Cold shoulder for Cold Storage?

There’s been some discussion over at VSRealms lately regarding the value of Cold Storage. Is the card worth it? Does it have any real value? Can it make enough of a difference in a deck to make it worth playing?

Personally, I think so. Sure, it’s a kill-turn card, but no matter how you want to look at it, it saves you a character. Yes, at the cost of a resource, but if it’s your kill turn, what good’s that extra resource point going to do you anyway?

One point of the argument is that it brings the character back exhausted – no additional attacks, no exhausting to reinforce – the character’s just another body on the field now, but…

… what about using it do dodge uniqueness? Do it during the recovery phase and you’ll be down a resource for next turn but you’ll have two ready characters.

… what about using it to being back excellent defenders like the MODOC Squad to defend a critical character so that you can strike back when your attack step rolls around?

… and the one that seems most pertinent to me, what about those Leader effects? You don’t need to be ready to give a neighbouring character the benefit of Leader text, you just need to be there.

I’m currently testing a couple of Crime Lords BYOT builds – one based on the Kingpin/MODOC Squad combo, the other based on the Mr Fear/Red Skull loop. The latter hinges entirely on having two Mr Fear’s adjacent to 3-drop Red Skull…

So you can imagine how pleased I was when my opponent put a Power Dampener on Red Skull.

All of a sudden the one thing that made the loop possible was neutered, and I was looking at getting tromped…

Cold Storage made the difference. I was able to wait for an attack to be declared, Cold Storage Red Skull off the board and then bring him back exhausted, ditching the Power Dampener in the process into the same position between two Mr Fears, and the loop fired.

So… Cold Storage. Not as useless as some people seem to think. Now that we’ve got toys like Power Dampeners hiding in SHIELD decks (and in any deck that has a dual affiliated SHIELD character, really), Cold Storage becomes a handy way of getting rid of the darn things.

I’m not saying it’s solid gold, but I think it’s deserving of a little more credit than it’s getting. Why, I remember when people dismissed Steel Girder as a crap rare…