We Are Venom!

This week on Deck of the Week we return to the bestest and my favorite aspect of them all - prepare to throw all your other cards in the trash because "We Are Venom!"

Audiocast link: https://mcm-podcast.com/2021/07/24/dotw-4-leadership-venom/

Okay don't through your other cards away yet. This The Power of Leadership deck only uses 12 Leadership cards. So it's more of a basic deck!

Let's get one thing out of the way - why would you play Venom leadership? We are at a pretty magical point in the game where 3+ types of leadership decks are viable for many characters. We can walk you through it.

1) Venom's kit has a built in ready with Run and Gun this can be used in combination with cards like Moxie and Morale Boost to get a double use out of those stat buffs. We went a different route.

2) You can make use of Strength In Numbers and Knowhere to pump your hand and make sure you can trigger your Savage Attack and Behind Enemy Lines kickers! We found a different way to do this.

3) The new wave has introduced many Guardians tribal cards and one is even a Weapon Laser Blaster to synergize with Locked and Loaded - sounds slick. Now this sounds like the kind of combo jank we are interested in. We likes it.

Ultimately - Venom has a truly unique kit and an amazing hero ability that allows you to reduce the cost of an ally by 1 with his Symbiotic Bond on top of this allies can block for Venom making the damage cost not a big deal.

Now, we will walk you through our deck.

The Basics

The deck plays around with some silly cheats. We want to get a set of 3-4 Guardians allies on the board and end the game in a giant Blaze of Glory. We will be pumping up these allies with Laser Blaster and Target Practice to ensure they hit hard on the turn we Blaze of Glory. We are all about the "Basic" allies so we have included all 5 Guardian traited basic allies to combo with The Power in All of Us and Knowhere.

How to Kick a Symbiote for Dummies

Three of Venom's cards Grasping Tendrils, Savage Attack and Behind Enemy Lines all require Venom to fully pay with a single resource type. We had lots of thoughts on how to fulfill this cost. With the number of The Power in All of Us in this deck at one point we had the three enhanced resources. Sadly they took up too much deckspace. What we like to do for now is use a combination of Helicarrier and Venom's hero ability to trigger these as much as possible. Helicarrier does not help with Grasping Tendrils so when given choices we made sure to include some physical resources - We'd still consider an Enhanced Physique (see hot swaps) 1 of card because that cancel and stun from Tendrils goes a looooooooooooooooooooong way.

An Assortment of Morons

We chose to go heavily into the Guardian traited allies - this is intentional. Not just for theme. We want to make our allies as cheap as possible and splitting between leadership and basic wasn't going to cut it. To make use of Knowhere we included all 5 Guardians allies but Star-Lord is probably not the greatest inclusion.

The Dream Team

Our goal if we can get it to work is to have an extremely burst turn fueld by Blaze of Glory with your allies. If we assemble all 5 Guardians allies and put a Laser Blaster onto Star-Lord, Gamora and Groot we will have a hefty turn indeed. Let's consider that 3+2 from Drax, 3+2 from Gamora 3+2 from Groot, 4-5ish from Rocket because lol Overkill, 3+2 from Star Lord. That's 25 just from your allies. If you have 3 copies of Target Practice out that's an additional 6 with a base attack from Venom of 4-6 depending on how many Venom's Pistol's we have in play. We don't need to wait for the perfect combo to set this off - we can do it with 2-3 guardians and still get good value but a lot of those Blaze of Glory pings are going to send those allies to your discard.

Hot Swaps

Note that Knowhere does not combo well with Make the Call because of this one obvious choice is to swap Knowhere for this antisynergy

+1 Make the Call -1 Knowhere

If you want to not go all in on Guardian's allies we can make some efficiency swaps.

-1 Starlord, +1 Ironheart

Finally if you want to lean more into Guradians but make them sustainable we will drop Blaze of Glory

-2 Blaze of Glory -1 Starlord +1 Yondu +1 Inspired +1 Comms Implant