ZACH’S ATTACK ON TAWC!!!

Defending The Empire

by Zachary Thorp

Inspiration strikes in the most amazing ways. Sometimes it can start from the smallest thing, like seeing a plastic bag be blown into trees. Sometimes, it stems from larger things, such as one person’s dream of greatness. In this game, however, it is most often inspired by cards and by the characters behind them.

Or maybe inspirtation can come from what is in an Unstable Molecular Suit?

 For years, I’ve had a deep love of the classic X-men storylines, especially the Shi’ar Empire and the long-distance love affair of Lilandra and Mr. Xavier. And for the life of Vs. System, I’ve longed to see them in print, hopefully along with the Starjammers added in. When they finally did appear, I cheered… only to see a total of three cards printed with the affiliation, later a fourth with the dual-team Prof. X. Not quite the printing I was hoping for, but at least I could pit it against a rival Skrull deck if I wanted.

 That said there is certainly room to add to this base, much like there was with the Skrulls. Fortunately, I’ve been designing stuff since I was seven or eight, originally game play for things like Super Mario Brothers, some of which actually made it into the SNES release Super Mario World (or so I was told). I did a full set or two for M:tG, but for Vs. System I only did a handful of cards, among them something like these. If the game survives long enough, I’d love to see cards like these in print:

 

Nathan Summers — Corsair

Summers Clan – Starjammer

Character – 4, X-men / Shi’ar

7/6, Range

While you control another character that shares a version with Nathan Summers, he is +2 ATK and +1 DEF.

 

Nathan Summers

Air Force Pilot

Character – 1, X-men

2/1, Flight

When you play Nathan Summers, if you control a character with the version Summers Clan or Starjammer, you may search your library for a card with one of those versions. Reveal that card, shuffle your deck, and put that card on top of it.

Interesting mechanic, no? Best of all, a card like this would interact nicely with other Summers-clan cards like Cyclops, Cable, Jean Grey, and Rachel Summers and the other Starjammer effects. The Imperial Guard could work a similar way, if they ever saw print, with the M’Kran Crystal a sort of Gamma Bomb effect. Still, I can dream – I’m not sure I’d accept a design job with UDE at this point, but I wouldn’t mind the offer someday.

Back on topic, I had to work with what cards are available when concepting the deck, and with Marvel Universe, that was three Shi’ar characters. Two of them have already found a great home – see the Revenge of the Empire article on TCG Player. Matt Wishart already made them work in the form of SHIELD affiliation, but I had a bit less to work with when I was building. Since I couldn’t find an answer to the problem of “how do I keep non-concealed characters in play for Gladiator”, I worked with Shi’ar Soldier instead, the defensive parallel to Marvel Origin’s Skrull Soldier.

As mentioned above, the problem with all the Shi’ar affiliation is keeping your board intact (read: hidden). This is compounded when the character you want to play has a recruit cost of 2, not 1, and is undersized at that. There are now four useful ways to hide them: the Marvel Defenders affiliation, the Shadowpact affiliation, the team-up Underground Movement, and the Invisible Woman-stamped card Invisibility. Since it served the dual function of keeping the deck in Modern Age and creating a Legend deck, I went with the last option. Here’s the deck, tuned and tested:

 

Feminine Wiles

3 Invisible Woman, Walking on Air

2 Professor X, Mutant Benefactor

10 Shi’ar Soldier, Army

4 Invisible Woman, First Lady of the Fantastic Four

4 Mr. Fantastic, Critical Thinker

2 Franklin Richards, Child of the Cosmos

1 Invisible Woman, Sight Unseen

1 Thing, Conscientious Objector

2 Invisible Woman, Shield of the Four

1 Silver Surfer, Norrin Radd

2 Galactus, Devourer of Worlds

 

2 Metropolis Reborn, Team-Up

4 Marvel Crossover, Team-Up

4 Empire’s End

4 Dirty Tricks

 

3 Invasion Plans

3 Combat Veteran

2 Pathetic Attempt

4 Signal Flare

4 Invisibility

 

At its heart, this is a stalling deck – it barely even makes an attack or stuns an opponent before turn 7, but by then, it has likely already won, no matter what the endurance totals stand at. The strategy is simple enough – play a high defense character in the visible, fill in the ranks around him or her with Shi’ar Soldiers, then hide them all via

Invisibility or 5-drop Invisible Woman. Barring that, start flipping as many Empire’s End and Dirty Tricks as you can to keep any soldiers you have out intact and milking Franklin Richards for all he’s worth.

As difficult as this sounds to get off the ground, it usually isn’t an issue. Most curve decks don’t run 1’s, and often whiff on their 2’s, so you often have a nice pocket of breathing room to get your stall on. The same cannot be said for swarm and short-curve builds, such MKKO or High Voltage, but those matches can be winnable if you get only a light amount of burn to the face and can cripple their characters with a few Dirty Tricks. A tough matchup to be sure, but sometimes a winnable one. In any case, a normal hand is often something like this:

 

Turn 1: Professor X, Mutant Benefactor

Turn 2: Shi’ar Soldier, use Prof. X.

