Deck Doctor 4: Tabletop Combo!

This week's article comes a tad late, since I am a Star Trek fan spending waaay too much time on Star Trek Online on the PS4, but this week I thought I'd unshelf another abusive card interaction that just never had a real chance to shine. Hell just finding a semi-legible image for it required me to dig into Lackey's card library.

The Definition of a win-MORE condition.

Well holy shit that's one helluva return for such an already amazing effect. If you deck out your opponent, you already have a pretty substantial advantage... still, players piled into the mill bandwagon trying to get it to go off... ever.

*******However, before I can continue, a disclaimer*******

MEV's Runaways make this too damn easy. If you really want to combine them, you won't need my help. Nico should never have existed and is a dirty, dirty girl. Therefore, we will avoid MEV for this weeks article. Runaways have a perfectly fine alt win condition for ending the game anyway.

**************

So let's say we have a solid mill consistently emptying your opponent's deck by turn 5 or so. And now your entire deck is in your hand. Now what? we need something that can abuse this or else there isn't much point is there? Let me introduce you to our 5+ drop.

Wait he isn't... OOOH.

Mill them out by turn 6 and you have around 30 cards left in your deck? Well Zodiac just became a 33/32 wall for the turn. Since we rely so much on the entire deck going to the hand, we are only going to need a single copy of Blindsided as well. However, Zodiac tends to be the defensive play. What we REALLY want is a guy with A spammable discard effect to take advantage of our gigantic hand.

Pictured: NOT talking to whales.

 So now it looks like we have a good plan for our endgame options. Now, how are we going to get there? Since it's a mill involving multiple teams, we'll toss 4x Funky's big rat code into the mix and 4x manhunter clones since they both mill AND let us team-up Secret Society and Manhunters. We will forgo Hypnotic charms because, well, you'll see. Let's skip ahead to a working list and I'll just explain it.

Fish-Slap

Locations
    1 [DJL] UN Building, Team-Up
    1 [MMK] Infernal Gateway
    1 [DWF] City of Tomorrow, Team-Up
    1 [DLS] 31st Century Metropolis - Team-Up

Characters

    4 [DJL] Manhunter Clone, Clone of Paul Kirk 
    4 [MMK] Orb-Drake Shannon

    4 [DJL] Poison Ivy, Deadly Rose
    4 [DCR] Deadshot - Dead Aim
    2 [DJL] The Wizard, William Zard
    1 [MMK] Zodiak-Norman Harrison

    4 [DJL] Lex Luthor, Nefarious Philanthropist
    2 [MAV] Moonglow-Melissa Hanover 


    2 [DGL] Manhunter Giant, Army 
    1 [MMK] Mephisto-Soulstealer

    1 [DJL] Ocean Master, Son of Atlan
    2 [DCR] Scandal - Savage Spawn 

Plot Twists
    4 [DJL] Funky's Big Rat Code, Team-Up
    3 [DGL] The Fall of Oa
    3 [MMK] Gravesite 
    1 [MOR] Blind Sided
    2 [DGL] Plans Within Plans
    3 [MMK] Strength of the Grave
    4 [MOR] Cover Fire
    4 [DCL] Secret Files

So our primary teams are Underworld, Secret Society, Injustice Gang and Manhunters. Secret 6 and Squad are technically there but we just don't really care as your goals are to get those crazy kids teamed up. Now in this build we avoid the Hypnotic charms because of Strength of the Grave. Once set-up, we plan to make sure we can keep adding piles of counters every turn. so essentially the breakdown goes like this:

People sometimes see Orb and think: BAMBOO. And try to focus him dead. that's fine. Here, all he really is, is a hidden utility 1 drop that interacts well with getting Deadshot into the KO pile and that's about it. He's also an easy choice for a consistent exhaust for fall of oa.

Manhunter clone is the workhorse of the deck, early game you ant as many of them as possible in play (he is passively non-unique)  evading for a fast card-by-card milling basis Until Fall of Oa goes up when each clone suddenly starts milling 2 cards a turn.

Lex gives us our control going into midgame, with access to Orb, Deadshot and 1 or two clones, a cover fire will give anywhere from +4 to a visible turn 3 lex. or +6 if you used orb to drop a deadshot and then used lex to bring him out on 3 while protecting a clone.

Turn 4 tends to be the Poison Ivy/underdrop more clones turn. Pop deadshot with her for a fast UN building and get your four teams crossed over. I can't say this enough though... NEVER have he pop a clone. Make her KO herself if you must. Seriously.

