Magneto? More like Slogneto (SCL S18 R3)

Episode Transcript
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(00:08):
Hey hey friendos, welcome to TheRoad to Nowhere, a Marvel
Champions LCG podcast. We focus on recapping solo
Champions League, but if you enjoy breaking down the finer
details of a Marvel Champions matchup, then we have something
for you. Somehow we made it to episode 50
on on this pod, which is kind ofremarkable.
So thank you, dear listeners, for bringing all your

(00:31):
engagement, making it, you know,really rewarding to continue
making this podcast. And coincidentally, winning hand
podcast is also just about to hit 50 as well.
So we've got a couple of our community podcasts around kind
of that same same Mark. Well, I'm your host, Josh Rue,
and with us this episode we got command man.
How you doing Nate? Hey everyone, glad to be here.

(00:52):
I hear it's hot where you live right now.
It is. We've been having a little bit
of a heat spell, like more than usual for this time of year, so.
Yikes, Yikes. And and lexicon.
Lexicon. How are you doing?
I'm doing really well. Glad to be back.
Congratulations on 50 episodes. Shocking I had I had to pad it

(01:13):
with starting to podcast about some other league actually.
That's right. Well, you know, what are you
going to do? I mean, Speaking of both of you
are actually in Modoc league. We're in the middle of our our
second season and we've got a real challenging one against
Modoc. I mean, it's against Modoc
against Magog. Sorry, how?
How's that going with you, each of you?

(01:37):
You got it in my first. OK, Yeah, we actually got in our
first practice game just this past this past weekend and it's
it's a it's tough. It's it's those.
Counters down. It's not easy.
Not easy. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it was funny. I think.
I mean, it was our first iteration of it, but we actually
got more counters from the main scheme pop and more than we.

(01:59):
We focused a lot on not trying to take any damage.
Right. I think that's the other Pete
you. Got to tweak the knobs and
adjust more now. But you won.
We did. I think our score would have
been 9. OK, that's out.
That's out of a possible 20 points.

(02:19):
So 9 is definitely not good. Yeah, how about you, Alex Cohen?
I have not played a game of it yet so I I don't even have my
decks fully built. I have done some sort of
brainstorming of how I want to approach it.
Adam Warlock gives me a lot of options.
So trying to think about how I want to emphasize getting tough

(02:43):
status, for example, and keepingthe threat from from going over
are kind of the two things I'm looking at for his deck.
So I, I, yeah, I'm not really sure.
We'll see. We'll see once I get some games
in. But I have, I have a lot of
cards at my disposal. So there's going to be a lot of
cards that give tough, I think, in Adam Warlock's deck to try to
help avoid damage. Yeah, it's so tricky when you're

(03:07):
playing with Adam Warlock, when you want to kind of really go in
the direction and then you realize, oh crap, I can't put
more than one copy of a card. So you really need an array of
cards that have similar effects if you want to do that.
But but there are some, definitely some.
There is a wide array of of cards in different aspects that

(03:27):
give tough, right? So it's I'm guardian, so I have
access to shake it off. I have the ready for action, the
leadership card that I can play.There's Hard Knocks.
There's what's the one now that you can exhaust an X-Men and an
X force ally and then give them both tough, right?
So there's a lot of things therethat I think I'll be focusing

(03:51):
on. And then tough allies, he has
pit patrol who has tough, who can you can play from hand to to
take an attack. So there's a lot of there's a
lot of good defensive tough focused cards at my disposal.
And then I can, you know, play things like counterintelligence
and under surveillance to even if I'm flipped down or whatever

(04:12):
to try to avoid that scheme popping even without trying to
stun or confuse, which I think we're using the the one that
makes him steady up front, right?
We have the. Correct.
Formidable foe Environment in play, yeah.
Yeah. So I don't like building a
discerner confuse anyway. Personally that's not my
favorite way to play and unless the hero wants to do that like.

(04:36):
Miles. Hawkeye or Miles or Jubilee, I
think decks that heroes that want to do it.
I, I think it's really fun, but I don't usually go out of my way
to build to do it a ton. So like the the wild tutor deck
is not my favorite with Adam Warlock.
So we'll see, we'll see, we'll see how they go.
I feel like I have good tools atmy disposal.

(04:56):
It's just a matter of whether ornot I can make them work.
Cool, well you definitely sound like you have been at least
scheming a bit. I am scheming for sure.
Always got to be a good villain in scheme.
Beautiful. I love it.
And and so I invited you to specifically because you were in
the same alliance and I thought that would be a fun, a fun thing
to do. So I was just asking before we

(05:18):
got started. You know what, what happens in
your alliance? Sounds like you're kind of not
the most chatty alliance while things are going on, but you,
you know, appreciate the constraints.
But like, tell Scott, tell me how how you're picking works.
Yeah. So we just rotate order every

(05:39):
every round. So when the round gets
announced, I'll go and pull the last picking order from the last
round. And then whoever was first go
2nd and whoever was last moves up to 1st.
So everybody kind of drops down.One of the person that that's at
the bottom who picked last last round gets in and gets their
their first round pick. And usually we'll, I'll throw a

(06:01):
disclaimer and they're like, hey, one, if you're not going to
be in this round, let us know. And two, if you're not, if
you're going to take a long time, if you're going to have
trouble picking, like please pass and we'll come back to you.
That way we're not waiting like 2 weeks in before somebody makes
a pick and, and everybody is delayed in their ability to
start doing practice games and get their games.

(06:23):
And if they need to do it early.So we kind of fudge it a little
bit. It, it is not uncommon for the
first round pick to just say, hey, I'll, I'll go last this
round. And if they do, I just keep them
first and they go first next time is usually what I do.
So we're pretty magnanimous in terms of being generous with
who's 1st and not worrying aboutit too much.

(06:44):
I don't think we usually ever, most of us are usually
interested in playing a few of the options that are available,
right? So we haven't really thought
over anything so far in terms ofwhat the options are.
And we have so many options in most games anyway that these
were not a big deal. The past seasons is, you know,
especially where pool is always an optional.
Yes. Additional 1 and all that sort

(07:06):
of stuff. There's a lot.
Exactly. Cool, and how many people are in
your alliance? Or it's add 3 to Mia myself and
Chris Nash or Nash man 87 I think is what he goes by in the
roster. Right, Fun.

(07:27):
Yeah, I think I was telling you 2 we pick in reverse order of
how we finished. So if you did the worst, you get
the 1st pick. But then we have very similar to
you. We, we, we give everybody a week
to kind of think about what theywant to do.
And then if they're not really ready to pick after a week, they

(07:47):
usually just pass. That's, that's kind of so it's
very similar to you, but good fun.
I love, I do. I actually do appreciate the
constraints a lot. Makes me so I don't always do
the exact same thing I would always do.
Yeah. I agree.
So let's let's have a little look at our season 18 round

(08:12):
three. I wonder actually we haven't I
haven't heard from in Smith Baervery much about what he's
cooking for season 20 now, now that we're on month long rounds
that, you know, season 20 is kind of way off in the future.
But, you know, I'm kind of curious what he's cooking up
because he likes to do celebratory stuff.

(08:32):
So I think I think there'll be something going on.
But yeah, we've got up against Magneto with Sinister Syndicate
and we were playing on Standard,so this was kind of the common
round 3 where we're playing a fairly challenging foe, but
playing them on Standard. The hero that was the main hero

(08:54):
available was Spider Ham, but you could do the round
challenge, which gets you 10 extra points and play Valkyrie
instead of Spider Ham. And then all of the aspects are
available including all basic, which has been coming, I think
increasingly less common with all the choices that everybody
has. I don't know, have you has
either of you noticed anybody playing all basic in a while?

(09:17):
Not personally, no. I think, I think I've only ever
done it maybe like once, right? Or twice.
Like voluntarily or when we wereforced to?
Yeah. And now you say that it's
probably because we had to. Right.
Well, yeah, Lexicon you missed in the past when it was there
was a lot more getting forced toplay all basic.
Oh, OK, yeah, no, I, I have not had to, I don't think.

(09:40):
And I, I don't think I've opted to in any in any of the rounds.
I've been very close. I think there's been a few where
I had like, Oh yeah, 3 or 4 aspect cards, you know, but.
Right. Or you just put in the one pool
card so that you can get get stuck with the the dread pool
stuff. So lucky.

