Deck Spotlight of the Week #2: Break Out the Cheddar

[Onslaught]

The point of these deck spotlight articles is to shed some light on the unpopular "low tier" cards. So why is this entry going to be entirely about the strongest decks around? Well, you have to know what you're going up against in a theoretical metagame before you can properly formulate the right mixture of cards for your less used characters. The format for this will take two things into account: a) overall prevalence (i.e., if there were a 100 person tournament taking place today, what % of the decks would be of each particular archetype) and b) top cut factor (60% of the field may be a Spawn/X-Man Any Hero based deck, but that doesn't necessarily mean 60% of the decks in the elimination rounds will be Spawn/X-Man).

So first, the "cheesiest" decks out there at the moment (I don't think any deck is actually cheesey enough to be considered unbalanced, but cheese is a nice catchall term for a top tier deck that is fairly cookie cutter):

Beyonder/X-Babies/White Queen/3-stat Magneto, The Crossing, Age of Apocalypse Battlesite: This deck is probably the most offensive out of all the top tier. It can ruthlessly trade hits on a decisive turn, since the first time it loses a character to KO it still wont have any unusable cards. It can potentially turn off your 9 or less teammate avoids with an event. It can have a snowball effect of discards after the KO event comes up. Now take all of those factors into account while facing a constant barrage of chained attacks from Beyonder, KOing someone before you can even hope to gain some kind of rhythm or momentum. Ally into Magneto 4m AA, White Queen 4e AA, 3i JW, 8e powercard...yikes! Things get really ugly when the chain starts off a Morph activator for his 2f make two additional attacks.

Strengths: relentlessly fast and efficient offense
Weaknesses: Beyonder dying is catastrophic, losing White Queen and then Magneto before the KO event comes up is also game over

Spawn/Starjammers/Scarlet Witch/Spider-Woman, Infinity Gauntlet, Onslaught's Citadel: This lineup just takes a little bit of everything and smashes it all together into a very well balanced and high powered deck.  Jammers have offense and utility, Witch has utility and a little bit of offense, Spawn has defene and a little bit of offense, and Spider-Woman has defense. This gives you two defensive characters, two utility characters, and 2.5 offensive characters. Themes in Overpower are always better when they are in multiples since the value of any given effect begins to grow exponentially when you have more of them in a given turn. For a very simplified example, if I only have one negate-baiting special in my entire deck, it is essentially useless. I play my Draw 3, it is negated, now I have nothing else to push through for a venture winning effect. But when you have a Draw 3, Raza, Finite Power, Spontaneous Combustion, venture stealing cards from Citadel...now I can fish out a negate, then punch through something extremely powerful. This isn't just true for utility cards, the same goes for defensive walls augmenting each other, or offense clearing the way for more offense. Since this deck does a little bit of everything, it has almost no drawbacks. Of course the downside is that it is "only" (boo hoo) merely good at everything while being truly great at nothing.

Strengths: balanced team that is capable of applying pressure in every facet of the game
Weaknesses: it can be exploited in the power pack due to only having one 8 stat character so it needs to win sooner rather than later, but it lacks any venture winning tricks/combos - also very susceptible to H4H

Spawn/X-Man/Scarlet Witch/Spider-Woman, Any Heroes, Shattered Image: This is Baby's First Top Tier deck. It is insanely easy to play since all the cards are reactive so you have no real decisions to make, and it relies on winning through inevitable attrition. It should be built in a way that it never has duplicates, then just kick around until the power pack with your defensive net keeping you alive as DoW or the "no activators" event steal you a few ventures. Once you make it into the power pack, you feast on most decks not having a backup 8 stat, allowing you to trade hits and eventually win through unblockable level 8 powercards. More decks would love to follow this skeleton of low dupes + Any Heroes, but it only works if you have a character with an EE special card or you run the risk of losing characters to level 10 teamwork followups.

