Monica Chang: Employee of the Month

That's Ms Employee of the Month to you

Morning Roundup

The first thing you must do is realised your entire starting hand is going in the bin. Use your Alter-Ego ability to grab The Iliad, but perhaps The Pericles if the fancy strikes you (confusing the villain makes it a lot easier to keep going back and ordering more ships). The Bellerophon is also a decent option depending on the encounter. Or maybe you have a stellar hand and just want to get out something smaller. That won't happen. Iliad and Pericles are amazing, and you should get them out as soon as possible.

Anywho, what you want to do then is dig for Chance Encounter and/or Monica Chang and start playing Surveillance Teams for free with lots of extra counters. Every time she comes into play, you get another Surveillance Team +1 counter on all of them. We want lots of counters on our S.H.I.E.L.D. supports, and to help out with that, Command Team comes with a few counters on them as well at a decent cost-to-counter ratio, and Field Agent comes with the best cost-to-counter ratio of them all. Either way you get there, once you have some teams with extra counters, you can start siphoning those counters onto your bigger ships with Maria's Reassignment ability. Again, Iliad and Pericles are your best options here (seriously, they're just really really good).

There's plenty of methods for getting a chance encounter with Monica. One Way or Another lets you fish something out of the encounter deck and also draw deeper into your deck, or you could try a more direct approach with a player side scheme. Build Support is included for the just so many supports you could choose: Helicarrier, Sky-Destroyer, Support Staff, even more Surveillance Teams. Generation X can let you pull some really powerful cards; have you look at these? All-Points Bulletin has the chance to just close out a game, and remember that they aren't attacks or thwarts so get past guard, patrol, stun, confuse, basically anything but crisis. On the Double gives you more value very quickly, or Reinforcements gives you more value over time. Or you can make The Hard Call and crash a giant ship into someone's face. Plenty of great options there. And finally, Superpower Training gets S.H.I.E.L.D. Director, the most broken card in the deck. If you have already, get a Life Model Decoy, cos you never know when you might need another Timmy!

Field Manual Misc.

• Special Funding, Reinforcements, and S.H.I.E.L.D. Director work on any S.H.I.E.L.D. support, not just ones with uses/counters. Don't forget that you can place counters on Helicarrier or Sky-Destroyer if there's no other option and simply reassign them somewhere else later.

• You must choose 3 non-Jusice S.H.I.E.L.D. supports for this deck and include all legal copies (1 if it's unique or one-per-deck, 3 otherwise), or simply have none. I'd like to go down to 2 copies of Command Team if I could. The 41 card meta is still strong though.

• Agent 13 just does so much. Two The Iliad uses? Two Helicarriers, Sky-Destroyers, or Support Staff? Great. Thwarting for 2 over and over again with a Command Team in play so you can clear a side scheme and get another Chance Encounter with Monica Chang? Priceless.

• Nick Fury lets you add a counter to your ships whenever he uses a basic power. If you use Command Team to ready him, he can help super-charge your counter reassignment. If you use Field Agent, you can get a longer, more repeatable use of this ability. If you use both, well that's just the best of both worlds, isn't it?

• The Iliad is the best ship overall. Lots of counters, lots of flexibility, looks really cool. The Bellerophon is also great for dealing with a swarm of enemies and/or tough tokens. The Pericles is great for confusing the villain, giving your allies a tough, or a high SCH minion a confuse as well. And what do you with that confuse? Flip down to Alter-Ego and go shopping for a new ship.