Turn 3: Invisible Woman, First Lady of the Fantastic Four. Flip Dirty Tricks.

Turn 4: Shi’ar Soldier x2, Marvel Crossover, and Invisibility.

Turn 5: Mr. Fantastic, exhaust Invisible Woman for Invasion Plans. Brick wall.

Turn 6: Signal Flare for Thing, play Thing. Brick wall again, draw again.

Turn 7: Invisible Woman, Shield of the Four. Attack; discard to her ability, brick wall.

Turn 8 & 9: Win

For those nay-sayers out there, this is not the idealized hand, but a perfectly normal one. Between the draw from Invasion Plans and Mr. Fantastic, you can easily pull enough to fill the curve out. Since the deck is also off-curve, it is extremely flexible about when it plays things – for example, it may drop a trio of Shi’ar Soldiers on turn 6 and immediately hide them, having just soaked damage in earlier turns. That alone gives you 9 points more defense to use, more if you’ve salvaged additional soldiers along the way. I just wish I could also run Cover Fire in this MA version.

There are a few key weaknesses in the deck that I just haven’t found a way to deal with effectively. First, as mentioned, the swarm and burn decks, or more generally anything that plays a ton of characters on the early turns and runs a ton of attack pump. The deck needs to survive until 7 to really start winning and you’re often 10-20 endurance shy by the time you get there, if you get there at all. Second, any deck packing KO effects can cripple your brick walling character, and this is particularly devastating if that character is Mr. Fantastic – his draw is critical to the deck’s success. Third, decks packing any number of Foiled! Or Flame Trap effects can ruin your day, including all variants of Human Torch. Fourth and finally, exhaustion builds can ruin you, since your Shi’ar Soldiers need to be ready to work. Pathetic Attempt only goes so far to correcting these difficulties, but there isn’t room for anything more – it’s at 62 cards already.

 Briefly, here are a few of the reasons for picking the cards I did:

Professor X: Like Invisible Woman, he’s a great early defender, and surprisingly helpful at helping your draw or removing your opponent’s key Mobilize that they’ve needed all game to make their Shadowpact deck explode.

Mr. Fantastic: Besides being a great defender, he is an amazing and crucial card drawer. Unlike Birthing Chamber, which is rather inconsistent in this build, he picks one of your top three and fixes your draws like no other. As a bonus, he’s always reinforced by Invisible Woman-3.

Franklin Richards: Decent attacker, and serves as a source of endurance gain in a deck that could really use it.

Invisible Woman, Sight Unseen: A necessary addition to the Invisibility suite. As a plus, she can often attack early on to keep a key character stunned.

Thing: Incredible brick wall character, similar to 6-drop Blob in that respect. Plus, he often takes down their best character, sometimes twice with the right defenses.

Silver Surfer: Still a beating, from his first debut in Common Enemy and continuing today. With the draw in this deck, it’s no issue at all to keep discarding.

Galactus: Although Onslaught would work here, this beater is in-theme for the deck (as a foe), while also winning the moment he hits play.

Invasion Plans: Birthing Chamber was annoyingly inconsistent in this deck, but this great card draw card – generic, no less – came just in time to make it.

Pathetic Attempt: Possibly better replaced by Cosmic Radiation, but possibly not. If nothing else, it keeps a key exhaust or stun off my characters.

Combat Veteran: I’d love this to be Cover Fire, but that’s not Modern Age legal. Still, that little +2 can help out more than you’d think.

Dirty Tricks / Empire’s End: Mmmm, swarm screwing, and oddly enough, curve screwing as well. When you drop a 6-drop and it only has 6-7 attack that turn, you must be doing something right. Just watch out, as it affects you as well.

I can attest that this deck can do some very rude things and is a fun addition the Marvel universe as a whole. If Hobby League would ever get back around to playing the Legends or Modern Age format, I would happily continue smash faces with it. Like good friend Joe Corbett has said, though, it could certainly be expanded to include the SHIELD affiliation, leading to a possibly hybrid of this deck and Revenge of the Empire.

In the meantime, however, I’ll continue to smile every time a deck must team attack with a 2, 3, 4, 5, and two big pumps to pull down my Thing. I may have created a monster, but at least it’s more fun to play against than a fully powered Spiderfriends.

Enjoy!

 

Cheers,

Zachary Thorp

Zach has been playing Vs & other Tcg’s forever. Zach has a unique & simplistic approach to deck building around the less obvious. If there is an unexplored or under rated theme Zach already has the deck sleeved & ready to go. Zach is a true comic book fan & a great asset to Vs System.