it’s dependent on keeping a certain resource row intact, and it’s vulnerable to key characters being removed from play. On the other hand, if your opponent doesn’t draw any of the kind of cards that hurt it (resource-replacement, such as Reality Gem or Transmutation; a KO effect of some kind for Jackal that can dodge a Rise from the Grave; or Utility Belt), you stand a very good chance of winning the game in the recovery phase of turn 4 or 5.
Against a deck like High Voltage, for example, the game is basically a flat race, but High Voltage must put Day of the Jackal negative the turn before Day of the Jackal is setting up to win. I wouldn’t play the deck in a Pro Circuit due to the vulnerabilities (Titans is probably the worst imaginable matchup thanks to Roy Harper ◊ Speedy; Terra; Null Time Zone; and Removed from Continuity), and I wouldn’t play it at Hobby League because, well, it’s a combo deck . . . but it can win on turn 4. And some decks, particularly more casual decks, will simply have no way to beat it due to the peculiarities of the combo and how it sets up.
Final List
Characters
4 Valeria Von Doom, Heir to Latveria
4 Boris, Personal Servant of Dr. Doom
4 Professor X, Mutant Mentor
2 Changeling, Kevin Sidney
1 Mr. Mxyzptlk, Troublesome Trickster
4 Poison Ivy, Deadly Rose
2 Deadshot, Dead Aim
4 Floronic Man, Jason Woodrue
4 Dr. Light, Master of Holograms
4 Jackal, Dr. Miles Warren
1 Robot Destroyer, Army
Plot Twists
4 Cosmic Radiation
4 Master of Puppets
4 Enemy of My Enemy
4 Straight to the Grave
4 Millennium
1 Rise from the Grave
Locations
1 Checkmate Safe House
1 UN Building
1 Soul World
1 Muir Island
1 Doomstadt
Decks like this make me nervous for another reason: I don’t consider myself much of a combo deckbuilder, so I have no doubt that this list isn’t optimal. The fact that even a relatively inexperienced combo deckbuilder can put together a list that can go off turn 4 if moderately uninterrupted is a shadow over Pro Circuit preparation. There’s always the worry when preparing for an event like a Pro Circuit that however strong the decks that you’re working on are, someone else will genuinely break the format, or worse, that everyone other than you has done so (much of this is simply paranoia, of course). There’s a real fear of being the only one to miss the next Light Show or Ivy League, and being dumped unceremoniously out of Day 1 as a result.
So from a Deck Clinic that was looking like being a bit of a swing-and-a-miss, this one has turned out pretty strong. It just goes to show that you shouldn’t forget about a deck just because you can’t get it to work at the moment. Remember your failed attempts, and make a note of them somewhere. Then keep an eye on the horizon, and although sometimes a new set will bring nothing to help out your old failures, sometimes . . . well, sometimes you get Valeria Von Doom.
As always, send suggestions, submissions, feedback, and hot Pro Circuit: Los Angeles tech (I can dream, right?) to vsdeckclinic@gmail.com.
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.