(10:03):
So let's hear a little bit aboutMagneto Lexicon.
What do you what do we need to know about going up against
Magneto? Well, first and foremost,
Magneto is very scheme heavy andhe has very low thresholds for
his main scheme. So the the big gimmick, I guess
if you want to call it that, forMagneto is that he starts with a
side scheme in play that limits the amount of damage that

(10:28):
Magneto can take. So you can never really defeat
Magneto until you start moving through the side scheme.
So you have to bore the asteroidM, you have to sabotage Master
Mold, and then you have to send the asteroid into an orbital
decay, crashing Corning towards Earth, which then puts

(10:49):
additional strain on Magneto, who's trying to keep it from
from crashing. And he loses his steady status
when that happens. So you kind of get a benefit
once you get through them that he's easier to stun and confuse
because he's spending a lot of his, his magnetic energy just on
keeping this asteroid from crashing into Earth.
So we're kind of exploiting his desire not to, to kill massive

(11:10):
amounts of people as we take himdown.
You're really paying attention to the narrative on this one.
That's right. Well, there's a pretty strong
narrative I feel like. So the the difficulty is, is
that up front you have a lot of side schemes, but the main
scheme, the first main scheme only has a threshold of five
threat per player. So in solo, if he schemes at

(11:31):
all, there is a good chance it'sgoing to pop.
He has two scheme and two attackat the outset and that attack
goes up when he as we flip to stage 2 and stage 3 obviously.
So I, I found that often when heschemes, there are enough 3
boosts and two boosts in his deck that you put on and he's
going to scheme for two and he'sgoing to get a boost for two or

(11:52):
three and then that pops. So if he schemes at all, your
chances are you're going to go to main scheme 2B and there's a
chance even then, because this threshold is only six that it's
going to pop again. So it's not while you have a lot
of threat to work with overall because there's three main
schemes, they have a threshold of 5-6 and seven respectively.

(12:15):
So it's none of those main schemes is very durable.
Like they're very easy to to have them to have them scheme
out. So there's definitely a
challenge there. I think a lot of folks who
wanted to avoid the scheme popping went justice because you
have access to under surveillance cards like

(12:36):
counterintelligence if you want to run that and just a lot of
ways to limit thwarting and and to get that main scheme back
under control. Not to mention the the wide
amount of confuse that we have available in justice now.
So I think there was a lot of emphasis on that.
People who weren't running it probably were running Professor
XI know I was for that occasional confuse.

(13:00):
So those are big pieces out of the the main villain of the
schemes that you have. On top of that, his main scheme
has a forced response after he attacks.
Well, it's sort of a bland rightof on Magneto, one on the main
scheme. So Magneto, whenever he attacks,
he puts a magnetic counter on the main scheme.
The main scheme says whenever a magnetic counter is placed
there, if there are three or more magnetic counters, you have

(13:21):
to discard until you get a magnetic card and then you
reveal it. Well, there's a lot of magnetic
cards in Magneto's deck. He has a pretty thick deck for a
villain, and over half of them are magnetic.
And they do mean things, right? They do.
They deal one damage to your to every character you control, or

(13:44):
exhaust all of your supports andupgrades, or one of them.
Like it destroys a Sentinel in play and deals 5 damage to your
hero. And you can discard cards to
prevent it, discard cards from your hand to try to prevent that
damage. But nobody wants to dish their
hand, and if it doesn't, it gains surge.

(14:05):
So if there's no Sentinel in play, you're just going to get
another card and one of them is all wrapped up.
And it's you can't make any attacks or thwarts or defenses
until you like exhaust and spenda physical resource, which is
painful when you're playing Valkyrie.
You don't want to be exhausted because you want to be able to

(14:27):
do basic attacks. So there were a lot of things in
there that just aren't fun. So he really dishes it.
And a lot of them will put more magnetic counters back in the
main scheme where there's some that like deal damage based on
the amount of magnet counters. And keep in mind that first the
effect happens and then you remove magnet counters.

(14:49):
So if it's like, hey, you just had him trigger and it puts 3
magnet counters in the main scheme, you might get a card
that says put a magnet counter on the main scheme, deal
yourself damage equal to the number of magnet counters on the
main scheme, or put threat on the main scheme equal to the
number of magnet counters. Like, OK, well there's four on
there. So you're taking four damage,

(15:10):
you're putting 4 threat, then you remove 3 after that
resolves. So it's none of them.
You, you don't really want to see any of them.
And there are two treacheries that will go and fetch A and the
card, the top most magnetic cardin your discard pile and put it
as a face down boost and then heactivates against you.

(15:32):
So the boost effects on these magnetic cards are also pretty
mean. They, they're usually some form
of their main component. So it's exhausting or some such.
So there's really, there's a lotin there and, and it means
you're getting extra encounter cards on average.
I found it to be every other turn because I often got a car

(15:55):
that was going to put a magnet on or you get an assault and he
puts a magnet on. So you're that's triggering
about every other turn, if not twice every three turns in my
experience. Yeah, I think I think that's
about right for you. Yeah.
He he is definitely tough in solo, right?

(16:17):
The, you know, the kind of like Zola where the, the effect of
the magnet counters. There are ways that you're
getting more, but it doesn't scale with number of players.
So you're getting the magnet counter effects kind of more
often to you in in solo than youare in multiplayer.
And then as you were mentioning the the main scheme threshold,

(16:40):
being solo is really, really challenging for a solo player
who in solo Champions League is trying to keep everything clean.
So he's, he's, he's kind of a pain in the butt.
He is and those I I forgot to mention the the Sentinel type
Ms. which are the ones that comein his set also have guard so

(17:03):
you can't always blow past them right?
You're going to have to get rid of that before you can hit
Magneto. And when they're defeated,
Magneto gets a tough status cardand their boost is to give him a
tough status card. So not only is he difficult, he
also has tough a lot to trying to find a way to get through his
tough. When you're trying to swing with
big attacks, you really need to have some alternate ways to deal

(17:25):
damage because he's going to be tough a lot of time and you're
going to have to get through a tough.
If that comes out, you've got toget through the minion and then
you're going to have to get through the tough that the
minion gives to to Magneto. So when when we start looking at
some decks, we'll definitely seepeople who are taking that into
account. Also, there's not a ton of these

(17:45):
effects but he does dish out some stun and confuse as well.
He does. There's a few.
So there, there's definitely a lot of stuff going on Command
man. What what about the actual
modular set that we had? Syndicate, Syndicate.
Sinister Syndicate? Yeah, the main gist is that

(18:06):
there are a ton of minions. I, I, I read A blog by Stan the
Leader a few years ago, I think it was around the galaxy's most
wanted kind of dearth of contentor at least stuff that people
liked. And so he's coming up with kind
of fun ways to combine modulars and, and encounters.

(18:27):
And so he started classifying like types of modular sets and
it it's kind of always stuck with me at the time, kind of
broad three categories where Sinister syndicate would
definitely be what he called thebrute squad, where it's just a
bunch of minions, the other type.
And a lot of nemesis sets followthis is rent a villain where

(18:49):
there's normally just one minion, maybe a beefier 1 and
things to kind of call it back out or interact with it.
And then? Yeah, villain theory calls those
ones mini bosses. Oh, yeah, yeah, Yep, exactly.
And then the other one I think you had like villain buffs.
I mean, there, there's there's lots of different types now, but
just things that help kind of buff and enhance the villain

(19:11):
stats or what they can do. So this is definitely,
definitely the brutes got brute squads.
They've they've all got nasty boost effects.
And also just when whenever they're attacking or getting
attacked, they do nasty things as well.
So you definitely don't want to leave them around for very long.

(19:32):
But yeah, that's kind of kind ofmain gist, just throwing,
throwing more bodies at you. Yeah, there's a lot of boost
effects in this set, importantly, so you you
definitely have to pay attentionto that.
And we'll you know, we'll, we'llsee, especially when we're
talking about Valkyrie, that Valkyrie and the rabbit.

(19:53):
And yeah, we'll, we'll talk about the white rabbit that kind
of got defeated. I don't even know how many times
across across each game, but. Yeah, So, yeah, it's a cool one.
The none of the minions are especially beefy, right?
They don't get huge. I think, you know, 5 is, is the

(20:13):
most health that any of them have.
And but if you do get to the point where they get to attack
you, then it really is unfortunate.
That's that's kind of where things go downhill, yeah.
Cool. Discard a random card from your
hand. Discard the lowest cost upgrade

(20:36):
you control. Yeah, it's or or just get
attacked first. Yeah, they're, they're bad.
Yeah, the well, the getting attacked first one was always I
so the speed demon, speed demon,and he only has three health,
but he's always tedious to get rid of because he has two
attack, he has to attack. And you always had to really

(20:58):
think about how how you actuallywanted to to sequence that to
make that not really stink. Yeah, I don't know.
I think that's a really cool set.
I think, I mean, honestly, the hood has quite a few cool
modular sets and I like this one.
It was kind of a mid tier type of one as a brute squad, as you,

(21:20):
as you called it while you're onthe mic.
Hey, what you want to tell us about how your round went?
And tell us what what you're actually, Yeah, all that kind of
fun stuff. Yeah, for sure.
I I landed on Spider Ham aggression.
I actually did start out with Valkyrie and trying a few rounds
and he's going OK, had some rough rounds.

(21:41):
And so I was like, I think I'll probably have more consistency
with spider Ham. But yeah, I was still, I still
found at least some of my practice games that it was still
taking a long time with spider Ham as well.
I even tried some different aspects and so my mine went a
little long, but I, I tend to I,I like controlling the board
inside. I really tried to lean into kind

(22:02):
of status locking, but I always seemed to time it just right to
where and roll down that confused feeling pretty good
gets the advance or some extra activation.
And, and so after a while I just, I just kind of knew I was
always going to at least get to the second main scheme.
So and that that's what happenedfor all my official games,
unfortunately, but. Every single time.

