Well, we are just a few days away from Pro Circuit Atlanta and the next Marvel Modern Age. If you are planning on making the trek to Georgia for the PC, you have no doubt been heavily testing the possible decks that you may encounter. Even though I can’t make it to Atlanta, I have spent a great deal of time discussing the Avengers and X-Men sets with my team, Team Alternate Win Condition (TAWC), to try to help those members who are going to Atlanta. I feel more and more each day that our team will do well there, and that we’ll finally take home something other than Tim Batow’s customary “Shortest Competitor Award.”

Recently, one of the regulars at the card shop where I play made a comment regarding the decks I posted in my past few articles. His notion was that they were modified versions of Marvel Modern Age decks that we would probably see. The Xavier’s School/Dr. Light, Master of Holograms deck could easily substitute Masters of Evil and Hard Sound Construct for Emerald Enemies. The Sticky Situation deck was based on the same premise as the “Masters of Evasion” deck (Morlocks/Masters of Evil) that certain teams are supposedly bringing to Atlanta. And the Last Stand deck featuring the Morlock evasion theme is very similar to . . . um . . . the Morlock evasion deck.

It occurred to me that I hadn’t given much credence to many of the decks that might pop up in the next Marvel Modern Age. Everyone knows that Squadron rush and reservist decks will be present in large numbers at the Pro Circuit. But what else could we possibly see? Will the Hellfire Club be ready to play a big game of chess with its opponents? Can Mutant trait decks put up a fight against the powerful teams from the Avengers set? Will Kang Council prove to be the “Doom substitute” of MMA?

Personally, I have just one big question—will the X-Men be there?

“I get knocked down . . . ”

On more than one occasion, I have mentioned my love for the X-Men team from Marvel Origins. In a metagame dominated by The New Brotherhood, X-Men board control was unsurpassed at keeping the Brotherhood weenies in check. Sure, TNB Blitz had the potential to get its characters’ ATKs quite high. However, when cards like Finishing Move and Gambit, Remy LeBeau limit the Brotherhood decks to one or two attacks on their initiative, and Children of the Atom and Muir Island keep your guys around perpetually, the fear of large attackers goes away quickly.

Ultimately, though, the downfall of my X-Men deck came from a different Brotherhood threat: Lost City. The large ATK values for characters in The New Brotherhood decks weren’t tough to deal with, but the ability of Big Brotherhood decks to pump their characters’ DEF values gave me fits! Even with a wide array of attack pumps, I couldn’t consistently stun the larger characters. The ability to control the board was fine, but it was useless if my opponents’ characters never got stunned!

“ . . . but I get up again!”

The situation in Marvel Modern Age got me thinking about my old X-Men deck. The key to my success with that deck was its built-in ability to maintain my board with control and recovery effects while simultaneously keeping my opponent’s board in check with various KO effects. Against aggressive decks, it worked beautifully. While my opponent’s characters could stun up the curve fairly easily, they had very few defensive tricks. I believe the environment for Marvel Modern Age will be very similar. The defining decks of the format—Squadron rush and reservist—have VERY big characters. However, aside from the potential to stun back characters, they are fairly limited when it comes to providing effective defense. The Squadron decks rely on gaining enough advantage in the early turns to let Golden Archer and Albert Gaines ◊ Nuke win the game on turn 5. Reservist decks, on the other hand, have the potential to carry the late game with several attack tricks. But aside from some formidable stun effects (i.e., Hawkeye, Clinton Barton and Wonder Man), the reservist decks have little to actually counter opposing attacks.

It occurs to me that the X-Men could have a home in Marvel Modern Age. The team continued with the recovery theme in the new set with cards like Angel of Mercy and Phoenix Rising. However, there’s a gleam in my eye for one recovery-related card in particular: Xorn! In the past, the ability to recover stunned characters was usually attached to a substantial cost (discard an X-Men character card, exhaust two characters, recite the Pledge of Allegiance backwards while standing on your head, etc). Xorn bypasses all of that, effectively saying, “If I’m non-stunned at any point in the recovery phase, I’ll give you a free recovery.” 

I hear your words, Xorn, and I am ready. It’s time for us to break Xorn and to break into the Marvel Modern environment with a new age of X-Men recovery!

The Build

Xorn is an obvious four-of, since he will be our deck’s focus. However, making sure that we have our non-stunned 3-drop in the recovery phase may be difficult given the proliferation of attack pumps that are likely to appear in Marvel Modern. Thus, we’ll also need four copies of Angel of Mercy. This card is included almost exclusively for use with Xorn, to make sure he’ll be ready to work his recovery magic. Of course, Angel of Mercy only works during the recovery phase. This means that we run the risk of losing our theme card to a well-played Stolen Power or Drain Essence, so we’ll also throw in four copies of Phoenix Rising. The updated version of Children of the Atom can put cards in our KO’d pile to good use and help ensure that our characters stick around to battle in later turns.

