Cyclops Leadership Reanimator

When I spent time going through Cyclop's cards and examining how his cards work it seemed obvious that an X-Men Reanimation style deck was clearly signposted in his kit. Not only does he have the ability to search out some of the core reanimation cards, but he can use any X-Men Ally in his deck.

The Reanimation Package

His signature ally Phoenix- Can recover any Cyclops card in his discard, allowing for recursion of Tactical Brillance which can itself recur Regroup or Rapid Response back into hand while also Thwarting.

Both Regroupand Rapid Response have the Tactic trait which means that as Scott Summers you can ensure there is one in your hand any turn where you start in Alter-Ego.

Make the Call remains really versatile in its power and while it cannot be tutored out of the deck, it still provides sufficient density of the reanimation effects to ensure that 3 copies of it is always welcome.

This normal reanimation package is rounded out with The Power of Leadership and Command Team to help pay for the costs and also squeeze additional activations from the more powerful Allys before they leave play. It is worth noting that The Power in All of Us is not in this deck because there are only two cards it synergises with.

The Allies

• Beast provides a free draw in the form of a resource card, which means he can grab The Power of Leadership in order to refund 2 points of his cost and fuel more cards.

• Maria Hill is a staple in any reanimation strategy and here is no exception. She might not have the X-men tag, but that doesn't matter. Ironheart was a consideration here, but she only works when played from hand, not from the discard and she doesn't have synergy in multiplayer with Field Commander.

• Marvel Girl is on paper the weakest of the allies, however she has the key Psionic tag and provides some action compression when attacking minions, so she made the cut.

• Nick Fury is another staple for this kind of deck.

• Nightcrawler gives you access to some excellent defence and essentially has a built in regroup.

• Polaris the other half of your defensive team, Polaris ensures that Cyclops has access to tough when he needs it and can even give it to other X-Men allies.

• Professor X is our third Psychic for Cerebro and he's also in essence a blending of Nick Fury with Mockingbird. He'll give you a stun or confuse when you need it or otherwise he can ready someone else for a second action.

• Squirrel Girl provides some minion chip damage and can be really effective in certain scenarios or when paired with another hero who is playing a Minion Tutor based build. Naturally she's going to vary in how useful she is from one scenario to the next.

• White Tiger Rounds out the roster with her scaling card draw, she's like Maria in that she's just generically useful and helps provide even more ways of getting cards into hand alongside all the other options you have.

The Support

• Command Team provides additional activations of characters like Marvel Girl or just another opportunity to use a high attack/thwart stat on an Ally who is going to be discarded/defeated before the end of the round.

• Cerebro is your tutor/filtering for the Ally half of your deck, when you are taking downtime as Scott you can use this to look for any of your six X-Men allies. With a Psionic in play this turns into a direct deck tutor.

• The Triskelion is just generically good for any deck running such a high density of Allies. It's better than Utopia because it allows you to run non-X-Men.

Other Possible Cards

The Ally pool can be switched up quite a bit because there are a lot of options between the X-Men, Leadership and Basic Ally pools. Here are a few options I did consider, but cut due to space. The more X-Men trait allies you add, the more powerful Cerebro becomes.

• Kaluu is another staple for reanimation strategies, however with Scott's Alter-Ego tutor I felt there wasn't much need for this redundancy.

• Colossus is a very good wall for the deck and he was the 41st card. It was hard to cut him but I felt that Nightcrawler and Polaris did enough work on this front already.

• Black Panther was another hard cut because he can provide you with a free copy of Make the Call or Tactical Brilliance while he's around. Ultimately his lack of the X-Men title meant he got left on the cutting room floor.

• Spider-Man is usually a great offensive choice, but here you could take Wolverine instead if you want an Ally who hits hard.

• Last Stand is an event you could lean into if you wanted to use very aggressive allies like Wolverine or Goliath and lean more into a Rush/Reanimation build.

• Heimdall is a big boy, but the 5 cost he requires means you'd want to move into The Power in All of Us and run more basic heroes like Colossus, Storm, Snowguard and War Machine.

• Go Down Swinging offers some additional value if you pivot into more high cost allies. But it's lack of the Tactics title does hurt it a bit when compared to the other options. There is a lot of value with this card if you do go with the X-Men who reduce their cost Storm, Colossus, Angel and the aforementioned big boy club.