Basic
Event
Cost: 0.
Resource:

Play only if your identity has the MUTANT trait.

Alter-Ego Action: Choose up to 2 identity-specific cards in your discard pile and shuffle them into your deck. If X-Mansion is in play, draw 1 card.

Gambit #21.
Mutant Education
Reviews

A phenomenal little workhorse card for most of the X-Men, especially since most of them tick the dual boxes of wanting to periodically flip down to Alter-Ego and wanting their Identity cards back. The X-Mansion bonus of card draw is the icing on the cake so that this card replaces itself, and that is an easy condition to meet in a decent number of solo decks and incredibly common in multiplayer X-Men games where you're already likely coordinating those archetype Supports so that SOMEBODY has the X-Mansion. It's open-ended in what cards it can rescue, from resources like Molecular Acceleration to clutch events like Steel Fist, or any number of vital Supports/Upgrades that got killed off to the discard pile by an unlucky draw.

I wouldn't call it a mandatory staple, but it's a very easy sell to include considering that recursion is typically pretty great when it's this cheap and simple. It's imprecise in that you have to wait to see the cards on a future draw, which is a knock against it, but as games drag on and your board state is increasingly set this is exactly what you want to see to fill your thinning deck with your most important tools again for high-value turns. I won't always run three copies, but if I have spare space for it I'll always keep it in mind.

The two requirements for a deck that wants this card are:

  1. You have to be able to go to Alter-Ego often. Since the card is limited to an Alter-Ego action and it isn't a high impact card that you would flip to Alter-Ego just to play it, then you have to have a deck that can flip to Alter-Ego relatively easily (that is with low risk of getting schemed out). Otherwise you just won't be able to play it.

  2. You have identity-specific cards that you would play over any other card in your deck most of the time. If the card you're shuffling back isn't better or enables you to do something that most of the other cards in your deck can't, then it's not worth reducing the chance of drawing the cards you would rather play. Generally Upgrades/Support are what you want to prioritize playing to buff your character and the cards you're shuffling back are not those things most of the time. So doing this is only worth it after you've set-up the rest of your Upgrades/Support.

What I found when playing this card is that it's not worth it to play it without X-Mansion on the field as you're spending a card without affecting your current situation at all and there are not many situations where you're not better off just spending the card as a resource. With X-Mansion in play, the cantrip makes up for the inherent weakness of the card, however the timing can be awkward if you didn't start the turn in Alter-Ego.

Ideally you want to sequence any card draw at the start of the turn to have the most information for which cards to play vs use as a resource and it makes this card awkward to use when you start in Hero form because the majority of the cards in most decks require Hero form so flipping to Alter-Ego usually happens at the end where the cantrip is irrelevant most of the time because there's a higher chance of drawing into something you can't play.

So overall the card is awkward to play due to needing multiple things to line up for it to be worthwhile. You would probably be better off considering other options.

Neokarasu · 173