After a week’s hiatus, it’s time to get back to the shenanigans.

I make no apologies for this week’s picture. Seriously. You should have seen what Professor Power was originally yelling… at least I *think* it’s meant to be Professor Power… I’m pretty sure the guy on the receiving end of Cap’s… um… exertions is the Controller.

Oh, and last contest’s winner, as decided by the author of the Spidey’s Angels series of wacky vignettes, is Savant!

Savant wins three prize cards from my binders. Savant, please email me your address at losthemisphere@gmail.com and I’ll get the prizes in the mail to you!

Time for a non-VS T13… Thanks to a wonderful pal sharing with me a Youtube video that made me smile a very broad smile indeed, Lost Hemisphere is proud to present to you thirteen videos proving that while they may be under the command of the Dark Lord of the Sith is also the Dark Lord of the Dance, and as such he expects his troopers to follow suit…

NB: Lost Hemisphere accepts no responsibility for any of these performances. We don’t even own Stormtrooper costumes. View at your own risk.

Number one: It’s fun to see Chewie getting down, and the sudden appearance of Zam Wessel is a treat, but Vader’s entrance trumps all.

Number two: What a lovely… mantle…

Number three: I don’t think we can really describe this as “getting down”, but there’s some groovin’ goin’ on

Number four: Stormtroopers have humps???

Number five: A little slow to start, and definitely low budget armour, but he’s got moves.

Number six: It helps if you tilt your head sideways.

Number seven: Space invaders!

Number eight: It’s hard to get peanut butter on Dantooine.

Number nine: This one needs a soundtrack… but the minitrooper’s cute.

Number ten: Lord Vader is not above starting a street party.

Number eleven: A full length track, rather spiffily done.

Number twelve: Ballet in the far reaches of the galaxy.

Number thirteen: Finally, a little shimmy.

Aaaaand I’m done.

Time for another round of the Family Feud. This time, college pals Reed Richards and Ben Grimm go at it - the nerd vs the jock, a battle for the ages. Bill Gates has been telling us for years that the nerds win, and for many it’s been the only comfort in between bouts of atomic wedgies and swirlies. But is he right???

The Uatu-vision’s on the fritz this time, so we can’t see the players hands, but the plays are all out in the open and such.

Ben wins the toss, and takes odds.

Turn One:

Keeping his opening hand, Ben recruits Ant Man: Scott Lang. Reed follows suit, and recruits H.E.R.B.I.E.: Robot Nanny

Deciding to get an early start on the Endurance differential, Ben puts Ant Man through H.E.R.B.I.E., taking the dual stun but getting a point of break out of the bargain.

Both Ant Man and H.E.R.B.I.E. recover.

Reed: 48; Ben: 49

Turn Two:

Reed flips an Antarctic Research Base. Exhausting H.E.R.B.I.E., a free Framistat slides into play and Reed draws a card. Flipping New Baxter Building, Reed exhausts it for a second extra card, but doesn’t get his 2-drop.

Ben also misses his 2-drop, but H.E.R.B.I.E.’s exhausted so no threat. Herbie’s now a 5/2 with reinforcement on the defence, but Ant Man goes for the dual stun anyway.

Reed 47; Ben 48

Turn Three:

Ben recruits Thing: Idol o’ Millions (IoM).
Reed recruits Mr Fantastic: Reed Richards (RR); exhausting H.E.R.B.I.E., Reed moves the Framistat onto his 2-drop and hides the robotic nanny behind him.

Ben sends the 6/5 IoM into  the 5/4 RR. In respose, Reed activates RR to go digging for equipment, coming up with a Pogo Plane. Ben activates Ant Man, stripping RR’s reinforcement to allow a couple of points of breakthrough. For the stunback Ben flips Yancy Street, searching out a Thing: The Ever Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Thing (TELBET).

Not wanting to lose H.E.R.B.I.E. in a stunback to Ant Man, Reed passes combat and moves on to Recovery. Both Reed and Ben recover their namesakes.

R: 43; B: 45

Turn Four:

Reed recruits Franklin Richards: Trapped In Time, activates H.E.R.B.I.E. to move the Framistat to Franklin, and then removes H.E.R.B.I.E. from the game to give RR a free Personal Force Field. With the equipment recruited, Reed draws for ARB and NBB, and then activates RR to dig out a Future Technology.
With a much less active build phase, Ben recruits Crystal: Inhuman

At 12/9, Franklin ploughs into Crystal. Crystal forces Reed to move RR out from behind Franklin, then reinforces with Ant Man. Ben takes 4, dropping him to 41 Endurance. RR had activated to find the Future Tech, so combat passes to Ben.

Ben sends his 6/5 IoM into the now 2/6 RR. No effects, so RR stuns and Reed takes 2, also dropping to 41.

Reed: 41; Ben: 41

Turn Five:

Ben upgrades his IoM to the beefier Thing: Heavy Hitter (HH).

Once again showing an active recruit step, Reed upgrades to Mr Fantastic: Stretch after activating RR and finding another Framistat. With Stretch on the board, Reed flips Pier 4; recruiting a Pogo plane he draws for ARB and NBB, using the plane to dig out a spare location (and reduce the chance of drawing into it later). Recruiting a Framistat onto Stretch, Reed draws for ARB. He gives Franklin a Future Technology, drawing again. Another Pogo Plane, another draw. Franklin is now 15/9 (15/10 on defense), while Stretch is a nice even 10/10 (11 on defense) with flight. Both characters have inherent reinforcement to boot.

Barrelling into the combat phase, Ben sends HH into Franklin - 11/11 on 15/9. Flipping a Torch & Thing, HH suddenly becomes unstunnable; Franklin activates for 3 pts of burn thanks to Future Tech, and then goes down under a flurry of rocky fists and loses his cosmic counter.

Ben follows up by sending Crystal into Stretch with a pair of Clobbering Times to get to 13/12 on Stretch’s 10/11. Stretch activates to ready NBB, draws, goes down with Ant Man stripping his reinforcement.

With no-one left to respond with, the turn moves to Recovery and Reed opts to keep Stretch.

Reed: 30; Ben: 38

Turn Six:

Reed recruits Dr Strange, and gives him the Eye of Agamotto, drawing for ARB and NBB. Stretch uses his pogo plane to filter more locations out of the draw, recruits a fresh plane, activates to ready NBB, draws for ARB and NBB, uses the new Pogo Plane to filter out another location, gives Strange Future Tech and activates to burn for 3, drawing once more for ARB.

Ben calmly sends up a Signal Flare for Hulk: New Fantastic Four. R30 T35

Reed readies his board thanks to to Strange. sends Strange at 15/13 into Crystal in the back row. Ben responds with a Clobbering Pine to redirect into Heay Hitter, powers up twice for the stunback and reinforces with Ant Man before getting a future powerup with Yancy St.

Reed sends a 10/10 Stretch into Hulk, pumping twice for the stun. Without a pump to respond with, it’s a dual stun.

Finally, Ben sends Crystal into Reeds face for a right slapping.

Reed recovers Stretch, reliant on his free equipment text, while Ben recovers Hulk, since he already has TELBET in hand.

Reed: 12; Ben: 24

Turn Seven:

Ben recruits TELBET, respendent in his 16/16 beefiness. It’s a solid board, with Hulk, Crystal and Ant Man still hanging around.

Reed isn’t daunted by TELBET’s size, and recruits Hulk: The Fantastic Hulk, discarding no less than 8 character cards for +1/+1 tokens, followed by a Personal Force Field for Hulk and look, a Pogo Plane… drawing three extra cards thanks to ARB and NBB.

After much thought, Ben comes to terms with not having enough to get over a 24/26 Hulk without using both big guys (Ant Man’s in the back row). Thing and Hulk:NFF into Hulk:TFH, TELBET takes the stunback. Not having enough to get through Reed, Crystal passes.

Reed swings over into Crystal, Ant Man provides a handy reinforcement.

Ben recovers TELBET, finally losing Crystal.

Reed: 5; Ben: 13

Turn Eight:

Reed recruits a new Franklin, but has no equipment to add to him.

Ben responds with a Luke Cage: Paid In Full as a potential reinforcer

Reed opens the hostilities by sending Stretch flying over into Luke 13/10 on 8/8. Ben responds with a timely Clobbering Pines, pulling Stretch it into TELBET, stunning the brainiac…

With no good attacks with Franklin, Reed sends hulk into Hulk. Ben reinforces with Ant Man.

Reed: 0; Ben: 7 and Game.

Thus, in the end, a timely Clobbering Pine spelled the difference between victory and defeat, and in the end the Ever Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Idol o’ Millions walks away with a win.

