It’s combo time!
A little bit of Monica in my life.
A little bit of Erica by my side.
A little bit of Rita is all I need.
A little bit of Tina is what I see . . .
Wait a minute . . . that’s Mambo time. My mistake.
For Vs. System deckbuilders, probably the most fun one can have is finding new and interesting card interactions. Some combos, like backup characters used in unison with The Rock of Eternity, are fairly apparent. Other combos are a bit more subtle, and it is the search for those harder-to-find combos that makes the game so rewarding. Not only do these deck ideas make the game itself more fun and interesting, but in the proper venue, they can also lead to a good deal of success.
“Face the fires of vengeance, mortals! And know the wrath of the BigSpooky!”
Recently, I was engaged in a pleasant chat online with my TAWC teammates and friends, John Hall and Shane “Wiggy” Wiggans. I was regaling them with the tales of a couple of Marvel Team-Up drafts that I had participated in over the weekend at Insanity Cards and Games in Mesquite, TX. In one draft, I had managed to be the only player at the table to draft Sinister Syndicate rush, and I piloted it to a 2-1 record. Of course, I probably could have won the tournament outright had I actually learned to play the deck properly before I drafted it. I discovered quickly that you have to avoid having too many resources in play, or else you burn yourself out of the game with cards like Alien Symbiote and Razorfist. But once I learned to take advantage of the reservist mechanic and all of the resource KO effects, I was able to keep my resource count down and win on turn 5 by a substantial margin.
In my other draft, I went with a Spider-Friends deck with a splash of Marvel Defenders (just a splash because everyone else at the table was drafting Defenders, as well). I didn’t think that this deck was as good as my Syndicate build, but on the backs of cards like Indebted and Spider-Man, The Spectacular Spider-Man, I went undefeated in the tournament. Raw power is all well and good, but it’s hard to argue that the defensive and control effects of the Marvel Defenders and Spider-Friends teams aren’t awesome.
One card that I developed a particular affinity for was Johnny Blaze ◊ Ghost Rider. The newest version of the Spirit of Vengeance is a defensive wonder that can single-handedly change the balance of a game. In the Marvel Team-Up Sneak Preview, I took my only loss in a round where my opponent was able to burn me for nearly 20 endurance through Ghost Rider’s effect alone. In other drafts, Ghost Rider has been an unbelievable source of damage over the course of the game. When a player knows that an opponent will dish out a ton of damage if his or her character becomes stunned, it’s hard to justify attacking.
You Know . . . We Have Vengeance Over Here in the DC Universe, Too!
Anyway, back to the conversation between me and my fellow TAWCers. Shortly after telling them all about my weekend drafts, we started discussing the potential for the new set in Constructed. I expressed how I thought that Ghost Rider was underappreciated compared to the other Marvel Defenders. My initial comment was that a couple copies of The Order would make Ghost Rider quite devastating. If he were to activate on a 5-drop, an opponent would lose a whopping 15 endurance once the 5-drop became stunned.
While 15 endurance loss is impressive, it really isn’t something that we can hang our hat on. So we started talking about additional ways to abuse Ghost Rider. At some point in the conversation, Join Us or Die was mentioned. Where The Order would give us the chance to increase the amount of damage that Ghost Rider’s effect inflicts, Join Us or Die would give us a way to control when our character becomes stunned. More importantly, because Join Us or Die automatically recovers the stunned character if it has the Villains United affiliation, we can trigger Ghost Rider’s effect multiple times in a turn. With three copies of Join Us or Die, that impressive 15 endurance damage from earlier leaps to a colossal 45 endurance damage! Now that’s something that we can hang our hat on.
I suppose it’s only fitting that we join the forces of Ghost Rider and his DC brethren in vengeance. With the help of The Order, Join Us or Die, and the Villains United, we’re going to let Johnny Blaze free the fires of vengeance all over our opponent’s endurance.
The Build
Four copies of Johnny Blaze ◊ Ghost Rider represent the standard start for our deck. In addition, we’ll need four copies each of The Order and Join Us or Die. If we can get a few copies of each in hand, then we can ensure that we’ll be able to deal lethal damage when the time comes.
