VS: Bring Your Own Two Teams - Avengers/Squadron Supreme Edition

Most of you know by now my fascination with the Avengers team-attack theme, and my desperate wish that they had gotten an effect reminiscent of Legendary Battles and of Playroom in MUN, especially now that my favorite theme is trapped in the hellish limbo known as Golden Age play. You also know that, after BYOTT was announced, they were the first deck I built and presented to you all.

Now, I was planning on doing a segment today trying to utilize Warworld for the BYOTT format, but the deck I had built just wasn't doing it for me. That isn't to say that it wasn't good - most of the decks I present to you are average, more theory than gameplay. It just wasn't satisfying enough, I suppose.

However, while combing through the cards that I thought I would enjoy using Warworld with, I began to look at Squadron Supreme. Squad was the first 'competitive' deck I ever built, and by that, I mean it was the first deck that my friends essentially gave me, with the sage advice to "Stop playing that frankly embarrassing Kang Lords X concoction and try and win a freaking game." They quickly came to regret this act of charity.

But we all know that the Squad No-Hand theme could be explosive. And I'm sure that most of you were aware that Squad had another theme. "Yes," I hear you say. "They had the No-Hand theme, and they had a theme that involved getting rid of the cards in their hand, right?"

"No," I say to you, "but verily didst they have a theme in which they did absolutely no breakthrough for any reason. And I do not know why."

One of the most potent cards this theme brought us was called Project Utopia, and it reads as follows....

Project Utopia
3
Choose a Squadron Supreme character you control.
Ongoing: Whenever the chosen character stuns a defender, that defender's controller loses 4 endurance.

Whenever the chosen character causes breakthrough, KO it.

Well, when I saw this card during the building of my Warworld deck, I certainly went, "...Quicksilver!" and thus was this deck born.

PROJECT UTOPIA
4x Jarvis, Honorary Avenger
2x Rick Jones, Hero’s Best Friend
2x Speed, Thomas Shepard * Young Avenger
2x Doctor Decibel, Anton Decibel

4x Natasha Romanoff <> Black Widow, Super Spy
2x Wasp, Janet Van Dyne-Pym
2x Captain America, The Patior * Secret Avenger

4x Quicksilver, Mutant Avenger
2x Patriot, Elijah Bradley * Young Avenger
2x Lady Lark, Skylark
1x Black Panther, T’challa

2x Amphibian, Kingsley Rice

1x Wolverine, Secret Avenger

4x Playroom
4x Utopia Isle

4x Project Utopia
4x Legendary Battles
4x Reckless Youth
4x Switching Sides
4x Liberating Number 42

Do you remember when I extolled with great verbosity the virtues of Playroom, one of the key cards of the Avengers team attack strategy? It was a few weeks back, and I told you it totally rocked. It wasn't a subtle card, but that 4 damage could add up right quick with Quicksilver.

Well, with further thought, Project Utopia means that it can REALLY add up something fierce. A single Project Utopia, naming Quicksilver, means that every team attack stun he gets nets you over 8 points of endurance stun loss. Assuming they have a 2, a 3, and a 4 on turn four, and you have a Playroom and a Project Utopia, that's 34 damage. Imagine if you were playing against an off-curve deck? And, of course, you can have multiple Project Utopia's out at the same time....

There is, though, a drawback to Project Utopia. One of the best things about Quicksilver is that, after the board is clear, he can attack directly. Yes, you're gaining a significant amount of damage, but is it worth losing that pumpable direct attack? I think it definitely is...but just in case, I threw in Switching Sides. After Quicksilver demolishes your opponent's board, he can make nice with their highest drop and invite them over for tea. If you played a Legendary Battles that turn, that leaves you with 0 stunned characters, a massive endurance swing, and your opponent's highest drop.

Just to play it safe, however, I added a card called Utopia Isle, which reads as such...

Utopia Isle
2
To flip, exhaust two Squadron Supreme characters you control.
Whenever an attacker causes breakthrough while attacking a character, that attacker's controller loses 3 endurance.

You won't be causing my breakthrough on your attacks, but your opponents very well could be, and a fast-enough deck could outrush you. With this, though, even when they're hitting you as hard as they can, you're hitting back.

As always, I'm not entirely satisfied with the character selection - Quicksilver and Natasha are perfect, and it's my personal belief that Wolverine is the perfect finisher for the deck. He and Quicksilver can team into their last remaining character with a Legendary Battles, causing 13 damage and then letting Wolverine ready for a direct swing. Jarvis is nice, thanks to the lack of search (and no, I can't afford Avengers Reassembled), and Amphibian offers you a nice option just in case you don't want to underdrop on 4, as he can bring you back a plot twist you really need.