Aaaaand we’re back.

For those of you who are just joining us, I’m rather exhaustively covering the cards available to an Illuminati deckbuilder. In part 1, I covered Illuminati-stamped support effects, the various members’ name-stamped Legend effects, and all the characters available to the “team” in Silver age. Today, I’m going to cover team-stamped effects you have access to thanks to the six members, as well as generics that are useful to the team. Finally, I’ll put it all together with a couple deck lists, and talk about general strategy.

At that point, my hands will fall off and I can sleep for the first time in a week.

*cries*

If you look hard enough, there’s actually a “Me” in “Team”.

Based on last week’s rough character selections, we see that we get six main teams from our support characters:

• Fantastic Four
• Inhumans
• Marvel Knights
• X-Men
• Avengers
• Infinity Watch

And depending on your specific character choices, you might end up with a few of these:

• SHIELD
• Atlantis
• Doom

Let’s take a look at these teams, and see if any of them offer us anything useful.

Fantastic Four

The Fan4 give us a few interesting toys. First of all, if we’re concerned about hitting certain drops (4-drop Reed, 6-drop Strange, and possibly our finishers if we go with Thing or Surfer), Fan4 have one of the simplest search cards in the game– pitch a Fan4 dude to go get one. Depending how heavy our contingent of Fan4 members are, this might end up being a worthwhile choice.

Actually, digging through the card list, there’s surprisingly little of use in the rest of the Fan4’s team-stamped card list– probably because the bulk of their MVL content was legend content. Out of the remaining cards, the only one I’d really consider using is Unstable Molecular Suit. If you’re using one of the 4-drop Mr. Fantastics as a turn 4 wall, the Suit could turn out to be a great help, simply making that wall even bigger. Even then, though, fitting these into the deck may turn out to be a bit difficult– we’ll see when we get to the decklist.

The rest of the Fan4 arsenal is made up of combat tricks and equipment support, and I doubt we’ll be needing much of those.

Inhumans

The Inhumans give us quite a few nice toys to work with, though of course it’s entirely Silver content. First and foremost, they give us several search cards– Great Refuge will ALWAYS get you the 1-drop Black Bolt, and so will Lockjaw, though he eats up a resource to do so. More exciting, though, is Attilan– as long as you’ve got Black Bolt on the field and you’ve maintained a face-up row (again, not TOO hard to do with this deck), Attilan puts absolutely any card from your deck on top of it, ready to be drawn or replaced into your row. Pulling this off may prove to be a little tricky, though, since you can’t flip all your resources in one burst if you need to– your best ones require exhausts, so putting Attilan online may not be quite reliable enough to merit inclusion; I guess you’d have to test and see.

Still vaguely under the “card draw/consistency” umbrella is Final Decree. Played during the build phase, Final Decree simply replaces as many resources as you’d like, which could theoretically be useful as some emergency card draw (since ALL of our support cards are playable from the row, and in fact most prefer to be used from there). However, I think this may be a bit risky– we’ll likely be playing a lot of single copies of characters, and getting one replaced into the row could end up being very, VERY bad for us. So, I think we’ll skip Decree.

Next up, the Inhumans have a small number of stall mechanisms and defensive tools. One that really catches my eye is Waking the Ancestors– exhaust an Inhuman to make a character not ready this turn. Sure, they need to be exhausted to begin with, but against our deck, all characters enter play exhausted! The more I look at this, the more useful it is– Waking the Ancestors could turn out to be a complete lockdown of a certain opposing character until you’re ready to deal with it properly.

The rest of the Inhumans’ stall tools seem to be defense pumps of various sorts. Blue Area of the Moon is a reusable From The Shadows, but I doubt our Black Bolts will be attacking much, so I think I’ll pass. Power Struggle is an Acrobatic Dodge for an Inhuman on either side of an attack, but a) as I just said, Bolt shouldn’t be in combat much, and b) it needs to be played from the row, and ours is probably too crowded. Finally, Himalayan Enclave gives all of our hidden people +1DEF, regardless of their team– but I think if we end up fighting someone who can hit our hidden area often enough for that to matter, we’ve probably already lost.

Marvel Knights

Marvel Knights probably won’t be providing us very many team-stamped effects, as they’re largely a smash/KO team, and we’re looking for stall effects. Still, though, I did find two effects that look like they might be helpful to us. First of all, there’s the easy-to-use MK search card, “Wild Ride”. The other team-stamped search cards I’ve mentioned (or will mention) are fairly marginal, but I think Wild Ride deserves more scrutiny because of one factor: Dr. Strange 2-drop is a $17 rare. This guy is very helpful for two different MUN teams, and being a low-drop, most people are going to need a playset for him to be any use at all. Thus, his price has shot through the roof (definitely higher than his actual performance seems to justify), and most players will have trouble tracking down enough copies of him to finish their deck. For these people, I’m going to suggest an almost-as-good alternative: track down ONE copy of Strange, and fill in the rest of your “playset” with Wild Ride. They’re simply the card slots you’d use for Strange if you had him, and who knows, they might even be useful to grab you a 6+ drop if you decide to build that way. This certainly isn’t ideal, but it’s probably easier to trade for an old MMK copy of Wild Ride than a playset of Stranges.

The other card you might look at here is Defensive Formation. All of our characters except Sub-Mariner have range, so this could turn out to be a huge defensive pump. Our lowbie Strange is a 2-drop and shouldn’t be defending, but the 6-drop is visible, so he has a fairly realistic chance of getting smacked at some point. Now, that said– by the time the 6-drop Strange hits the board, you’re probably already controlling the board with Gauntlet and Iron Man, so this may not be necessary. Still, though… it’s nice to know the option is there.

X-Men

With the X-Men set having just slipped out of Silver, the number of options they give us for support cards just got cut in half. Of the ones that remain, we’re looking most at recovery cards. Children of the Atom is probably too hard to fire, as it’ll only recover Professor X, and will require you to discard another copy of him to do so. Muir Island is much more permissive– discard an X-Men character card, OR any two cards, to recover a 4-drop-or-less. We’re definitely going to need to run SOME kind of recovery in our deck, and Muir’s definitely a frontrunner. We’ll take another look at it a bit later on.

The only other card I’d pay much attention to from the X-Men stable is Xavier’s Institute of Higher Learning. If you’ve got a non-stunned X-Man during recovery, this gets you a card. This is a great effect, but it’ll be hard to fire for us– the visible 1 and 2-drop Professor X are going to get stunned more often than not, and it won’t be worth firing a recovery effect JUST to use this card. So while it might get you a card or two once your blocker is up, or once you’ve upgraded to the hidden 3-drop prof, I don’t think this is going to be giving you cards on any kind of reliable basis.

Avengers

The Avengers had a pretty huge feature in MUN, and both playable versions of Iron Man (3 and 5) have the affiliation, so we can be pretty sure that we’ll have access to them most of the time by the mid-game. Unfortunately, though, these have the same problem as the Marvel Knights support cards– they’re designed to support a beats deck, and not a control deck. As with the other “main teams” I’ve listed, the Avengers give us a search card to help us hit our copies of Tony– not very useful in the Modern build, since there are plenty of chances to hit him by 5, but potentially quite handy if we’re planning around hitting the 3-drop Iron Man in a Silver build and using him as our tank.

I’d love to include Switching Sides in our deck, but sadly I can’t see us exhausting either of our Iron Men to it, so it’s probably not going to see play. The last card the Avengers give us is similarly underwhelming: Electron Scrambler. You drop this equipment on an opposing character and take away their Activated powers. Unfortunately, this just isn’t that helpful– you can’t put it on a hidden guy, so it doesn’t stop a lot of the more irritating activated effects (Bullseye, Ahmed, etc). And as for the hidden ones, if someone’s really pissing you off that much, you can just Elektra their text box away. Now, if the Illuminati-useful versions of Tony were SHIELD instead of Avengers, I’d be all over Electron Scrambler’s sister card– but we’ll get to that in my crying section a few paragraphs down.

Infinity Watch

The Infinity Watch, while present on every “Protector Of” character, isn’t a tremendously useful affiliation, given that it only has three support cards. The first is their search card, which would be great if it didn’t require you to run a large number of Infinity Gems to power it. The gems themselves are great, but none of them can go on hidden characters, so you’ll rarely get a chance to play them– and it’s not worth playing them JUST to power your search card.

