Queen's Gambit

Deck Pitch - We're going to be putting our hero at risk after laying a trap that is going to blow up in the villain's face.

Black Widow excels at laying traps for her opponents. She is at her best when she is punching above her weight class and still coming out on top because she has out-prepared and out-thought her enemy. She moves them into positions where they think they have her pinned and then it is revealed, they have been playing into her hands the entire time. This deck was inspired by the newest episode of the People's Podcast, The Winning Hand and their discussion about Toe to Toe. I was considering building decks for Drax, Winter Soldier, Nick Fury, or She-Hulk, but something LazyTitan said stuck with me while they were talking about the resource type on the card. Him saying that a play like this isn't necessarily just charging recklessly into battle, but that it could represent being a tactician really made me think. I love playing Barbarians in DnD, but I also love Battle Master Fighters and this is how we are playing this deck.

We are ultimately looking to pull off some combos to see if we burst the villain down by getting swing at us and trigger our Preparations for large chunks of damage. Key to this is our Synth-Suit, which doubles as a defensive item by buffing our defense and lets us ready back up after resolving a prep card. We can use this to make sure we take minimal damage from the blows the villain is throwing at us when we play Toe to Toe and then ready back up if we trigger something on the swing. And if the hit is much bigger than expected we can re-ready to change to alter-ego and heal up.

Mulligan Priorities

1st - Synth-Suit
2nd - Resource generators (Quincarrier or Black Widow's Gauntlet)
3rd - Prep card so you can draw an additional card on your first turn

Flow of Battle

I don't think breaking this deck down into what to do and look for during each phase of the game is as useful as it usually is. Since our strategy is dictated more by what we draw and how our board state looks at that given moment, I'm going to jump straight into the combos we're building for.

Checkmate:

Toe to Toe + Counterattack or Toe to Toe + Attacrobatics
This is where our biggest chunks of damage come from. Toe to Toe is doing 5 damage then depending on whether we are able to defend or not or whether mind taking damage at the moment we are either popping Counterattack to deal all that damage right back to the villain or we are minimizing damage taken by redirecting that boost card back at them. Counterattack has the higher damage potential since it counts every damage we take from the attack so some villains could be hitting us for 6 damage which makes the damage from this trick deal 12 damage back to them (5 from Toe to Toe, 6 from Counter, 1 from Widowmaker). I would reserve this for very late game or when you have full health and don't mind flipping down to heal back up. Luckily if you have your board state right, you can pivot into one or the other of these if you see the opening to make the most of it.

Poisoning Pawns:

Aggressive Stance + Widow's Bite
Self Explanatory combo that sets you up to take down a minion by letting you pull an attack and stun it. This is the baseline for our Minion Traps and the rest of them build upon this.

Aggressive Stance -> Clobber Gives us a resource to spend on something else, either by just adding it to your hand and letting you spend it or bouncing it after playing it at the start of your turn.

Aggressive Stance -> Drop Kick
Lets us stun the villain to help set us up for a risk free Toe to Toe.

Aggressive Stance -> Toe to Toe + Widow's Bite
If we trigger this on a big dangerous minion, we can Toe to Toe the minion after stunning it which should be enough to take out 90% of problem cards without much risk to your health.

Aggressive Stance -> Dance of Death with an Aggressive Energy in hand
This is for field clear and chip damage. Aggressive Energy adds three extra damage to Dance of Death. Thin out and finish off minions or do nine damage to the villain.

Dutch Defense:

Nick Fury, Sr. and Captain America both give us tough cards to play around so we can Toe to Toe without any damage being dealt to our side of the table. We get to maintain a high degree of flexibility in this case because we still get all our basic activations since we are either taking the hit to the face and negating it or having Cap step in and block it, leaving him with all his health since his tough will eat it. This doesn't work as well when we are looking to finish off the game with Counterattack, but it is much less risky.

Strategies for our Pieces

Our Bishops are Agent 13 and Mockingbird, they are here to support our plays and help set us up. Agent 13 is especially useful since she allows us to use our Safe House #29 twice in a turn returning two discarded Preparations to our hand. You can close out your turn with this by using one of them to pay for the other if you don't have any other cards in hand or maybe you can use your Gauntlets to pay for each of them. Save her activations for when you are in alter-ego to make the most of her value. Mockingbird throws out a stun to free us up for a Toe to Toe.

Our Rooks are Nick Fury Sr. and Captain America, as I mentioned above they are defensive and utility pieces. They can fill any role if needed, but are best when used defensively unless there is an opening that needs to be pressed immediately.

Our Knights are Winter Soldier and Nick Fury. Use them for aggressive and flashy plays. Bucky will usually come in for free and hits the ground running. If I could have included the Aggression Winter Soldier in this I would have. Nick Fury will either be drawing us cards or doing damage upon arrival while swinging and blocking for us. Winter Soldier should be used whenever he's drawn since he should be cheap and Nick Fury is a more tactical pick depending on what is needed.

Other Important Notes

Assault Training is for recycling our events back into our deck so we have something for Aggressive Stance to pick up for us.

Target Spotter helps us trigger our Minion traps in multiplayer since we can steal one from another player.

Endurance gives us a little more breathing room with all of this since her measly 9 hp doesn't give us much room for error when the villain hits us.

--- Munkey