Strengths: easy to play, never duplicates, very difficult to lose a character
Weaknesses: extremely vulnerable to anti-energy tech, severely hurt by KO event, somewhat vulnerable to H4H, difficult to win venture vs. other Any Hero decks

Heroes for Hire/Reavers/Starjammers/3-stat Black Widow reserve, defensive Battlesite (like Danger Room or Hell's Kitchen): Surprise! This is just one of many H4H variations, and I just happen to like this one the best since Black Widow is the only 15 point character that can play special cards from reserve. There are a lot of different configurations for a H4H deck so I'm a bit remiss to lump them all in one category, but they all are going to have the focus of punching through defensive walls. Some may back H4H up with defense, some may go with more offense, but for the most part you can get away with counting them under the same archetype.

Strengths: not crippled by anti-energy cards, able to KO characters even in the most defensive decks
Weaknesses: can be difficult to keep team alive, little to no venture winning tricks as the deck is focused mostly on attacks

Mr. Fantastic, Invisible Woman, Thing, Namor: Sub-Mariner, Four Freedoms Plaza homebase, various mission sets/Battlesites or Any Heroes: This deck doesn't have very many special cards. It doesn't have any way to stop opponent's tricks/combos. It doesn't have any tricks of it's own outside of maybe conjuring something up with Battlesite/Missions (though I prefer any heroes for this deck). What it does have is three level eight stat characters (guaranteed win in the power pack), a homebase inherent that allows you to outplace your opponent fearlessly, and a lineup that allows characters to die without losing much. It's just a slug it out kind of deck, all you are really doing is hoping to have 3 cards placed to each character and a full hand and hope you can win just by attacking and blocking attacks. You have to hope to win either really quickly or really late, as anything inbetween your very plain deck composition will get you overwhelmed by fancier special cards and more sophisticated attacks.

Strengths: consistent, low duplicates, generate card advantage in the first few turns by outplacing opponent
Weaknesses: very straightforward, transparent strategy, near automatic loss to the Starjammers OPDs

There are a few more decks I'd consider top tier, but they fall into the "Other" category where they are not highly represented in swiss rounds but one or two of them are guaranteed to show up in top cut. Examples of these decks include Asteroid M homebase, Zealot/Serpent Society/H4H/3-stat Spider-Woman with Fatal Attractions, X-Man/Reavers/Starjammers/Spider-Woman, and so on.

So, what can be gleaned from all this?

-the majority of good decks are predictable, so you can add in cards specifically to beat them while they most likely do not have cards specifically to beat your specialized low tier deck

-the majority of good decks use Battlesites, meaning if you can field a lineup that is able to survive defensively without a Battlesite you can gain a huge advantage by running Any Heroes

-the majority of good decks have a minimum of one teammate avoid, try to exploit this (JWs, KO event to bring down the net, anti-avoid event, anti "teammate" event, Appetite for Destruction, Psycho-Man, etc)

-the cheesiest characters in the game are energy based, make them pay for having redundant grids (Brood OPD from a battlesite, Shockwave Rocks the World, etc)

-if you are using low tier energy characters, try to mitigate the pain of inadvertent anti-energy tech by running anti-fighting cards

-top dier decks are very "Starcraft-like" in composition: in Starcraft, the more units/money you can invest in gathering resources, the better positioned you are in you economy to overwhelm the opponent later on. Of course, they aren't going to let you expand and tech up without harassing you - and the hallmark of an excellent Starcraft player is that he will devote as few resources as possible to defending himself, usually at the very last second. What does this mean for Overpower? Character choice is done as efficiently as possible, allowing low tier decks to attempt to overcome their drawbacks by over-focusing on a single aspect. Prime example - overrun a deck with only one negate character and no JWs by utilizing a ton of non-attacking special cards (hello Marauders). Top tier decks are so focused on having just enough to cover each potential matchup vs. other top tier decks that there is no way they can properly prepare for any unique effects that low tier characters bring to the table, so use this to your advantage by emphasizing things a lesser used character can do that no other character can. This is far more preferable than trying to use a low tier character as a mini-version of some other better character, since you'll be playing against decks that are already tuned to play against the superior version already.

[drdeath25]

Great Article.

[BigBadHarve]

Great Article.

Agreed.   Keep 'em coming.

-BBH