Next up for the Watch is the half-stamped Soul World, which only costs you 2 endurance to use in an Illuminati deck. This seems like a good deal, but given that our deck: a) has no discard-powered effects, b) has little to no mill, and c) already has access to recursion effects through Namor, I don’t think we’ll need Soul World.

The last support card they have access to is Monster Island, which stops each player from targeting his own biggest guys. This is actually fairly useful for our deck, but it ends up being a little redundant; the thing you most expect people to target their biggest guy with is combat pumps, and our opponents’ biggest guys never see combat since they’ll almost always be exhausted. I’d run Monster Island if Clandestine didn’t exist, but it does, so I won’t.

Doom

And now we enter the “if only” segment of the build. Doom is notorious for his broken stall effects, and the 3-drop Iron Man I advocate playing in Silver has the affiliation. Unfortunately, every single effect I’d want to use is stamped to Doom himself by name, so the affiliation doesn’t do us a damned bit of good. I briefly considered using Carrying the Torch to make one of our 3-drops into Doom to help power Mystical Paralysis and such, but I think that’s starting to be a completely different deck– actually, a pretty solid one, now that I think about it. Run just enough Illuminati to power Clandestine and Elektra, then use Doom and Puppet Master to exhaust whatever they’ve got left. Hmm… there’s actually some potential there. I think I’ll do something with this later.

SHIELD

Sigh… if only. I love… love… LOVE the SHIELD support cards in MUN. Power Dampeners is pretty much my favourite card ever printed, shutting down so many cards with such a minimal investment. SHIELD also has two huge DEF pumps in Company of Heroes and Out For Justice, You’re Under Arrest for activation negation, Security Clearance for unlimited search… the list goes on. I’d love to have a blanket SHIELD affiliation on our board, but sadly, the only way we have of getting it is on two 4-drops– a Mr. Fantastic with a bad ability, and an Iron Man whose text box might as well be blank. It makes me so sad. I dunno… there MIGHT be some potential with that version of Reed, since the main reason I want Critical Thinker is to reuse a Stretch Out during an attack (Play it, Namor it on top of the deck, Critical Think it to hand, play it again), and he DOES do that quite nicely… but… ehh. It’s probably too much work and deck space to be worth it.

But hey… I can dream.

Plain Noodles, Please.

Hmm… the team-stamped effects list was shorter than I expected. Let’s see what we can dig up in the generic suite. I guess I’ll go set-by-set in reverse order.

MUN

MUN, being the set that released the Illuminati, has a few cards that seem tailor-made to fit them. The first one that struck me when I was building my Illuminati deck was Empire’s End, which takes 2ATK off anybody who enters play for this turn. It’s a great card– but it overlaps with a better card, Clandestine Operations. One blunts new recruits, the other removes them from the equation entirely. Now, that said, Empire’s End deserves some attention for two reasons:

1. Just as Wild Ride can temporarily sub for Dr. Strange 2-drop if you’re short on copies, Empire’s End can sub in for Clandestine until you pick up your playset. It’s not ideal, but the 2 or 4ATK you chop off a new recruit can often be enough to stop them from doing anything useful, so you’re not much further behind than if you’d exhausted them.
2. In my testing, I’ve been missing Clandestine a lot, even with a full 4 copies in the deck. It really hurts to get smacked by new recruits, so I’ve been debating adding two Empire’s End in addition to my 4 Clandestines, to ensure that I hit SOMETHING to blunt newbies.

One card that seems tailor-made for the Illuminati is Invasion Plans. You’ll often have a spare body or two to exhaust, and it’s not like you’re going to be attacking anybody otherwise. I’d say that if you’re building an Illuminati deck, start out with 4 of these in it, but it’s probably your first cut if you start to be short on space– the extra 2 cards, while nice, are still only a one-deeper dig than if you weren’t playing Plans at all. Good, but not essential.

At first glance, I thought Flattened was a solid card, giving you the same effect as the excellent Waking the Ancestors I mentioned above, for a discard instead of an exhaust. Upon further inspection, though, it needs a STUNNED character, not an EXHAUSTED one, so you’ll rarely get anyone of value with it (since your guys kinda suck in combat).

Someone pointed out to me an interesting use for Frog of Thunder: if you’ve got Clandestine online, Frog basically reads, “exhaust target character that didn’t enter play this turn”. If your opponent has a fierce board and you’re looking at getting turned inside out this turn, Frog could be just enough disruption to turn things around. Personally, while I respect the power of the combo, it’s just a little too random for me– it depends too much on hitting Clandestine, and I only get it every other game or so, since my mulligan is always for characters and not plot twists. I can definitely see a justification for including it, but personally I’d give the deck space to something a little more integral. Oh, and if your answer is “it also nukes equipment and counters”, I’d counter that most of the equipment in Modern right now is largely irrelevant to you, and the two characters you most fear having counters aren’t afraid of Frog– 4-drop Iron Man can Stark his counters off and then put them back on the next copy of himself that comes out, and Radioactive Man stops you from playing Frog in the first place.

Beyonder is a fantastic piece of “free” recovery– he requires no exhausts, and can be searched at any time with I’m A Futurist. Running Illuminati without at least one copy of him is… well… stupid. Another “free” recovery effect shows up in My Name Is Peter Parker. If you’re running the “one visible tank” strategy, Pete could be quite handy to ensure he always survives the turn– but on the other hand, if you’re running the “one visible tank” build, you’re probably running the hidden Prof instead of the visible one, so you’re never taking two stuns unless your opponent has hidden hate. And if your opponent has hidden hate… you’ve kinda lost already. :/ Oh, and a quick note– Beyonder’s counterpart, Death, isn’t very useful to us, for the same reason Flattened isn’t; we just don’t stun people.

Uncertain Legacy could be quite handy if you’re playing a Clash of Worlds swarm build– you’ve got a spare Clash and a resource point, so grab another Black Bolt or Mr. Fantastic with Legacy and bring it out. Also useful if you’re playing a defined curve with an upgrade at a particular point– for example, upgrading the 2-drop Strange for the 6-drop.

A couple quickies on the “thanks, but no thanks” list: Death of the Dream isn’t very helpful, as running a 3-drop Black Bolt covers your “oh crap I’ve been Omnipotenced” protection, and I don’t think we have enough room in the deck to be running “random” hate for hate’s sake. House of M has exactly one use: if you’ve got Professor X visible in your back row, protected by Critical Thinker, and your opponent has a flier, House of M stops you from getting smashed through your 1-drop. This single situational use isn’t worth it IMHO. Carrying the Torch isn’t worth the deck space you’d need to commit to running any non-Illuminati character, and in pure Illuminati it’s unlikely to be helpful in doubling up the name of a character you haven’t managed to get into play yet, since Gauntlet requires six exhausts, not five exhausts with six names. Sleeper Cells would be useful if its threshold was 4 instead of 5– you’ve got the bodies to spend to exhaust an opponent’s attacker, but by 5 you’ve got Clandestine and Iron Man online, and possibly even the Gauntlet. If you need extra exhausts by that point, you’re kind of already losing.

I’ll cover the pros and cons of team-ups in the build section later on, but for now I’ll mention the three that have some potential. Heroes for Hire is your card of choice if you’re planning to double gauntlet on 6 (by playing 6-drop Dr. Strange, making everybody Fan4, and readying them all at the start of combat for a second exhaust)– it’s 4END to affiliate Tony, Prof, Namor, and Bolt, which is probably worth it if that’s your aim. SHRA is nice as it gives you some pseudo-card draw (letting you recruit off the top is basically free draw), and lets you run Shape Change, since you’ll know how much it’s firing for even if you haven’t stacked the deck with Subby. And finally, Underground Movement gets a mention for the simple fact that it hides Professor X for you. This is a really narrow application, but c’mon– play a couple games with him and tell me it’s not tempting. His 1-drop body is a huge liablity visible, and I can definitely see the allure of shoving him among the black cards. I’m not sure I’d act on the urge, but it’s definitely something to consider.

DCX

DCX gives us two cards of note. First up is Origin Story. Like Uncertain Legacy mentioned above, Origin Story can get a lot of mileage in an Illuminati build. If you’re swarming, it can be used to upgrade a character (the 1-drop Prof for the 3-drop, to hide him), though in that build Uncertain Legacy will probably be better, since it doesn’t KO the one already in play. The upgrade will probably be better in a curve build as I mentioned earlier, and if you’re doing a straight upgrade, Origin Story is probably the better choice, as it gives you a card in hand instead of just KOing the old version.