(22:24):
Yeah, yeah. Well, Yep.
And I I found it after based on someone's comment that I
misplayed the counters the the Magna counters.
I forgot that whenever you advance main scheme state that
they get cleared. Oh, so you could have saved just
a little bit of pain. Maybe I mean, maybe not a ton
right, because it would go usually just like once a game,

(22:47):
you know, some of the practice games twice.
But still I was like wish I would remember that but.
Yeah, outside of, you know, scored games in, you know, here
in Modoc League or whatever, youknow, you you sometimes can take
advantage of of that sort of thing to actually remove some
pain by getting rid of counters.You know, Zola has a similar has

(23:09):
a similar thing, right. That's.
Or even threat in general, right?
Yeah. Like when you're not, when
you're not doing SCL, like, you know, the strategy can open up
quite a bit of that's a lot of threat I'm not going to worry
about. And I'm going to time it to
where he schemes way up, way past the limit.
And then I'm going to set back to 0 and I'm good.
Yeah. We're we're going to make sure
that the the threat is one underthe limit after stage one, yeah.

(23:31):
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Yeah, it it, it is weird how much solo Champions League
distorts the way you play. Oh yeah.
Yeah. But but overall, you did well.
We'll see you you were on the podium, so we'll we'll come back
to your performance. But in the end, your your
strategy worked out. Yeah.
I was actually kind of surprisedby that because I was like, go

(23:54):
ahead. It took me a long time.
It was a. Tough.
It was a tough round. Yeah, Lexicon, how about you?
So I I picked up. Initially I was playing Valkyrie
in aggression was my plan, but when Nate opted to switch over
to spot a ham, I moved over to leadership.
And unfortunately, I started allmy practice games with the

(24:16):
Sinister 6, not the Sinister Syndicate that's right in the
deck. And so I practiced several
times. They are much bigger, they are
much meaner, they are all three boosts.
Don't they all have villainous too?
Yes, they all have Villainous. Doc Ock has insight too, right?
Like the games were not going well, let's put it that way.

(24:40):
And then when I somebody posted something about White Rabbit, I
was like, oh, I've made a terrible mistake.
So I had to kind of revamp. I played around with Pool a
little bit, which I actually quite liked.
That was the one that performed best against the Sinister 6, but
when I switched over to Leadership, it just was very
clean. I felt like Pool wasn't as much

(25:02):
of A a sacrifice. Getting Dread pool because it
gives you a target every round for Valkyrie to be able to kill
a minion because he's super easyto kill.
But with Sinister 6, I was usually able to pick or with
Sinister Syndicate, I was, therewere more minions that I was
more happy to have on the board.So I, I didn't feel like that I

(25:24):
was much of an as much of an advantage as it was when I was
had these bigger minions and didn't want to grab one.
So the games went better, right?Once I switched over to
leadership, I was really lucky and I contribute a lot of my
higher score to just luck in that the magnetic counters went

(25:45):
off a lot, which that's not lucky, but they did burn my
obligation and shadows, so I only got my obligation once and
I never got shadows. Oh, right.
That was very, very lucky. If I had gotten shadows, my
games would be much harder. So there is an element of of
luck there were like the deck sometimes just works in your

(26:06):
favor and your games are better.I think folks who hit shadows,
yourself included, especially early on in the game, it's
really devastating with Valkyrie, that's absolutely
nightmarish. I had built my deck to try to
manage some of that a little bitby having both Clarity of
purpose and the Quinn carrier. That's why I selected that over
like a helicarrier or any anything else so that I would

(26:28):
have access to a wild so I couldlike get rid of Seduced and
stuff like that. But outside of that, it really
just came down to trying to stayalive, chump block as much as
possible and and move quickly. I I feel like Valkyrie playing

(26:50):
Valkyrie in this set. One there's there were a lot of
minions. Once I was using the correct
modular. There were a lot of minions that
are good targets for chooser of the slain and that are easy to
kill and then trigger your Valhalla supports, get that
heal, get the extra readies and Valkyrie does a lot of damage
right. If you put the death glow on

(27:10):
Magneto and you have access to it ready, it's like that's eight
damage right there. Just two swings with dragon
Fang, which is A1 cost support that's very easy to get out.
You're you're doing a lot of damage really quickly and you
have havat the so there's good damage in her kits outright.
The issue was managing everything else and not having

(27:34):
your your board state screwed uptoo much during the villains
phase. So that was sort of my
experience with it. My games went well.
I think I were I was nine turns,11 turns and nine turns, which
again, faster. Yeah, it was pretty quick and
those faster rounds to I I neverthe deck only reset barely
right. When you have like 131415 turn

(27:56):
games, you're more likely to seethose bad cards more than once.
You're more likely to get Shadows of the Past, which is
really bad. So in some ways it was better to
go fast and not have clean boards at the end of the game
that it was to try to be super clean.
So I my main scheme popped at least to the second one.
And then one game I went all theway to round 3 to the third
scheme. And on at least one of my games

(28:20):
I still had a side scheme and play with like, I don't know, 3
or 4 thread on it or maybe 2 thread on the side scheme and
one of the mains. So I had like 3 thread out.
So I did not have a perfectly clean board.
And every single one of my gamesI didn't have any minions out.
But in the end, the bonus from the challenge of playing
Valkyrie definitely upped my stats because it can get you

(28:42):
over 100, right? Otherwise you just you can't,
you can't get over 100 if you don't do the challenge based on
how in Smith Bear has it set up now.
So there is that incentive. If you want to be able to try to
break 100 and not be like in a tie, then you have to do the
challenge. So I I think in that instance
too though, the challenge was a big part of my score pushing

(29:04):
over because my other stats werenot that great, but they were
OK. It's yeah, it, it is
interesting, right, that we, we get a lot of ties now because of
that, that cap and, and how muchthe this bonus can really, you
know, looking at it and saying, oh, I have access to above 100

(29:28):
if I if I do this. And so, you know, folks are
pretty some folks are incentivized to do it and other
folks are just incentivized. We we saw a lot of comments of
oh, I tried Valkyrie and poorly Abraham now.
Yes, so. That was a common refrain on the
on the Discord server. I'm curious, Scott, the pool,

(29:52):
you said it, it went well. What what was your approach with
pool? Resource heavy.
So what are the things that I think?
Yeah. Valkyrie wants is money she
doesn't have. She doesn't generate, she
doesn't have a lot of resource generation right?
She just has Valhalla to get hera card and her cards are

(30:13):
expensive. The Havati cost 3, her flight of
Valkyrie or cost 2 which that was a terrible card for this
round because it clears 5 threat, but if there's five
threat on the main scheme, you've lost the main scheme.
You you really want cheaper smaller increments of threat
removal generally speaking like the side schemes all have three

(30:34):
threat on them. If it was a two player game
Flight of the Carrier would havebeen so much more cost
effective, but as it was more often than not like you're
burning one or two threat removal when you use that card.
I think it's a great card but here it often felt bad using it
because I was like I use flight of the Valkyrier to take two
threat off the main scheme. Like I spent 2 for this card

(30:58):
that only removed 2 threat so that wasn't my favorite.
But having more having resourcesto be able to pay for those more
expensive cards helps a lot. The healing right from healing.
What is it? I forget the name of the card.
That really helps. The stick to itiveness helps

(31:19):
being up to discard a a physicalor spend a physical to ready
your hero because she's exhausted a lot.
That helped. And then being able to ride a
little bit on our other like Blackout and what's the other
one? Tic tac toe.
Yeah, Tic tac toe, Yes, thank you.

(31:40):
Those are really helpful too, because again, if you had extra
cards and you didn't have a goodtarget for using her death glow,
you had something to dump them in to be able to say remove
threat or hear an heal an ally or heal your hero.
So there were some really nice usable cards in the pool aspect,

(32:00):
but I don't, I don't feel like they were useful enough.
And the risks of having some of those other cards come out and
having, you know, playing your own hazards or and amplify or
something when he already hits really hard.
It just, it was OK. I mostly was using it for the

(32:21):
resources and for some of those other side cards, not so much
for what pool really wants to do.
So it it, it was OK. It did not.
It was not as good as leadershipin the end.
Like playing band together, which is a card I included in my
decks still was often giving me 3 resources and I didn't have to

(32:43):
worry about being at full health.
It made it way easier to play. And even if it wasn't, even if I
have no allies out I can still discard it to well no you you
have to spend 1 to play death club.
I usually had an ally out. I don't think there was ever a
time when I didn't have at leastone ally to to use with band
together, so it's it's fine. That is a funny card because

(33:06):
inevitably when I put it in the deck I get a hand where it's a
dead card and then I swap it out.
I, I did have one turn. I'd had Ant Man 2 double
resources band together and likeEarth's Mightiest Heroes and

(33:27):
that was my hand and that it wasthe first turn and that felt
really bad. Like after Mulligan because I'm
like, Oh, I have a band together, but I I basically used
everything else for Ant Man and then I used the band together to
throw a death glow out and it was like, all right, I at least
I could use it for something because I got an ally on the
board. So it never was a fully dead
card. But I definitely feel you.

