X-23 Stabby Sidekick

This is a modification to my Stabby Siblings deck, which I designed before Age of Apocalypse was revealed. In that deck, I just tried to get as many X-23 activations as possible out of Honey Badger before she died.

This meant I had to get Honey Badger's health up, as well as repeatedly ready her.

But now with Sidekick, you don't really need to worry about losing Badger once she's in play.

Playing the deck

It's wondrously simple. Get Honey Badger on the table with an upgrade and Command Team or two.

Then you keep activating Honey Badger to ready X-23. Combined with X-23's own abilities, you can easily get 5 activations a turn once a few of the pieces are in play. Every now and then you get to throw in a Side-by-Side to really stack up the damage.

In the early game, you want to get Badgerand a Team out as soon as possible, followed by any upgrades that will increase her health. A Suit Up in your opening hand is a blessing, as you can just grab HB and Sidekick and you're off to the races.

However, if HB is in your hand or on the table, you'll still want to use Suit Up to grab an upgrade for HB, but you can't grab Sidekick if you tutor for Forge or Pixie. (Suit Up requires that the upgrade be able to attach to the ally, and Sidekickcan only be attached to HB) If you do Suit Up for a different upgrade, my recommendation is Danger Room Training, because it buffs Honey Badger's stats across the board, making her significantly more useful.

There isn't a lot of resource generation available to X-force heroes (read: none) so Clarity of Purpose and Grim Resolve are going to do a lot of heavy lifting. Which is complicated by the fact that you will need to time their use in order to get their full benefit. (Clarity pings HB, readying X-23. Grim Resolve pings X-23...also readying X-23) Basically, you'll very rarely get to use them both to pay for one card, since their secondary benefits are so crucial.

Unless you've used X-23's Claws to ready her once this turn.

On the plus side, there's literally nothing in the deck that costs more than 3ER, so the resources that are already there get the job done.

The Mulligan

Okay, you never want to discard a Command Team, period. They are a focal point of the strategy and there is no way of getting them back until you cycle the deck, so they are precious. Same goes for Team Training, though I would give up Team Training to pay for a Command Team in a second.

Other than that, there are so many ways to get HB and her upgrades back, your mulligan should focus on your supports and upgrades that you need the most. Up against a villain with a lot of toughs? Aim for Adamantium Lacing. Worried about taking big hits? Down Time and Endurance or Adamantium Lacing.

Ultimately, the perfect starting hand is HB, Sidekick, Command Team and three double resources. Which is almost never gonna happen.

However, a Command Team and a Suit Up with any two resource cards is nearly as good. Drop the Command Team and then grab HB. Use the remaining cards to play HB and save Sidekickfor the next turn.

Sideboard The easiest cards to get rid of are X-Mansion, and a Side-by-Side. Then you can probably lose Endurance, since Adamantium Lacing does the same thing but different. Team Training isn't crucial either, given how easy it is to gather upgrades with Suit Up.

That's four cards you can swap out with very little impact, since they are all really just there for redundancy.

Why the redundancy? Well, I tend to have very poor luck when randomness is involved. So a deck that does one thing very well with many ways to do that tends to work a lot better for me.

The more adventurous of you could easily add a second hook to the deck with a four card margin. Heck, you could take out the Reinforced Suit and have five cards to play with. Go nuts.

But for me, I'm just gonna go ahead and double down.