The other card that’s useful from DCX is Clash of Worlds, which I’ve mentioned several times by now. Simply put, if you’re playing a swarm build of Illuminati, you MUST include four copies of Clash. The swarm build will run into major uniqueness problems (”I’ve got four resources left, but all the characters in my hand are already in play!”), and Clash allows you to avoid wasting your points. Granted, it’s not a perfect situation– you can’t exhaust, say, two Black Bolts for the same Illuminati effect, since they all specify “exhaust X different Members of the Illuminati”. But the extra copies can always be exhausted for different effects, say by exhausting two different pairs of Black Bolt/Mr. Fantastic to draw a card for each.

Clash isn’t that useful in a curve build, as theoretically your curve is designed to hit a certain character each turn, and you should be able to ensure that that character doesn’t interfere with a previous drop.

DCL

Now that I think about it: if you’re considering playing Invasion Plans, why not just run Birthing Chamber instead? It’s reusable, not restricted to a particular time, and doesn’t require an exhaust. And if you don’t plan to get to the six-character threshold… what the heck are you doing playing Illuminati? The fact that it occupies a spot in your row is a concern, but it’s not a deal-breaker by any means.

My favourite card for Illuminati in DCL is without a doubt Dirty Tricks. You DO NOT CARE about combat for at LEAST the first six turns of the game, and getting out multiple copies of Tricks will ensure that: 1) Characters, especially small swarmy ones, do less or no damage when hitting you directly, which they probably will at some point, and 2) if you decide to go with a visible blocker, Tricks will effectively boost his DEF, making him more effective and require your opponents to spend more pumps to get over him. Now, admittedly– it’s hard to find room for this card, both in the deck and the resource row, but personally I think it’s worth it. Right now it’s in my Illuminati deck in the slot I used to reserve for Omnipotence, and so far I’ve found it to be more useful, as Omni really only stops opposing copies of Omni, since you can just Elektra opposing characters who scare you, whereas Dirty Tricks puts a damper in ANY combat deck’s efforts to bleed you out. Not everyone will agree with me on this, but personally, I can’t see making an Illuminati deck without Tricks unless I’m REALLY short on space.

Once again on the Visible Tank strategy, Coast City gives you a possible solution to that accursed visible 1-drop Professor X, by making him unattackable while behind your tank. This has some potential, but it’s going to be unreliable (your best efforts at tanking WILL fail eventually, leaving Prof attackable anyway), and I’m not sure this effect is worth a resource row slot. I’d probably skip this.

You’re going to need SOME way to take out an opposing Omnipotence, and there are basically three “ideal” ways to do it– 3-drop Bolt, Have a Blast, and a third card I’ll mention later in the example decklists section. Of the three, I prefer Bolt, and my co-conspirator Paul Sung prefers the as-yet-unspecified mystery card. I can sort of see playing Blast (it’s searchable by Dr. Strange on turn 6 with Essence of Zom if you’re recruiting the 6-drop, which is the turn I personally plan to have the glove online, so the timing’s nice), but the plot twist-searching mechanisms in the deck aren’t THAT solid, and I’d prefer to run something that can be fetched with a smaller investment.

Heroes of Two Worlds is theoretically a pretty useful card for our deck, particularly in the swarm build, where it essentially gets you ANY character you need to complete the Gauntlet requirement. In the curve build it’s probably less necessary, as you can simply run 4 of your 4+ drops, which gives a pretty solid chance of hitting them with all of your other search and draw. Heroes certainly isn’t an essential card, but it can be a nice smoother if your swarm build needs more search.

TDB and I went back and forth on the usefulness of Home Surgery. It seems really good for blunting a rush deck (you recover your tank with a hidden guy to make the opponent run through him again, or use this as an anti-Skree to recover a small drop that got smashed into), but the problem is that it completely clashes with your OTHER anti-Rush card, Clandestine Operations; if your 5 is exhausted before combat, he CAN’T recover your 4 during combat. I’ll get into the details later on, but personally I didn’t end up running this in my own build– if I need a recovery card, I’d rather just run multiple copies of Beyonder, as he doesn’t require an exhaust, and you’re realistically only going to fire a Home Surgery once a game anyway.

I touched on this earlier, but Shape Change is probably your best bet in Modern for a defense pump if you feel you need one. With 3-drop Namor on the board, you can repeatedly stack the same 10-drop on top of your deck to mill with Shape Change, giving yourself a solid brickwall once or twice a game. I’m personally not convinced that this huge brick is necessary (unless you’re running my personal choice of Brick in Critical Thinker, who has the less-work-required Stretch Out to accomplish the same thing on a smaller scale, making Shape Change kind of redundant) since you should have pretty solid control of the game through all your exhaustion effect. But hey, if you feel you need a DEF pump, this is probably your champ.

MCG/MEX

The Coming of Galactus kit brought two obvious choices for us: the ubiquitous Omnipotence and Pathetic Attempt. If you’re playing in a tourney setting, it’s probably going to be necessary for you to run Omnipotence and take odds– you HAVE to flip your own Omni and name Omni to stop from getting locked out of Infinity Gauntlet. It also has other uses, shutting down some burn characters and maybe even taking out an opponent’s win condition (Endgame, for example). Personally I play at a much more casual level, and I find Elektra Situation handles most of the problems I run into… but if you’re playing anywhere above that, you’ll probably want the extra insurance.

Pathetic Attempt seems kind of iffy to me. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of more than a handful of effects I’m afraid of being targeted by, though admittedly, those few hurt pretty badly. Bullseye - Lester lets the opponent rape our hidden area, but a) a single PA doesn’t stop him forever, and b) Elektra DOES. 4-drop Torch from MVL is the same. Burn is definitely a problem, coming notably from Great Arena and Human Torch 4-drop from MUN, but even in those matchups, the burn is rarely lethal if you’ve established your lock correctly. I dunno… there are certainly effects I can see wanting to protect yourself from, but I’d say that Omni and Elektra can handle a good 2/3 of them, and the deck is just too packed to find room for an answer to half a dozen seldom-played cards.

Oh, and someone pointed out to me that they found Ultimate Nullifier to be useful in a swarm build, as it shuts down a lot of those annoying payment powers we just talked about. It’s a little hard to search for and may end up doing nothing at all, but I dunno… this might actually be a better choice than PA if you’re afraid of being targeted, as the bulk of the scary targeting effects these days are on characters.

MVL

Another one that was pointed out to me as being helpful for swarm is Medkit. I’m not a huge fan of this myself (I think you’ll get more mitigation out of Dirty Tricks), but I can certainly see the appeal, especially if you go whole-hog for an endurance gain engine using Messiah Complex and the like.

Don’t play Construction Site or Research Facility. You’re going to be running too many 1-ofs to risk it. Oh, and don’t bother with Evil Lair. You’ll make up the endurance differential later on.

Someone tried to convince me that Assorted Aliases is a good choice for defending your tank. I’m not seeing it– it requires too much “aligning of the stars” with regards to your hand contents, and it’s likely not that much better than Shape Change’s average mill.

Mobilize has some potential, IF you’re planning to go for a global team-up. All the extra search you can get is welcome. Though keep in mind the risks– if you draw two Mobys and no SHRA, you’re holding dead cards. Don’t fool yourself into thinking it won’t ever happen.

Only Human is cheaper-but-worse Elektra Situation. I don’t see it being worthwhile.

(These “reviews” are getting shorter because a lot of the cards retread each other. Or possibly because it’s 2am and my brain is tired. I dunno which.)

DWF

There’s only one DWF card I’d consider running: Chilly Reception. Even then, I wouldn’t run it as a 4-of– I’d say it’s probably only useful as a 1-of in a deck you’ve built to abuse Essence of Zom for toolboxing. I’ve mentioned it a few times, but Clandestine/Iron Man/Glove really IS enough most of the time to lock your opponents down. The extra exhausts from all these secondary sources really aren’t necessary most of the time, though I can see justifying the deck space for a single toolboxable copy of this one, since it requires no effort or cost to play.

MTU

We’re now leaving Modern and stepping into the realm of Silver. I’m going to say no to Poker Night for the same reason I’m turning down every other reinforcement effect– if things are going well, you won’t rneed reinforcement, and if things aren’t going well, a single reinforcement effect won’t be enough to save you.

I almost want to run Ego Gem (to drop on 1-drop Prof), but I find that I usually need all my exhaustable bodies for my “standard” Illuminati effects, and so I doubt I’d want to use the gem very often.

Oh, and “The Illuminati” is, somewhat ironically, completely useless to us.