(33:48):
I am always a little nervous to put it in and I think there are
some things I could have done differently.
But by the time I played my game, I was passed refining.
I really was like, I need time to get these done.
And the games were long, just like command may have said, like
they are long games. Mine were faster than most, but
they still took. I don't think any of my good
games took any less than an hour, which is long for a solo

(34:11):
game. Magneto's stinky, yeah.
He is. He's stinky.
There's a lot going on and you have to get through a lot before
you can kill him. So.
Cool, Thank you. Well, I I played Valkyrie as
well, played justice Valkyrie. You know, I'm of the opinion
that I, you know, can take justice shield up against pretty

(34:34):
much anything and, and meet somelevel of success.
So that's, that's how I how I decided to go.
I went with A50 card deck so that I was actually watering
down the Valkyrie kit a little bit and was focusing a little
bit more on the card that was adding.
And I went for lots of blockers and similar to what you were
saying, Lexicon. And when I do play Justice

(34:58):
Shield, I actually don't usuallyuse Homeland Intervention.
But she has such poor, you know,you were speaking to her main
thwarting card, just kind of notdoing what you needed.
The three copies of Homeland Intervention.
I don't, I don't usually use that card in, in Justice Shield,
but I ended up using that here 'cause it was just such an easy
way to get two or four threat removal when I needed it.

(35:21):
And then I managed to lose my first game, sadly.
I got, I got a shadows on turn 3and I was able to kind of flip
down and deal with most of what was going on.
But then I just never, I never recovered and I, I lost from
having the main scheme thread out.
So I had to go through all of them and somehow managed to make

(35:42):
it to 12 turns despite kind of having a really, really rocky
start. And then very proud to say that
I got agent of Hydra for I believe my first time.
So that's the the award if you have the lowest score and a loss
in a game in in the round. So.
Congrats. Actually a little jealous.

(36:03):
Congratulations. Thank you.
Well, you know, it turns out that when you have done
absolutely no damage to the villain, there's a crap ton of
thread on the board and I had perfectly fine health at that
point, but I just, I could not keep that main scheme under
control. So it was, and you know,

(36:23):
speaking about the long games, because of those magnet
counters, you can go through themain deck pretty fast, which
means you start accumulating acceleration counters as well.
And so then the compounding effect of doing that is that
keeping the main scheme under control also becomes even more
difficult. Uh, and then Game 2, everything

(36:48):
kind of went nicely according toplans and it was, I don't
remember what it was 16 or 17 turns or something like that.
So you know, very long because the deck was built to to go long
and then game 3 was a an absolutely remarkable 27 turn
game. TJJJ also had a 27 turn game

(37:10):
with with leadership Valkyrie. But yeah, that was I couldn't
even believe that that turn counter just kept on going up
and up and up. And basically I got hit by
shadows in the mid game and tookme a long time to re stabilize
before I was able to actually finish it off.
And overall it was pretty fun experience to to actually do all

(37:31):
that stuff. Of course I was disappointed in
the loss, but you know, kind of navigating a 27 turn game and
just keeping your wits about youand all that sort of stuff.
You know, as the the one hour game was, you know, I definitely
overshot one hour by quite a biton that, on that final game.
That's very impressive. That's a long game to hold your

(37:52):
stuff together. That is a long game.
Yeah. I didn't even probably do the
what would have been the wise thing of just, you know, taking
some 5 or 10 minute breathers atat various points because I was
just so into it that I just I just kept going.
OK, overall results. So Spider Ham, 75% of the people

(38:14):
picked Spider Ham. You know, based on chatter on on
the discord, I would guess that,you know, a quarter or a third
of those people that picked spider ham initially tried out
Valkyrie and then just said no and and swapped over.
So I think people, you know, hadthe ambition of doing it and
then became face to face with the reality of doing it and

(38:34):
decided no. And then aspect choices
leadership 44%, no surprise, especially because Spider Ham is
so good in in leadership. But as we also saw, there's some
reasons that justice can do they're sorry that leadership
can be quite good for Valkyrie, Justice was 25%.
So this was more lexicon what you're speaking to kind of try

(38:56):
to keep that main scheme under control as a strategy, 15% for
aggression, 12% for protection and 4% for pool.
Overall, the number of players Ithink in in this round was maybe
something on the neighborhood of60, so quite a bit lower than
usual. I think a lot of people either
didn't want to touch it or maybetry to practice and just decided
not to bother. And then, you know, speaking to

(39:20):
actually how challenging it was to keep that main scheme under
control. Only 29% of the games managed to
stay on Stage 1. Wow, yeah.
That also tracks. Right.
Yeah. So, so any of those folks who
managed to get two or three games that managed to stay on
stage 1, you know, huge Congratsto you.

(39:41):
That's, you know, statistically that was not an easy thing to
do. And then, you know, the win
percentages on this are kind of interesting because surprisingly
the Spider Ham win percentages were up at 94%.
So that. That is pretty high.
That's that's higher than I might have guessed.
It was a 10 turn average. But we do see, you know, the

(40:04):
scheme scores where everybody got hurt and then Valkyrie was
at 79% win average, which actually is, you know, pretty
decent overall. That's not terrible. 12.3 turns,
so 2.3 turns slower, which is, you know, as you're saying, she
has a lot of damage output, but I'm, I'm still actually
surprised that she was able to keep up that pace.

(40:24):
And then the approval rating was91.5 versus 79.3.
So that that 10 points that you got for Valkyrie was added on
top of that. So her approval rating without
that would have even been 69.3. So that would have been a pretty
big gulf in, in approval ratingsabsent that sort of thing.

(40:45):
So I don't know anything, anything in any of that that
jumps out to to you at all, Kamea.
No, I, I, I think for the, I think for those that tried
Valkyrie, definitely commendable.
Cause Magneto really had any difficulty and even against
really any hero, he's, he's tough, he's well-rounded.

(41:05):
So I think the fact there's likean 80% win rate, that's that's
super good for those for those that that did it.
Yeah, Lexicon. No, I, I think it is interesting
that Justice didn't rank higher a little bit to me, but I get
that for Spider Ham leadership is really good because of

(41:28):
clarity for purpose. So and I know that that's also
really good for Valkyrie becauseit's cheap resource generation.
I I don't know that there was any deck in leadership that
didn't run clarity of purpose. So I think that was a big push
here over Justice, even though there was a lot of threat and
threat management, I think it's one of the bigger challenges of

(41:50):
this matchup. Still, I think people opted
towards resources because you dohave to set up fast, right?
That's one of the other challenges of Magneto is that
there's a lot on the board when you start the game and the
magnet counters mean that he's going to put a lot of pressure
on quickly. So you don't have a lot of build
time, which is why you see thoselonger these longer games.
You have to kind of constantly keep things under control while

(42:11):
you build. So I, I get that that's where
the, I think where justice maybedidn't get as much as, I mean,
it was still 1/4, which kind of tracks.
But we see aggression protectionobviously scoring much lower
because leadership and justice are the two that really give you
that ability to observe a littlebit more control as you're
trying to get set up and keep track of the board.

(42:33):
So not really super surprising, but it is interesting that there
was so much more of an emphasis on leadership in this round.
I don't think we've seen that that much lately.
I think it's been more balanced in the past I feel like.
Yeah, people really have their pet aspects.
And then because there's so manypeople that are in alliances, it

(42:55):
also does tend to spread it out,right.
But interestingly, overall protection was the top
performing 92.5 approval rating.And as Lexicon already
mentioned, the way the current scoring scheme works, the
maximum score you could have gotten if you played a Spider

(43:17):
Ham was 100 on the approval rating and then 110 with
Valkyrie because those those tenextra points.
And so 92.5 is, you know, pushing up against kind of
maximum scores. We'll see that there was no
Valkyrie protection, so that that this was done strictly on
the back of Spider Ham protection.
Which is good for him, the web warrior.

(43:38):
Yes. Well, so that's, that's part of
it. That's.
Right. Yeah, we'll see.
We'll see that in a SEC. And then leadership, justice and
aggression all did very, very similar, but they were in that
order. And then pool was at 83.7, so
just about 10 points lower than protection.
And then nobody picked basics. So and there's relatively few
people that actually played poolas well.

(44:00):
So that's that's pretty skewed by just kind of the people that
actually played it. Yeah.
One of the things that is with Bear does on his result sheet is
he has a bunch of extra funny interesting things.
He has a thing called Civil War that looks at all the
affiliations that the heroes have and then looks at the

(44:20):
highest and lowest performing heroes in in each of those.
So there's ten of them, you know, Avenger, Guardian, all
those sorts of things. But Asgard is actually one of
the affiliations, and Valkyrie is currently the strongest
member of the Asgard family, with Thor being the weakest
because those are the only two. Not that there's all that many.

(44:45):
Yeah, no one. Yeah, so do I'm.
I'm curious if either of you anticipate another Asgard hero
anytime soon. I mean not not specifically when
it would happen, but like what the hero might be realistically.

