Format: Casual Golden Age (Modern recommended)
I honestly didn’t have much time to brew this week, so I went with a team brewed a while ago that I had never gotten to play with. And if you’re not ready for it, it’s a team that can really hit you…
Out of Knowhere
The Team: Kitty Jones? Jessica Pryde?
The basic strategy revolves around Kitty Pryde, Knowhere and Jessica Jones. It works like this: have Kitty Pryde active, roll Knowhere on an action face. Attack with Kitty Pryde (alone, so she’s unblockable), use Knowhere after blockers are declared to swap out Kitty for Jessica Jones, and potentially deal much more damage.
To really deal damage with this, though, I need a global to target with. Enter Hulk. I end up adding 2 damage for each fist I spend (1A from the global, 1A+1D from Jessica’s ability). Sure, there are other options for these types of globals, but I chose Hulk for one simple reason: this isn’t a one-hit-kill team. Jessica Jones will likely be less useful after that first big swing. With Hulk on this team, I can actually swap out Jessica Jones for Hulk with Knowhere, giving me a fantastic secondary strategy.
I also wanted to have another 5-cost to add more options. Enter SR Mimic. On top of the potential pain of combining Hulk with Mimic again (worked well last time), SR Mimic is so flexible and fun to use that he’s an easy add. Because of SR Mimic, I decided to bring C Yuan-ti. Say I use Knowhere with Yuan-ti active, Yuan-ti becomes unblockable…and so would SR Mimic if he’s copying Yuan-ti. And if my then-unblockable Mimic attacks, after blockers are declared, I could then choose to use Mimic’s ability to copy, say, Jessica Jones after blockers are declared, and deal a truckload of damage.
As for the rest of the team, Billy Club serves as removal (with a nice fixer to boot), Resurrection serves for ramp and churn, Shriek serves for blanking, and Upgrade – Proton Cannon serves as another option in case I’m stuck attacking with Jessica Jones with blockers around.
Game 1:
My first game was against a Boom Boom + Morph build that uses Thrown Brick and Raised Shields, alongside Wasp for good measure. Yeesh, that could outpace me in a hurry. I ended up saying to heck with my combo, bought one Brick (he let me go first so he could buy 2), Yuan-ti, Mimic to copy his Boom Boom, and started burning him down and hitting him for unblockable damage. I got lucky; he didn’t buy Wasp, and there weren’t enough characters with high toughness to use Thrown Brick on, so he didn’t benefit from the ramp as much as he’d like. Plus, I kept KO’ing Boom Boom (1 damage from Thrown Brick, I ramp, and 1 damage from Yuan-ti’s Attune to KO Boom Boom), and refielding her was a pain. In the end, I outpaced him and won.
1-0
Game 2:
This game, I went up against Immortals. I went for my combo early this time, hitting him for 12 (!) very quickly with Jessica. He managed to get GDM to slow me down, alongside Hela and Jarnbjorn to get the damage going. However, he didn’t have enough characters on the board. When Hela + Jarnbjorn fired off, because of the early damage, he couldn’t afford to attack with everything. Eventually, I managed to get a second Kitty Pryde (seeing as I’d Knowhere’d the first one) and dealt the last few points of damage.
2-0
Game 3:
I was up against a new player. He made a team based around Guardians, primarily, alongside Dum Dum Dugan. He used C Nebula a fair bit, trying to mess up my bag. It messed me up several times, but thanks to some careful bag management, I did still manage to get the Kitty Knowhere’d into Jessica combo going for 8 damage. I swapped Jessica for Hulk later, and managed to get some extra damage in thanks to him KO’ing my sidekicks. I later got Kitty Pryde and enough energy to get him down to 2 life points. He saw he had no way to win, so he conceded at that point. He said that he learned a fair bit from the game though.
3-0
Game 4:
For my last game of the night, I went up against a Wong + Spider-man team. Interesting concept, and quite aggressive. This started like a street brawl, with both of us dealing each other 8 damage on T3/T4. However, when I got Jessica Jones back on the field, I swapped her for Hulk like I did last game, and that just messed up his strategy, big time. I fielded sidekicks for defense, bought another Kitty, and did the combo to hit him for another 10 with Jessica Jones. By that point, he was at 2, and I had a level 3 Hulk; he had no way to attack me or to block me. I won shortly after.
4-0
Post-Mortem:
-This may not be a one-hit-kill strategy, but this hits pretty hard. The fact that I can hit for anywhere between 8 and 12 damage on turn 3 can really surprise opponents and put them on the defensive in a hurry.
-I actually didn’t buy Shriek once. That’s so weird, but she never became relevant, and I’m realizing that, ever since Nats, I’ve been using her less and less. I’m finding it fun not to use her as a crutch, and it allows me to just win quicker.
-I was really lucky that Scarlet Witch didn’t make an appearance tonight, or the whole combo could’ve fallen apart in a hurry. I guess Acererak could’ve helped if that became an issue though.
-This team doesn’t have a response to Kate Bishop’s global, but no one ran that either. I was quite lucky that people didn’t know this was coming.
Overall, this was a ton of fun to run. That Kitty Pryde is really underestimated, in my view; she has a ton of potential.