DLS

There’s not much of interest in DLS. Earth 2 has some potential, I suppose, in the swarm build. You might find yourself with a random unspendable resource point here and there, so being able to use it to draw a card isn’t a bad thing. Still, though… I think you’re better off adding cards to avoid that situation, than planning to make unsatisfying recruits in the first place. E2 might have a place, and it’s certainly worth testing, but I doubt I’d use it myself.

I’ve been badmouthing reinforcement effects, but there’s one that MIGHT– repeat, MIGHT– be better than the rest. Girls’ Night Out, rather than reinforcing a defender, cuts out the breakthrough on the attacker’s side, which means you can play it when you’re being attacked directly. An opponent playing a rush deck will likely try to save his pumps until he’s hitting you to the face, so having a Girls’ Night Out ready to cut out his entire attack could end up being a really brutal move, forcing him to waste all of his pumps at once. I doubt I’d run this because I’d generally be running a visible blocker, but if you want to try the all-hidden build, this might not be a bad choice.

MHG

The generic suite of MHG has nothing to help us. All the good stall in this set is Inhumans- or Heralds-stamped.

DCR

Closing out the Silver sets, DCR only has one card that helps us, but it’s actually pretty great. Remember my breakdown of Home Surgery above? How the problem with it was that it required one guy bigger than the target, and our “bigger guy” is usually exhausted? Well, here’s your solution: Revitalize. Your 4-drop will be exhausted on 4, but your 2 and 3 will still be ready to recover him with Revitalize. They’ll be ready on 5, too. Revitalize is a really handy recovery card, and after the one or two Beyonders I’d run in a Silver swarm deck, I’d also toss in Revitalize as the backup. It’s easy to fire, while letting you keep your board around. Just a great card.

LET THERE BE DECKS!

Ugh… soooooo tired of reviewing cards. >_< Let’s make some decks, shall we?

First up, I’m going to show you a sample Silver deck, which will take advantage of some of the Silver-only options to make a nice little swarm build. Next, I’ll show you the curve build I loosely assisted Paul “Deranged Bear” with a couple days before Worlds, which is a curve-based Modern build. And finally, I’ll take a look at a rather oddball way of using the Illuminati support.

Silver Illuminati

1-drops
3x Professor X - Mutant Benefactor
4x Black Bolt - Enemy Within

2-drops
2x Black Bolt - Illuminati
4x Dr. Strange - Secret Avenger
4x Mr. Fantastic - Protector of the Power Gem

3-drops
3x Iron Man - Illuminati
3x Sub-Mariner - Protector of the Time Gem
1x Professor X - Protector of the Mind Gem
1x Black Bolt - Protector of the Space Gem

4-drops
1x Dr. Strange - Protector of the Soul Gem

5-drops
2x Iron Man - Protector of the Reality Gem

6-drops
[none]

7-drops
1x Starfire - X’Hal’s Fury

8-drops
1x The Sentry - Mighty Avenger

10-drops
1x The Beyonder - Inhuman

30 characters

Plot Twists
4x Secret Government
3x Essence of Zom
4x Clandestine Operations
3x Elektra Situation
3x The Infinity Gauntlet
4x Dirty Tricks
3x I’m A Futurist
4x Clash of Worlds

Locations
2x Birthing Chamber

30 non-characters

This deck is pretty simple to play: spam out characters. Every Illuminati member has a version with a cost of 3 or less, so you’re trying to get them all out by 5 if possible, but definitely by 6. You toolbox the higher versions as required– 5-drop Iron Man will be necessary against any rush decks, 4-drop Strange is there to fight off annoying plot twists (Heat Wave, anyone?), 3-drop Black Bolt takes out opposing Omnipotences, and 3-drop Professor X is there to upgrade you to a hidden Prof.

This deck features my preferred Illuminati finisher combo– Starfire and Sentry. This is what I use in my Modern deck, but it works just as well in Silver. On 7, your opponent won’t have a 7 (since you’ll be Gloving his hand), and you can use 5-drop Iron Man to exhaust his 6. With only a 5-drop to swing with, your opponent is unlikely to get through Starfire’s 16DEF, especially with Dirty Tricks in play, and ESPECIALLY if you’ve got someone visible blocking for her. So at the start of recovery, your opponent goes down to one character and takes a bunch of burn. On turn 8, you bring out Sentry, activating him to nuke whatever opposing character survived last turn. You Glove again, and now your opponent has absolutely nothing on the board, and realistically no chance of recovering. On turn 9, you glove again, and then smash your opponent for 34 with your 7 and 8. If that’s not enough, you do it again on 10. I’m a big fan of the Starfire/Sentry package because as long as you survive turn 7, you’re almost guaranteed the lock from 8 onward.

As I mentioned in the character write-ups, the 3-drop Iron Man is a huge advantage for this deck, as it gives you a fairly realistic shot of assembling the Gauntlet by turn 5. One thing this version of the deck doesn’t take advantage of, though, is Tony’s potential as a damage sponge. Sure, he’s blocking 2 damage with his 5DEF butt, but if you add in all the Legend crap from MUN, he can actually become insanely beefy. If you want to try that build, I’d drop a 2-drop Black Bolt to put Tony at 4 copies, and change the support suite to:

Plot Twists
4x Secret Government
3x Essence of Zom
4x Clandestine Operations
3x Elektra Situation
3x The Infinity Gauntlet
3x I’m A Futurist
3x Clash of Worlds

Locations
4x Stark Armory

Equipment
3x Extremis Upgrade

30 non-characters

With this build, you’ve got a Tony who’s on-curve through turn 5, and the Extremis means your opponents need to wade through him twice to make any headway. Sadly I had to cut the Dirty Tricks to fit all the legend support, but I think Tony’s huge butt makes up for them.

Modern Illuminati

by Paul “TheDerangedBear” Sung

1-drops
4x Professor X - Mutant Benefactor
4x Black Bolt - Enemy Within

2-drops
4x Dr. Strange - Secret Avenger
1x Mr. Fantastic - Protector of the Power Gem

3-drops
4x Sub-Mariner - Protector of the Time Gem

4-drops
4x Mr. Fantastic - Critical Thinker

5-drops
2x Iron Man - Protector of the Reality Gem

6-drops
1x Dr. Strange - Ally of the Four
1x Ravenous - Steward of Annihilus
1x Spider-Man - Outlaw

7-drops
1x The Sentry - Forgotten Hero

8-drops
1x Silver Surfer - Norrin Radd

10-drops
1x The Beyonder - Inhuman

30 characters

Plot Twists
4x Secret Government
4x Clandestine Operations
4x The 100 Ideas
4x Stretch Out
3x Elektra Situation
3x The Infinity Gauntlet
3x I’m A Futurist
3x Omnipotence
3x Home Surgery

30 non-characters

I’ll preface this next section with this: “I ultimately had very little impact on this deck, and the several hour chat I had with Paul was mostly composed of me suggesting bad ideas, him ignoring them, and him coming up with a much better one. This deck is 99% Paul’s brilliant work, and my contribution was as little more than a sounding board.”

Paul approached me on Wednesday while he was stuck at the Vegas airport, looking to see if I had any ideas for improving Illuminati’s game against rush, because in his testing IG Concealed and Hulk Rush just eat Illuminati alive. We knew there are two ways to stop rush: you either exhaust all their potential attackers, or you sponge out some of their damage. Up to that point, my sponge of choice had been Dirty Tricks, but TDB hated that idea, as it just wasn’t making enough of a difference to matter, especially against Hulk. We couldn’t find anything to really help exhaust opponents, either, because by the time Sleeper Cells comes online on 5, we’ve already got the game under control. Jokingly, I suggested that he play Mr. Fantastic - Stringbean, calling Defense, and then play Stretch Out to soak up hits. My idea was stupid, but it clicked something else in TDB’s head– Stringbean’s a piece of crap, but Critical Thinker is a huge blocker already. His ideal curve up to that point involved Subby on turn 3, so a combo was born: on 4, your opponent swings into Reed. You play Stretch Out from hand, let it resolve, exhaust Subby and a 1-drop to put it back on top, and Critical Think it back to your hand to play it again. That’s 17DEF on turn 4, which should be more than enough to keep a rush deck from a turn 4 win, letting you take control of the board on turn 5, and eventually lead into Gloving them on 6.