Some of you out there may be thinking that the four copies each of our combo plot twists probably aren’t enough to ensure that we have a sufficient number of copies in hand when the critical turn arrives. And you would be right. We don’t really have any effective plot twist searchers or recursion among the Marvel Defenders and Villains United. As such, our combo would probably only be sporadic at best if we limited ourselves to those two teams. So, we’re going to add a third support team to the mix: Secret Society. With effective search and recursion cards, the Secret Society may be just what we need to ensure the consistency of our combo.
Let’s start off with our character choices. At 1, we have a slew of select characters. First and foremost are four copies of The Calculator, Noah Kuttler. This Villains United 1-drop plays double duty as a Villains United character and a Team-Up searcher. With three teams in our build, we want to have a way to get our Team-Ups active ASAP.
Another essential Villains United 1-drop is the vengeance searcher Alexander Luthor, Duplicitous Doppelganger. With a heavy presence of characters with vengeance in our deck, we could certainly benefit from having a way to search out our key drops. Alexander Luthor is one of the more effective searchers available to us, so we definitely want to play our maximum four copies.
Since we are playing both Villains United and Secret Society, we should probably play Cheetah at 1 as well. This feral feline is dual-affiliated with these two teams, so she can be of great aid whenever we have a team-stamped effect. In addition, her vengeance gives us a bit of an extra ATK boost so that we can dole out some extra damage in the early turns.
As is the case with many combo decks, we will find that hand size is a critical issue for us. That being said, we might want to have a way of improving our hand size. Such a task is tailor-made for the Secret Society 1-drop Mr. Mxyzptlk, Troublesome Trickster. With Mr. Mxy’s auto-recursion effect, we can discard without worrying about having enough cards in our late turns to fuel our combo.
Our final 1-drop gives us a bit of end-game damage potential. If we use Ghost Rider’s power multiple times in a turn, our opponents may just decide not to attack to spare themselves the damage. In this situation, we can bring out Chomin to ensure a stun in the late turns. This Anti-Matter 1-drop can force a stun on one of our characters, and thereby force through the damage on our opponent. However, we need to be careful when we recruit Chomin, as we can only play The Order if all characters we control have the Marvel Defenders affiliation. Unless we have a Team-Up, we will generally want to use The Order and Ghost Rider’s effect first, then recruit our Anti-Matter 1-drop afterward.
We have one copy of our sole 2-drop. In general, we will not want to recruit this character, but if we find the need to recur a character and we don’t have a plot twist or location that can meet the need, then we can recruit Peter Merkel ◊ Ragdoll for a bit of on-demand recursion. The Secret Society 2-drop has a built-in recursion effect that we will undoubtedly need to use from time to time. And because Ragdoll has vengeance, we can search him out with Alexander Luthor quite easily. Ragdoll is a simple and effective answer to a difficult problem.
At 3, we’re going to play four copies of Floronic Man, Jason Woodrue. Voluntarily KO’ing a 3-drop is never easy, but this 3-drop’s ability is one of the more powerful recursion effects in Vs. System. As we mentioned earlier, we will need multiple copies of our combo plot twists. Floronic Man is effectively an additional copy of a plot twist, since we can recur a plot twist right after we use it with Floronic Man’s effect.
Turn 4 already brings us Ghost Rider. We could feasibly activate Ghost Rider’s effect on himself and deal quite a bit of damage, but we would probably be better off playing a character that already provides us a bit of additional burn. Villains United has a character who fits this role perfectly in the form of Deathstroke the Terminator, Lethal Weapon. Even before we consider Ghost Rider’s effect, Deathstroke already has a very powerful burn effect. When we start stacking Ghost Rider activations, the amount of damage that Deathstroke deals can be absurd. With just a single copy of The Order, Deathstroke will deal 12 endurance loss every time he becomes stunned. With a one-two punch of Ghost Rider and Deathstroke, we have ideal drops for turns 4 and 5. In addition, this leaves an extra resource point open for us on turn 5; we can play Chomin, or if necessary, we can play Alexander Luthor to search out Deathstroke. There’s definitely a variety of options.
