March Madness Deckcheck: Skrulls

By Gdaybloke

Back in the days of MOR, we had Cully Hamner’s crisp, almost minimalist art depicting the Skrull Warrior and the Super Skrull, and dammit we were happy. We walked ten miles, barefoot, through snow, uphill all the way, to our local hobby store, which was just a cardboard box by the side of the interstate, and we were happy. These kids today, they just don’t know how good they have it.

What the smeg am I rambling about? If you don’t know, I’d say you’d either have to have either been living under a VS rock for the last year or so, or be so new to the game that you have no idea why everyone was so concerned about Teen Titans Go being printed in DCL.

MHG brought a resurgence to everyone’s favourite crag-chinned shapeshifters that shunted them from the depths of obcurity up the ranks to actually being competitive. Now, the question is, can the revitalised Skrulls hold their March Madness water when they can’t splash Franklin Richards?

The no-splashing rule does remove their most potent ally in VS, the son of their hated nemesis Reed Richards…. little Franklin, who would giggle and play with his toys while hiding the Skrull Captain America, who would then point the Skrull Wolverine at targets of opportunity and say something like “Go. Hunt. Kill for Skrullos.”

However, most of the Skrulls’ favourite toys are still in place - they just need to work a little harder to keep their cosmic counters.

After all, what’s a Skrull deck without an evil twisted version of Captain America making it impossible for you to stun his pals?

• 3x Skrull Soldier: Army
• 3x Warskrull: Skrull Infiltrator
• 3x Captain America: Skrull Imposter  
• 3x Wolverine: Skrunucklehead
• 3x Ethan Edwards: Visitor from Another World
• 3x Paibok: The Power Skrull
• 1x Super Skrull: Kl’rt
• 1x Titannus: Alien Conqueror
• 3x Battleword
• 2x Rann
• 3x Alien Insurrection
• 3x Interstellar Offensive
• 3x Act of Defiance
• 3x Acrobatic Dodge
• 3x Watch the Birdie! 

The curve’s almost self-explanatory. No Nenora - as handy as she would have been, I tried to avoid banned cards, so instead we have six Skrulls at the 2-slot, since we can’t afford to not have bodies on the field, and the Warskrulls can dig out Act of Defiance for us.

Captain America and Wolverine are no-brainers. Both are key to a good Skrull build, with Cap providing unstunnable attackers and Wolverine providing… well, a nice big ATK once he gets his cosmic counter. This all ties in with the choice of plot twists, which we’ll get to in a second.

Four brings us the beefy Ethan Edwards and five brings Paibok - these are the only Skrulls available at four and five, so it’s not like we had options, but both should be sufficiently beefy to carry the weight on their shoulders.

Six has a single copy of Kl’rt, as opposed to the MOR Super Skrull. I’d have loved to include two copies, but the “one rare character per deck” limit pretty much locks him down - I can’t really justify an exception to the rule in this case. With any luck he’ll be a 14/14 with a 6pt burn activation, leading right into…

Titannus at 7. If this guys any smaller than 17/17, then something’s not working right. It could be that guy who’s supposed to be clearing snow from our complex driveways, I’m not certain… all I know is I had to literally dig out the back end of my car yesterday after the snowbank fall over and bury it…

Battleworld and Rann both add additional team affiliations to my troops, as well as packing an ATK pump - do you get the idea we’re planning ton being aggressive with this deck yet? Battleworld also provides my worthy opponent with a teamup, but… all the decks in March Madness are Mono-Team, so who cares! Muhahahah!

(*cough*)

Interstellar Offensive is essentially a 1-threshold Savage Beatdown, Alien Insurrection is essentially a 1-threshold slightly-stronger-than-usual Nasty Surprise, Act of Defiance adds a little punch up the curve while also utilising the extra affiliations from the three- and four-drops…

And then we’re onto the “defensive” stuff.

I say “defensive” in inverted comma’s (air quotes FTW!) because of the two only Acrobatic Dodge is actually a defensive card. Watch The Birdie! adds anti-hidden tech and reduces opponent’s ATK’s while they’re defending. It won’t help us stun our victims, so why Watch The Birdie!?

As stated earlier, we don’t have Franklin to hide Captain America. This means he’s at risk of a Flying Kick or somesuch stealing his cosmic counter and thus denying us unstunnability. No immunity to stunbacks means we lose the cosmic counters on Wolverine, Ethan and Paibok - we’d rather keep ‘em if it’s all the same to you…

Skrull attackers should be sufficiently pumped to kick most foes in the teeth, but avoiding those stunbacks could well be the key staying in the game long enough to make all those attack pumps count.

So… is March Madness ready for the Skrull Invasion?

Stay tuned, and beware of green-skinned dudes with craggy chins…

Oh, and this is pretty much your last chance to participate in the March Madness pool at VSRealms! Make your picks, win prize cards! Doesn’t cost you a penny. Not even a Skrull one. First round games will be played tonight at Hobby League, the results posted thereafter - once the first results have been posted, no more participants will be accepted in two of the three betting pools (ie, choosing the overall winner, and choosing the bracket winners). You can still choose individual match winners after tonight, but you’ll miss out on a chunk of the fun.

Regular discussion of March Madness can als0 be found at VSRealms… all you have to do is clicky da linky… unless the linky is a Skrull, in which case it’ll probably lock you in a closet, assume your appearance, and go out and ruin your reputation by flirting with postal workers. Skrulls are wierd like that.