Ghost-Spider: Co-op Defender

The core idea of this deck is to rely on Ghost-Spider ability to allow her to defend both herself and another hero every round. It's not very glamorous, and the other heroes are probably going to do the lion's share of damage to the villain. Just remember that the other heroes are able to take big swings because they almost never have to worry about defending themselves.

Ghost-Spider is the ultimate tank, with three DEF off the bat and a special ability that allows her to ready after resolving a response or interrupt...once PER PHASE. This means you can ready her twice per round, but I think what you'll find is that you will mostly rely on this ability in a single phase depending on the aspect you use.

This is a protection deck, so you will be playing most of your Hero turn during the Villain phase and using your Hero phase to keep building your upgrade pile.

And let me tell you, it is a full-on armory of upgrades, taking up more than a quarter of the deck.

This makes Ghostey a hard ramp character that needs time to build up her kit, so you will be using events to pay for upgrades in the beginning. You will be leaning on the extra card draw and untouchable HP of Alter-Ego for the first round or so, which means you will need to get as many upgrades onto the table as quickly as possible because you don't have a lot of tools for dealing with threat. This requires that you mulligan hard into upgrades and spend heavily on them for a turn or two. At that point you will probably need to flip to Hero mode and get to work, hopefully with an upgrade or three.

So let's talk about specifics of playing the deck.

The crucial upgrades are the two Web-Bracelets and Unflappable because they provide you with card draw, which fuels your upgrade empire. Next most important are Armored Vest and Electrostatic Armor because defending is the core of this deck's strategy. (There are two copies of Armored Vest to increase the likelihood of drawing it early, and then you can slap it on another player when you run into the spare copy.) Lowest priority goes to Flow Like Water, Plan B and Hard To Ignore. They’re all useful, but if you have to make a choice, use any of these three to pay for one of the higher priority upgrades.

Once you have a few upgrades down, Ghost-Spider becomes a balancing act.

The perfect play is to defend against an attack, then play an interrupt or response card and not take any damage. This will allow you to trigger Ghost-Spider's ability and ready her, as well as activate all of the upgrades. However, this may not always be possible.

Taking damage prevents Hard to Ignore and Unflappable from triggering. Not playing a defense card with an Interrupt or Response prevents her ability, Flow Like Water and a Bracelet from triggering. There will be times when you just aren't able to get every single upgrade to trigger, and you have to make hard choices. The simplest way to reduce the frequency of these issues is to either have George Stacy in play with cards under him, or hold on to at least one event between phases. Since Gwen's ability requires events to be played in order to activate, one of these in hand is the diesel for the engine that ensures you can stay in hero form almost indefinitely.

A single defense event generates so much value for Ghostey that it is always worth the reduced card draw. It all gets a lot easier after your first pass through the deck, since you will have thinned it out to mostly events.

Next, you should continue to prioritize upgrades that allow you to draw cards or get the Helicarrier in play to reduce cost. The first level of bonus card draw (1) is only going to provide you with enough room to Defend yourself and either Defend your partner OR play an upgrade. Once you are able to draw 2 extra cards per round, you begin to control the options that are available to you.

In the late game, you will have numerous upgrades enhancing your Defense actions while also leaving room for you to swing with Ghost-Spider’s hero events.

In the best case scenario, when you defend you will have a DEF of 4, deal 2 damage, remove two threat, draw two cards and ready Ghost-Spider. If you defend a second time and have Desperate Defense in hand or Indomitable in play, you will deal two more damage, ready Ghostey and draw another card. That works out to all damage prevented from two attacks, three cards drawn and four damage dealt...all from upgrades. You likely will have played one of her signature cards to either deal more damage or remove more threat.

Most of time, however, you are going to be taking a Defense action for yourself and then deciding whether to defend your partner, play an upgrade or play a hero event. This is because all of the Defense events cost zero or one resource, nearly all of the upgrades cost one and all but one of the hero events cost two. It is this tug-of-war that makes this Ghost-Spider deck a precarious pleasure to play, and what makes the slow build of her attack responses so much fun. Halfway through the game, you realize you have dished out damage and cleared so much threat without any effort that her actual hero cards become the chef’s kiss of each round.

But Ghost-Spider isn’t done yet.

She also has Assess the Situation working with George Stacy doing a slow build.

You see, George allows you to add an event to him once per turn, and then acts as an extension of your hand. So if you load him up with three Assess the Situation events, you can trigger them all on a single turn, then draw an additional three cards at the end of the phase. While typically the optimal situation would be for Ghost-Spider to be in Alter-Ego at the end of the phase so that you can draw nine cards, there is an even better scenario. After using all those Assesses from George, playing the rest of your hand and taking any available actions...you trigger Ticket to the Multiverse, draw 8 cards, ready your character and take another oversized swing at the villain. And with both bracelets out she can get two more cards in response to the events you will definitely be playing, followed by readying everything and drawing another eight cards when the Villain's phase starts, which is essentially Gwen's action phase as well.

This is where Gwen steals back that thunder she doled out to the other heroes all game and potentially deals the finishing blow.

Is this the most effective use of Ghost-Spider? Maybe not. But There are currently 31 heroes in Marvel Champions, and only five of them have a defense of 3. Of those, two of them only have that defense part of the time (Wasp and Ant-Man). So Ghost-Spider is an excellent candidate for the defense-boosting abilities of the Protection aspect. Plus, she’s the only hero in the game that has a high defense as well as the ability to ready herself once each phase, thus allowing her to natively defend herself and another player in the same phase.

Sure, Quicksilver runs a close second with his innate readying and max potential DEF of 3 (if running Protection), but that extra point of DEF on Ghostey adds up, and no one else in the game has Ghost-Spider’s ability to re-set her entire board state for an additional turn. It may be a once-per-game ability, but it can literally change the course or even finish a game before the villain has a chance to deal a crushing blow.

This deck is meant primarily to be support for other heroes. While it can dish out some exceptional threat removal and damage in the mid-to-late game, it may not always get there without another hero keeping the main scheme clear in the early stages.

I look forward to the amazing things other people will devise for Ghost-Spider, but this deck is a ton of fun to play in the meantime.