The Indomitable Iceman - Con of Heroes 2025

This ain’t your daddy’s iceman build.

Iceman loves to ready, in order to get his Frostbite onto enemies. The easiest, and by far most prevalent, way to do this is to flood his decks with allies and Utopia to ready Bobby.

Forget all of that.

But we still need to ready, so we are going to lean into defending. Using Desperate Defense will get us to 5 DEF (2 native DEF + Frostbite + Desperate Defense), which should trigger the kicker and ready us. That will trigger Unflappable to draw us a card. If we do not trigger Unflappable, use Cryokinetic Perception to draw a card and potentially to ally ready. Otherwise, hold off and trigger Cryokinetic Perception on the second attack you defend to maximize your chances at the ready.

You can also play Never Back Down to defend, trigger Cryokinetic Perception to draw a card and potentially ready, and stun the villain for the next player.

Finally, Indomitable will ready us if we don’t ready on the villain’s turn from Desperate Defense of Cryokinetic Perception. There is no limit to how many you can have, so play this out every time you draw it.

Anticipation is another great way to bank a ready. Play "Come Get Me, Bub!" to heal, get a tough card, then discard Anticipation to ready yourself to attack and add another Frostbite on the villain.

Mulligan Priorities

1. Cryokinetic Perception - it’s Iceman’s best card and should be a priority.
2. Frozen Solid is a close second for his best card and should be played out whenever possible.
3. Resource generators: Deft Focus, X-Gene, and Team-Building Exercise are included to help with his expensive kit.

Deck Strategy

Plan to defend the table as much as possible. Tank your own attacks with a tough card, just eat the damage and heal (and ready) with What Doesn't Kill Me, or basic defend if you have enough Indomitable in play. Especially if you’re about to reshuffle your deck, get it into the discard pile. Plan to flip down when you have a lot of Frostbite out to shuffle cards back into your deck. You should always prioritize Frozen Solid above all else—being able to stop activations is great for the table.

Changes

1. Helicarrier is a solid inclusion if someone at the table is running Build Support but you don’t need it.
2. Nerves of Steel could get cut if you wanted to get to 40, but there’s no need. So many of these are supports that you will have a really thin deck.
3. This is meant to be 3-4p deck, but to adapt for solo you’d need more ways to thwart. I’d add some allies to help with that—-but they don’t have to be X-Men, since we aren’t running Utopia. By the time you add Utopia and allies this is a different deck.