Someone really needs to call child protective services or the Center for the Blind, 'cuz I'm gonna show you how to abuse Alicia Masters and Franklin Richards. It won't be pretty. Kids under thirteen should click elsewhere now.

Ok, you've been warned.

It's hard to keep Alicia and Franklin in play, as they run away as soon as anyone announces an attack on them. But their abilities are so tempting, there's got to be a way to get some real resource acceleration out of them, right? I bet you've tried already. Well, try this.

4 Alicia Masters
3 Franklin Richards
2 Human Torch, Johnny Storm
4 Human Torch, Hot Shot
2 Human Torch, Super Nova
2 Invisible Woman, The Invisible Girl
2 Invisible Woman, Sue Storm
1 Invisible Woman, Sue Richards
2 Mr. Fantastic, Reed Richards
2 Mr. Fantastic, Stretch
1 Mr. Fantastic, Scientific Genius
4 Thing, Ben Grimm
3 Thing, Heavy Hitter
2 Thing, The Ever Lovin' Blue-Eyed Thing
4 A Child Named Valeria
4 Cosmic Radiation
3 Medical Attention
4 Signal Flare
4 Doomstadt
3 Four Freedoms Plaza
2 Yancy Street
2 Pogo Plane

What's the best way to keep Alicia and Franklin from being attacked and sent to the bottom of your deck? Stun them yourself. That's right. If they're stunned, they can't be attacked, so you can recover and ready them at the end of the turn. Then they'll be all ready to do their thing at the start of the next turn. How do you stun them? Check out A Child Named Valeria. If you control Dr. Doom, you can stun target exhausted character with a cost of 2 or less. Alicia and Franklin both come into play exhausted, and they both cost 1, so this is a match made in heaven. Well, they may not think so . . . Since this isn't a Doom deck, Doomstadt is a great way to control Dr. Doom without having to look at his ugly mug.

Undoubtedly, your opponent will be bashing some of your other characters while you're setting up this combo, so you're likely to fall behind on endurance early on. Recovering Alicia or Franklin can be tough when you've got a couple of real fighters stunned as well, so there's got to be a better payoff than just a 1 resource point savings for recruiting one of the original Fantastic Four.

Here's how the combo works in practice. You want your opponent to have the initiative on odd numbered turns. Rejoice if you see Alicia and the 3-drop Thing in your opening hand. Ideally, your opponent will not play a 1-drop character, while you play Alicia with nary a care in the world. On turn 2, you can activate her ability and get out the 5 ATK / 5 DEF Thing, Ben Grimm and go to town. If your opponent does play a character, then there's no point in playing Alicia on turn 1—you'll just have to start planning for the future. Franklin doesn't have any particular usefulness on turn 1, as there isn't a 3-drop Mr. Fantastic or Invisible Woman for him to accelerate into play.

The backup plan for the deck is to get the Four Freedoms Plaza engine going. If you get out the original four members of the FF, you can then dig Cosmic Radiation or A Child Named Valeria out of your deck. A Child Named Valeria can protect all of your characters better than any other card in the game. It can protect the 1-drop Invisible Woman, 2-drop Mr. Fantastic and Human Torch, and the 3-drop Thing. Granted, it will take you until turn 4 to get this engine going, but once you do, you can really fire up the Plaza and set yourself up for turn 5.

However, you don't actually want Mr. Fantastic and Invisible Woman in play if you're trying to stun Alicia or Franklin with A Child Named Valeria. Why is that? Because if Invisible Woman and Mr. Fantastic are in play, you won't be able to stun Alicia or Franklin due to the first effect of A Child Named Valeria.

Here's your ideal turn 4 play. Play Alicia, then A Child Named Valeria, then play Mr. Fantastic, Reed Richards and The Pogo Plane. Search for Four Freedoms Plaza at some point during the turn, even if you already have one in play. Hopefully you already have a Four Freedoms Plaza in play to search for Cosmic Radiation. At this point, you can be very aggressive with your Human Torch and Thing as you're setting yourself up to drop some huge ones on turn 5. Use Medical Attention to keep Invisible Woman and Mr. Fantastic around. Finally, recover Alicia at the end of turn 4.

During your resource step, go ahead and play another copy of Four Freedoms Plaza face down into your resource row. During your recruit step, activate your face-up Plaza and search for yet another Cosmic Radiation. If you do not already have at least three of your Cosmic Radiations in hand, go ahead and flip the second Four Freedoms Plaza and search for a third copy of the card. This will KO the one that's currently in your resource row, but you won't mind in a minute. You gained your 5 resource points at the start of your recruit step, so those 5 points are safe.

After all this preparation, it's time to "go off." Activate Alicia to reduce the cost of Human Torch and Thing by 1. After it has resolved, play Cosmic Radiation. Repeat. You must have three Cosmics to make this work. You'll need to activate her power four times, once for free, and then three more times by way of the Radiations. Human Torch, Super Nova and Thing, The Ever-Lovin' Blue-Eyed Thing will cost 2 and 3 resource points respectively. That's 5 resource points total, which is exactly how many you have.

Since this deck doesn't like to have the initiative on the odd turns, you're on defense right now. Hide Human Torch behind Thing. Your opponent's biggest characters are probably 7 ATK and 9 ATK. They might be able to team attack to take down one of your big guys, but this is the tennis equivalent of breaking serve. If you have Yancy Street in play, your opponent won't even be able to Finishing Move to make the attack count. Despite not having the initiative, you're going to be able attack and smash your opponent this turn, and next turn, too, as your opponent will still be playing catch-up.

Note that if you are very lucky and have gotten all four of your Cosmic Radiations by turn 5, you can play Franklin and drop your Mr. Fantastic, Scientific Genius and Invisible Woman, Sue Richards on turn 5. If you're really lucky, you might have Franklin and Alicia in play at the same time, so you can use them both to upgrade all of your Fantastic Four characters in one earth-shattering turn.


Let's recap this strategy in six easy steps,

1. Recruit small Fantastic Four characters

2. Collect lots of Cosmic Radiations

3. Stun Franklin and/or Alicia, then recover them

4. Activate Franklin and/or Alicia as many times as possible by playing all of your Radiations

5. Recruit huge characters

6. Go medieval on your opponent


I'd like to hear from anyone who manages to abuse Alicia and/or Franklin in ways similar to what I've described above. If you've abused them in ways worse than what I've outlined, you can write me at mhyra@metagame.com and beg for forgiveness.