(45:06):
I don't know as much of the comics and so I've, I've since
learned like Beta Ray Bill is, is somewhat of a bigger
character, so it could be cool to see him.
But I, I think anything Asgard would be great.
I I think they're both fun. Yeah, I, I feel like we would
either get some variation of Loki, right, like Kid Loki or

(45:28):
something from the Young Avengers, or there's potential
for something like Angela. She's been in a lot of different
groups. I think also the Mighty Thor,
right? So that's our, what's her name?
Jane Foster. Jane Foster.

(45:48):
Yes, thank you. Jane Foster version of Thor.
She's in a lot of the comics. So there's a lot of material for
the Jane Foster version of Thor and definitely has a different
spirit than traditional Thor. So I, I think there's definitely
some options there. I think those are the ones we're
more likely to see, but I don't know that we'll see them anytime

(46:08):
soon because none of them reallypair up with the types of groups
that I think we might have coming soon.
I I feel like that Fantastic Four has got to be somewhat on
the horizon and the next big wave that they do that would
make sense something along thosethose lines.

(46:30):
So I wouldn't be surprised if wewe get something more in that
direction and, and Asgard doesn't fit super well with
that. There were some other big
overarching comic themes and sets that, you know, the War of
the Worlds kind of stuff with Frost giants taking over Earth.
And was it Roxanne Inc is a big part of that, the leader of

(46:52):
Roxanne. So there's some cool things that
we can build into and future ones that I think we'd see more
Asgard, but I don't I don't feellike it's coming soon.
So maybe and and like you said, Nate, maybe Beta Ray Bill, he's
one that's very well liked. So if we did some sort of like
space nights esque stuff. Maybe I was going to say that's
that's kind of if we have see some more cosmic stuff that
would make sense to have him show up.

(47:14):
To have him show up, yeah. The I think there's actually an
almost inevitable Throg when, you know, the final box that
they make before they decide to stop publishing is, you know, a
Pet Heroes box and. We get.
We get we get all the pet heroesand, and Throg will be in there.
Yes, I'm looking forward to that.

(47:37):
I do I I think he would be well,and there are some, there are
definitely we've seen some ones eek into the game that would not
be like SPDR. There's not very many comics
with SPDR, but somebody really, really liked SPDR and wanted to
do SPDR right. Like I think that was Molly's
right, something that she reallywanted to do.

(47:58):
So the, you know, the hero makesit into the game.
There's some ones, I think there's like sort of a list of
ones that, like you said, they're sort of their favorite
heroes and they kind of find places maybe to work some of
those in there just because they're they're so passionate
about wanting to design a hero, a card set for that hero.

(48:18):
Right. Yeah, it it would some of these
I don't have obvious initial hooks like you wouldn't, you
know, if you were talking about the the Mighty Thor, Jane
Foster, you know, the there's not there's not an obvious thing
where you're like, oh, I can't wait to design that hero other
than, you know, kind of looking at what's going on with our ally

(48:41):
and maybe how do you expand thatinto the good thing?
But but you know, there there's others where you might be able
to imagine like SPDR as a great example that that somebody
really was like, oh, I have someneat ideas for how this could
work. Yeah, Throg.
Throg is very interesting, right?
Like sort of like a Throg alligator Loki combo or

(49:06):
something in a set. Would be Howard the Duck in
there? Maybe when we get an animal, an
animal box? Oh, that's a good shout.
Just. Just just a straight up lockjaw
hero. Lockjaw.
Yeah. Lockjaw.
Howard Frog and Alligator Loki. Good to go.
We got 4. Yeah, cool.

(49:27):
I love it. Thanks for the indulgence.
The so we're, we're going to visit the decks now.
You know, the one of the challenges of, of Innsmouth Bear
continuing to make the number ofchoices available to us quite
plentiful is of course, us reporting on these decks is
getting, you know, a little bit more more challenging and

(49:49):
arduous. So we're not going to go through
all, all the decks, dear listeners, but we're, you know,
we'll hit some highlights and just pause when folks have some
things that they notice and really want to talk about.
So I'll go Spider Ham did better.
So we'll go through the Spider Ham ones 1st and then we'll go
through the Valkyrie one second.And like I mentioned, protection
was the the best overall. So we had to Jacinto or Jacinto

(50:16):
getting #3 in the training grounds with a, you know, fairly
straightforward web warriors protection deck.
There was a couple of energy barriers in there, but other
than that, you know, there was the the highest impact web
warriors and you know, your twiptwips and your across the spider
verse and all those those other goodies that work, work great.

(50:36):
And you know, Spider Ham just has that lovely benefit as as
Nate experienced of you just have access to resources when
you need them. So good.
Yep. And is it on?
And so the the web warriors build is relatively expensive
because it does focus on allies that you know, you do need to

(50:59):
get them into play and then you kind of get this engine going.
But but just having access to some of those extra resources
when you need them can make sucha big difference.
JG got second there and actuallybrought Tot a tot taunt and and
leaned even more heavily into web warriors than than Jacinto

(51:19):
did. And then friend of the pod Greg
got a third out of out of all that.
So the only person who got kind of the perfect score was Jacinto
out of that. That group about the 100, the
the HAM leadership group was a three-way tie for first with

(51:41):
everybody getting 100. So you we got, you know,
Tristan, who's who's been on thepod before, Jared who's been on
the pod and is in my alliance and then energy thief.
And I don't know, did either of you look at any of these decks
very closely a little bit? What'd you notice, Scott?

(52:04):
Well, I thought Jarrett's was interesting going that he used
Goliath for a big part of his damage, so he built a lot around
Goliath swinging, using his forced interrupt and swinging
twice in a turn, which is kind of interesting.
That's not in the traditional Spider Ham wheelhouse.

(52:24):
But as you said, Spider Ham has a lot of resources.
You know, most people go web Warriors, right?
You just spam the Web warriors, Warrior of the Great Web.
It's just resources for days andjust keep punching.
But having that big burst of damage, I think probably helped
a lot in the speed with which Jarrett won his game.
So 7.3 is really fast and I think that that was a big part

(52:49):
of it. I think it was smart using suit
up to grab Professor X and clarity of purpose, right?
So we can start off with a confuse and and with that three
threat removal. So we can get rid of that first
sight scheme right off the bat, which I think was big because
based based on when the main scheme pops, you wanted to have

(53:10):
already completed Defeat Master Mold.
Otherwise you have to go get a Sentinel M menu sent into play.
So you really wanted to get through those first two side
schemes right off the bat. And his strategy for getting set
up that way, I think looks really effective.
I think that was a good call. Yes, this was this was a neat

(53:34):
deck and you know, command man has been around in in the league
for quite a while like I have and you know, back in the day
there were a lot more leadershipdecks that used Goliath as a
finisher, right. That was before there isn't many
options as there were, as there is now for leadership right.
It was kind of playing Avengers Assemble decks or these, you

(53:58):
know, Goliath decks that you yougot set up and you know, he even
had team training to get an extra health on Goliath so you
could actually get a third attack, a third attack out of
it. And, you know, this just feels
so familiar and nostalgic. I mean, there's lots of things
that are different about it as well, but just that that that
setting up Goliath, you know, sometimes you he has really good

(54:21):
thwart. So sometimes when you aren't
going to need all of his damage,you can thwart with him once
before you kind of go in for thebig attack.
I love it brings me a lot of joy.
And then you can, you know, do arapid response to get him back
and try again as well. Pretty fun.

(54:42):
Tristan went with a a deck with regroup and, you know, high
value allies and and web warriorallies.
Yeah, regroup is good for the Web Warriors, right?
You you want them to leave play,but they don't have to be
discarded. So they just have to leave play.
So then coming back to your hand, there's a lot of ways to
do that. So I that was a nice, a nice

(55:06):
choice. And I think Magneto is one of
the ones more likely to swing atyou twice in a single turn
because of cards like Master of Magnetism and assault and the
magnet counters coming out like there were a couple of different
ways that he might attack you twice in a round.
So you get more bang out of regroup than you often would do
in a solo game. Agreed.
And then and then Energy thief used an old villain theory deck

(55:29):
Ronan Goes Vegan, which was, youknow, had some last stands,
which is a card we don't see allthat often, but that's a, an
event that is a 0 cost. When an ally you control
attacks, it gets +3 for the attack.
After the attack resolves, discard the ally.
And so you know, that works well, especially obviously with

(55:50):
with Nick Fury who's already leaving anyway.
But it it's kind of a neat thingthat you can again go with some
of these leaving play effects like you were mentioning
Lexicon. And a mini Goliath esque trying
to get some quick big splash damage.
Well, it was so exciting when Power Man came up because you
got another Goliath style target.

