It’s that time again! No, not Hammer Time. Not even I can guarantee that much awesomeness (or pants that ridiculous) in a mere article. What I can guarantee is that when this week’s Deck Clinic is over, you’ll never look at the Sinister Syndicate in quite the same way again.
Now, before I kick off by introducing the deck, a disclaimer—this Deck Clinic is not like other Deck Clinics. For a start, the deck type is one that has, to my knowledge, never before been covered in a Deck Clinic article: combo. True combo, I mean—the kind that sits there confusing your opponent before exploding in a single-phase orgy of looped effects and activated powers. One more disclaimer; as I write this intro, I can’t guarantee that the final product will be anywhere near as stable or consistent as other combo decks that have seen high-level play. I don’t expect to turn this submission into the next Light Show or Ivy League, but I do hope to mix it up, throw in a sprinkling of ideas, and come out with something more powerful at the end.
Submitter: Kariggi at VsRealms.com
Jack'M
Characters
2 Wyatt Wingfoot, Keewazi Adventurer
4 Archangel, Angel
1 Chameleon, Dmitri Smerdyakov
4 Professor X, Mutant Mentor
4 She-Thing, Sharon Ventura
4 Dr. Light, Master of Holograms
4 Floronic Man, Jason Woodrue
4 Jackal, Dr. Miles Warren
Plot Twists
4 Teamwork
1 Funky's Big Rat Code
4 Straight to the Grave
4 Gone But Not Forgotten
4 Rise from the Grave
4 Cosmic Radiation
4 Enemy of My Enemy
Locations
4 UN Building
4 X-Corp: Amsterdam
Alright, you wanted janky with an overlooked interaction . . . okay, maybe not an overlooked interaction, just an unused one. This is the closest I could get to making this work, and I know others have tried. Good luck!
First of all, a brief rundown of the mechanics of the combo itself.
Ingredients:
Jackal, Dr. Miles Warren, ready and unstunned in the recovery phase.
Professor X, Mutant Mentor in play.
Floronic Man, Jason Woodrue in hand.
Cosmic Radiation in hand.
Gone But Not Forgotten in the resource row.
The following teams teamed-up: Fantastic Four, Secret Society, Sinister Syndicate, and X-Statix.
Recipe:
Activate Jackal, Dr. Miles Warren, putting Floronic Man, Jason Woodrue into play. Play Cosmic Radiation from hand, readying Jackal. KO Floronic Man to return Cosmic Radiation to hand. Activate Professor X, Mutant Mentor to return Floronic Man to hand. Play Radiation from hand, readying Jackal and Professor X. Continue until you’ve gained a suitably excessive amount of endurance (a few trillion should do it, or maybe a googolplex if you want to pretend to be a mathematician).
Unfortunately, your eagle eyes may have already picked out some difficulties that we might face with this plan:
- You need a lot of team-up action going on. You also need to get Professor X, Mutant Mentor into play, with possibly the most inconvenient affiliation for loyalty in the game (X-Statix). Working around this kind of thing, however, is the bread and butter of combo deckbuilding.
- You need a 6 ATK / 6 DEF 4-drop to be ready and unstunned in the recovery phase. This? This is trickier.
- Gone But Not Forgotten is banned, effective September 23rd. This one is a doozy.
- You need to find all these various characters, along with a Cosmic Radiation to start the loop; GBNF in the resource row (I know, I know, banned); and multiple team-ups. If you play a recovery effect on Jackal, you’ll need an extra copy of Radiation to ready him before you can get started. That’s a lot of search cards that we’ll need.
Identifying Core Cards: Something Old, Something New
Assembling all those components is quite a challenge, and until the release of Heralds of Galactus, this article was looking like a diary of failed attempts, with the motto: “Know when to give up on a combo deck that isn’t working.” Instead, it’s increasingly looking like the moral might end up being: “Remember to think about the decks that didn’t work when a new set comes out.” In this case, despite the banning of Gone But Not Forgotten, one new card may make all the difference. That card is Valeria Von Doom, Heir to Latveria. In one incredibly efficient package, Valeria provides the Fantastic Four team affiliation, a card-cycling power, and the “You are considered to control Dr. Doom.” power. The thing that really pushes Valeria over the edge is her alternate recruit cost, allowing a deck that had problems getting sufficient characters into play for the necessary team-ups to “cheat” one of those affiliations into play for the cost of a discard.
My first, pre-Heralds of Galactus attempts at the deck used Dangerous Experiment to search for Cosmic Radiation and Gone But Not Forgotten. Valeria, however, opens up the option of using Boris, Personal Servant of Dr. Doom, a possibility being reinforced by the presence of an alternate route to victory also included in the new set—Master of Puppets. Representing a perfect alternative to GBNF, Master of Puppets simply ends the game on our combo turn rather than gaining endurance (and potentially leaving ourselves vulnerable to an alternate win condition like Captain Marvel, Champion of Magic or, even more embarrassing, Secret Six Victorious).