I would also seriously think about making room for AIDA, to prevent an opponent from exhaust Quicksilver before he can attack. You need Quicksilver to be free to attack, and AIDA helps guarantee that.

Still, the deck looks to be pretty fun, a slightly riskier but notably faster version of my X-Men/Avengers team attack deck. Hope you all enjoyed, and I'll see you all again soon!

VS: Bring Your Own Two Teams - Avengers/X-Men Edition

Whenever a new format comes out, I end up hoping and praying that it’ll let me play with my single favorite sub-theme of all time – Avengers team-attack. I know that the Avengers part isn’t part of the theme, but I still find that the Avengers in MAV are the most fun, competitive team-attackers ever made. Much as I love the Young Avengers content in MUN, the lack of effects like Legendary Battles, Playroom, Quicksilver, and Natasha make it so that they can’t quite hold a candle.
They are, however, an excellent addition, because aside from those four cards, the old Avengers lacked strong team-attack based characters like Patriot, Speed, and Vision, and effects like Liberating Number 42 provide a frankly brutal amount of potential card draw.

Of course, the most recent announced format is Bring Your Own Two Team, a golden age format that automatically teams up two teams of your choice, but bans generic cards of any sort, like most of the most popular, powerful cards: Mobilize, Savage Beatdown, Blinding Rage, etc…. It also, I believe, bans Legendary cards, unless they also reference one of your two team affiliations.

Since the format’s Golden Age, a format that I often find less than appealing, it allows me access to my old Avengers team-attack core. And since it automatically teams up, I don’t have to worry nearly as much about getting a team-up online, opening up roughly 8 slots in the deck.

The X-Men don’t offer a bunch of powerful effects, but they don’t have to – the Avengers pack a powerful punch – but between their three features, they definitely have the tools to fill the holes in the Avengers roster, with powerful team attack centric characters like Cyclops, Slim, and the slightly toned-down functional reprint of Quicksilver in Nightcrawler, Man of the Cloth, not to mention potent plot twists like Time Breach, Bamf!, and Turnabout.

While many of the hardest hitting decks are slowed down slightly in this format thanks to a lack of generics, this deck is vastly enhanced by the format, not needing to worry about getting a team-up online ASAP, and most of the best team-attack support cards have been hard-stamped to a team. Still, I should stop talking up the deck, as I’m sure a more gifted deck-builder could do something far more impressive with the basics, and just give you my amateurish first draft of the deck.

So, without further ado, I present to you…

GABYOTTAXMTA!

4x Jubilee, Jubilation Lee
4x Natasha Romanoff <> Black Widow, Super Spy
3x Quicksilver, Mutant Avenger
3x Captain America, The Patriot * Secret Avenger
1x Falcon, Secret Avenger
1x Hawkeye <> Ronin, Secret Avenger
1x Patriot, Elijah Bradley * Young Avenger
1x Kate Bishop <> Hawkeye, Young Avenger
3x Speed, Thomas Shepard * Young Avenger
3x Cyclops, Slim
3x Nightcrawler, Man of the Cloth
2x Professor X, Idealistic Dreamer
1x Monica Rambeau <> Captain Marvel, Lady of Light

4x Playroom
3x Muir Island

4x Legendary Battles
4x Liberating Number 42
3x Switching Sides
4x Time Breach
4x Bamf!
4x Turnabout

The deck is immensely flexible – Natasha or Slim on 2, Nightcrawler or Quicksilver on 3, or underdrop them later. You want access to Legendary Battles and Bamf! as soon as possible, and Playroom is the most brutal, and necessary, card of them all. Without a ‘once per turn’ trigger, Playroom will kill a weenie deck as early as turn 4 – if they have 5 1-drops and you have Nightcrawler and Quicksilver with a single Legendary Battles, you just dealt 36 damage and lost none...and if you have a Liberating Number 42, you just rallied for 10 character cards as well. Even against a curve deck, the damage adds up quickly, and the sheer number of ways you can hit the opponent can make it difficult to lock down.

So, there’s my first BYOTT.ga deck. I hope you enjoyed, and I’ll be back in a day or two with a new update.

Deck Building on a Budget

Decks...decks are tough. I mean, I can cobble together the most asinine stuff you can imagine. Give me a card - any card in the entire damn game, and I'll do my damnedest to make fair use of it. It's not always a success, but, you know, it's generally fun.