This deck differs greatly from the Silver build because instead of swarming with whatever you have (which is, technically, a faster way to get the glove, but leaves your board open to get wrecked, and of course it relies on access to the 3-drop Tony), it has a solid curve plan. A 1-drop on 1, the other one on 2. Secret Government to get Namor on 3. Return it to your deck to use again to get Mr. Fantastic on 4. Mr. Fantastic blocks beatdown decks from winning too soon, using the Stretch Out combo to brickwall attacks. Turn 5 brings Iron Man, who locks down their opposing drop-minus-one, with Clandestine up by this point to shut down the turn drop. Turn 6, Dr. Strange comes out and completes your Glove; you use it to nuke the opponent’s turn-minus-one, ready Strange and Reed at the start of combat, and exhaust them to Tony’s power to exhaust the turn-minus-2. Turn 7, you’ve got the init– before the opponent lays a resource, you Glove them to make sure they can’t recruit this turn. Drop Sentry, who can’t be stunned this turn. Start of combat, use Namor’s power with Reed and Strange to put a Fan4 character on top of your deck (to prep for Surfer next turn) and slam Sentry into their biggest remaining guy. Turn 8, you start the lock– Surfer steals the init and hides behind Sentry, leaving a flier-less opponent completely unable to stun your guys. From that point on, you simply keep stealing the init and smashing their board until their endurance is gone.

One thing that’s interesting to note about Paul’s build is that he’s turned his turn 6 into a toolbox. With Tony out on 5, you can use Futurist to find your toolbox characters– Ravenous to shoot down an opposing Omnipotence, or Spidey to shut down hidden-heavy decks. Now, to be honest, I’m not really a big fan of the latter segment of Paul’s deck. His turn 6 toolbox is definitely handy, but personally, I find that I’m almost guaranteed to miss SOME part of my first three turns, which means that the ONLY way I can get the Gauntlet online is to underdrop on 6. Playing one of the toolbox characters means you’re completely writing off the Gauntlet, and I just don’t think I’m prepared to do that. Why shut down Omnipotence if you need to abandon the Gauntlet to do so?

We also ran into a bit of a problem with the Home Surgeries. The original plan was to use Home Surgery on turn 5 by exhausting 5-drop Tony to recover your 4-drop Reed, but this combo doesn’t actually work– Clandestine exhausts Tony the moment he hits play. So, you end up in kind of an awkward position– either you play Clandestine and settle for Home Surgery only on your turn-minus-2, or you don’t play it to have better access to Surgery, but then get raped by your opponent’s turn-drops. Neither is a terribly exciting proposition, to be honest.

I’m not sure if the version above is the list Paul took with him to Worlds, but it’s the last version he sent me on Thursday morning, so it’s the most recent list I have. Admittedly, Paul’s deck is a little above my head, and I’m probably missing some of the subtleties involved. I’m sure he’ll be writing about it for his Bearsday on Thursday, so we’ll have to wait until then to correct the gaps in my understanding. Still, I did try to adapt his basic shell (I think his 1 to 6 curve is just about the perfect shell for an Illuminati non-swarm deck) into something that corrects the flaws I saw– or if not actual flaws, then at least “things I wasn’t good enough to use right”.

I dropped the Home Surgeries, and instead simply played more copies of The Beyonder. Granted, you can only Beyonder once per game, but realistically you’re only going to get one Home Surgery too, so that’s no reason not to play him. I also dropped the Omnipotences because I just don’t know opposing decks well enough to make smart calls with Omni. I’m running Dirty Tricks in the Omni slot– a terrible idea in a tourney setting, but it works just fine at the tabletop level. The last change I made was to drop the turn 6 toolbox, including instead a copy each of the 3-drop Bolt and Professor X. This lets me use turn 6 as an “emergency catch-up turn”, replacing a missed or KO’d character, or dropping Bolt to take out opposing Omnis. I lose out on 6-drop Dr. Strange, but instead I get one last chance to get the Glove online without surrendering to Omni. Oh, and I’m using my Starfire/Sentry package instead of Sentry/Surfer, because I just find it a little simpler to use. Here’s my list, which is a tweak of Paul’s– cards I’ve added or changed the counts on are highlighted in blue.

1-drops
4x Professor X - Mutant Benefactor
4x Black Bolt - Enemy Within

2-drops
4x Dr. Strange - Secret Avenger
1x Mr. Fantastic - Protector of the Power Gem

3-drops
4x Sub-Mariner - Protector of the Time Gem
1x Professor X - Protector of the Mind Gem
1x Black Bolt - Protector of the Space Gem

4-drops
4x Mr. Fantastic - Critical Thinker

5-drops
4x Iron Man - Protector of the Reality Gem

6-drops
1x Dr. Strange - Ally of the Four

7-drops
1x Starfire - X’Hal’s Fury

8-drops
1x The Sentry - Mighty Avenger

10-drops
3x The Beyonder - Inhuman

29 characters

Plot Twists
4x Secret Government
4x Clandestine Operations
4x The 100 Ideas
4x Stretch Out
4x Elektra Situation
4x The Infinity Gauntlet
4x I’m A Futurist
4x Dirty Tricks

32 non-characters

As I said, my version probably isn’t as good as what he’s playing, but it’s a little easier to use, and I think it’s a little more resilient.

Goofball Illuminati

The last decktype I’ll show you today is a little different from those above. See, you don’t actually have to make your Illuminati deck completely based around the Gauntlet. It’s hard to pull off, and sometimes isn’t the killing blow you’re hoping for. I’ve gotten the Glove off and still lost.

What I’m going to show you here is a list (which, admittedly, I just made up five minutes ago and haven’t tested at all) that uses a handful of Illuminati members as PARTS of a strategy, and not the entire thing.

1-drops
2x Professor X - Mutant Benefactor
4x Black Bolt - Enemy Within

2-drops
4x Mr. Fantastic - Protector of the Power Gem
3x Puppet Master - Overprotective Father

3-drops
4x Sub-Mariner - Protector of the Time Gem
1x Professor X - Protector of the Mind Gem
1x Black Bolt - Protector of the Space Gem

4-drops
4x Dr. Doom - Diabolic Genius

5-drops
3x Iron Man - Protector of the Reality Gem

6-drops
2x Dreadnought Tank

7-drops
1x Terrax - Herald
1x Wonder Woman - Founding Member

8-drops
1x Loki - Loki Laufeyson

10-drops
1x The Beyonder - Inhuman
1x Death - Second Force of the Universe

33 characters

Plot Twists
4x Secret Government
4x Clandestine Operations
3x Elektra Situation
4x Mystical Paralysis
3x Elektra Situation
3x I’m A Futurist
3x Faces of Doom

Locations
3x Doomstadt

28 non-characters

This is simply an all-out stall deck. You spend turns 1 through 3 getting out Illuminati members (and Puppet Master) so that you can flip Clandestine. On 4, Doom comes out for the Mystical– which you can play from hand and reuse turn after turn with Sub-Mariner. Turn 5, you continue to swarm out, or if you need another exhauster, you drop 5-drop Tony to lock down another opposing character. You’ve also got Elektra Situation by this point to shut down the powers of anybody who threatens your lock. From turn 7 onward, you use I’m A Futurist to grab your toolbox characters, dropping Terrax to stymie team attacks off-init, and Wonder Woman for uninterruptable attacks on your own init. Loki on 8 ensures that attacks will (eventually) end up where you want them– if they swing a single lowbie into your 2-drop, you redirect to your 8. If they swing a 20-point team attack into Loki, you redirect it to your 2. Your opponent simply can’t make profitable attacks with Loki on the board. From 8 onward, you just keep bringing out huge guys, exhausting the opponent’s biggest threats, and eventually you smash for the win.

The big advantage this deck has over a standard Illuminati build is that you don’t really care if your Illuminati guys get killed. You don’t have any ambition of getting all six out, so all you need is “any two” to fire your good effects. If you get Skreeed and lose Reed, it’s no big deal.

Sweet Jeebus, it’s finally done!

Ugh… I am so glad that’s over. I hope someone found all this useful, because it was a pain in the ass to write.

I really enjoy the Illuminati, and personally, I see them as UDE trying to give us a hidden message. They know how sad we are about the delay between sets, and how bored we get with using the same cards for half a year. They know this, and Illuminati is kind of their attempt at an apology: “Yes, I know you guys don’t like playing the same decks for so long… so here you go, have a team that will honestly take you six months to figure out how to build right.”

As I’ve gone through this, I’ve rattled off over a hundred potential cards you could include in an Illuminati deck, and each one would have a dramatic effect on your deck’s performance if you slotted it in. There are a ridiculous number of completely different Illuminati decks you could put together, so we the jank players have at least one toy to play with during the upcoming draught.

Alrighty, that’s me for today. Sorry about not getting to the review article today, but I had a busier weekend than I expected, and it took me most of Sunday-through-Tuesday just to finish this monstrosity. I’ll absolutely, positively have it for you next week.

Promise.