We have some encouraging new options, and now all we need to do is work out the best way to make use of them. Easier said than done, of course.
First of all, we need to decide when we realistically aim to win the game. The earliest possible turn is 4, because that’s the turn we can recruit Jackal. Each turn after 4 gives us more options, but also gives our opponent the chance to snatch a win from under our noses, or get disruption online that we can’t handle. The first thing we want to do to start pulling a list together is to pick out the key cards that we can’t live without and want to draw every game. The starting point for our first draft will be four copies of each of those cards. After we have a core list ready with four of everything we might need (unless it’s very clear we don’t need that many), we can work out how many cards we need to trim.
4 Valeria Von Doom, Heir to Latveria
4 Boris, Personal Servant of Dr. Doom
4 Professor X, Mutant Mentor
4 Floronic Man, Jason Woodrue
4 Jackal, Dr. Miles Warren
4 Cosmic Radiation
4 Master of Puppets
We will also need substantial access to team-ups, and it’s looking like we’ll need some way to get around the double-loyalty for X-Statix and X-Men on Professor X. Given our rapidly-increasing range of low drops, Dr. Light, Master of Holograms is the next card to be added (another card in common with the original list).
We will also need another Secret Society character to team-up with before we can put Floronic Man into play with Jackal. Thankfully, there are a couple of solid options for low-cost Secret Society characters: Deadshot, Dead Aim; Deadshot, Floyd Lawton; and Mr. Mxyzptlk, Troublesome Trickster. All three cards provide some additional benefit beyond their team affiliation. Mr. Mxyzptlk fuels discard costs, Dead Aim can be brought into play by any 3-drop or higher for free (and is concealed), and Floyd Lawton has the potential to KO opposing 3-drops. Another option for getting the Professor into play is Changeling, Kevin Sidney. The littlest shapeshifter allows us to drop any 1-drop into play, regardless of loyalty or recruit restrictions, and absorbs an attack in the process that would otherwise be aimed at a character we care about keeping around.
There is another option for getting our Secret Society (and, indeed, any other team affiliation) needs met: Detective Chimp, Bobo T. Chimpanzee. The diminutive simian investigator has two great plus points. He can team us up with a team we can’t otherwise get into play in time, and he can skulk in the hidden area, safe from attacks. Even the fact that he can stand in front of Professor X while in the hidden area will be of use against some of the powers and effects that are used to attack hidden characters. We shouldn’t need many copies of the Chimp though, as he will mainly be used to fill in holes rather than provide the core strategy itself. We’ll start with one Chimp, and maybe add a copy or two if we find ourselves searching for him often.
At some point, we need to team-up a lot of different teams. There are two main engines that have been used recently to facilitate finding team-ups, each with its pros and cons. The first is Archangel, Angel twinned with X-Corp: Amsterdam, allowing you to chain multiple search cards together to hit a Team-Up. The second is Poison Ivy, Deadly Rose and chumps . . . poor, defenseless, little chumps, taking one for the team to search locations out of your deck. At the moment both cards are options, although it should be noted that Changeling interacts particularly well with Poison Ivy; when he becomes stunned and his triggered power goes on the chain, he can be KO’d to Poison Ivy to search for a location while still putting a 1-drop into play from your hand. The one significant advantage Poison Ivy has over Archangel is that she is the complete package. She doesn’t require adding multiple copies of another card (X-Corp: Amsterdam) to the deck in order to do her job, and we’re already looking tight on space.
It’s becoming evident that we’re going to need some substantial search ability for this deck. Since we’ve decided to go with Poison Ivy over Archangel, we have locations (and therefore team-ups) covered. For plot twists, we have Boris. For characters, you all know what’s coming next—after all, it’s a Golden Age deck containing characters with (so far) a whopping eight teams represented (Fantastic Four, Doom, X-Men, Arkham Inmates, Injustice Gang, Secret Society, X-Statix, Sinister Syndicate), and we aren’t even done yet. Four copies of Enemy of My Enemy it is. With Dr. Light, Master of Holograms; Professor X, Mutant Mentor; and access to a copy of a location like Slaughter Swamp or Soul World via Poison Ivy, Straight to the Grave seems like the best choice for a secondary character search card. Given our access to the Secret Society team, we may actually be able to make use of the secondary effect of Straight to the Grave on rare occasions. For example, if Jackal is already ready in the recovery phase, we can use Straight to the Grave to find the Cosmic Radiation we’ll need to go off.
It’s probably worth taking time out at this point to give some indication of just how many options you have—over and above the decision between Poison Ivy and Archangel—when trying to assemble a deck like this one. To give a brief idea, here are some of the ways that a combo deck like Day of the Jackal can find all the various components it needs, and why some of them aren’t appropriate in this specific deck.
