I want you all to picture Deadpool sitting on a rooftop with a gun pointed right at your head, ready to squeeze the trigger if you so much as blink the wrong way. That’s what today’s preview card represents. Deadpool isn’t the kind who can be bothered with fisticuffs. He's an assassin, and as such, he doesn’t really jump into brawls and start fighting fair. That’s just not his style. He’ll flat-out take you down if you try any funny business, and he’s not going to let you off easy with just a stun—he'll make it as though you never existed.

When I started working here at UDE last summer, the team was halfway through development of Marvel Team-Up. One of the team themes from the set is dual loyalty, which I was very happy to see brought back since I enjoyed it so much in Marvel Knights. Checking out the powers on the dual loyalty characters was one of the first things I did, and wow, was I surprised. These characters seemed really cool, and I couldn’t wait to play with them. When I saw I was going to have the chance to preview one of them, I jumped at the opportunity to show you all such a flavorful, fun, and powerful card. You’ve already seen Hellstorm, Son of Satan, and Moon Knight, Fist of Khonshu—it’s now my pleasure to add Deadpool, Merc with a Mouth to the list.

He is nice, isn’t he? Deadpool might be the card I was most in love with when I arrived at UDE, although at the time the card was a little different. In fact, this card went through a lot of iterations before it got to where it is now. There were times when he was stunning characters with a resource cost less than the number of resources you controlled,  and other times when he would just KO a character for 4 endurance.

One thing was always constant, though—he wasn’t a fighter. This was a dude who was so smooth, the numbers in his bottom left didn’t matter. If you’re seeing just a 6 ATK / 6 DEF 5-drop, you’re missing the big picture. Since he has concealed, he doesn’t fight unless you want him to. He usually just waits in hiding, making sure your opponent’s biggest character isn’t going to try anything funny. Since you can use him on either side of the initiative, he’s pretty much a free Mystical Paralysis every single turn, except for one thing—there’s no getting around this one. You can’t use a ready effect to get your character into the fray. If you even think about it, you’ll be sorry. That’s what Deadpool is all about: he’s the “don’t even think about it” character. Any time you exhaust him, ask your opponent if he or she feels lucky.

The best part of this card is putting your opponent in the squeeze. If you can make your opponent attack, you can flat-out KO a character every turn with no cost restrictions. There might even be some cards out there to try out in a deck with Deadpool. I won’t mention what they are—*coughO-Forcecough*—but they’re out there.

Dual Loyalty . . . How Does it Work, Exactly?

I’ve seen some confusion about how dual loyalty works. Since I’m not a rules guy per se, I’ll just copy what it says on the boxtopper and take it from there.

Dual loyalty means:

Recruit this card only if both its printed affiliations are among the affiliations of characters you control.

To recruit a dual loyalty character, check its two printed affiliations against all the affiliations, both printed and non-printed, of characters you control.

Example: Morbius, Shadow of the Vampire has dual loyalty and the Underworld and Spider-Friends affiliations. You can recruit Morbius if you control both an Underworld character and a Spider-Friends character. You can also recruit him if you control a Team-Up crossing over Underworld and Spider-Friends, along with one or more characters of either affiliation.

If that wasn’t clear enough, here’s what you really want to know: you cannot cheat dual loyalty with Crisis on Infinite Earths.

Why, you ask? Here’s how it works:

In order to recruit a dual loyalty character, you have to control one or more characters that share both of its printed affiliations. If you have Crisis on Infinite Earths in your resource row, all of your characters in play have the Crisis affiliation, as does Deadpool (in your hand). When you try to recruit Deadpool, his dual loyalty will still check to see if you control a Sinister Syndicate character and a Marvel Defenders character, which you don’t.

Okay, so how does it work if you control Spider-Man, The Sensational Spider-Man, you’ve teamed-up Spider-Friends and Marvel Defenders, and you want to recruit Moon Knight, Fist of Khonshu? You have no character in play with the printed affiliation Marvel Defenders, but that’s no problem. When you recruit the Fist of Khonshu, his dual loyalty only checks to see if you control a Marvel Defender and a Spider-Friend, since those are his printed affiliations.

In the end, it works exactly how you would expect it to work, so don’t get confused by the fancy wording. The important point to remember is that it doesn’t work with Crisis on Infinite Earths, nor does it work with other cards that strip team affiliations from the dual loyalty character in an attempt to meet its requirements. When you want to recruit a dual loyalty character, all you have to do is read the side of the card and ask yourself if you have characters with those affiliations in play.

That said, I hope you all have as much fun playing with Deadpool as we had working on him.

Until next time, enjoy putting your opponent in the squeeze!

John Fiorillo