If we’re going to play Phoenix Rising, we need to have some reliable methods of getting characters into the KO’d pile. In order to accomplish this, look for cards that not only put cards in the KO’d pile, but also yield benefits by doing so.

First and foremost, let’s consider the aspect of deck-cycling. It would certainly behoove us to have a way of moving through our deck so that we’re not just relying on the two cards that we draw each turn to give us what we need. Prior to the X-Men set, we used Cerebro for this. In Marvel Modern, we have Worthington Industries, which is similar to Cerebro in that it allows us to look at more cards to find the characters we need. It also improves upon Cerebro in that it lets us look at three cards as opposed to two. However, we are limited to selecting only one of those three cards, and—just like Cerebro—it ships any non-character cards to the bottom of our deck. This is unfortunate, but worth the sacrifice, since it helps us move through the deck and discard cards to the KO’d pile.

Even with an aggressive mulligan and a couple of early activations of Worthington Industries, we still can’t be sure that we’ll see Xorn by turn 3, so we’re going to hedge our bets a bit and include two copies of Time Breach. While not a great search card, it is up to the task of searching out our deck’s MVP. In addition, it can search out other character cards for various purposes—namely, hitting that all-important 2-drop or getting a character for a discard effect. If we find that we don’t need those extra copies, then it can go to the KO’d pile for the discard requirement of Angel of Mercy or Worthington Industries just as easily as any other card in the deck.

Our attack pumps for the deck are relatively obvious. Flying Kick has to go in, as it is the best attack pump available in Marvel Modern Age. It was not an easy call to include it over Turnabout, but this deck will follow a fairly strict curve, so the opportunities to use Turnabout will be fairly limited. On the other hand, there are no restrictions on the use of SNIKT!. This card effectively gives the X-Men a Savage Beatdown and Nasty Surprise rolled into one card. Some might argue that the discard cost to play SNIKT! hurts the card’s utility, but since we actually need cards in the KO’d pile for Phoenix Rising, SNIKT! can be a great enabler for our recovery theme.

We have plenty of cards to keep our board intact. Now let’s see if we can’t wreck our opponent’s board a bit. My personal card of choice for this task is Mutant Massacre. The benefits of this card above and beyond simple board control are plenty. Against Masters of Evil, you can keep Beetle, Armorsmith and Yellowjacket, Rita DeMara from making repeat trips to the board. Against Morlocks, you can bypass the anti-KO effect of The Alley altogether. Finally, against Anti-Green Lantern rush, you can negate Felix Faust’s effect AND keep it out of play for good. (Okay, I realize that AGL rush isn’t a part of Marvel Modern Age, but it’s still a pretty cool counter!)

Our character selections are designed to make the most of our mega-recovery theme. At 1, we’re going to try to up the odds on getting Worthington Industries into play early by putting in four copies of Archangel, Angel. Having characters that can search for needed cards is always good. Archangel’s flight and decent stats just make our reason for including it all the more obvious. For backup, we’ll throw in a couple of copies of Jubilee. Is it a major beater? No, but it has a decent effect that, after a few turns of use, can change the outcome of close games.

At 2, we are pretty much required to include four copies of Cannonball. The only thing better than free recovery is avoiding the need to recover altogether by attacking with a character that cannot be stunned while attacking. Nightcrawler, Kurt Wagner was a 2-drop giant in Golden Age, and Cannonball is cut from the same cloth. In addition, we’re going with four copies of Longshot, Hero of Mojoworld. Since we want to have most of our characters recovered during the recovery phase, Longshot can really improve our deck cycling by allowing us to look at four more cards each turn (and selectively exclude two of those cards). While not nearly as abusive as its Marvel Origins progenitor, it still has quite a bit of utility in our deck.

At 3 . . . Xorn. That’s it. ‘Nuff said!

Turn 4 is where our deck should really start taking control of the game. Four copies of Havok, Critical Mass should be effective to this end. Not only is it a very respectable 8 ATK / 7 DEF card, but its effect works beautifully in unison with Xorn. Since we can add effects to the chain during the recovery phase, we can use Xorn to recover Havok prior to wrap-up, then use Havok to stun an opposing character with a cost of 5 or less. If Havok hasn’t been stunned going into the recovery phase, then we can use its effect once to stun an opposing character, recover it with Xorn, then use its effect again to stun another character. Toss in a Phoenix Rising to recover Havok, and the hit could conceivably keep on coming into infinity—or at least until we run out of characters to stun! Also at 4, we’ll toss in a couple of copies of Professor X, Headmaster. While its effect doesn’t have nearly the “Wow!” factor of Havok’s, it has solid stats and an ability that also works well with Xorn’s effect. Besides, we can’t put too many copies of the good Professor in the deck since we might be seeing another version of him in the later turns.