(56:15):
Well, this thing was interestingbecause it doesn't have very
many allies. The running goes vegan, yeah,
but there's an emphasis on beingable to like, recur Ghost Spider
with Make the Call or where whenshe leaves play, right?
You can go get one of your cardsand then you can bring her back
an attack with her in the next round.
You can attack again And then when she leaves play like you

(56:36):
can kind of forcibly trigger that.
Being able to go get one of youridentity specific cards, which
is great for spider ham because those cards are really good and
you want to see sort of your bigand you can grab which one you
want. So it's like, well, if you need
hogwash, you grab hogwash. If you need petulant pig, you
grab that. If you need the your the one

(56:58):
that reduces damage. What's it called?
Cartoon physics, right? You can grab that so.
Yeah, I thought about that too. I was like, oh man.
But yeah, it's I think it's justonly an event.
Oh, is it only an event? A ghost spider?
Yeah. Because it's not even my first
thing. It's like, Yep.
Go, go. Get the physics and then.
Ham it up, Ham it up is such a good card even by itself, for

(57:19):
reducing, for removing threat. But there's some really good
ones in there, even just in the events that you want to grab.
But yeah, good, good catch. And then we had justice and
Kakita Jamie, my alliance mate, got the top scorer in there
again, a three-way tie for firstbecause they all capped out at

(57:41):
the at 100. Kakita Jamie went with kind of,
you know, a hybrid deck taking advantage of those great web
warriors allies and then regularevent based justice one way or
another. Turn the tide, clear the area.
There's so many schemes kicking around in this one.
Clear the area is really, reallygreat and then.

(58:05):
That's a classic justice stick to me.
Yeah, that's right. Justice is always like AI,
always love playing justice. And Yep, all those cards are so
familiar. Yeah.
And then Chance encountered, thethree copies of Chance
encountered there's because there are all of those side
schemes kicking around that you can really take advantage of
being able to clear side schemesbecause all that those stages of

(58:30):
going through those side schemesthat lexicon mentioned at the
start, those are all, you know, technically side schemes.
They they don't go back into your discard pile unless you
clear them with Vivian and then you can't have them go back into
your discard pile, as we'll talkabout in a moment.
But the there's kind of nice opportunities for chance
encounter. And so if you put really high

(58:51):
impact allies in your deck, chance encounter is is awesome.
It's like almost to make the call.
Yeah, it's really good. And then Wild Zach attack coming
out of the training grounds, another one of the players that
that podiumed here. And then, you know, kind of a

(59:11):
similar deck overall, clear the area, turn the tide.
We got upside the head here, which you know, once you get a
little deeper into Magneto, you can start actually confusing him
and giving you some more room toflip or just to protect you from
those advances like you were talking about before Lexicon.
And then we start seeing that's.A really good call because he's

(59:34):
already got some confusing kit with screen wetpig.
So that's that's a fully status Magneto stun, stun, confuse.
Right, it is interesting how rarely I've found that I've
managed to hit upside the head with a stun.
Yeah, that is the key. Like it feels in practice, we're

(59:54):
sorry. In theory, it feels like it's
the thing that's going to happen.
In practice, it feels like it doesn't happen very much.
For me anyway. It's hard to.
Confuse on. Well, that's it.
And when you have it, you often take advantage of it, right?
And then I'll lay the trap and we'll see some other folks with
justice once we start talking about these some of the other
justice decks too. We see, you know, that's a way

(01:00:16):
to get if you're already have a deck that's leaning into
thwarting, this is a way to get 5 damage on the villain barely
cheaply, which can be great in that that final push.
And then the final Ham Justice was Mayday coming out of the
training grounds also with with 100 and then command may your
crew ham aggression. We see none of the players

(01:00:39):
managed to get 100 points. Everybody would, you know, it's
in the mid high 90s, but nobody managed to get 100 points.
So I don't know what it what didyou see in these decks, you
know, as a person who was actually really thinking about
these cards? Yeah, they're, they're all
pretty. They're all pretty different.
I mean, even just starting with Mista Mista at the beginning,
really leaning into just trying to take out looks like the but

(01:01:06):
the minions as well as getting some extra effects right were
are triggering getting a piercing or extra threat removal
or yeah, yeah, you can yeah, youcan really, really do it all
the. The Piercing Strike, right that
we were, we knew there was four of those Sentinel minions that

(01:01:27):
whenever that card shows up, whether it's a boost or or
actually coming into play, it's going to result in Magnetic
Magneto getting a tough. So you're going to see lots of
tough. So Piercing Strike can be pretty
helpful. It's always expensive though, so
it's always a tricky. It's a tricky call but but it's
cool to see. Yeah.

(01:01:47):
Because if it saves an activation somewhere, you know
to to ping the tough and that definitely provides the value.
Yeah, I I also like the inclusion of toe to toe for
killing those those minions in one go and and getting a little
extra damage on spider ham, but ideally a smaller amount of
damage than like a tons or the petulant pig where the villains

(01:02:11):
going to hit you real big. So I thought that that's a nice
inclusion, especially in Spider Ham.
It's a cool spider ham card. The the sinister syndicate
minions unfortunately all have. Not all, but a lot of.
Them they do have those nasty effects.
Nasty effects when they attack. So you're you're I think more
hoping for the the Type M Sentinel as the minion for
those. That's that's what I was

(01:02:32):
thinking more was for knocking out the type and Sentinel.
Exactly. Yes.
Just take two damage and you do 5 damage, which is exactly what
you need. Right and then there's a neat
inclusion of keep up the pressure, which is the player
side scheme that's a 2 threat one that you get to search your
deck and discard for an attack event.

(01:02:52):
So this just really sets you up for, you know, finishing the
game or maybe not this specific setup that we're playing
against, but you know, some of the setups that have minions
that you know are just going to be terrible to deal with.
You can get this out on the on the board and then clear it when
you actually need that event, which I haven't really played

(01:03:13):
like that, but it seems like a really sound way to to do
something. I don't know.
Have either of you really playedwith Keep Up the Pressure?
I haven't yet. Not a ton unique, no.
A few times. It's it's pretty new, right?
It's in the Iceman pack, so it hasn't been around too much.
But and admittedly, I don't playa ton of aggression either.

(01:03:40):
And good to see Braun. Yeah.
The value the. Yeah, when you when you are
playing aggression and you can just keep that main scheme under
control by having Braun do otherstuff and tick that, tick that
down. That is so good.
And. He's so good at knocking off
tough. But you need to also knock off a

(01:04:02):
tough, tough, yeah. Take off a threat.
Perfect. That is very, very true.
And then your your other podium mate was the Chase.
So somebody who's also in in Modoc league with us and I don't
know, Nate, what do you what do you see in this one?

(01:04:22):
Yeah, a lot of similar veins. Yeah, piercing strike as well.
We got the toe to toe again got I had Sunfire as well.
Good to help when those attachments show up to, you
know, clear them a lot cheaper and a lot a lot of web warriors.
I mean, regardless of aspect, you're going to be bringing web

(01:04:43):
warriors with spider ham. It's so bad.
You're so good. Oh, I even see the target
acquires. There are a lot of boost
abilities. SO3 target acquires.
Yeah, that's that's interesting.And then for for you, you also
had three target acquires, right?
So you you're you're part of that same team.
You went with three drop kicks. Yes.

(01:05:06):
In which is interesting in a deck where there wasn't a ton of
fists. But as as mentioned, you know,
you know, power of aggression, obviously, but because spider
ham has those counters that can build up kind of I don't know
how, how effective did you end up fighting that was?
Oh, it, it was great. I it wasn't every issue of like
not having enough physical resources, more of just timing

(01:05:28):
and like, oh, there's a guard minion or right or whatever it
may be. But yeah, the intent with the
aggression was pretty much just try to keep them status locked.
So that's that's actually why I had the hand cannons to help
deal with the minions as well. If the if my allies couldn't
but. Right.
And and it's interesting in thisscenario because he has he

(01:05:48):
starts with steady and then you can get rid of it.
Obviously once you get through all of those that side scheme
sequence. So even if you put a stunt on
him that doesn't get used immediately, you can then later
get the steady and then still take advantage of that even if
you didn't have to double stunt him or something like that.

(01:06:09):
So it's not, it's not as uselessas it can be on steady putting
just a lone status effect on them because you're going to get
rid of that. It's actually, this is my
favorite kind of implementation of, you know, steadier Stalwart
is where there are ways to get rid of them.
Yes, yeah. I agree.

(01:06:32):
That because though some of those heroes, as you know,
Lexicon you were mentioning before, that do have status
effects being such an important part of their kit, it really
feels terrible to go up against Thanos, I would say, with Miles.
But of course, Miles is just so strong.
Even without the status effects,he's still pretty decent.

(01:06:52):
But you know, taking Jubilee up against Thanos, that stinks.
Yeah, it does. It's not very much fun.
No, I love Thanos actually as a as a villain in this game,
despite despite the complaint I just issued.
And then we had two people do hand pool.

(01:07:13):
Only one of them got three wins.Mr. self destruct again another
another person who was hanging out in Modoc league with us as
well and got near perfect score,but not quite 97.
And you know, this looks like it's all of the good pool cards
that you were already mentioningfor what you had Lexicon when

(01:07:34):
you were trying it out and and then the web warrior stuff,
right? So kind of not a surprise that
this actually went well. No, yeah, not a surprise.
So the. The only thing is, you know,
compared to what you were talking about, some of the
advantages of pool for Valkyrie where she's so resource limited,

(01:07:56):
getting those triple resources, Spider ham wants to take damage.
So those things definitely don'tstay as triple resources.
They help you, they help you getout the gate quickly, but they
don't kind of have the same lasting power because you really
are trying to take that damage as spider ham as well.
So it's kind of an interesting thing of trying to, I find
trying to float it so they stay as double s as opposed to, you

(01:08:21):
know, they're usually only triples for the first turn,
right and. They may have managed to keep it
in that double s range because of the healing factor, right?
That's the benefit you get out of pool is that spider ham is
healing every turn. So you're not just constantly
draining on that health resourceand having to flip and heal.

