Four or Five Moments

Mutant Genesis is finally here, to much acclaim. Iconic villains! Powerful new heroes! ...But the new heroes have awful preconstructed decks that can barely keep up with these scenarios. For veteran players this won't be an issue but for new players who might want to get into the game with the X-Men, it could be a bit disheartening. So I thought it'd be a good idea to build decks geared towards new players, using only cards from the core set and the new X-Men cards. These decks can handle any of the Mutant Genesis villains on Standard, and should be more than a match for most Expert villains, too.

So here we have Colossus. The first problem with his precon is: he has a whole bunch of cards that rely on having allies either in play or in hand, but has only four allies in his deck. One of them is Professor X, not exactly a prime target for a Training card since he won't stick around to use the extra health, and the other is Shadowcat who you very likely won't be able to play if someone else at the table wants to use her hero version. The other flaw with the deck is endemic to Colossus; he can't thwart. His hero kit doesn't have a single thwart card, and while Bait and Switch is actually pretty good for him it won't help with side schemes, of which Mutant Genesis has many. Plus, you can't expect him to be a hero all the time. Wake up a hero, brush his teeth a hero. He'd really like to flip down to Alter-Ego when he can to preserve his tough cards and obtain more. So, let's pair him with Justice. That'll solve his thwarting issues, plus Justice gives him more freedom to flip for those four or five (or six, or seven...) moments where he really needs to be a hero.

Great Responsibility is a card worth highlighting here; once you have Iron Will out you can use this to trade a tough to prevent a lot of threat on the main scheme. Either from the villain scheming against another player, or if there's some acceleration tokens out just use it at the start of the villain phase. Jessica Jones, Surveillance Team and For Justice! will help with that side scheme problem. Haymaker perhaps demands a bit of explanation since it's not a particularly strong card, but Colossus can have problems dealing with minions early on before he's able to get a big stockpile of Toughs and he only has 2 ATK. So, Haymaker it is.

Beyond that, it's standard Justice fare. Core Set Justice doesn't have that many options, and even if you get Phoenix's pack, there's not much help you'd be able to find there either outside of an ally or two. Thwart a bunch, flip down, come back up and thwart some more. All Colossus really needs is time to build up because once he's built he's invincible, and this deck will buy him that time.

Big thanks to royal7 from Discord for coming up with the concept for these decks.