On the theme of favourites....

[BigBadHarve]

What's your all time favourite deck to play?

Any interesting situations come up while playing it?

-BBH

[Onslaught]

Why not start things off by contributing with your favorite deck in the original post?

Anyway, even though the shift era was constricting in that it you were forced to anchor your deck with certain staples, it was also responsible for allowing a lot of weird characters/cards to be used that would never have seen play otherwise.

Basically the metagame was something like:

-Marauders based decks (with three distinct archetypes)
-Four Freedoms decks
-Gimmicks (Bet 7 lock, Gift of the Gods, etc)

Marauders decks were broken into: H4H based, mega negate based, mega draw based - with a few other variations along the way.

Mega draw (Usually involving the Ray) could completely dominate Four Freedoms decks since they don't pack a negate, allowing you to easily bet for the win with a Draw 3 + Malice. Mega Negate decks (Marauders/Scarlet/X-Babies frontline) were obviously very strong against mega draw, as well as having the option of turning off the opposing Vertigo consistently. Because of this, it would often win venture against other Marauders decks by forcing them to concede or lose a character. However, since they were really low on scoring points to venture, the deck was at a disadvantage vs. Four Freedoms and became heavily reliant on the three venture stealing cards in Onslaught's Citadel to win. Mega negate also had the built in advantage of completely shutting down any combo/gimmick type deck. H4H based Marauders decks were extremely solid against both Four Freedoms and other Marauders decks, trading in big flashy plays for overall consistency.

Now, all that background info being provided should hopefully better explain the amount of possible diversity allowed by the Marauders. For example:

Marauders/Captain Mar-Vell/Mole Man frontline with Any Heroes and Dark Phoenix Saga - attempt to KO their battlesite with Arc Light, Moleman's OPD, etc. You'll lose venture consistently, but Captain Mar-Vell will let you reset the missions and New Lease On Life will shuffle your any heroes back while giving them dead activators. Not only is this strategy impossible without using the Marauders yourself (otherwise your characters would die too fast), but it also wouldn't be as viable in an environment that emphasized winning venture over killing characters. Since it was so hard to kill characters it was almost impossible to force your opponent to have lots of unusable discards, but this was one way to accomplish it. Currently, it would be pointless to attempt to kill a battlesite since it would be much more efficient to simply attempt to KO a character. Also, you were guaranteed to play against a deck using a Battlesite during this time, as opposed to now where your anti-battlesite cards have a 50/50 chance of being unusable.

Marauders/Metallo/Scarlet Witch/Captain Atom - Basically you want to move all hits to Metallo, suck them up and move him to reserve with his OPD, then potentially even do it again with Captain Atom on the same turn. Obviously you would bet for the win once you have this set up, with the event that returns all missions to the reserve pile to make sure you're in range to bet for the win. Scarlet Witch over X-Babies here for the added disruption to clear out negates. This deck is a little "cheesey" since it's mostly an un-interactive combo deck, but it shows how the Marauders were able to make people like Metallo and Captain Atom playable when otherwise they would never be seen.

Ok so that's a lot of information to set up my explanation of my all time favorite deck to play, but I think the context was necessary to properly frame how useful this deck really was.



So the main crux of the deck is the KO event. In an era of shifting, decks were constructed in a way that assumed your characters would never die. By having a guaranteed KO, they would have to discard tons of specials while you lost nothing due to having a variant character in reserve. However, the deck was also able to function perfectly well without needing to rely on the KO event. A mega draw skeleton of Ray/Starjammers/Marauders was very common, so here all you are doing is trading in the Starjammers for the Hellfire Club. Their Draw 4 is superior to the Jammers Draw 3, Sebastian Shaw is arguably superior to the 8 anypower when Vertigo is in play, Tessa is a level below the 11 anypower, and then the Jammers also have Raza. So the Hellfire Club is surely a downgrade from the Jammers, but your frontline is knocking on the door of being identical to another strong archetype while having the added luxury of the KO event. The KO event was fairly weak against Four Freedoms since they could easily lose a character without having too many discards, but their aforementioned weakness to mega draw made it an unwinnable matchup for them. The only roadblock the deck faced was Bet 7, but that was a very niche deck and in theory you could take a loss to it in the swiss rounds knowing that your overall chances of facing one during elimination would be very unlikely. The Ray was always one of my favorite Overpower characters, so making a very synergistic, highly competitive deck with him that was insanely good against most of the environment is what makes this my favorite deck of all time.

[Karmanal of Zert]

Great, great post Onslaught! I was 10 years old in 1998 so I was never part of an actual OverPower community or anything like that, reading your synopses of different playing strategies and their reasoning isn't only really cool and informative, but sounds fun! I really wish I had been older and lived in a more populated area when the game was out. Right now I don't have that one true deck that's definitely my favorite, if I develop one now I know where to turn. Some pretty formidable DC-only combinations I prefer are (Reserve character last): The Ray/Metropolis S.C.U./Green Lantern/Eradicator; The Ray/Metropolis S.C.U./Eradicator/Green Lantern; Lex Luthor/Brainiac/The Riddler/Penguin. I've been having a hard time making the perfect deck to work around Cyborg...