Turn 5 is the giant. and some great utility with Deadshot. activate deadshot to mill, ko him to giant to mill 2 more, exhaist lex to bring hinm back and do it again, then exhaust giant and do it a third time for a self-contained 9 card mill. afterwards, if he Ko's lex and himself, thats 17 cards and we haven't used the manhhunter clones yet! In general the rule here is, if you can mill them completely and leave either the giant OR Lex intact, you will be able to survive the turn with your ridiculous amount of defensive pumps in your now humungous hand.

On turn 6, Ocean Master discards all but essential defense cards and three random cards (this is important!) to pile up some counters and attacks, playing strength of the grave to put all crossed over underworld characters into the deck (now you see it!) then orb activates fall of oa to put your deck in your hand and counter-up again. rinse and repeat until you are out of strength of the graves for literally a potential of HUNDREDS of damage direct. If that attack didn't end the game, discard those three random cards to get a strength of the grave for next turn using Infernal Gateway and do it again next turn.

Of course, in a pinch there are other options too. You could blow up zodiac with giant and keep boosting him for aheavy hitter every turn. and Mephisto also enjoys one solid swing to the face for game-ending proportions if you are in a pinch.

So why did this deck never become a thing?

1. Turn 6 is too late. sorry. It just is.
2. This deck is absurdly weak playing into resource control, Lex luthor, Metro Mogul, and Sonic Gun or Holocaust, AOA. are easily tapped as bullet cards for this build. In general them teching into you is far easier than the other way around.

So where does a build like this shine then?

MULTIPLAYER.Oh God, multiplayer.
See, this is a penultimate "B" class build. that is to say, It doesn't react to answers well, but if left untouched will completely wreck the game for somebody. Now most people play multiplayer the same way it was done for the Coming of Galactus "raid" set. which is to say, players just use the alliance portion of the rules against another alliance.

Alliance rules TLDR:
-each alliance player chooses an affiliation and they are crossed over.
-each player has his/her own field/resource row
-combat is simultaneous and all player characters are shared for the purposes of team attacks and targetted pumps.
-Each alliance's endurance is 50 + 25 for each extra player to a maximum of 100 endurance


So what makes it so good in this sort-of format?

If enemies focus their hate cards on killing it, your allies will dominate. If they don't... well... it won't end well for them...Your single copy of only human should allow you the leeway to function against Lex. and in a pinch, Infernal Gateway can get it back later. While it still allows a fun winnable game for your opponents.

Essentially, this deck lets you FEEL like the final boss of your playgroup without the one-sided winrate! Fatal flaw and everything! (Seriously watch out for sonic gun!)

So what do you guys think? If you used MEV what would the list look like? Let me know in the comments or in the facebook group! And if you have any other builds you want me to address, let me know!

Deck Doctor 3: Going Infinite

The Infinite Loop. The pinnacle achievement of all players looking to break a format, finding one almost always resulted in a ban/errata if the loop was attainable too early. Many players shrug and assume all infinite lists have been dealt with but alas, several options still exist. Let's build one!

So first off, we want one that can go off by the mid-game, so ideally turn 5 or even earlier, but first we need to decide what kind of lynchpin we want our loop to be based around. In general infinite loops focus around cards that give easy +1's. For example the banned dr. light was a +1, but when used with rama-tut (another errata'd card from this interaction), you netted even more! This allowed the recycling of cosmic radiation while players would delete Rama for Devil's due. (In my humble opinion, the card that REALLY needed a ban but I digress)
As another example, Black box represented a unique infinite loop If you purposely decked yourself before it was errata'd to be unable to cycle other black boxes, or even simpler, a Syphon energy that targetted another Syphon energy while Feral was attacking for an infinite atk Feral (Syphon energy was errata'd to not target itself as well)

So where shall we begin? That is the hard part. I actually found my key while looking for the worst card ever printed.

A friend of mine recently asked for my help to categorize the 10 WORST cards in Versus System, using a series of qualifiers to determine the absolute worst cards. So there was a lot of spitballing cards that generally were considered to suck. Dr Tzin Tzin, Reign of Terra, J, and Jonah Jameson were among many others being nominated to this list, when one card in particular was mentioned due to low stats and a difficult effect to utilize.

 Jackal, Dr. Miles Warren.

Give this man a pimp hat.

My VS brains exploded. 

