Deck Doctor 5: The price of themes

"So my Barbara Gordon attacks your Wolverine with a flying kick for a mutual stun."

Wait... WHAT!?! Did she throw her wheelchair or something?

It can be easy to forget some of the absurdity that applies when it comes to the myriad of interactions in our love-able card games, and VS is no exception, the thought of a wheelchair-striken supporter dishing out savage beatdowns, flying kicks and megablasts can leave some funny moments if you stop and think about them. And I'm not even going to get started on Man Thing.

But this week i wanted to look at a different angle, A deck can be built for synergy, combo, utility, but many, MANY casual players have begun to crave theme builds. Obviously this can be different things for different people.

For example, myself, when it comes to my casual decks, I like sticking to team options in many of my builds even if a non-team option can prove to be superior.

Whether it is sticking to teams, companies, lore, or otherwise, thematic building has affected every one of our approaches when building a deck. Even if all we are doing is trying to stay "pure" to what a build is supposed to DO.

This weekend's deck doctor certainly falls in line with this.

John Chapman asks:
Between Mandarin and the 10 rings, why has nobody ever made a good Mandarin deck? Help! Make him actually USE the ten rings and not lose every game!
P.S. no MEV please!

It just HAS to be hot as hell there right now.

Well, in the past I have made draw-centric builds to focus on Mandarin's stun effect, But it's pretty safe to say I've never once used ten rings in any build... ever.

Lets walk through our options to start.

First off, we are going to start with 4 mandarins and obviously, 10x ten rings, now lets try the path of least resistance and take a look at Crime Lords options. Do we see anything there that can either cater to drawing cards or supporting equipment?

Well, at a glance I see:

Notable equips:
Armed Escort
Death Warrant

Notable cards for Crime Lords
Master Man  
loads of army characters and support
wolverine direct kit is present here

Team up options:
Hail Hydra for forced crime lords affiliation
the rose into made men. (although Made Men only affects characters in play)

As attractive as turning this into a Wolvie direct build might be, it also means I have conflicting drops at 3. And our go-to 3 drop MUST remain to be Mandarin, so unfortunately that's going to be a pass. armed escort could certainly be an option if we toss in some abilities that  could allow for some double equip shenanigans as well. Same goes for Death warrant, but unless Mandarin rallies into it. it can sometimes feel like a dead draw. Especially considering we will also be drawing into 10 rings fairly regularly.

let's take a look at sources we can tap to double equip instead:

Weapons Lab
Pier 4
Black Panther, Vibranium Vogue
Punisher. Guns Blazing

Interesting, both character options are Marvel Knights. The often abused pier 4 will require fan 4, and an often overlooked Weapons Lab will need BPRD. Of the potential teams both marvel Knigts and fantastic Four have some very solid equipment support. While a team-up with BPRD may force tings a bit too much.

Now lastly, lets look at our other non Fan 4 or MK equipment options before we try to make this pile coherent.

Fate Artifacts And tower
Man and Machine
Hank Pym<>Giant Man, Big Brain
Dr. fate, hector Hall (HOLY SHITBALLS) 

 

I DARE you to try not to sing "I wanna Rock" while playing him.

Alright so we may have just found our win condition with Dr. Fate, granting a hypothetical +13 ATK across your board if you can set him up and manage to live the dream. This however, assumes  getting him the core ability to have 2 equipment attached to him. (equip a fate artifact, THEN equip a 10 rings. The equipment's effect will allow you to go beyond 2! this also works when using fate's tower to transfer the equipment since its effect is always moving one at a time)

So now we sort-of have a bit of a problem where thematically we need mandarin and his 10 rings but crossing over Crime Lords, marvel knights and fantastic 4 AND shadowpack just isn't viable, and without a team-up, we are more likely to rally dr. fate straight to the bottom of the deck than we are to see him on 6 with any consistency. That leaves our universal team-ups. Superhuman Registration Act, and Underground Movement, with our consistent rallying, taking iron Man's side of Civil War will cater to setting up favorable mandarin rallies as we can mow through the deck faster. While Underground Movement will allow us to stack the hidden area with potential attackers on our kill turn. For this build, we're going to try SRA.

Next lets really push the equipment theme, so Dr. Fate's Tower and New Baxter building is in.
Black Panther allows our fate endgame turn to really push the upper limits of his effect so he is in for sure as well.

