Natasha Romanoff: Meditative Spy

Gameplan

• Mulligan: look for Safe House #29, Black Widow's Gauntlet, and Meditation primarily. If you have them already, you can fish for things to Meditate into.
• Early game: develop Safe House #29, Black Widow's Gauntlet, Avengers Mansion, Helicarrier, and Beat Cop. Stay in alter-ego to take advantage of the virtually 7 card hand.
• Midgame: set up to loop Counterintelligence every turn then start throwing in Covert Ops and allies to chip down the villain.
• Lategame: set up some turns with Attacrobatics and Grappling Hook out to flip over to Widow and play Dance of Death for a burst of damage.

Card choices:

• Meditation: super efficient card for this deck since the plan is to stay in alter-ego the majority of the time and there's usually no other reason to exhaust Natasha. Ideally used for Beat Cop, Helicarrier, Covert Ops, and allies. Its main downside is it's only usable once per turn so it can get awkward if you draw multiple on the same turn. But it's a strong enough card to hold onto an extra copy to use the next turn.
• Beat Cop: consistent threat control and works well with Meditation.
• Helicarrier: playing this over Quincarrier b/c Quincarrier requires you to be an Avenger and won't work with Meditation.
• Counterintelligence: this is the primary card to get with Agent Coulson. With Safe House #29 + 2 Black Widow's Gauntlet/Helicarrier, you're preventing 3 threat (and drawing a card) every turn.
• Spycraft: this is mostly to get rid of a really really bad encounter (Shadow of the Past or any giant minions) but otherwise you just sit on it for insurance.
• Espionage: is a 1-cost Preparation (so useful for Mission Prep and Winter Soldier) that can potentially get you 2 cards (cost neutral) at some point in the future.
• Quake: you'll be in alter-ego most of the time so she's a consistent source of minion damage.
• Snowguard: 9 dmg for 5 effective cost (1.8 dmg per cost). With Meditation it becomes 9 dmg for 3 ec which is really good. I think she's better than Daredevil because she's more streamlined in what this deck needs (more damage).
• Determination: "free" threat removal (technically 1 effective cost but it's getting used to pay for another card anyway so the bonus is basically free). There are 11 1-cost cards so it lines up nicely with this.

Cards not included:

• Foiled!: the timing of this means you'll be down a card for the turns that you play it so even though it's printed as a 0 cost, it's effectively a 2 cost card for preventing 2 threat on average.
• Multitasking/Clear the Area/Skilled Investigator/etc: the majority of the cards commonly played require you to be in Hero mode which you actively want to avoid.
• Turn the Tide: would only work with Covert Ops or her natural thwarting making it not reliable at all.

Strengths

• Efficient threat control. Once set up, you're able to remove/prevent 6+ threat every turn.
• Drawing lots of cards. Staying in Alter-ego will let you have a consistent 7 card hand.
• Good resource management. Meditation + a lot of 1-cost cards + 7 card hand means there won't be many awkward turns where you're doing nothing.

Weaknesses

• Low damage output. It will take a while to finish games.
• Not very good minion control. Multiple minions will be problematic for this deck.