-Spud

To all those who’ve taken me in here in the great white North (well, white for several months of the year at least), Happy Canada Day!

To all the comic geeks, celebrate Canada Day with a trip to AlphaFlight.net, and marvel that the only member to be on the roster for every incarnation isn’t the dude with the maple leaf jumpsuit, but rather the big, hairy orange one.

O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.

We all knew from the moment the teams were announced that I’d be playing Crime Lords from MUN. There wasn’t any doubt - they’ve been so unloved and disrespected for so long (and maybe rightfully so, considering their lacklustre power level in the days of yore), and Lord knows us Aussies love an underdog… besides, they’ve been bloody hilarious in multiplayer - as one of the few teams that prefers never to have the initiative, playing three players when you only have the initiative every third turn has done wonders for the value of a good Face The Master…

… but now we have new toys to play with.

AIM, RAID and Hydra are out in full force, the Red Skull’s running amok with Baron Strucker snapping at his heels and egads, yes, even the Silver Samurai’s finally shown up on card form, giving us someone who’s actually supposed to wear a Samurai helmet, as opposed to that dimension-hopping six-armed wannabe hiding out in Mystique’s Brotherhood.

And now, of course, I’m spoilt for choice.

Army? Curve? One of the version themes? Red Skull Legend? Or do I play random stuff and push for Baron Strucker, a Satan Claw, and a Death Warrant for board-clearing fun?

So, that brings us to today’s little rambling as I test the waters for the Crime Lords and try to figure out just which way I’d like to go. What this means is a deck that’s pretty loose, with very few 4-of’s (which, really, works for me since I’m a card shy of a playset in a few places). We take the deck, we kick the tires. Cut stuff we don’t like, keep stuff we do, rearrange counts, you get the idea.

I’ve been champing at the bit to do something with a whole buttload of AIM agents, but I got distracted by the idea of a Hydra curve. Yes, I had to branch out into AIM and RAID in a few spots, but by and large I’m starting with a Hydra deck, and really, just trying stuff out to see what works and what doesn’t.

Hydra packs a lot hidden characters, and a few visibles to throw us off. This immediately reminds me of the Hellfire club - have a bunch of hidden toys, leaving some hideous visible brute to brickwall, or alternatively to smash face. It’s a fun theme that works fairly well, especially in an environment with limited hidden hate, so I thought I’d run with something along those lines to start.

At one, The Hand. Who doesn’t love a ninja? At 1/1 they’re not going to make much of an impact themselves, but if we’re looking to set up a single visible defender, and to punish our opponents for even considering attacking us, why not make our opponent go through them twice? Nice and spiteful, and rather thematic with the Hand’s habit of resurrecting deceased metahumans.

At two, Viper gives us someone to threaten opposing hidden lowbies, and if they have no concealed board, to just smash them to the face. At 3/3 she has very healthy stats (gee, someone with green hair having above average stats… whodathunkit), and while she won’t do much to your opponent’s board, she’ll definitely be able to cause a headache if left unchecked. 3 END every turn adds up, ya know. Also, she has the Hellfire Club affiliation on the side… food for future thought.

Also at two, Yelena Belova @ Black Widow. Average at 2/2, she’s packing a variant KO effect like Punisher: Suicide Run’s. Sure, it’s only usable during the Recovery phase, but she bounces to hand to become a handy discard or re-recruit as needed. While I’m thinking of Viper as my main, I’d still like to complete my playsets of Yelena. I’ll always be loyal to Natasha, but anything with “Black Widow” as an identity piques my interest.

At three, someone visible would be a bloody good idea, so Silver Samurai’s our Hydra man of the hour. 6 ATK is nice and healthy, and that Substitute may well come in handy at some point. His effect means your opponent better have predicted Kenuichio’s showing up to the party, or he’ll have just wasted an entire attack when Silver Samurai gets a freebie exhaust. And you know, if your opponent’s managed to swarm, a single one of those ninja’s we hopefully recruited on turn one will certainly put a dampener on their day. Heh.

Running as an alternate to Silver Samurai, the Hydra-corrupted Wolverine. Sure, he’ll leave us with no visible characters until turn four, but if your opponent hasn’t been able to gain momentum up til that point, then we’ll survive just fine, and look at that - a 6/6 who can hit either your opponent’s board or face, as the mood strikes. A couple of good pumps and, along with Viper, Wolvie could be doing some serious END damage.

Four’s a little irritating, as we need to break away from Hydra. Master Man’s a beast. Not only is he one of the few Crime Lords with flight, he’s also instantly a 9/9 on the defense. Slip a ninja past him for the next attack and he’s 11/11. It adds up, it eats your opponent’s pumps, and it leaves you with a beefy character to strike back with on future turns. He’s just several colours of nifty for the Crime Lords.

As an alternative on four, Monica Rappaccini, AIM’s Scientist Supreme. The primary value of Monica is that she’ll hide that Silver Samurai we recruited earlier, reinforcing him while she does so, leaving our opponent with no-one to swing into but Master Man, who just loves it when he’s attacked. The inherent problem here is that she’s the same drop as Master Man. She’ll help us keep our visible board count low to remove “simple” attacks from our opponent’s list of options, but to recruit her on curve means losing out on one of our best defenders.

Five is full of very nifty art, with Elektra leading the charge. Master Man should (in theory) be holding down the visible fort nicely, so having a 10/8 KO’ing attacker in the hidden area works nicely. Of course, with MUN every other bloody character’s dual affiliated, but we’ll take care of that when we get to the plot twists. Even without her KO effect she’s still a healthy 10 ATK, so we can’t argue too much.

The Gorgon’s our alternate for testing at 5, messing with out opponents once they’re swinging to our face by stopping them readying. Take THAT, Hulk! No multiswings for you! The 8/10 stats may make me wish he was a visible defender with that healthy DEF, but that’d just defeat the purpose of his ability, wouldn’t it. Tricks like Fast Getaway and Girls Night Out only work when a character is defending, so they won’t work with Gorgon, but I’m sure we’ll figure out something one of these days.

Pickings are a little slim at the high drops, with Baron Strucker and Modok competing for our six-slot - I’m not predicting a lot of card draw, so we’ll go with the self-recovering Strucker- and Red Skull being the only on-team 7-drop in MUN… but working off a Leader effect, which isn’t as useful as we’d otherwise like if we’re planning on hiding everyone with Monica as the game progresses… so we’ll delve back a couple of sets and grab Joe Fixit instead. 16/16 stats and Reservist means that even if we never get to use his ability we’ve got a solid wall who’ll stun back almost every other 7-drop in the game.

And just cos we have a Crime Lords 8-drop to play with, The Sleeper can have a single copy in the deck as well. 15 DEF means he’s not going to survive to be useful if we’re not running on Evens, but if we are…

Choosing our support cards isn’t any easier than choosing the characters. You’ll note there’s not a single Red Skull in the character portion of the list… well, this is about testing everything out, so maybe, just maybe, we can decide who we’re going to team up with ole’ crimson cranium based on this deck.

Four Mobilize is a given, especially since the Crime Lords have no inherent search of their own. We’ll also throw in some Savage Beatdowns and Nasty Surprises to make sure we’re getting stuns and doing some damage… but from the new toys MUN gives us, wer’e going to start with three Superhuman Registration Acts. Only three, because I don’t have four in hand yet…. Why SHRA? Because it’ll give Elektra a third affiliation so that her KO effect can trigger, and combined with Alias Investigations, it’ll give us access to an extra 1.5 cards per turn. 1 because we can rally whatever’s on top, and .5 because if it’s a character, we can recruit it. SRA’s a nice card. Sure, it sucks some of the surprise out of the game for your opponent, but that’s the price you pay.

From the Crime Lords stable of support cards, Fortress Yashida gives us a reusable pump that should be worth at least 2 or 3 each time we get to use it, on the attack or defense. That generally translates to a stun up the curve, so that’s a good thing for us. Throw in some Death Warrants for additional board control through KO, some Assault On Helicarrier Thirteen to further screw with our opponent’s opportunities to hit us in the face, and some New King in Towns to keep that one visible dude reinforced, and we’re pretty much at our deck.

Yes, it needs more pumps, yes, the curve needs tweaking, yes, it needs more focus, but this is about getting a feel for how the new cards work together, not about creating an uber deck from the word go.