This is essentially a Dr. Light 4 drop for Syndicate. With Rama-Tut's errata to recruit only though, we need a different target for card cycling. What's more, with a limitation to the recovery phase only, we need to be able to consistently go off under the assumption that the Jackal is stunned unless we can also hide him.

So eventually I came up with a skeleton.
4x Jackal, Miles Warren
4x Floronic man, Jason Woodrue
4x Black Rose, Roxanne Simpson
4x Cosmic Radiation
- Any fantastic 4 characters
- A pile of teamups

So with this we have a hypothetical infinite loop:
Assuming all teams are crossed-over (Syndicate + Fan 4 + Underworld + Secret Society), at the start of recovery, we could activate jackal, put floronic man into play, ko floronic man, get cosmic rad, activate black rose, get floronic man, play cosmic and do it all again. Rinse and repeat et-infinitus.

Well that's swell Aaron, but that doesn't win us the game.

Correct. Not alone it doesn't.
So let's add our win condition.
 +4 Advanced Hardware
All we need is one and any other visible character. We ARE going infinite after all.

Now consistency. How can 4 teams regularly see a team-up ASAP?
Black rose forces some underworld consideration and Hypnotic charms is a BOSS for teaming up. So let's take a page out of Black Bamboo and try the Orb focus with as many hidden characters as we can fit. Secret Society will reinforce this with Straight To the Grave allowing us to send key cards to the KO pile and also, making sure we have a Cosmic radiation in the KO as well. (everyone seems to forget SttG's secondary effect)

Now things are coming together! But with a hidden-character Orb build, Advanced Hardware has no good equip target. So we're going to swap them out for Future Technology instead. Since if done right every character in play will be fan4 anyhow. This allows our disposable hidden 1 drops to get some work done. Lastly, we'll add some recovery options, and throw in some Medical Attentions since our 6/6 isn't going to be much of a threat in combat.

So lets see what we have now. I'd like to present to you:

Infinity Dog

Locations:
    1 [MHG] Soul World
    1 [MOR] Avalon Space Station
    1 [DJL] Slaughter Swamp

Characters:
    4 [MMK] Orb-Drake Shannon 
    3 [MEQ] Black Panther, Vibranium Vogue
    3 [MUN] Green Goblin, Insanity Unleashed 
    1 [DCL] The Riddler, Riddle Me This
    1 [MVL] Uatu the Watcher, He Who Watches

    4 [MTU] Black Rose, Roxanne Simpson
    2 [DCL] Dr. Sivana, Mad Scientist

    4 [DJL] Floronic Man, Jason Woodrue
    3 [MEV] Vision - Earth-1010

    4 [MSM] Jackal-Dr. Miles Warren

    1 [MUN] Invisible Woman, Secret Avenger

Plot Twists:
    4 [MOR] Cosmic Radiation
    4 [MMK] Hypnotic Charms
    4 [MXM] Enemy Of My Enemy
    4 [DJL] Straight to the Grave
    4 [MOR] Medical Attention
    3 [MEV] We Can Rebuild Him

Equipment:
    4 [MVL] Future Technology

The general premise is not unlike Black bamboo when it comes to setting up. fly through the deck as fast as possible using vision, we can rebuild him, Orb, Straight to the Grave, and Enemy of my Enemy to get Hypnotic Charms set up as soon as possible. Ideally by turn 3 you'll have a future tech equipped on a hidden lowbie so you can go nuts on the recovery phase of 4.

Tech options:
As usual the Oh-so-boring Pathetic Attempt is a good fit here to prevent enemies from KO-ing Jackal before he can recover, but a chained Medical Attention works just as well so I didn't bother including it, but you may want to try it. I am also a big fan of dipping into an early Uatu search to see any tricks opponents may draw into before equipping him with a Future tech.
There is something that waxes poetic about a 0/1 character dedicated to watching being the cause of infinite endurance loss.

Aside from that however, I'd wouldn't consider much else as a tight fast build is better than a slow one choking on too many answers. However, for those of you that NEED to play with tweaks, there are some other quick tricks you could make, sacrificing the builds speed in favor of more favorable matchups, As I already mentioned, this is essentially the black Bamboo engine, so if one were so inclined, it wouldn't be too hard to fit in a full suite of Black Bolt 1 drops and a Tarnax IV for some decent play into a rush by dropping a superfat 1 drop in the way.

Needless to say, Jackal did NOT make it onto our "Worst Cards List".

Let me know what you guys think and keep those deck clinic ideas coming!