(01:08:41):
You've got you've got a way evenhealing factor triggers even
when you flip down to alter ego because it's just a response,
not a hero response. So I, I do like even though you
are using your health more as a resource, so those triple
resources maybe aren't quite as reliable, I do think you're
reliably getting at least 2 because you're going to get that

(01:09:04):
healing. And with his he, he wants to
recover to be able to get the benefit off of the daily Beagle.
So I think it plays well. It's not like totally against
what he wants to do. Oh, agreed, you just definitely
find yourself in lots of situations where you're not at
Max health, but the you know, you you bring up you bring up

(01:09:24):
something that's really also useful to consider.
And I don't didn't see too many people that leaned into this
very hard. But since the games are fairly
long, there are cards that have quite a bit of slow value that
are are can be really great in these long games because they
just because they keep on returning.
And so healing, healing factor is a great one, right?

(01:09:45):
Having two bonus health a turn when you're going to be playing
A10 or higher turn game, that isa ton of health.
You don't have to figure out howto recover.
We saw Mista Mista used Legion in in their ham aggression deck.
And so that's, you know, Legion flips over a card and of the

(01:10:08):
possible things that you could flip over, one of them is that
Legion heals for two. So once he's in play, he can
just kind of stay. Yeah, I really get that
longevity. Pete Wisdom obviously is tricky
because he's actually X Factor trait locked I believe, so you
could only you can only get him into play with call for backup

(01:10:28):
perp with actually having an X Factor one.
But you know Pete, Pete Wisdom. He heals one whenever you reveal
a treachery card. Right.
So if you can get him into play and then just leave him in play,
his value is going to be throughthe roof in a long game.
Yeah, especially against Magnetowho's revealing those magnetic
cards when he triggers his magnetic ability.

(01:10:50):
It's a really good card against Magneto.
I do like WAR inclusion as well for this deck.
WAR and Plasma Pistol are are interesting tech choices.
Right. So war is potentially a really
easy way to get rid of some Tufts.

(01:11:12):
Obviously the yeah. And if you are playing with a
more expensive deck, this one isn't necessarily especially
expensive, but there's, you know, there's an Avengers
Mansion, for example. Well, there's another card,
right? So Avengers Mansion is another
great example of if you are or if you know you're going to be

(01:11:33):
playing a pretty long game and especially if you get start the
game with triple resources, something like Avengers Mansion
is just so good. So this was a bit of a, you
know, playing the long game kindof deck with Avengers Mansion
and Healing factor I. Was going to say too, it's hard
to know for sure that them on, but they could have gotten back
up to three quite a bit. I mean, they've gotten durance

(01:11:54):
just to make help sure that it'sOh yeah, you have to get the
double s and the downtime. So maybe that was the intention
was like, yeah, I'm going to recover for for was it 8?
And so if you're already healing2 from healing factor, recover
for 8:00, get a counter like youcould probably get back up to
that up to full pretty quick. Yeah, that's true.
If you're flipping, yeah, you know, if you're flipping then

(01:12:17):
you just get also the infinite value of the daily Beagle, which
is is totally, totally stellar. And you also get A2 encounter
when you recover. So you are with Spider Ham
really incentivized actually to be flipping and recovering.
And that can really pay off in those long games.

(01:12:38):
Anyway, very cool. Great to see a couple people try
out pool. So we're going to look at the
Valkyrie decks too. As I mentioned, there was nobody
that played Valkyrie protection.So that that highest score for
for protection came all just from the Spider Ham players,
your crew Lex Con. So you were the person who got

(01:12:59):
over 100 points out of the Valkyrie leadership crew and we
got in 2nd place was so amazingly bad coming out of the
training grounds. Another, another person who's
joining us in Modoc League and then in 3rd TJJJ also playing in
Modoc League with us. And TJJJ has the distinction of

(01:13:23):
having the the slowest overall average, as we'll see.
And also as somebody who had a 27 turn game like me, but but
Lexicon, what do you what do younotice in these in these decks?
I think obviously the clarity ofpurpose, everybody's running
that, that was pretty basic. I see team training came up a

(01:13:47):
lot, which was surprising. I didn't think to include team
training, but a lot of folks I think wanted to keep their
allies out maybe a little bit longer than I was planning to
keep mine out. The ally choices were kind of
varied, right? I think we all had a tendency to
pull Black Knight because we wanted to get the piercing

(01:14:11):
right? Although I never, I think maybe
I played Black Knight in one game we had I think TJJJ
included Beast to be able to grab that extra resource.
Ran Mockingbird for the stunt, as well as Professor X Vivian
shows up in several of them in the Leadership and Injustice.

(01:14:31):
I think Babycorn also used Vivian.
I think the idea there is to blank the side scheme.
It is so that when you defeat it, you don't flip the other
side scheme, right? It just goes away.
So you don't get orbital decay. But you're not.

(01:14:54):
You don't have to get through all the rest of the side schemes
right? Yes, the downside is in these
long games that size team is nowin the encounter deck and can
come back. Out and can come back out.
Undo some of the damage that you've done.
Oh yes, interesting. So that's kind of, that was an
interesting choice. I would not have thought to kind

(01:15:14):
of break it like that. I do.
I was aware of that interaction,but I didn't think to try to go
for it in this set. So that was kind of an
interesting choice. I think so amazingly bad had US
agent to soak some attacks, I think from the allies
specifically because he has thatretaliate.

(01:15:37):
So that was kind of an interesting choice and also
included Beak, who is not X-Men locked but does thwart more
based on having an X-Men ally inplay, but he's still like A2
cost enters play, removes one threat, removes one more threat
maybe and then soaks a hit. So kind of gets into that and
also ran Adam warlocks. We just see some interesting

(01:15:57):
like different poles of one off allies to kind of boost.
There was there's a handful thatare pretty consistently across
the board and there's a handful of ones that folks ran that
nobody else ran. I ran cable.
I didn't see anybody else running Cable, for example.
Right, another good example of kind of high value if you if you

(01:16:22):
can wait until he can do the stuff that he is does well.
A. Lot of value.
I mean, Adam Warlock is one of my favorite allies in this game,
so I will always endorse the inclusion of Adam Warlock, even
whether I think it was actually necessarily that useful for this
specific game. But you, you, you see team

(01:16:43):
training right as a useful way to also buff Adam Warlock
because he it buys him an extra turn of being able to do his his
stuff. And going to, I didn't see
anybody take the approach that Idid, which was I think I leaned
a little bit more into Avengers.Not that I used a lot of The

(01:17:04):
Avengers support cards, but I ran Inspiring Presence so that I
could use my Avenger allies morethan once in a turn without
having to use Command Team. I think a lot of folks lean
towards, especially in the Spider Ham decks, Obviously they
don't have access to Inspiring presents, it's Avengers locked,
so they use Command Team to ready their allies instead.

(01:17:25):
But when you've got allies like Cable or Professor X even like,
hey, do you want to read him up and remove three more threat?
You can. So getting those extra for me,
my focus was, hey, get an ally down that has tooth wart, throw
inspired on them, and then inspiring presence gets me extra

(01:17:48):
activation. So I think in my first game, I
used Maria Hill like five times because I had reinforced suit on
her. Like she came out on the first
turn, drew me a card, and then Ithrew inspired on her to remove
the threat off the side scheme, and then I could use inspiring
presents to remove three more thread off his side scheme and
now I'm already on my first turnwith a fairly cheap hand.
Gotten through those two schemesand pretty sad that if that

(01:18:10):
scheme pops, I don't get the Sentinel lamb.
So. That's pretty clever.
There were, there was some. For me, that was sort of my
approach, was trying to make useof cards that Valkyrie had
access to as an Avenger and thatwould be beneficial.
Squirrel Girl for knocking off Tufts, right?
And doing that little bit of extra damage sometimes if,

(01:18:32):
because I didn't have access to something to boost Dockery's
attack, she only hits for four. So being able to hit one on say,
A5 health minion and then take her out.
I saw that TJJJ also included a Hawkeye, as did I is a great
target to put out and then take some damage off those minions

(01:18:53):
when they came out. So you could, you know, even
choose or the slain and you've already got 2 damage on the
minion. And then if you hit with
overkill with have a fee or something, that just makes it a
little bit easier to get throughthose low health minions or
higher health minions. I mean, so there were some cool
options there. I did not lean into suit up,
which I think was a poor choice in retrospect because Annabelle

(01:19:15):
Riggs would be a good target forsuit up clarity of purpose.
So you can grab those two on thefirst turn if you wanted.
I think a lot of folks use it for Professor X.
So I that was a really good choice for those who ran that.
I think TJJJ did the suit up to get his build up.
We mentioned that I know nor so amazingly bad you suit up.