[The Dude]

my favorite is White Queen, Bishop, Holocaust, Spider Woman with Any Heroes and Dark Phoenix missions. On their own they are all pretty formidible as White Queen has JW plus telpathic manipulator (and back in the tourney days Mutant Headmistres was playable defensively), Bishop has two big opds from the first set and of course Holocaust is the obligatory negator with another multi 8 to go with Bishops, while Spiderwoman defense in reserve is absolutely necessary and everyone has energy in common to build the bulk of the deck around but all three other skills are covered in the frontline as well for added teamworks.

However the trick of the deck is to hopefully keep everyone on your side alive and get the game to go long. At which point both White Queen and Holocaust can take turns destroying the opponents Dead Pile so when New Lease comes up your getting your entire deck back and the opponent is just getting Power cards. Then Bishop can use Temporaral Anamoly to retrieve New Lease and theoretically repeat the cycle into infinity. (Plus you have Web Head Wizard if one of those cards comes up early to give you a second shot at the trick).

Obviously they were at disadvantage against decks with a lot of 8 powergrids but otherwise I found them fairly competive in the tournament circuit and  certainly a more fun change of pass than the usual Marauders/X-Babies/HforH crew

[BigBadHarve]

Why not start things off by contributing with your favorite deck in the original post?

Good point!

(Actually, I found that I didn't have the time as I was typing, so I just left the question and figured I'd come back to it later.)

I think my favourite all-time team is my Avenger's Mansion deck. Back when I got into the game in '98, I was drawn to the homebase cards for the thematic appeal. Looking at the Avengers team, I felt they could be made into a formidable, tournament worthy deck.

My team consists of:

Hulk, Capt. America, Thor in the Front line with Black Widow in reserve.

Battlesite is the Outback. Lately I've experimented with alternates, but for this team the Outback is the best option.

A few people look at me crosseyed, (especially when I used that deck in tournaments), but it's got some surprising firepower and neat tricks if you build it just right. The introduction of the anypower 7 and 8 power cards, and the Marvels cards really made the team playable. The AP power cards are amazing for creating offsuit decks.

Using Fatal Attractions, I am able to create problems for opposing teams with the No Specials event. Most of the time I am able to Venture high or even for the win in a no specials round. It's a teamwork heavy deck, and the doubleshots on this team are lethal.

I limit the specials of each character to no more than 2-3, and load up on Teamworks. Two doubleshots rounds it out nicely. The DS defensive capability on this team has helped, but a DS attack in a no specials round is almost always a character killer, being a two-card (unblockable against a 7 or 6 character) hit.

The introduction of the Marvels cards, particularly Hulk's 'Savage' allows me to potentially create the no specials scenario multiple times.

My tournament record with this deck back in the day wasn't bad, per se. I made it to final rounds more than a few times, but never won overall. Now, after many years of tweaking, as well as using the Marvels cards (Cap's 6 and Thor's 12 also help!) my deck roughly has a 75% win ratio. Mind you, that's against one player. But still, I love the team!

my favorite is White Queen, Bishop, Holocaust, Spider Woman with Any Heroes and Dark Phoenix missions. On their own they are all pretty formidible as White Queen has JW plus telpathic manipulator (and back in the tourney days Mutant Headmistres was playable defensively), Bishop has two big opds from the first set and of course Holocaust is the obligatory negator with another multi 8 to go with Bishops, while Spiderwoman defense in reserve is absolutely necessary and everyone has energy in common to build the bulk of the deck around but all three other skills are covered in the frontline as well for added teamworks.

However the trick of the deck is to hopefully keep everyone on your side alive and get the game to go long. At which point both White Queen and Holocaust can take turns destroying the opponents Dead Pile so when New Lease comes up your getting your entire deck back and the opponent is just getting Power cards. Then Bishop can use Temporaral Anamoly to retrieve New Lease and theoretically repeat the cycle into infinity. (Plus you have Web Head Wizard if one of those cards comes up early to give you a second shot at the trick).

A friend of mine had a similar theme for deck recursion. He uses Spawn, Capt. Marvell, Bishop and Spider Woman. Capt. Marvel allows him to keep resetting the mission cards while his new lease event, and bishop's ability to replenish events keeps things going. The idea doesn't always work, but he's pulled it off a few times. One time, our game lasted two hours because he kept resetting it, and we just weren't able to hit one another enough to kill characters. Of course, something eventually gave, but it was amusing.

I like your idea of annihilating the opponent's dead pile. An underrated card.

-BBH

[Onslaught]

I spent years trying to find a build of the Bishop/New Lease on Life/Remove their deadpile shell that felt right, but something was always off. It was only recently that I stumbled upon the key to making it work: put Bishop in reserve. I guess the thought never crossed my mind since Bishop has the nice big OPDs, but it makes the deck run like clockwork by freeing up space on the frontline and ensuring that Bishop will be around late in the game to pull off the combo.