Anyway, I'm going to take you on a little blast to the past, a deck I made back in the time when the metagame was ruled by Squad No-Hand, Avengers Reservist, and that pesky, damnable Faces of Evil. My deck could beat them all. Not 100% of the time, of course...but often enough. Squad was the toughest match of those big decks, and Titans just kicked my ass.

It was a deck featuring a team I liked - X-Statix. They'd had some success with the "I Stand Alone" theme, but I didn't have the rares and I wasn't the obsessive I am today. I coupled them with a team that I saw had one card that I was convinced was the absolute most broken card I had ever scene (ahhh...youth...): Legendary Battles.

And thus do we have: Grandstanding!

Characters
4x Rick Jones, A Hero's Best Friend
4x El Guapo, Robbie Rodriguez
1x Beast, Furry Blue Scientist
1x Doop, Forward Observer

3x Natasha Romanoff <> Black Widow, Super Spy
2x Wasp, Janet Van Dyne-Pym
3x Gin Genie, Beckah Parker

4x Quicksilver, Mutant Avenger

4x The Spike, Angry Young Mutant,
1x Carol Danvers <> Warbird, Galactic Adventurer

1x Monica Rambeau <> Captain Marvel, Lady of Light
1x Anarchist, Tike Alicar

1x Hank Pym <> Goliath, Giant Genius

Locations

4x Playroom

Plot Twist

4x Two-Worlds, Team-up
4x Legendary Battles
4x Go In Swinging
4x Grandstanding
4x Never Give Up!
4x Chaos Magic
2x Prismatic Shield

--

I'll admit it...not the best deck. Unreliable, to say the least. But powerful. Gin Genie was shockingly good if you got unlucky enough not to hit Playroom and/or a team-up by turn 3...but obviously, Natasha was the drop of choice.

I think the strongest point in the deck's favor is versatility. It may be unreliable, but it can make due with what it has. It can run a solid Avengers team-attack if that's all you see, but X-Statix opens you up to things like Anarchist, Never Give Up!, and most importantly...Grandstanding!

Grandstanding + Quicksilver was generally amazing, especially with a free Rick Jones. On turn 4, my board frequently ended up being Quicksilver, Natasha, Wasp, Rick Jones, and Doop. A single Never Give Up and Grandstanding would often net you between 20-30 damage on turn 4, if you had Playroom out, and you'd likely only lose a pair of 1-drops in the exchange. Your opponent, on the other hand, would lose considerably more in the exchange.

It's the first deck I ever built that was even remotely 'tricky'. You couldn't play Legendary Battles and THEN play Grandstanding! You had to make sure that you had enough characters to do what you needed to. You had to know what effects to redirect and where. It was honestly a great learning deck for me. It was potent but simple, punishing me for mistakes...but not destroying me for them. It could stand up to the metagame of the time, but obviously had room for improvement.

The deck was fun, but it didn't age well. It was okay when JLA hit, but the advent of X-Mental, and more reliable and potent Faces of Evil builds, caused the deck to begin to lag behind, but it had received very little support. I put the deck aside, tragically, for over a year...until the first city championship came up, and I decided that it was time to team attack once more, albeit with an enormous change to the deck - the removal of X-Statix, and insertion of another, newer team. More on that next time, though.

There's something else that's notable about the deck. Despite being a fairly solid deck at the time, it's fairly cheap. The only card of any expense in it is Monica Rambeau, who would often be sold for 3-6 dollars. The only other rare is the under-used, extremely fun Chaos Magic, and that never really hit more than two dollars.

For as cheap as Chaos Magic was, it was actually far better in the deck than Monica Rambeau. It helped quite a bit to protect Quicksilver against the out of combat stuns my friends were so absolutely in love with, redirecting them onto poor, abused Rick Jones.

The X-Statix cards were cheap as could be imagined, and the Avengers commons and uncommons were, for the most part, easily cobbled together. If I recall correctly, the most difficult card to obtain for the deck was Natasha Romanoff, strange as that sounds.

But, there...if you want to try a blast from the past that you could build really cheap, give it a whirl. Or, better yet, play around with it. What can YOU do with Grandstanding? How can Playroom best be abused now, with so many more sets released?

So there you go. A gift, from me to you. Yes, Titans team-attack is powerful, but I don't know that I'd call that a team-attack deck. In fact, there aren't very many team attack decks in the game. Outsiders is probably the most prominent, but how do you prefer to tag-team your opponent? Are you a Dynamic Duo kind of person, or do you prefer a more Legendary Battle? What's your favorite team attack combination?