Bardsong - Buff Support Deck

What? KennedyHawk is playing Hawkeye again? I'm confused - I thought this was the new Mutant meta? Don't worry we'll explain.

People may not know this, but I love playing support characters. In almost every game I'm playing a medic, druid, priest, or... bard! To buff the part and keep them punching damage at high levels. When I opened Psylocke's pack I knew what had to be done - it was time to make a support Hawkeye deck!

The decklist shown here is optimized with a 2 player game in mind and it generally revolves around buffing up your teammates with a copy of Float Like a Butterfly and a constant stream of confusion. This list works well at 1-2 players but for 3-4 you'll want to add 1-2 copies of Endurance and 1 copy of Float Like a Butterfly.

Float Like a Butterfly can be played under any player's control (even yourself) and it makes all of your attacks more efficient against confused targets. Luckily with Hawkeye we have 2 copies of Sonic Arrow and a good reason to attack and use Upside the Head.

Typically with Hawkeye - every round you want to:

• Shoot and arrow,
• Perform a basic attack, and
• Incrementally build your board

Here our arrow of choice is a Sonic Arrow but we want to ensure the villain is always confused. There's two sides to this: 1) we need to to not flip down, 2) we need other players to not flip down! We can do this by augmenting the confusion we deal out with an Upside the Head to also stun the villain. We have other means of confusion as well in the realm of Professor X .

We want to encourage other players to stay in hero form so supplying a steady stream of stuns, confusion, and allies i the best means to this. Cheap allies like Quake, Eros and Spider-Woman are great for chumping while a stun takes card of the other attack.

Damage - in justice? We got that.

The upside of the damage provided by Float Like a Butterfly is pretty insane. Compare this to something like Combat Training and we almost always double our efficiency (adding 1 damage to the arrow attack and our base swing). One thing often overlooked is Float Like a Butterfly also increases the damage deal by ally attacks! I've seen games where I get 15-20 damage off of a single Float Like a Butterfly and if you can buff the other players the numbers get even bigger.

Using the new wave cards we can get to pretty nutty damaged on a confused villain. I'm talking about Sharpshooter and Directed Force. Sharpshooter allows our Sonic, Electric, and Vibranium arrows to increase their damage dealt by 1 - while Directed Force basically acts as an our of aspect Skilled Strike for attack arrows.

The goal for this deck is to make your Electric Arrows, Sonic Arrows, and Vibranium Arrows hit a high efficiency mark. We are aiming for 2 resources per card.

A sonic arrow into a confused villain with float out will hit for 6. We can even add on sharp shooter and directed force to hit for 9 over 4 cards spent! (Assuming the float cost eventually becomes negligible).

SHIELD Support

Really pushing the support end we want to push out Player Side Schemes like Build Support and Superpower Training. I almost always grab Sky-Destroyer and Hawkeye's Quiver with these. Sky-Destroyer makes our SHIELD allies incredibly efficient.

For2 resources Spider-Woman can come into play (assuming a confused villain). She'll deal 2 damage from Sky-Destroyer, then attack for 3 (Don't forget Float Like a Butterfly) and block an attack for another player. Uppercut isn't a great card but if it came with a chump block I'd be pretty happy!

Global Logistics is pretty versatile here. Typically this is used to set-up the encounter deck. We can stun one attack, block another with an ally and set-up a 0 boost icon card for attack 3. Occasionally I'll use this to push through my deck and find confusion if it's needed. Or to let someone know they can flip down because "I have a confusion coming up to buff us all next round".

This deck feels a bit like a standard Hawkeye SHIELD deck but really thrives in group play. Hope you enjoy it!