Card draw simulator
| Derived from |
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| None. Self-made deck here. |
| Inspiration for |
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| None yet |
TheAdipose · 169
The Sword and the Psionic Helmet
Or: how I learned to stop worrying and love a telepathic hat.
Watch the full deck guide on YouTube
For a long time, Valkyrie has lived near the bottom of the hero tier list, somewhere between “needs help” and “has anyone seen Hulk?” This is a little unfair. Hulk, at least, has the decency to be Hulk. Valkyrie has had the more difficult job of being a perfectly interesting hero whose kit appears to have been assembled by someone who believed conditions were a food group.
But here is the thing: Valkyrie’s cards are not bad.
In fact, a surprising number of them are very efficient. Her thwart card can remove 5 threat for 2 resources. Her weapons are cheap stat boosts. Her ready is extremely efficient. Annabelle Riggs and Valhalla both represent repeatable card draw. Shieldmaiden is better than it first appears. Have at Thee! is not quite Swinging Web Kick, but it hits hard and brings overkill-shaped manners to the dinner table.
The problem is not value. The problem is access.
Valkyrie’s kit asks three questions:
- Can you kill things regularly?
- Can you get Death-Glow where it needs to be?
- Can you safely go to alter-ego and make use of your alter-ego engine?
This deck tries to answer all three questions with a firm “yes”, followed by the sound of a sword being unsheathed and a mutant professor quietly doing something legally questionable in the corner.
The Core Idea
This is an Aggression Valkyrie deck built around doing the thing Valkyrie actually wants to do:
Kill a marked enemy, draw cards, ready, flip down safely, draw more cards, find the next answer, then come back up and do it again.
Aggression gives Valkyrie the killing tools she always wanted, but historically it struggled to let her flip safely. That has changed. With Professor X and Psylocke, Aggression can now confuse the villain reliably enough that Valkyrie can spend real time in alter-ego.
And once she gets to alter-ego, the whole thing starts to hum.
Or, more accurately, it starts to make a low ominous noise from inside the psionic helmet.
Why Aggression?
Valkyrie needs to defeat enemies. Aggression is the aspect that looks at enemies and says, “Ah, resources.”
This deck boosts Valkyrie’s attack so that she can reliably kill minions with basic attacks:
- Dragonfang gives her +1 ATK, or +2 against the Death-Glow target.
- Combat Training gives another +1 ATK.
- Aggressive Conditioning gives yet another +1 ATK.
- Mean Swing is excellent because Valkyrie’s weapons do not need to exhaust to provide their passive bonuses.
- Have at Thee! handles larger targets and brings overkill to the party.
- Firepower can become absurd once both weapons are in play.
With Dragonfang, Combat Training, Aggressive Conditioning and Death-Glow all online, Valkyrie can swing for genuinely frightening numbers. More importantly, she can ready and do it again.
This matters because every defeated Death-Glow target is not just damage. It is a little jackpot machine with wings.
The Reward Engine
Once Valkyrie is killing things consistently, the deck starts paying her for it.
Valhalla draws a card and heals 1 after the marked enemy is defeated.
Blood Rage draws another card when Valkyrie defeats the Death-Glow enemy, at the cost of 1 damage.
Together, these two cards are beautifully silly:
- Blood Rage deals you 1 damage.
- Valhalla heals 1 damage.
- You draw 2 cards.
- Everyone pretends this is normal.
This is one of the main reasons the deck works. Valkyrie is no longer just spending resources to kill things. She is turning kills into more cards, more options, and more turns where she can keep chaining actions.
Add Hall of Heroes, and the whole thing becomes even more dramatic. If Valkyrie has been collecting counters, flipping down can lead to huge hand sizes. Starting a turn with six cards, then using Annabelle Riggs, then Hall of Heroes, can give you the kind of hand size normally associated with Leadership players and minor acts of tax fraud.
The Psionic Helmet Package
Here is the suspicious bit.
Valkyrie wants to flip to alter-ego. Aggression now has two excellent allies that help her do that:
- Professor X confuses the villain and can also thwart.
- Psylocke can confuse the villain and help control the board.
The problem is finding them often enough.
Enter Cerebro.
No, Valkyrie is not a mutant. No, she cannot normally play Cerebro. No, this will not stop us, because Build Support can put it directly into play.
Once Cerebro is down, it can search for X-Men allies. If you control a Psionic character, it becomes even better. That is why Legion joins the party. Professor X, Psylocke and Legion can all help turn Cerebro into a recurring search tool for the ally you need.
Is this thematically clean? Absolutely not.
Is it effective? Yes.
Does it feel like Valkyrie has wandered into a mutant academy, stolen a hat, and decided that fate is now a searchable database? Also yes.
Alter-Ego Is Not a Luxury
A lot of heroes flip down because they need to heal.
Valkyrie flips down because that is where half of her engine lives.
In alter-ego she can use:
- Annabelle Riggs to dig for Valkyrie cards.
- Visit Valhalla to retrieve the exact Valkyrie card she needs from the discard pile.
- Hall of Heroes to cash in all those defeated minions.
- Cerebro to find Professor X, Psylocke or Legion.
- Meditation, if included, to cheat expensive cards into play after she has already done her heroic work.
This is why flipping at the right time matters. Valkyrie often wants to start her turn in alter-ego, not just end there. Starting in alter-ego lets her use Annabelle, Hall of Heroes, Visit Valhalla and Cerebro before deciding how the turn will unfold.
That is much stronger than flipping down at the end of a turn and immediately being dragged back up again by panic and obligation.
The Nemesis Problem
Let us speak of the unpleasantness.