In addition to the combo plot twists that we’ve already mentioned, we have a few other blue cards that are worth playing. First, we have the partner Team-Up to The Calculator: Coercion. A majority of our characters are on the Villains United team. Coercion allows us to team-up other teams with the Villains United even if we don’t actually have those teams in play. The fact that it’s searchable makes it a perfect addition to our deck.
Since we’re discussing search, let’s talk about our character searchers. To aid Alexander Luthor in hitting our preferred curve, we have Baddest of the Bad and Straight to the Grave. Baddest of the Bad has a unique cost associated with it in that we have to return a Villains United character to our hand to play it. With such a slew of Villains United 2-drops, this shouldn’t be much of a problem for us. But the real charm of Baddest of the Bad is that it can search out any character in our deck. Yes, since all our characters are affiliated, Baddest of the Bad can put any one of them in our hand.
Straight to the Grave is similar to Baddest of the Bad in that it can search out any character card. However, Straight to the Grave instead puts that character card in the KO’d pile rather than our hand. With a few recursion options (like the aforementioned Ragdoll), this shouldn’t be a problem for us. Of course, the real allure of Straight to the Grave is that it can also put a vital non-character card into our KO’d pile. With our deck’s recursion effects, this can be a very beneficial method of finding our combo plot twists for our kill turn.
Our final plot twist is a pseudo–plot twist recursion effect that can effectively give us additional copies of our critical plot twists. Sorcerer’s Treasure is another good reason for the inclusion of the Secret Society in our deck. Since the amount of damage that we can inflict is directly related to the number of key plot twists that we can play, it makes sense for us to play a card that allows us to reuse these critical plot twists. Sorcerer’s Treasure does force us to remove the plot twist that we reuse from the game, but considering that we will usually only play Sorcerer’s Treasure on our kill turn, this isn’t much of a drawback.
Before we move on to our locations, we should probably talk about the effective use of our plot twist recursion effects; in essence, should we reuse The Order or Join Us or Die? The short answer is that, with just a few copies of both, you will usually achieve the same amount of “net damage.” Consider the following scenario: You have Ghost Rider and Deathstroke in play and one copy each of The Order, Join Us or Die, and Sorcerer’s Treasure. Here is a breakdown of the damage that you could deal:
1) Two copies of The Order (one use with Sorcerer’s Treasure) = 12 damage
X one copy of Join Us or Die = 12 damage
2) One copy of The Order = 8 damage
X two copies of Join Us or Die (one use with Sorcerer’s Treasure) = 16 damage
As you can see, copying Join Us or Die results in more damage to your opponent. But if we take into account our own stun damage (4 endurance in the first case versus 8 endurance in the second case), our net damage comes out to 8 endurance. Basically, it’s the same no matter what we choose.
Of course, as we increase the number of copies of our plot twists, we find that we achieve diminishing returns for every additional copy of The Order that we play. Before any Ghost Rider activations, Deathstroke will deal 4 endurance damage every time he stuns. With one activation, that number doubles to 8 endurance. Thus, our first copy of The Order increases our total damage output by 50% (from 8 endurance to 12 endurance). The second copy will increase damage by 33% (from 12 to 16). These returns continue to decline as we increase the number of copies of The Order that we play.
Let’s go back to our original scenario. But this time, let’s double the number of each plot twist. Here are two possible outcomes:
1) Four copies of The Order (two uses with Sorcerer’s Treasure) = 24 damage
X Two copies of Join Us or Die = 48 damage
- 8 stun damage = 40 net damage
2) Two copies of The Order = 16 damage
X Four copies of Join Us or Die (two uses with Sorcerer’s Treasure) = 64 damage
- 16 stun damage = 48 net damage
This illustrates that it is generally better to maximize your copying of Join Us or Die.
