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.

Kate Bishop <> Hawkeye

I was excited when I heard that the Young Avengers just might be in Marvel Universe. I don't get excited about a lot of the standard teams, because I know that we'll see them again...and again...and again. Doesn't mean I don't like them, but it's nothing to get excited about. The Young Avengers, though? We'll see them once, with random support popping up rarely and without warning, I suspect.

Anyway, I was further excited, as I've said, to learn that the Young Avengers would carry the bulk of the Avengers team-attack theme. In the previews, we saw Vision, Young Avenger - and he blew my mind. He blew a lot of minds, I think. Then we saw Kang <> Iron Lad - and thank goodness we got that errata - and he's solid. Patriot, Hulkling, Wiccan, etc...overall, the Avengers have an extremely strong lower-curve that lends itself well to team attacks, though they have nothing even comparable to Quicksilver, Mutant Avenger + Legendary Battles, sadly.

Still, Kate Bishop <> Hawkeye was a card that caught my eye pretty quickly. I understood that free-stuns were powerful, but her ability is so extraordinarily costly, especially in the age of Pathetic Attempt, that I was curious as to why she was made rare. It didn't seem that there could be a draw engine worth her cost, and while there were some rare occasions where you'd want to stun someone with cost 3 or more, that would be extremely rare.

The more I thought about it, though, the more powerful I realized she was - when she worked with the rest of the Young Avengers to help Captain America during the Civil War.

Cost: 3 Patriot, Elijah Bradley * Young Avenger
Team: Avengers
Ranged
ATK: 5
DEF: 4
Leader: Whenever an adjacent character stuns an opposing character, rally for a character card.

Cost: 3 Liberating Number 42
Whenever an [Avengers Icon] character you control stuns an opposing character this turn, rally for a character card.

Two common cards that make Kate Bishop go crazy - fitting given her on-and-off crush with Patriot and her ceaseless loyalty to fighting against the Registration Act. Think about that. Let's say you have 4 characters surrounding Patriot. Three of them team-attack. Kate stuns one with her ability, and the three team-attackers stun one - that's 4 rallies - and 3 more for each Liberating Number 42 you can play. The further Kate gets into the revolution, the more she's inspired to keep going.

The more I think about the modern Avengers Team-Attack deck, the more I think that mono-Avengers can't work. However, I've heard some fun things about Bring Your Own Team Golden, and I think Avengers will be my team. I'll try and get a deck up soon.