Valkyrie’s nemesis set is, to use the technical term, horrible.
Seduced can stop Valkyrie from attacking, which is especially cruel because attacking is how Valkyrie does almost everything useful. Worse, Powerful Enchantments can block the route to clearing Seduced. It is a very nasty little trap where Valkyrie’s sword is confiscated and everyone involved is asked to reflect on their choices.
This deck has a few answers.
Face the Past is one option. It lets you deliberately bring out Enchantress and Seduced without also bringing out Powerful Enchantments. That means you can deal with the worst part on your own terms. It slows you down, but it also reduces the risk of Shadows of the Past detonating your entire game at the worst possible moment.
The flip strategy also helps, because Seduced is cleared in alter-ego. A Valkyrie deck that can already flip safely is much better positioned to survive her nemesis set than a Valkyrie deck that is stuck in hero form staring mournfully at its own sword.
Professor X can also help clear Powerful Enchantments, and Flight of the Valkyrie can remove threat after the marked enemy is defeated, even if Valkyrie herself was not the one who defeated it.
That last point matters. The card cares that the enemy with Death-Glow was defeated. It does not insist Valkyrie personally did the defeating, which is exactly the kind of wording that makes rules lawyers sit up like meerkats.
Important Cards and Why They Matter
Dragonfang, Combat Training and Aggressive Conditioning
These are your attack boosters. Valkyrie needs to get to the point where her basic attack reliably kills minions. Once she does, the rest of the deck starts working.
Mean Swing
Excellent with Valkyrie because her weapons can be exhausted without losing their passive bonuses. It turns spare weapon exhausts into large attack bursts.
Blood Rage
Pairs beautifully with Valhalla. Draw a card, take a damage, heal the damage, draw from Valhalla too. It turns each marked kill into a little economy engine.
Hall of Heroes
A key alter-ego payoff. If Valkyrie is doing her job and killing minions, this becomes a huge card draw burst.
Professor X and Psylocke
The confuse package. They let Valkyrie flip down safely and use the alter-ego half of her kit.
Cerebro, Legion and Build Support
The “psionic helmet” package. Build Support cheats Cerebro into play. Cerebro finds the allies that let Valkyrie keep flipping. This is the deck’s cleverest and most suspicious trick. Legion further enables the Cerebro package by providing another Psionic body and useful flexible pings of damage or thwart.
Chase Them Down and Gatekeeper
These help compensate for Valkyrie’s weak thwarting. Chase Them Down is cheap and fits naturally with what Valkyrie already wants to do. Gatekeeper can be incredible when the scenario has minions with manageable health.
Face the Past
Optional, but very useful if you want to handle Valkyrie’s nemesis set proactively rather than simply hoping Shadows of the Past is busy ruining someone else’s day.
How to Play
Your early game priority is to set up enough attack power that Valkyrie can reliably kill what she marks.
Look for:
- Dragonfang
- Combat Training
- Aggressive Conditioning
- Build Support
- Hall of Heroes
- Valhalla
- Blood Rage
You do not need everything immediately, but you do need enough of the engine to start making each kill pay you back.
Once you can defeat minions consistently, start chaining value:
- Put Death-Glow on an enemy.
- Kill it.
- Trigger Valhalla and Blood Rage.
- Ready Valkyrie.
- Use the new cards to keep going.
- Flip down when safe.
- Use Annabelle, Hall of Heroes, Visit Valhalla and Cerebro.
- Come back up with a plan, a sword, and a faintly troubling amount of card draw.
Multiplayer Notes
This deck gets better in multiplayer because minions are more likely to appear. Valkyrie does not always need to be engaged with the minion herself. She just needs access to enemies she can defeat or help finish off.
Multiplayer also makes the Cerebro package more comfortable, because other players can help cover threat while Valkyrie sets up. Once the engine is running, she can become a very effective minion cleaner and burst damage hero.
She is especially satisfying in games where several minions appear at once. Those are the turns where Valkyrie gets to go full “Death-Glow, swing, ready, Death-Glow, swing, ready” and the table suddenly remembers that tier lists are mostly astrology with spreadsheets.
Scenario Tweaks
This deck is not a fixed holy text. It is more of glowing map which you need to adjust based on the villain and modular set.
Consider adding or increasing:
- Angela if you need more minions.
- Bring It! if you expect multiple minions.
- Gatekeeper if minions are small enough to still kill after the +2 hit points.
- Into the Fray if you need more main scheme control.
- Smash the Problem if you want to convert Valkyrie’s boosted ATK into thwarting.
- Godlike Stamina or The Night Nurse support if stuns are a problem.
- Meditation if you want more alter-ego economy.
- Helicarrier or Quincarrier if you need more reliable Death-Glow payments.
Cut or reduce:
- Minion-search cards in minion-heavy scenarios.
- Gatekeeper against large-minion scenarios.
- Cerebro/Build Support/Legion if the scenario is too fast or too tight to support the package.
Final Thoughts
Valkyrie is not secretly top tier. This deck does not turn her into Doctor Strange with a sword and a better haircut.
But it does show that she is much better than her reputation suggests.
Her cards are AMAZINGLY efficient. Her kit has real payoffs. The problem has always been building a deck that allows her to meet her own conditions consistently. With modern Aggression tools, confuse allies, Blood Rage, Hall of Heroes, and the magnificently dubious Cerebro package, she can finally do the thing she was designed to do.
She kills things. She gets rewarded. She flips down. She draws a ridiculous number of cards. She comes back up. She does it again.
And somewhere, in a dusty corner of Asgard, a psionic helmet hums gently to itself and pretends this was always part of the plan.