(01:19:38):
So that was I think that was a really good choice.
So, some cool differences, different approaches.
Yeah, well, that's the most fun part, right?
When you when you see multiple people be similarly successful
and they have just radically different approaches.
Yeah. Valkyrie Justice So that was my
crew, and we saw Baby Corn and UNC Dave get #1 two overall for

(01:20:05):
this round, and they both got the 110.
So the actual maximum possible score that you could get for
this somehow. I mean, I should no longer be
surprised, but somehow baby cornhad a blistering 9.
Term. Average with with justice, but
when you look at it, you kind ofget it because he went for lots

(01:20:28):
of thwart to be able to deal with those side schemes event
based justice and then also had the lay the trap and followed
combination to be able to do, you know, 10 damage quite
easily, even maybe more because if you get both follows out,
there's so many side schemes youcould realistically get even
even more damage out of it. And the idea was, you know, not

(01:20:52):
dissimilar to what Jarrett did was kind of trying to Sprint
through getting those side schemes out of the way so that
you then had access to confuse and really didn't have to worry
about the the main scheme going.And so you actually see a
perfect, well actually from bothof them, but we don't have UNC
Dave's neck, but you see perfectthreat scores, which there

(01:21:13):
weren't a lot of those. So that was pretty awesome.
So yeah, this is a very. Cool DVP was able to trigger
take out the guards because I don't think I've ever played it.
It's in here and so I'm I'm curious if you got it off.
Yeah, Do we? I don't think we had any elite
minions in there right though, all other than if you actually

(01:21:35):
saw your your nemesis so. Yeah.
I guess, yeah. I mean it's a good target for
flight of El carrier which assumes that you have at least
two minions out, but being able to like take out a minion
trigger that remove 5 threat. It's only got 4 thread on it so
you can just clear the side player side schemes.

(01:21:59):
Yeah, yeah, so cool. Cool deck.
Uncharacteristically from baby corn decks, there's 3 copies of
Turn the Tide. We don't see a lot of threes in
there, but of course, Turn the Tide's so good.
What are you going to do? Very cool.
And then Valkyrie aggression. Scott, did you say that was your

(01:22:22):
first thing that you had tried out?
That is what I started and to behonest, I think I probably could
have done just as well with it as I did in leadership because I
like I mean, she's built for it.That's what Valkyrie wants to
do. This deck has some of so this is
Brian V's deck. There were a lot of I think he

(01:22:45):
leaned into those little bits ofdamage, right.
So you're not always going to beable to knock out a minion with
one hit or sometimes you want tonot have to swing at them
because you're exhausted alreadyand you want to be able to throw
down a death glow, kill a minionand then ready.
So precision strike one by one. There's one copy of take that,
which is kind of an interesting inclusion.

(01:23:05):
You can throw that on a you can use it against a minion that you
have the death glow on or the villain, right.
So you had some big damage coming out of that card that we
got from Iceman's pack. Frog.
I I think those Asgard allies inin red are solid.
He only included Frog, but that's nice being able to throw

(01:23:27):
out a minion with Tough. I mean, he'll be.
Fair, I even included Valkyrie and spider ham like Asgard.
Asgard is good so I I still ran spider man or Valkyrie 2.
Yes, technically you were tryingto not get too far away from the
Valkyrie challenge, huh? Yes, exactly.
I think it throwing that combat training in there along with

(01:23:49):
your dragon Fang means that you can hit for five just in your
base attack. So that's there's an advantage
there in aggression as well thatthere none of them in Yinked you
can't clear with a single hit. And then there's a hand cannon
too. And then there's a hand cannon
as well for that overkill damage, so you're not wasting
your attack if you hit somethingsmaller.
So I I think it's a solid aggression deck.

(01:24:12):
An infrequent sighting of Earth's mightiest heroes, right.
So this is leaning into what youwere just talking about getting
that, that attack way up. Because we play Avengers heroes
less and less often because there's just so many other ones.
We we don't see that as much. But, you know, I think Earth's
mightiest hero, Earth's mightiest heroes earlier on in

(01:24:32):
solo Champions League was reallycommon, honestly.
Yes, it was. Well, I mean that's again
leadership and we see Blade and this and on several of the
others and I think he's in thereusually as an Earth's Mightiest
Heroes engine. Stinger is the same for for
leadership decks. So we that definitely got some
play with Valkyrie because we needed to be able to ready.

(01:24:54):
This also has the inclusion of God like stamina, which I know
came up in the discord a decent amount.
A lot of folks were looking at that as an inclusion for
Valkyrie as a heel and a way to get rid of status effects.
I ran it for a little while and just didn't.
I wasn't using it enough to warrant have it in my hand.
Sometimes it felt like a dead card in my hand and I wanted to
have something else. So I leaned on three copies of

(01:25:14):
Earth's Mightiest Heroes to helpwith those status effects
instead. But I like the inclusion of both
here. They've got 2 of each, so a
little bit more of the splittingthe two.
Precision strike is nice. It gives you a heal because
Magneto hits hard And if you're not planning to try to defend,
if you're just soaking those attacks and you don't have a lot
of allies to defend, which this deck doesn't, I'm assuming that

(01:25:38):
you're taking a lot of hits. And so precision Strike and God
like stamina was probably doing some extra work to keep keep
their allies, their hero's health pool up.
And even Hall of Heroes. So I mean, obviously Hall of
Heroes makes a ton of sense withwith Valkyrie, but the IT was a
scary scenario to be able to flip down and take advantage of

(01:25:59):
it, right? So that's always the the tricky
part, but very cool to see take that in there.
I recently tried to play a game with a bunch of my local friends
that we played. All the heroes that have the
upgrades they can put on stuff. And I bet that was fun.

(01:26:22):
Well, I cranked up the difficulty of the scenario a
little too high and nobody ever really got to get going.
We, we, we actually lost. But it, it was, it was fun.
In principle, we were, we were not as successful as we should
have been. I I guess I have a bit too much

(01:26:42):
of A mean streak. Yeah, clearly.
Valkyrie pool, no takers. So nobody played basic, We
didn't see Valkyrie in protection, we didn't see
Valkyrie in Pool. So just three, three Valkyrie
aspects all together. And then I already mentioned a
couple of these awards, the Pietro Maximoff Irony award for
the slowest top performing deck TJJJ was 17.3 due in large part

(01:27:09):
to that 27 round game. And then the if only Quicksilver
actually played this fast deck. So we had Meet Hammer Joe, which
is a a new name to me but an awesome name with somehow six
turns playing Valkyrie Justice that boggles the mind did not
have the cleanest scores. Jarrett who did have the

(01:27:30):
cleanest scores had a 7.3 turns in HAM leadership.
So I wanted to show both of themout for slightly different paths
to being very fast. Yeah, very fast X.
I don't. I didn't get any nominations
down here, but I'm wondering if either of you have any
nominations for the Rocket Raccoon Tinkering Award for the
most clever tech that you saw inhere?

(01:27:53):
Anything that you especially liked?
The ones the things that stood out to me were the Goliath don't
really see that as often, right?Some burst damage at the end.
I don't know what's necessarily clever, but just chance
encounter you you you know you're going to see with all the
sights schemes out more on the justice side of getting allies

(01:28:13):
out and I I do like kind of the other burst the baby corn slay
the trap followed. Just really lean into we're
going to do it all at once. When?
We when we can, yeah, those are good ones.
I really liked the inclusion of WAR in Spider Ham.
I know that's like a war doesn'tsee a whole lot of play in Pool
because it's it's really you have to take damage when you use

(01:28:35):
it and you might take a lot and you're not guaranteed to do very
much damage depending on what you draw out of your deck.
So but the plane that on spider ham who wants to take damage as
like an additional way to get more counters.
It's kind of like using clarity of purpose and leadership, but

(01:28:56):
in Pool. So that was kind of a cool
addition that I just didn't really expect it.
It's really swingy, right? It's not very consistent, but
you're consistently going to take damage when you're playing
against Magneto. So that was a nice, I thought
that was a smart place to use it.

(01:29:17):
Cool. Yeah, I, I like all those.
I think I even I was just excited by, you know, lexicon,
you and Brian B who used our Spidey heroes, which again, we
haven't just haven't seen all that much.
And you know, this was a good hero for that because as you, as

(01:29:39):
you mentioned with dragon Fang, her attack actually gets up
pretty, pretty high. So those are Spidey heroes
really pay off or it's just another way to hopefully get out
of when you do get stunned if you you need that help.
Well, thank you both. It was an absolute pleasure.
Thank you Kamea for for joining.Yeah.

(01:30:02):
Thanks for having us. And and Lexicon, thank you so
much for joining as well. It was my pleasure, always a
pleasure. And dear listeners, thank you
for listening and celebrating our our 50th episode.
What a shocker. And I hope you you continue to
listen and support and we'll seeyou next round.

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Episode Transcript

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.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}NFL Daily with Gregg Rosenthal

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NFL Daily with Gregg Rosenthal