Hide the Pain - Protection

Wouldn't it be nice if the minions could just cool down a bit? How about they just have a nice hug instead?

I have been working on a few X-Men decks for 2-player that can use strategies you wouldn't be able to in single player. This deck focuses on setting minions attack powers to zero, so that the other Storm deck can gain huge draws from "Bring It!". You can find the Storm aggression deck here.

The idea is to leave minions in play and use a combination of Pinned Down, Practiced Defense and Blizzard from the Storm deck to keep their attacks at 0. Cyclops is ideal for using Pinned Down as his alter-ego ability and Tactical Brillance can search for it when required.

You want to leave minions with 1-3 attack in play and use the appropriate upgrades to reduce their attack. Minions with only 1 attack can be dealt with by Blizzard alone, allowing you to keep several on the field at once. Watch out for any with nasty effects and the patrol or guard keywords though. If there are any you need to remove, you can always attach a Priority Target too.

The other part of this strategy uses Mutant Protectors to provide defence and keep threat down while you set up. You can either use Mutant Protectors on the villain attack with an ally that can survive, such as Colossus, or use it on a 0-attack minion if you want to put the ally into play for cheap. Of course when doing this Hangar Bay becomes useful.

This deck also fills a support role. It is able to flip into alter-ego often to trigger the X-Men support cards and the Constant Training ability. As the Storm deck does not want to flip into alter-ego, you can also provide some healing with Med Team.

One thing to note is that this deck will end up going first every player round once you have Field Commander out. In that case you can ask the Storm player to play an action on your turn, so they can use Looking for Trouble. This will allow you to attach Pinned Down or Practiced Defense straight away.

I have tested these and they work well on scenarios that have at least some suitable minions. It has bad matchups against any with very few minions or ones with many patrol and guard keywords. This does unfortunately mean they are not good against the Master Mold and Magneto scenarios from Mutant Genesis, but most other ones should be fine!

Hope you find this fun!