A Confusing Creature With A Confusing Gun v1.2

Card draw simulator

Odds: 0% – 0% – 0% more
Derived from
None. Self-made deck here.
Inspiration for
A Confusing Creature With A Confusing Gun v1.2 2 1 0 1.0
Confusing Gun mod 0 0 0 1.0

Saan · 3518

So MTS and Nebula are out, and there's a couple small changes I've made.

-1 Cosmo, +1 Martinex. I noted this in the comments, but Martinex is basically a better Cosmo, since you don't really want to use Cosmo that much in this deck anyhow, given you don't really want to discard.

-1 Down Time, +1 Crew Quarters. Down Time was here to give additional value for when you flip to heal, and Crew Quarters does an even better job by allowing you to heal without needing to exhaust yourself. This is better for turns when you don't need to exhaust, but still have a bit of damage to heal, and still works just as well as Down Time for the turns when you do.

-1 Booster Boots, +1 One Way or Another. Booster Boots was just here as an extra Tech upgrade for card draw that had an upside if you found it, and One Way or Another draws more cards for less resource investment. Admittedly, you now have a Side Scheme you probably need to take care of, but with how efficiently this deck annihilates threat, it's not usually an issue, and can often lead to drawing even more cards, through Clear the Area and Skilled Investigator. I'm almost never sad to use this card, and it helps you blow through your deck that much faster.

The day that Venom got spoiled and I saw Sonic Rifle, I knew it would be insane in good ol' Rocket. Rocket likes flipping down fairly often in order to turn his spent tech upgrades into card draw, and being able to Confuse the villain on demand makes this trivial to pull off. Putting that ability on a tech upgrade itself?

Yes please.

An Extremely Confusing Gun

What makes Sonic Rifle so good in Rocket isn't that you can flip down and trash it for card draw, it's that once you get it out it should have more or less infinite charges. 2 Battery Packs and 2 Salvages for Battery Packs give eternal life to this gun, and Rocket's card draw on either form should cycle the deck fast enough that Sonic Rifle should always have a charge when you need one. I often play 2 player, and once Rocket has it down, it provides enough Confuses for both players easily.

Now, we still want to play our other weapons and kill minions in order to draw more cards (and kill the Villain eventually), and this darn Sonic Rifle takes away one of the Restricted slots we have. Fortunately Venom also gave us Side Holster! What a nice symbiotic horror from space. This enables us to play Sonic Rifle while also having 2 free hands for weapons with more lethality, which is nice, because it has the side benefit of letting us hold more Tech items, which lets us draw more cards.

A Confusingly Low Amount of Justice

One thing that I found while playing Aggression Rocket through the GMW campaign (paired with his best bud, Protection Groot) is that I basically never wanted to use Rocket's basic attack. First of all, it's only 1. Sure, Cybernetic Skeleton eventually might make it 2, but that's beside the point, mainly because Rocket can boost his Thwart to 3 natively as well with Thruster Boots. Heroic Intuition boosts it to 4, and at this point I've Got a Plan hits for 5, and you just end up annihilating threat.

Since your basic Thwart action carries so much weight, you don't really need a lot of other cards in your deck to take care of your primary function.

I like card draw, and Rocket likes card draw too. Really, everyone likes card draw. Clear the Area makes the cut, because it removes threat and draws cards. For similar reasons, Skilled Investigator is also great value, since it costs 0 and also draws cards -- potentially quite a few, depending on the scenario.

Seeing as you annihilate threat, Turn the Tide is a no brainer, and has been in basically every Justice deck since the card was printed. I'm only running 2 copies because gosh darn it getting to only 40 slots is hard.

Beyond that, I've chucked a copy of Making an Entrance into the deck. I tried out several cards in this slot, and having a little extra reach on your Thwarting for the cost of 1 just worked out best with the rest of the deck. The extra heal is usually pretty easy to pull off as well, and is a nice perk on top. This is probably the most flexible slot, though, and several cards aren't bad here. If you're playing Solo, you can probably swap this out for Turn the Tide and end up being just fine for Thwarting.

Confusingly Basic

The most confusing card in here is probably C.I.T.T. Honestly, I just don't think much of it. It's 2 to play, and then another 2 to use to merely ready your hero. I had another version of this deck in my testing of Sonic Rifle, but I kept running into a problem, mostly in multiplayer. Since Rocket's main pull toward Justice is his high Thwart value, if you get in a situation where you are exhausted or get confused and can't thwart that turn, you end up slowly falling behind.

Then I started playing with Drax, and after messing with both Protection and my Aggression deck, I found that C.I.T.T. was actually fairly reasonable with high enough base stat values. However, just throwing C.I.T.T. in the deck didn't solve much, since there were already a lot of valuable 2+ cost things in the deck, and you really want to play a lot of the 1-cost things as well, meaning that it was hard finding the time and resources to both play and use C.I.T.T.

