Dreamchaser_Guild · 17
This deck is all about the time shenanigans.
And with it, we are going to shenan again and again and again.
Building Your Time Machine Pt. 1: Go Alter-Ego… Then Rewind
All of these time shenanigans are thanks to Ready for a Fight. This is a card that I feel has been a bit slept on for Bishop, which is insane because it's actually crazy with him for two reasons.
First, the obvious is that Bishop likes to take damage and heal. Using a basic recovery requires you to go alter-ego, but going alter-ego means you miss out on being attacked and activating his Energy Absorption ability.
The second reason is Bishop's Temporally Displaced ability, letting you add a card to your hand from your discard every time you go alter-ego. This can let you get out any of your upgrades from the discard pile, or just add a double resource to your hand. Thanks to these, Ready For a Fight on its own really only costs Bishop 0 ER, or even -1 if you added one of his double resources to your hand. As in, you are usually going to GET resources for playing it.
Normally, it's a 2-ER card. But just having a larger hand size nets you more resources for your next turn. And then Bishop's Temporally Displaced ability gets you more resources on the turn you flip to alter-ego by letting you return a Bishop card from your discard to your hand. If that card was one of his double resources, that use of Ready For a Fight was just a free extra resource. There is almost never a good reason to not play Ready For a Fight in this deck if it’s in your hand.
And Moira MacTaggert makes this deal even better. You play her, and every single turn you flip is going to net you another card, making her practically a second Avengers Mansion.
Preparing Your Body For Time Travel: Endurance Conditioning
Bishop has 12 HP. That’s fine for many decks. It’s not enough for this one. You need a body that’s made for time travel!
That’s why we have Defensive Conditioning, Endurance, and Specialized Training so you can become a Front Line Specialist. And Honorary X-Men even provides an extra HP. If you get all these upgrades out, you’re looking at as much as 23 HP in total, nearly doubling your starting HP.
Get even a couple of these out, and you have a massive amount of HP that can withstand several attacks.
Building Your Time Machine Pt. 2: Undo All Damage
So now you have a high max HP. But you still got hurt. What do you do next?
Easy!
You rewind the damage! Just go back in time before you ever were hurt!
But your base recovery isn’t enough for that on its own. That’s why you have Down Time to increase your recovery. And it’s why you have Dr. Sinclair to heal you by your recovery in exchange for a small mental resource. Together with your basic recovery, you can heal 12 per turn with that combo alone.
But I added a smaller, more subtle combo to help this time machine along. Bishop has two X-Men allies that come with his deck. If you are in really dire shape with your life and need some extra healing, and you go alter-ego, you can add one of those X-Men allies to your hand. If you have Honorary X-Men on, you’re an X-Man even in alter-ego, so playing one of these allies with Utopia out readies your identity for another heal. With these alone, you can reliably heal 18 every turn you have Ready For a Fight and either of those allies in your hand or discard.
And none of that’s even touched Bishop’s Uniform, being able to heal damage as he takes it. If you have even as little as 4 resources in your hand when you use this, you can go from 1 HP up to 23 by the end of the turn.
Realistically… your time machine won’t be perfect…
All of that is for the ideal scenario. The nature of this deck means you probably won’t be able to get everything you want into play since a lot will be discarded. The only guarantees are his Uniform and Rifle which can be added from the discard pile.
While becoming a true Lord of Time with every upgrade is ideal, you can think of most of these as redundancies. You don’t need a full 23 HP. 16-18 can suffice. You don’t need every single healing card in play. Healing 12 is still more than enough to ensure a win most of the time.
Build Support Priorities
You have 3 supports you can play with Build Support.
Priority order is Dr. Sinclair > Moira > Utopia. Getting reliable healing with Sinclair is the most important, while Moira’s card draw is secondary to that. Utopia’s readying can provide some nice extra healing but it’s not as important as the other two.
Running Your Time Machine
Now that you have the setup, let’s really get the time machine moving. A lot of this deck is carried by Taunts. Taunt lets you take attacks from the future to draw cards from the future and then trigger Bishop’s Energy Absorption ability to potentially draw even more resources. Face the Past serves a similar role, letting you draw 3 and take a hit from a quickstrike minion that can put even more resources in your hand.
If you have your Uniform down, I would advise saving its use as long as you can if you have Taunt or Face The Past in your hand. You only get to use it once per round. If you have a Taunt in your hand and can tank another villain attack after the first, save your Uniform activation for after the Taunt so you’ll have more resources and be able to heal more.
With these, you’ll be able to cycle through your deck and put a lot of your setup cards into play very quickly.
You might expect a 50-card deck to take a while to get through a first pass, but this is a deck that will end most of its turns in alter-ego, giving it a larger hand size. It's a deck with a ton of cards that draw even more cards. And it's a deck that will discard a lot of its cards straight from the top. Despite being 50 cards, it's still usually emptying on the third turn and will go through multiple passes. This gives you plenty of chances to, if not drawing your Uniform, recur it from the discard pile.
Sometimes you even get lucky and get to pull a free White Fox straight from the timestream.
Endgame
This doesn't need much explaining. Build up a bunch of energy counters on Super-Charged. Depending on how many copies you have in play, you're looking at either 10 or 18 damage from those with one single attack. Use your Rifle to hit for a huge amount of damage on top of that. There's a good chance of it dealing 8-12 with one shot.