Wolverine Never Makes a Basic Attack

Brute Force has been around for a while, but its Forced Response means that it has only limited use. Or does it?

This deck has one goal - get Wolverine's basic ATK as high as possible, and then never make a basic attack. The secret sauce is Quick Strike, Team Strike, Smash the Problem, and, to a lesser extent, Fastball Special. As you can see, these cards just care what your ATK value is, so the higher it is, the better.

Thankfully, you have plenty of ways to get there. Symbiote Suit, Aggressive Conditioning, and Adamantium Skeleton each give +1 ATK and some extra HP (along with piercing from the Skeleton and extra card draw from the Suit). Brute Force, Combat Training, Specialized Training, and Fluid Motion each give you another +1 ATK apiece, and you have 3 Brute Force in the deck. Once you have the Brute Force out on the field, you want them to stay there, so do not make any basic attacks after you play any copies of Brute Force! If you get out all of your upgrades, you can have a whopping 11 ATK, 9 REC, and 30 HP - definitely nothing to sneeze at. (Theoretically, you could get up to 15 ATK if you fit in 3 copies of Adrenaline Rush and got a campaign specific attack boost like Norn Stone. I don't recommend Adrenaline Rush, though - the deck doesn't cycle often enough to truly make them worthwhile.)

I said earlier that the secret sauce cards just care about YOUR ATK, but that isn't quite true - Fastball Special cares about Colossus's ATK, too, and Team Strike cares about any X-Men allies. There aren't a lot of them here, but Colossus always gives +3 ATK and Gambit has the potential to grant +3 or +4 ATK and get rid of a nasty elite minion, dangerous treachery, or even a card that you know the villain will be searching for once they flip phases. Sunfire only grants +2, but his Response is a god-send for getting rid of sticky attachments without spending resources, and Jubilee... exists. Since you can't take her card out of the deck, just use her for the resource or the chump-blocking.

Two of your four secret sauce cards require you to exhaust as a cost. Though you have Battle Fury, Utopia and Spoiling for a Fight to mitigate this somewhat, 5 cards out of 48 can only do so much - treat them as extras to enable particularly powerful turns than something you can regularly rely on.

"I Got Better" is quite expensive, so Superpower Training was added in to help get this out on the field. This is a new, yet untested addition, so I appreciate any feedback on how that well that particular combo works. The idea here is that Superpower Training can be used early game to get out the ever-useful Adamantium Skeleton or mid-to-late game to get out "I Got Better".

This deck is Aggression doing what it does best, and isn't really intended for solo play. You can help out with the thwarting a bit via Track by Scent and Smash the Problem, but in general, you'll want to focus on buffing yourself and doing as much damage as possible.

I'll admit, I haven't tested some common X-Men cards like Moira MacTaggert, The X-Jet, or X-Bunker, but Weapon X didn't work well here - you just don't spend enough time in alter-ego. I'd also like to slim this deck down a bit, but the cards I found that tended to be the weakest are all Wolverine specific cards that can't be removed: Berserker Frenzy, Logan's Cabin, Track by Scent, and especially Jubilee all get used for resources more frequently than for their effect (though the Cabin is definitely the strongest of the four, since it allows you to get more use out of combining Wolverine's Claws and Lunging Strike or Berserker Barrage.