One final note about this issue. If Chomin is in play, he will tend to skew the results toward playing more copies of The Order. Consider our original “one copy of each plot twist” with Chomin in play:
1) Two copies of The Order (one use with Sorcerer’s Treasure) = 12 damage
X One copy of Join Us or Die = 12 damage
+ 16 damage from Chomin = 28 damage
- 8 stun damage = 20 net damage
2) One copy of The Order = 8 damage
X Two copies of Join Us or Die (one use with Sorcerer’s Treasure) = 16 damage
+ 12 damage from Chomin = 28 damage
- 12 stun damage = 16 net damage
The bottom line: if you have Chomin in play, it is generally better to maximize your uses of The Order. Otherwise, maximize your uses of Join Us or Die. ’Nuff said.
Our locations should be fairly apparent. Since we’ve been talking so much about recursion, we should expect that four copies of Slaughter Swamp will make their way into the deck. And indeed they shall. With Slaughter Swamp in play, our character search provided by Straight to the Grave becomes 100% effective (barring any resource row disruption). In addition, we can freely discard late drops to the KO’d pile, secure in the knowledge that we can retrieve them when the time comes to play them.
Our final card is a bit of an insurance Team-Up. With all our search, we should have no problem finding multiple copies of Coercion in most games. But since Team-Ups are critical for deck success (because we can’t play The Order unless we’re all teamed-up), we’re going to add a couple copies of 31st Century Metropolis. This Team-Up can satisfy the initial “two teams together” function. In addition, the activated effect can bring one of our characters into the fold for a turn. If we have wayward copies of Floronic Man, Jason Woodrue or Chomin in play, this can be an invaluable asset for letting us play The Order without too much difficulty.
It may not be Trogdor, but our deck will burn as effectively as any dragon, man. Let’s take a look at the final product:
Spirits of Vengeance (60 cards)
Characters (30)
4 Alexander Luthor, Duplicitous Doppelganger
4 Cheetah, Feral Feline
1 Chomin, Qwardian Spy
4 Mr. Mxyzptlk, Troublesome Trickster
4 The Calculator, Noah Kuttler
1 Peter Merkel ◊ Ragdoll, Malleable Miscreant
4 Floronic Man, Jason Woodrue
4 Johnny Blaze ◊ Ghost Rider, Damned
4 Deathstroke the Terminator, Lethal Weapon
Plot Twists (24)
4 Baddest of the Bad
4 Coercion, Team-Up
4 Join Us or Die
4 Sorcerer’s Treasure
4 Straight to the Grave
4 The Order
Locations (6)
2 31st Century Metropolis, Team-Up
4 Slaughter Swamp
Unlike standard decks, there aren’t usually any hard and fast rules for mulligan conditions with combo decks. Alexander Luthor is probably a good start, as he can fetch a number of essential characters for our deck. Of course, we can’t use that as a strict guideline, since we will need to have at least a couple copies each of The Order and Join Us or Die for our combo to go off. With all the character search in our deck, we generally shouldn’t have a problem hitting our character curve.
Initiative choice isn’t much of a concern, as the combo can go off on turn 5 whether or not we control the initiative. If we do have even initiatives, though, we will generally want to play Deathstroke on turn 4 and then Ghost Rider on turn 5. This allows us to maximize damage on our attacks, as we can deal burn damage without having to exhaust a character with Deathstroke in play. In addition, this also allows us to get a late Team-Up on turn 5 if we miss it in our early turns.
And that’s a wrap. I hope that you all take an opportunity to try out this crazy combo idea. In addition, if you have any combo ideas that you’d like to share with me and the Vs. System public at large, please feel free to send them my way.
Take care, and I’ll see you again next week for another episode of Breaking Ground.
Michael Barnes (a.k.a. BigSpooky) is an avid Vs. System player who is a founding member of Team Alternate Win Condition (TAWC). When he isn’t concocting crazy deck ideas that no sane person would think of, he occupies his spare time working as an accountant in Dallas, TX. Any questions, comments, suggestions, or vengeful activities that you might have for Michael can be sent to him at BigSpooky1@hotmail.com.