As I mentioned above with the Marauders deck, the key to a good combo deck is to have a frontline that is actually formidable even if the combo never goes off. Spawn brings some much needed defense to the team, along with all the offensive bonuses that come from the 8 stat. Spawn, Holocaust, Scarlet Witch, Bishop, Any Heroes is a really solid deck and incredibly fun to play. If you really want to go all out with the theme you can even put in Living Costume for Spawn to play on White Queen, but she would already be dominating in the powerpack with specials/any heroes vs. their powercard only draw pile anyway so it's probably overkill.

[The Dude]

I too have used a Spawn variant for this (although sticking Bishop in reserve never occured to me).

Still the version I posted was the original version, and something I played in the 10 month Classic-Image gap when there was no Spawn. Those were good times, monthly tournaments and with so long between sets people finally started trying creative decks again instead of all the FF Plaza etc stuff.

[BigBadHarve]

A friend of mine had a similar theme for deck recursion. He uses Spawn, Capt. Marvell, Bishop and Spider Woman. Capt. Marvel allows him to keep resetting the mission cards while his new lease event, and bishop's ability to replenish events keeps things going. The idea doesn't always work, but he's pulled it off a few times. One time, our game lasted two hours because he kept resetting it, and we just weren't able to hit one another enough to kill characters. Of course, something eventually gave, but it was amusing.

I like your idea of annihilating the opponent's dead pile. An underrated card.

-BBH

Oops, made a slight error. He doesn't use Capt. Marvell. (That team is too expensive, even with 3 stat spiderwoman in reserve) He uses Shadow King.

-BBH

[steve2275]

a couple of my favorites
marvel unverse
captain america 2846 20
colossus(super soldier serum candidate) 1574 17
deathlok 4556 20
and superpatriot in reserve 3672 18
75 points
could replace deathlok with taskmaster3745 19(if i had him)

marvel universe
heroes for hire 2784 21
namor              2774 20
thing                1584 17
strong guy (R) 3473 17
                                 75
i have considered maggot 4644 18 as an alternate reservist or front line now that im thinkin about it

feel free to offer up suggestions

[Demacus]

Buddy of mine had a nasty deck of The Ray/Green Lantern/Iceman/Magneto(R).  The front line were all pretty solid heavy hitters between Ray's dual-9, GL's 8 any and dual-9, Iceman's 10E, and Mage's 11 any. Front line also had some really solid defensive, between Hailstorm and Ice armor and Guardian angel, you were practically guaranteed to lose at least 2 attacks pet hand.  This was back in the Pre-Monumental days.

[gameplan.exe]

I've recently built a deck that is quickly becoming a favorite. It's a bummer when a favorite/fun deck isn't all that strong, but then again, maybe that's just greedy 

Cyclops, Gambit, Rogue, Jean [R], X-World BS, Coming of Galactus

I got the idea from old RPGs where you have a "tank" who is out front, taking the brunt of your opponent's assult, but not necessarily defending anything. Then, it really took shape after playing XML and XML2, with the Double Date team (which is specifically the 4 listed above).

The real fun of the deck comes from getting Angel's AERIAL COMBAT into play on Rogue with her own NIGH INVULNERABLE...

* NIGH INVULNERABLE (FL) <MP> {X} [OPD]
        For remainder of game, cards on Rogue's Hits to Current Battle with
            Fighting or Strength icons do not count towards Opponent's Venture Total.

   * AERIAL COMBAT (FQ) <MARVELS> [OPD]
       Cards with a Fighting icon do not count toward Angel's Spectrum or
          Cumulative KO for remainder of game.

I used Coming of Galactus for the EVENT to use Activators for any Special, so I can get that Angel Card into play ASAP.

Then, it's all about filtering all selected attacks over to Rogue. In one game, I had her rack up 50+ points, including most of my opponent's Fighting Power cards! (it was a Dept H deck).

Cyclops and Gambit have all of the offense, except Rogue's 9F (AS). I was worried at first that a mega-negate deck would just strip my buffs, but I've found that Gambit and Cyke have enough firepower to bleed out negates with fair consistency.

Anyway, it's a hot/cold deck. It doesn't win a lot, but when it does, it's super-fun! 

[Demacus]

That sounds like a blast!  So, because all she's eating are fighting attacks and not being spectrum KO'd, the Dead is Dead rule doesn't kill her for having 50+ pts of damage?  Clever!

[gameplan.exe]

That sounds like a blast!  So, because all she's eating are fighting attacks and not being spectrum KO'd, the Dead is Dead rule doesn't kill her for having 50+ pts of damage?  Clever!

exactly! she actually had an Any Power and a couple specials, too, but still not spectrum KO'd! I use 2 of her AC, 2 Image Inducers, and then an AC under the Battlesite. So, I have to be a little selective with the hits I pull over to her. I've probably played 8-10 games so far, and the trick has worked at least half the time. Even when it doesn't, Cyke and Gambit have a lot of venture up their sleeves