It may not be very pretty, but we want Wolverine, The Best at What He Does for turn 5. Many players are critical of Wolverine for having a low DEF and thus being an easy target for attacks up the curve. However, several considerations really make this criticism a non-issue. First, stunning up the curve will be commonplace in MMA, so the two points of DEF that Wolverine loses compared to the average 5-drop are not going to be a major issue. Of course, it is also highly unlikely that a character with a cost of 4 or less will be able to attack into Wolverine without stunning back. In this case, we are effectively trading a stun on an opposing character for a few points of endurance (since Wolverine will recover for free).

Second, since the deck wants the odd initiative, we will usually only have to worry about attacks up the curve on turn 6 or later since we will be doing all of the attacking on turn 5. Finally, if we achieve our goal of gaining board control on turn 4, then our opponent will usually have only two good attacks going into turn 5 (assuming that we don’t control the initiative). If our opponent wastes his attack with his low drop on Wolverine, then he will net no board advantage. If we have a SNIKT! handy, then our opponent could actually lose board advantage on his initiative. Despite his low DEF, playing Wolverine is a win-win situation.

Turn 6 is a tough call for us. While Colossus, Organic Steel is a very big character and can work well in unison with Xorn, its effect will usually only be useful once per game (if at all). So we’re going to go with someone even bigger that can make more of a difference if we have to go to turn 7: Iceman, Deep Freeze. This 13 ATK / 13 DEF 6-drop is a monster on either initiative. Presumably, we’d like to end the game by turn 6. To that end, Iceman presents a lot of problems for our opponents, as many 6-drops in Marvel Modern can’t stun Iceman without help. Of course, if we do go into turn 7, then we have the security of knowing that any characters that try to take on Iceman will probably stay exhausted going into the next turn. Finally, Iceman’s discard cost shouldn’t be too much of an issue since nearly a quarter of our deck is Energy characters; Iceman is just another good way to get characters into the KO’d pile!

Finally, at 7, we’re going to depart from conventional wisdom (and MXM 7-drops) to try out two copies of Professor X, Friend of Mutants. While this X-Men Starter Deck rare is smaller than most 7-drops, it makes up for it with an effect that gives all of our X-Men characters a substantial boost. If we have the initiative, then putting our X-Men characters in the front row will increase our characters’ ATK values by 2, meaning that almost all of our characters can attack one spot up the curve without any other attack pumps. On the other hand, if we put all of our characters in the support row, then our opponents will have to work to stun our characters, since each character’s DEF increases by 2.*  Effects that boost all characters we control are formidable, and Professor X has one of the best.

We’re wrapping up our Modern Age build now. Let’s look at the final product:

“You’re Never Going to Keep Me Down!”  (60 cards)

Characters (34)

4 Archangel, Angel

2 Jubilee, Jubilation Lee

4 Cannonball, Blast Field

4 Longshot, Hero of Mojoworld

4 Xorn, Shen Xorn

4 Havok, Critical Mass

2 Professor X, Headmaster

4 Wolverine, The Best at What He Does

4 Iceman, Deep Freeze

2 Professor X, Friend of Mutants

Plot Twists (22)

4 Angel of Mercy

4 Flying Kick

4 Mutant Massacre

4 Phoenix Rising

4 SNIKT!

2 Time Breach

Locations (4)

4 Worthington Industries, X-Corp

As I mentioned earlier, this deck wants odd initiatives. While it is still possible for it to win on evens, the best chance for the deck to take control of the board is the turn that Wolverine, The Best at What He Does comes out. Assuming that we keep Xorn healthy, Wolverine will easily take out any opposing 5-drops, Havok, Critical Mass will dispatch the 4-drop, and any remaining drops can be taken down by Xorn and Cannonball.

Against Squadron Supreme, your preliminary goal is to survive the early turns and take over the late turns with your characters. If your opponent is playing AIDA, then Havok and Mutant Massacre are essentially worthless to you. However, if you can avoid AIDA somehow, then try to keep a character ready to counter Panacea Potion with Mutant Massacre, and use Wolverine and Havok to take Albert Gaines ◊ Nuke to school.

Against reservist decks, try to get out Cannonball (since it laughs at Heroes in Reserve and The Acolytes). Don’t even bother to make safe attacks down the curve, since they can easily stun most of your guys back. Hold on to SNIKT! for your defensive turns, and use your superior board control cards to keep their characters out of action. If you can get off a Mutant Massacre on She-Hulk, Gamma Bombshell, then you’ll probably win.

For those attending the Pro Circuit, good luck and have fun in Atlanta! I’ll be enviously keeping tabs on the action via the Metagame.com coverage, wishing that I could trade places with any one of you. For those of you who, like me, can’t make the festivities down South, feel free to send me an email at BigSpooky1@hotmail.com. Those of you attending the Pro Circuit are also welcome to drop me a line . . . though I’ll probably just tell you how incredibly jealous I am!

* And magically, just like that, Wolverine, The Best at What He Does jumps to 9 DEF!