Big Brotherhood has been overshadowed considerably by New Brotherhood for the few months since Vs. has been released.  The deck’s strength, versatility, and unique resiliency had gone largely unexplored, but after claiming top honors at the 10k tournament the odds are good that that will change.  Let’s take a look at the deck that Bill Hodack fielded to examine how the deck works.

Bill Hodack’s Big Brotherhood:

Characters
4 Toad, Mortimer Toynbee
4 Quicksilver, Pietro Maximoff
4 Quicksilver, Speed Demon
4 Mystique, Raven Darkholme
4 Mystique, Shape-Changing Assassin
4 Sabretooth, Feral Rage
2 Sabretooth, Victor Creed
4 Blob, Fred Dukes
4 Magneto, Eric Lehnsherr
4 Magneto, Master of Magnetism

Plot Twists
4 Acrobatic Dodge
4 Overload
4 Relocation
2 Burn Rubber

Locations
4 Lost City
4 Avalon Space Station

The Brotherhood has some of the most curve-breaking early-game drops, epitomized by Sabretooth, Feral Rage but in no way limited to one key card.  The entire team is naturally strong in the first four turns, and New Brotherhood decks look to augment this strength in as many ways as possible to steal early wins.  Big Brotherhood decks use the natural early game strength of the Brotherhood as a solid foundation for a mid to late game offensive.  Any card that loses utility over the course of a game is one that is included in a deck at great cost: in any game where drawing is limited to one or just a few cards a turn every draw has to count, and the longer you survive in the game the higher your chances of drawing into any card become.  If utility decreases while the chance of drawing the card increases, you’ve got a formula that is eventually going to screw you. 

Big Brotherhood takes this concept to heart by strictly running cards that do not suffer from diminishing utility like The New Brotherhood or Lorelei.  Instead, the deck uses a card pool that generally becomes increasingly useful as the game goes on.  Case in point, Lost City becomes more powerful on turn five when Quicksilver, Speed Demon can effectively gain a double-boost from its effect.  It also becomes increasingly useful as more and more cards are cycled through your hand – you have a better and better chance of making your powerup opportunities.  Toad is another example of a card that becomes more and more useful as the game goes on.  While he’s a standard two drop initially, his effect allows him to be recycled and used to feed Avalon Space Station once it hits the field and powering up becomes more and more important.

And that’s what Big Brotherhood does: it makes big drops reliably and abuses Lost City by pairing it with Avalon Space Station in order to have a constant supply of power up material.  It maxes out on the character cards it runs in order to have reliable power up options, dishes out huge amounts of damage, and runs a lot of tech.  Hodack’s deck ran ten cards that could be classified as tech: four Relocation and two Burn Rubber to stymie Doom and New Brotherhood, and four Overload to deal with FF Equip and mirror matches.  No Savage Beatdown and no Flying Kick: the deck doesn’t need them.  It’s focused, has its goals, and protects them.

Playing the deck isn’t difficult in concept: the combo is key, and when it doesn’t come up you’ve still got some of the best curve economics going character-wise.  Acrobatic Dodge saves resources and works in conjunction with Burn Rubber to utterly screw with the game’s natural tempo: it’s the same thing that Doom Control does, going from an appearance of docile defensiveness to out and out attack at the drop of a hat on turns in which it doesn’t have initiative.  The deck is highly aggressive, but it’s aggressive in a sustainable way and unlike New Brotherhood, it doesn’t have a sword of Damocles dangling over it: Big Brotherhood likes turn six, heck it loves it, and turn seven too.