So…

6x The Hand: Army/Hydra
2x Yelena Belova @ Black Widow: Agent of SHIELD/Hydra
4x Viper: Madame Hydra/Hydra
3x Silver Samurai: Kenuichio Harada/Hydra
3x Wolverine: Agent of Shield/Hydra
3x Master Man: Max Lohmer/RAID
3x Scientist Supreme: Monica Rappaccini/AIM
3x Elektra: Pawn of the Gorgon/Hydra
1x The Gorgon: Tomi Shishido/Hydra
1x Baron Strucker: Baron Wolfgang Von Strucker/Hydra
1x Hulk: Joe Fixit
1x The Sleeper: Doomsday Device/RAID
4x Alias Investigations
3x Fortress Yashida
3x Death Warrant
4x Mobilize
3x Savage Beatdown
3x Nasty Surprise
3x Superhuman Registration Act
3x New King In Town
3x Assault On Helicarrier 13

Aaaaand after a few games of testing:

• Missing drops sucks. Seriously. Four games, and I only pulled a single Mobilize. Four games and Yashida only came out once. Four games and I only ever saw a single SHRA, thus making Elektra blank against the vast majority of the characters in MUN.
• I do like Kenuichio, but the deck needs some defensive pumps - stunbacks are a killer, even with the ability to recover them with Hand ninjas. Some reinforcement tricks other than Monica would also be a nice thing.

• Flight! Dear God, the deck needs flight. Are Flying Kicks even legal in Silver nowadays?? I’d say a playset of Rabbit Fire, but almost everyone has Range already, so I’ll have to think of a better option. New Mutations is always nice…
• New King’s a very nice toy, as are Death Warrants (which your opponent can’t shake by going hidden), but irritating as it may be, I think I’m going to have to pack Pathetic Attempts in every other deck I run if Spud’s going to keep up with his Power Dampener obsession.
• I like the Assault on Helicarrier 13. It’s a neat little stalling toy, and a suicidal Hand Ninja can remove an opposing high-drop from the equation, and there’s really not a lot an opponent can do about it… it doesn’t target… (*cackles*)
• There’s a really solid Stall in the Crime Lords here… it’s just a matter of working out how best to coax it out.
• Ninjas! Ninjas! Ninjas! No, I’m not talking about the plot twist… I love the Ninjas! Recovering that sole defender is really quite neat…
• Options to consider: AIM Agents, Hydra Agents and MODOC squads - the team has four different Army affiliations, better give ‘em all a shot… and Red Skull needs to wave his rosy complexion around the place too…

Yup, Worlds is over, and people are filtering back to reality.

Some people didn’t perform as well as they had hoped, others kicked serious amounts of posterior… but none so much as

Brian Eugenio!

Congrats on being declared VS System’s first World Champion!

Be sure to let us know what the heck you’re going to do with that Galactus trophy

It’s already being commented upon elsewhere, the niftiness of the Sniper Shot deck, and we’ll no doubt be seeing a notable impact on the secondary market of such cards as Sniper Shot and heck, we may even see a third life (fourh? fifth?) for Wild Ride…

… but what I want to know is, what has Brian named the deck?

I have to do something to help me get through the weekend while all of my peers are at Worlds, right? Well, always being amused by character generators and the like, I downloaded the Spore Creature Creator and came up with a few nifty little improbable beings of my own.

Naturally, I’ve decided to share some of them with you. I’m a generous soul like that.

The Stripicore was the first of my creations, and I still think it’s pretty nifty.

A carnivore, its primary defenses are the talons on its forelimbs and the spike-firing tail (hence the name… stripey manticore, which when shortened becomes stripicore… whatever).

It’s fairly short, but I just liked the way it all came together.

The Swiimate was the fourth or fifth creature I came out with.

An amphibious omnivore, this rather tall creature has whiskers like a catfish and little wing-like flippers on his ankles like some Atlantean monarchs.

Probably the most amusing thing is the spiral horn thingie on its rump, which apparently adds to its “charge” rating…

I guess with a neck like that, it *could* watch where it was going while running backwards to impale someone on its buttspike…

And finally…

The Floptoad stares into your sooooouulllll!!!!!!!

And sadly, nor is Brian “Bigflyp” Martin, who was going to be reporting and taking pics for me, thanks to a last minute change of plans… poop.

Lost Hemisphere does have one more agent hopefully in place with a camera, though he hasn’t checked in yet, so we’ll have to wait and see if we can get any coverage whatsoever.

In the meantime, massive props to the Canadian contingent, including the legendary Aaron Mead, who was sitting at 22nd in the field at Round Seven.

Additionally, thank God that WalterKovacs is safe, after someone apparently played an out-of-combat stun effect on his truck, resulting in a flip on the way to Worlds. Thinking of you, dude.

Welcome back to the Family Feud, the event where we see just which member of the Fantastic Four can rise above the others WITHOUT the support of their headlining teammates. Four Golden Age decks, all pre-MUN, with almost every card stamped for the team. Bring it on!

Time for a little brouhaha between the brother and sister duo, Johnny Storm and Susan Richards. That’s right, the Human Torch - master of burn and out-of-combat stunning, against the mistress of stalling and reinforcement.

Through the wonders of Uatu-vision, we get to see all the shenanigans…

*ding!*

Susan wins the toss and takes odds initiative.

Susan’s opening hand has a Flare, two Medusa, and an Invisibility. Sucks to lose the tutor and Invisibility, but she opts to mulligan. She’s rewarded with a slightly healthier hand of options - She-Thing, She-Hulk, Franklin and Norrin - and two cards that will really mess with Johnny’s day - Pathetic Attempts.

On the other side of the table, Johnny’s opening hand has 2 Matshsticks, a Hotshot, and a Torch And Thing. Not willing ship two 2-drops from the opening hand, he keeps, and draws a Firewall and a Cosmic Radiation to complete his 6 starting cards.

Turn one: Init Sue

Susan rows a Pathetic Attempt, and has no recruit. She passes.

Johnny rows the Cosmic Radiation, and also passes.

Sue: 50 Johnny 50

Turn two: Init Johnny

Johnny draws a Heatwave and a second Hotshot. Clearly, he’s hoping for a Clash of Worlds in the near future. Rowing the Torch And Thing, he recruits a Matchstick in the support row.

Susan draws a Signal Flare and an Unstable Molecular Suit. Rowing the flare, she recruits Sharon Ventura in the front row.

For Combat, Johnny swings into Sharon, figuring an even stun is better than taking break in return. Dual stun, both take 2 END.

With no unstunned characters, Sue passes. Both players recover their wounded.

Sue: 48 Johnny: 48

Turn three: Init Sue

Susan finally draws some of herself - Walking On Air and Shield of the Four. Rowing the second Pathetic Attempt, she recruits She-Hulk: Jennifer Walters into the front row and passes.

Johnny draws a second Firewall, and Lyja: The Lazerfist. Rowing a Firewall, he recruits Lyja side-by-side with Matchstick.

For Combat, She-Thing into Lyja, 3/3 on 4/3. Lacking any defensive pumps, Johnny doesn’t have much choice and it’s a dual stun. Sue takes 2, Johnny takes 3.

Eager to get a headstart on the endurace race, Sue sends She-Hulk into Matchstick. 4/4 on 3/1. Johnny activates Matchstic to drop She-Hulk’s defense into stunback range, and Sue opts to let it pass, saving the Pathetic Attempts for later. Sue takes 3, Johnny takes 5.

Sue recovers She-Hulk, Johnny, without a Clash Of Worlds in hand, recovers Lyja.

Sue: 43 Johnny: 40

Turn four: Init Johnny

Just his luck, Johnny topdecks a Clash of Worlds, and a Flame On!. Rowing the Clash, he recruits Hotshot, forming up behind Lyja.

Sue topdecks her 4-drop self, and pulls a Force Field Projection. Yummy. Rowing the FFP, she recruits Sue Storm and gives her an Unstable Molecular Suit for added protection.

For combat, Johnny’s options aren’t good. Lyja can do a whole lot of not much, and with the Suit, Sue Storm’s DEF is high enough that even the two Firewalls won’t put her in stun range for Lyja. Johnny opts to declare Hotshot into She-Hulk. 6/5 on 6/6. Once the attack is legal, Johnny plays Torch And Thing to dodge the stunback. Sue decides to hold onto the FFP, and lets it go through. Sue takes 3. Johnny then passes with Lyja, who’s just not big enough to threaten Sue.

Sue responds by trampling Lyja. 6/10 on 4/3. Johnny doesn’t have much to answer with, the stun goes through. Johnny takes 6.

Both players recover their stunned 3-drops.

Sue: 40 Johnny: 34

Turn five: Init Sue

Sue draws another flare and a She-Thing. Non-plussed, she recruits Franklin Richards: Child of the Cosmos, and positions him behind She