Character Search
Enemy of My Enemy and Straight to the Grave are the two strongest and most flexible character search cards, bar none. In a deck with Dr. Light, Master of Holograms; access to a location like Slaughter Swamp or Soul World; and even Professor X, Mutant Mentor; Straight to the Grave is almost as efficient as Enemy of My Enemy itself, and has the added occasional benefit of searching for unaffiliated characters or putting plot twists or locations in our KO’d pile to be brought back with Floronic Man.
In a deck packed with 1-drops, Vicarious Living can be almost as strong as Enemy of My Enemy. In our deck, which needs to find Floronic Man and Jackal as well, it’s not as efficient as it could be in something more like a Rigged Elections deck.
Beetle, Armorsmith and Yellowjacket, Rita DeMara are often used in conjunction with a copy of Kyle Rayner, Last Green Lantern and multiple copies of Hard Sound Construct to put characters directly into play in the build phase. The Masters of Evil characters are excellent for decks that have the space and spare team-up capacity to make use of them. Sadly, I don’t think this deck fits the bill, simply due to reasons of space.
Various team- and keyword-stamped search cards like Signal Flare; Bat-Signal; and Sovereign Superior are usable or not depending entirely on the specifics of your chosen combo and the teams involved.
Location and Team-Up Search
In combo decks that need a lot of locations and have a “pre-emptive” team-up like Coercion or Midnight Sons that can get around his loyalty, Ahmed Samsarra, White King could be a star. We, on the other hand, would never be able to recruit him.
Incredibly efficient in terms of card slots, in any deck that can keep the cheap (or alternate-recruit) characters coming, Poison Ivy, Deadly Rose is a superstar.
Although it only searches for Team-Ups, Teamwork has the secondary benefit of protecting the Team-Ups in our resource row. The lack of flexibility is what rules it out for me in this deck.
For decks unable to provide enough fuel for Ivy (or decks like Ivy League that were completely focused on finding Team-Ups specifically), Archangel, Angel and X-Corp: Amsterdam provide a relatively card-efficient chain of search cards, although they take up a reasonable amount of space in the deck. In particular, X-Corp: Amsterdam can search for Mutopia. While Mutopia is, in most situations, a fairly suboptimal Team-Up card, it has a unique (and very powerful) synergy with Multiple Man ◊ Jamie Madrox. With Multiple Man in play, a flipped Mutopia can crossover every affiliation among characters you control (as every affiliation shares the Physical trait), even if Multiple Man later leaves play.
The oddballs (like Lacuna, Media Darling; Morbius, The Living Vampire; and The Rose, Shadowy Lieutenant) are usually too focused for combo decks, although Morbius (and more specifically the card he searches for, Hypnotic Charms) has potential if you find a combo deck involving extensive use of the Underworld or Secret Society teams. Charms works extremely well at teaming-up your characters in play with anything you want via Straight to the Grave and the other Secret Society deck depletion cards.
Plot Twist Search
Boris, Personal Servant of Dr. Doom, our plot twist search card of choice, has been improved dramatically by the printing of Valeria Von Doom, Heir to Latveria. We can now use a character search card to find a character that doesn’t cost resource points, satisfies Boris’s Dr. Doom requirement, has two useful team affiliations, and proceeds to draw us extra cards when we play plot twists.
The yin to Boris’s yang, Alfred Pennyworth, Faithful Friend is a staple of combo decks, most notably those running A Child Named Valeria or those able to make use of multiple copies of Cosmic Radiation in the build phase to work around the fact that he comes into play exhausted.
Until the release of Heralds of Galactus, Dangerous Experiment was in my early (and far less efficient) builds of the deck, providing plot twist searching without a resource point cost.
For some decks, Marvel’s Most Wanted is the ultimate combo search card. Unfortunately, “some decks” is quite a small number. I have vague recollections of the card being used in Thunderbolts Team Tactics decks, but the hefty discard cost, high threshold value, and restriction to Marvel cards have kept it out of most other decks.
The new kid on the block, Creation of a Herald is even more flexible than Marvel’s Most Wanted, for a more tolerable cost. It’s still early to tell whether Creation will end up making the cut for combo decks, as Creation of a Herald and Galactus represents quite a commitment in terms of card slots.
An interesting new choice, Dr. Doom, Richards’s Rival provides a single-shot plot twist search, along with a reusable “card-drawing” effect via replacing into the resource row. For decks not needing Dr. Light, Master of Holograms (maybe a Team Tactics combo deck, for example), the new Doom could be very effective.
Tomorrow, I’ll finish running through the inclusions in the deck, see how fast the deck can pull off the combo, and present a final list along with the usual rambling, play notes, and post-mortem analysis.