Thus enters The Power in All of Us. This enables you to both play and use C.I.T.T. for a fairly reasonable rate. This also lets the deck have 6 different 2-resource cards to use with it, which is a pretty good percentage of your deck, especially once you have gone through it once. I tried this deck with 2 copies of Power, but running so many resource cards can lead to too many hands where you have 3 resource cards and nothing to do with them, especially the 2nd time through the deck. It's weird, but 1 copy just smooths things out more.

TPiAoU sucks on its own, though, so throwing in a lot of high value (or just cheap cost -- sorry Cosmo) neutral Allies helps make TPiAoU a good draw a good amount of the time. There's 8 targets for it, and once C.I.T.T. is down, it always has a target. So far, I haven't been sad.

Beyond that, I'm playing Down Time, because we already have Cybernetic Skeleton for HP, and being able to REC for more when we flip to convert Tech upgrades into cards adds more value to the flip. Booster Boots aren't really here so much for their damage protection as they are here because I wanted another cheap Tech upgrade that I could trash for cards.

I'm Confused Why You Didn't Include...

So the original version of this deck had Swift Retribution in it, which kinda makes sense, seeing as you're confusing the Villain, so the Scheme never actually occurs. This is more or less fine, but just not that good in Rocket, who wants to flip fairly often. If you burn a Confuse to do 4 damage, you're not going to have that Confuse for when you flip down to Recover/draw, so effectively you're still going to have the Villain scheme, you're just delaying it. I'm sure there's a deck where you try and stay in hero form as much as possible and use your Confuse effects to play Swift Retribution, but I don't think Rocket is the deck for it. With Retribution at 1 cost and a scheme activation, I'd much rather just play Turn the Tide.

Scare Tactic is just worse Turn the Tide, and we don't have slots for Worse Turn the Tide. "Think Fast!" is another fun card for Guardians, but it's 100% unneeded once Shock Rifle hits the table.

15 comments

Jul 18, 2021 rstorcdk · 4683

You are so right about the basic attack. I never used it either. Almost seemed like a waste when his THW is so good :)

Jul 21, 2021 AngelCorral · 8

A very nice deck. Thank you!!

Jul 21, 2021 Webhead123 · 1

As soon as I played him, Rocket quickly became one of my favorite Hero decks. I never put serious effort into a Justice build but I always knew Rocket would be a real trooper with Justice if he needed to be. I tried this deck and it is an absolute champ! The allies buy time to get out the guns and Sonic Rifle lets Rocket ease into his Alter-Ego flips without fear of the scheme going bonkers. Thanks for this deck!

Jul 24, 2021 Skylight · 1

Wouldn't "Think Fast!" be a good option for this kind of deck?

Jul 24, 2021 Saan · 3518

@SkylightYou'd think so, and so did I when I first started testing the deck. However, once Shock Rifle is out "Think Fast" is just a dead card, since Rocket can effectively give infinite charges to the Rifle.

Jul 28, 2021 OTamarindo · 1

I can understand why use Rocky's THW is good, but basic ATK + Combat Training + Skeleton + Hand Cannon is a pretty good combo (you can throw a Skilled Strike there too)

I can see a Justice Rocky never using basic ATK, but for aggression it can do a lot of damage.

Jul 31, 2021 Judicator82 · 117

The Power in Alll of Us can pay for play C.I.T.T., but it can't pay for its ability by itself.

Aug 03, 2021 Saan · 3518

@Judicator82 I've heard either way. I think this is something we need an official ruling on, seeing as in all other situations "paying for" and "spending" resources are the same thing.

Sep 06, 2021 Saan · 3518

The only real update that MTS brings is swapping out Cosmo for Martinex. You don't really want to attack with Cosmo in the first place, because you usually want your Upgrades, which are the most likely discards. Either way, Martinex is a 1/1/4 for 2, which is better than a 1/1/2 for 2 that you don't really want to activate.

Oct 17, 2021 Maialideth · 1

Have you considered Brains over Brawn for Rocket's hero ability?

Nov 13, 2021 Teowulff · 1

So iiuc you need to buy two Venom Xpacks in order to be able to use 2 #Sonic Rifle in this deck?

Jan 06, 2022 Saan · 3518

@TeowulffNo, Venom should come with 3 copies of Sonic Rifle in his hero pack.

Jan 06, 2022 Saan · 3518

@MaialidethI looked at it, but at it's best it's just 2 resources (3ER) for 4 damage, which isn't amazing. If I was going to add another damage card, I'd throw in a 3rd copy of Turn the Tide.

May 09, 2022 Saan · 3518

Just thought I'd post on here again to say that Boggs' recent clarification of CITT says that you can use Power in All Of Us to pay for it, which is obviously what I thought and how I've been playing it, but it's great to have confirmation.

Dec 29, 2022 Leo_the_wookiee · 1

Awesome deck, nice work @Saan! Any advice if someone else is playing Groot? What ally could sub for such a great cornerstone?