I really struggled trying to decide between Dr. Strange, secret avenger and the original equipment king, Mr, fantastic. While strange could hypothetically offer a bigger payday, the consistency of Mr Fan won the day, and strange became my alternate drop at 2 copies.

For turn 3 Mandarin is king. this also allows us to under-drop a missed mr fan or a doc strange if we miss him and not feel too badly about it.

at 4 it's all about punisher, this is the turn i will typically fate him up. If i managed to hold back on equipping anything up to now, he gets both the fartifacts AND the rings. This deck is all about taking the even initiatives and a flying untargetable auto-koing 4 drop that thinks it is a 6 or 7 drop is certainly useful.

for turn 5 the clincher was Steel's ability to fetch not just equipment in the deck, but the KO pile as well. Making him an auto-include.

Turn 6. our endgame we want dr fate entering play, then using the tower to load him up with all the Punisher's toys allowing for a pretty insane board-wide attack pump. In testing I was consistently seeing at least +8ATK across the board. I don't need to tell you how ridiculous that is.

For our off-initiative 6 or later, I splashed a single copy of Mr, fantastic, Dimensional Explorer. He single-handedly brings Mandarin online for an off-initiative stun on your defensive turn since he enters play and draws you the better part of 10 cards on a standard game anyway. Sometimes, he'll net me even more. Allowing us to live both halves ofthe Mandarin dream, getting that stun, AND getting huge from the rings.

I'll let the list do he rest of the speaking for itself. Without further delay, I humbly present to you,

Mandarin KO

Locations
    3 [DCR] Dr. Fate’s Tower
    3 [MTU] New Baxter Building

Characters
    4 [MEQ] Black Panther, Vibranium Vogue

    4 [MOR] Mr. Fantastic-Reed Richards 
    2 [MUN] Dr. Strange, Secret Avenger

    4 [MUN] Mandarin, Tem Borjigen

    4 [MVL] Punisher, Guns Blazing

    4 [DJL] John Henry Irons <> Steel, Steel-Drivin' Man

    2 [DCR] Dr. Fate - Hector Hall
    1 [MVL] Mr. Fantastic, Dimensional Explorer 

Plot Twists
    2 [MUN] Invasion Plans
    2 [MXM] Teamwork
    4 [DLS] Mobilize
    4 [MUN] Superhuman Registration Act, Team-Up

Equipment
    10 [MEQ] The Ten Rings
    3 [DCR] Helm Of Nabu - Fate Artifact
    2 [DCR] Cloak Of Nabu - Fate Artifact
    2 [DCR] Amulet Of Nabu - Fate Artifact


Are you wondering who didn't make it?

The runners-up

Ape X - a solid 1 drop that gets us on the right foot, she was cut in favor of repeatable card advantage cards like New Baxter.

Blue Beetle - another solid opener, however his discards became a higher and higher price as i was reluctant to drop equipment cards to his search. in testing i found i was only using his effect once or twice anyway.

The Captain - a fantastic combo piece, the deck was unable to actually make space for the pieces that would really push him to the next level. competing for the 4 drop slot against Punisher made it an always sub-optimal play.

Losing the Argument - with the SRA a staple in this build and access to dr. strange's multiple rallies, the interactions with Losing the argument feel pretty synergistic, unfortunately space just wasn't there as Mr. Fantastic is absolutely our favored 2 drop to hit. Too often we had Losing in hand and no Doc Strange available to maximize its use, or worse yet, we did have the doc, but missed the ideal time to play him.

All equipment search - getting the equipment isn't the hard part. the hard part is managing the discards fuelling the build. between teamwork, mobilize and helm of nabu, your hand can get very limited when it comes time to pick discard options. To help with this i filled the final two open spaces with Invasion Plans.

Jerry's Final Thoughts:

This list won't dominate a meta, and of course, for those of you looking to try it, you would do well covering some bases. For example, if your group is very active running Jester, meltdown and other pieces of equipment hate, you may want to consider dropping Invasion Plans for some Pathetic Attempts or tweaking the build a bit. As a rule though, I wouldn't try to remove more than the 2 invasion plans and an amulet and cloak. The build IS stacked pretty tight, after all. Try it out! Let me know what you all think!

And keep those deck ideas coming!