Deck Doctor 6: IMMORTALITY

This week it was Robert Snyder that piqued my interest with his take on an "Infinite Brick" based around the interaction of Washout, X-Men Assemble and having him teamed up to X-Men.

Even though he gave me a list to tweak, (and I'm sure it is pretty good) Instead of tweaking or troubleshooting his build. I'm going to run away with it instead, lets go for full-on combat IMMORTALITY.

How, you ask?

Literally the original king pimp.

So what we have here is a potential set-up for an infinitely recovering Washout next to an unstunnable kingpin. All we need is a face-up X-Men Assemble and a way for Washout to become an X-Man adjacent to the King. Off the top of my head, we could use Forced Conscription and enable it with a full suite of lowbie X-Men characters. Beyond that, team affiliation just doesn't matter in this build. Instead we need to make Kingpin huge. And considering our entire game-plan is to milk immortality...

...YUP.

We need to take the pressure off of hitting X-Men Assemble. Survival will fit Amazingly while bumping up to 8 counter-generating resources helping us inflate those that stick around. And in fact, will take precedence in this build, since the Kingpin will never benefit from Assemble anyway, and Washout only needs one to stick around indefinately. As a side, Washouts synergy with Iron Man, Mighty Avenger nears the realm of absurd if you assume an opponent can't make him shed all his counters, he will always double up at the end of the turn. (iron man can trigger more than once!)

At this point, I ran a search on all characters that are involved with recovery to flesh out the curve. The preliminary list looks like this:

The Immortal Pimp-Slamp

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

Characters
     4 [MVL] Shadowcat, Phase Shifter
     4 [MEV] Blink - Earth-295

    4 [DCR] Deadshot - Dead Aim
    4 [MAA] Bishop, Age of Apocalypse


    4 [MEV] Washout - John Lopez

    4 [MUN] Iron Man, Mighty Avenger

    4 [MEX] Kingpin, Overboss

    1 [EHB] Johann Kraus - Free Spirit
    4 [DCR] Scandal - Savage Spawn

    1 [DCL] Nyssa Raatko, Maiden of Death

Plot Twists
    4 [MAA] X-Men Assemble!, Age of Apocalypse {MAA}
    4 [MAA] Survival of the Fittest, Age of Apocalypse {MAA}
    4 [DCL] Straight to the Grave {DCL}
    4 [MXM] Enemy Of My Enemy {MXM}
    4 [MSM] Forced Allegiance {MSM}
    3 [MOR] Press The Attack


So the notable interactions are: SttG deadshot on 3+ to get access to deadshot through his effect. this sets up your Scandal Ongoing search to land the team-up and other ongoings the deck needs to sustain through the midgame.

At 6 our go-to is right outta the Hellboy set, Johann kraus. Not many people realize that his effect can continuously target himself, making him essentially unkillable without a KO effect applied. While, on 7, Nyssa also can remain as yet another wall of immediate recovery, at the cost of killing off those little hidden X-men characters we started with. I keep these drops as 1-ofs since the 8 pieces of search do well to ensure we'll see them

Honorable mentions that didn't quite make the cut.

Kick - yeah that MEV equip nobody played since it KO'd the equipped character on a stun? Well when you are immortal a free +4 ATK with no negative downside can be pretty damn good at turning kingpin into a monster perpetually swinging up the curve. Unfortunately, press the attack tends to get more work done. But feel free to experiment and test for yourself.

Pathetic Attempt/BPRD Signal Device - With such a glaring weakness into KO abilities, you'd expect to try to cover it more. In fav3or of keeping it tabletop level, I ultimately chose to leave it. The build can easily underdrop and dig into the KO pile to replay lost characters while still ramping up the curve with those hidden characters and kingpin. Feel free to toss a few in if you really want to cover your bad matchups. The ceiling on this build is quite high if you min/max it well.

Cable, dayspring and Deadpool, interminable terminator - with access to invulnerability and yet another auto-recovering character, there is a lot of temptation to turn this build into a Bosom Buddies variant. Unfortunately the card space is really, REALLY hard to justify. This is supposed to be a washout/kingpin build at this point, but they were worth mentioning. Cable could actually be directly swapped for Iron Man if you prefer the idea of an invulnerable washout wall.

Keep in mind.

This is a preliminary list built around a very cool premise. As a weekly article not every build is going to be min-maxxed perfectly in 7 days. But feel free to make your own adjustments and toss them my way! Also, keep those deck ideas coming! I'll See you next week!