VS Deck Garage
The New Brotherhood

by Paul Hagan

Hey all, I suppose I should start things off with a little bit about myself before jumping into fixing decks. My name is Paul Hagan and I’ve been gaming for about five years now. In addition to using ten to fifteen hours of my week playing / trading Marvel Origins, I also currently play Magic, Raw Deal, D&D, HERO system, and I’m slowly building War Machine and Warhammer 40K armies. Why have I been sucked into all of these games? Because I’ve worked in a game store, called The Game Closet, in Waco, Texas for about three years. Having helped almost every regular customer in the store with a deck at some point or another over the course of these three years, I feel fairly qualified to start up a deck garage.

For those of you unfamiliar with the general format of deck garages, I’ll do a quick overview. Each week, I’ll take a deck that someone needs help with (more on that later), break it down in its current form, make suggestions for change, and then post the final revised decklist. Not only does this work out well for whoever sent the deck in, the Deck Garage will be a great source of decklists for anyone out there looking for good ideas.

So what do you need to do to get your deck in the VS Deck Garage? Simple! Just send the decklist, a brief description of what you want the deck to do, and any other criteria that you need met (ex., “I can’t afford the rare cards, so could you build this without rares” or “I’m really attached to card X, so don’t take that out”) to Hagan0001@aol.com and I should be back with you within the week.

…And now, onto the first edition of the VS Deck Garage.

After deciding to start writing this column, I bummed around my local game store until coming up with a regular who needed help with his deck. Casey was playing a mostly-Brotherhood deck for which he’d been acquiring cards over the last week or so. The decklist currently looks like this:

CHARACTERS –

3 Destiny, Irene Adler

3 Phantazia, Eileen Harsaw

2 Avalanche, Dominic Petros

2 Puppet Master, Philip Masters

2 Pyro, St. John Allerdyce

3 Banshee, Sean Cassidy

3 Rogue, Anna Raven

3 Blob, Fred Dukes

2 Sabretooth, Feral Rage

3 Magneto, Eric Lehnsherr

3 Scarlet Witch, Wanda Maximoff

1 Mystique, Shape-Changing Assassin

2 Sabretooth, Victor Creed

2 Magneto, Master of Magnetism

PLOT TWISTS –

4 Finishing Move

3 Flying Kick

2 Global Domination

1 Mutant Supremacy

2 Savage Beatdown

3 Surprise Attack

3 The New Brotherhood

2 War on Humanity

LOCATIONS –

2 Asteroid M

1 Savage Land

EQUIPMENT –

3 Personal Force Field

This totals the cards up to 34 Characters, 20 Plot Twists, 3 Locations, and 3 Equipment.

WHAT LOOKS RIGHT:

Before going into what’s wrong with the deck, I’d like to point out what’s right. First, Casey seems like he has the right mix of character and non-character cards, give or take two or three. Second, he is using most of the good Brotherhood characters and not the chafe like Unus or Mastermind. Finally, he has at least one of the majority of the good non-character cards that belong in Brotherhood, including Savage Land, War on Humanity, and Savage Beatdown.

WHAT NEEDS FIXIN’:

There are a few immediate problems that jump out at me on scanning the decklist.

1) A few non-Brotherhood characters are hanging out that don’t belong. Although I’m definitely a fan of splashing in an off character or two (I run three Scarlet Witch, Wanda Maximoff in my X-Men deck), the Puppet Master and Banshee don’t need to be there.

2) The deck isn’t particularly focused on one strategy. It uses New Brotherhood, but it isn’t centered on it. Some of the characters look like they are pure offense (see: Sabretooth, Feral Rage) while others look like they are trying to stall the game (see: Puppet Master, Philip Masters…again).

3) The curve as far as character resource cost seems slightly off, with six 1-Drops, six 2-Drops, six 3-Drops, five 4-drops, six 5-drops, three 6-drops, and two 7-drops. Using the Brotherhood, Casey can get away with not using 5-, 6-, or 7-drops at all if he uses the right cards, freeing up space to really take control of the game with a more focused deck.

HOW WE DO IT:

Before I start making changes, I have to take into consideration any restrictions put on deck-building. Casey told me that he doesn’t have any Genosha and doesn’t have access to any more Sabretooth, Feral Rage or Savage Beatdown, so we have to make do without any of those cards.

The overall design I’m going to aim at is what seems to be working for a lot of other people: The New Brotherhood. The deck makes good use of the Plot Twist of the same name to pump up their quality small characters. This concept, combined with resource disruption in the form of Ka-Boom! and Foiled, make the deck a viable top-tier strategy.

CHARACTER CHANGES:

Knowing that we’ll be operating off of few characters with a resource cost greater than four, I immediately cut all cards that cost six or more:

-1 Mystique, Shape-Changing Assassin

-2 Sabretooth, Victor Creed

-2 Magneto, Master of Magnetism

I’m envisioning a deck with only three 5-Drops. Brotherhood definitely has a fair selection of quality drops in the form of Magneto, Eric Lehnsherr and Scarlet Witch, Wanda Maximoff, but the true powerhouse (at least in this deck) is Quicksilver, Speed Demon. Follow my logic: Casey’s deck is based around doing as much damage as it can as fast as it can. Quicksilver, although smaller than Magneto and Scarlet Witch, can possibly attack twice per turn. Sound good enough?

-3 Magneto, Eric Lehnsherr

-3 Scarlet Witch, Wanda Maximoff

+3 Quicksilver, Speed Demon

In this deck, characters will generally be smaller on average as far as DEF goes, so Casey will need all the help he can get as far as reinforcing and team attacking goes. Therefore, any character who is not Brotherhood *and* doesn’t have an 11 ATK gets cut as well:

-3 Banshee, Sean Cassidy

-2 Puppet Master, Philip Masters

“Now wait, why the stipulation on the 11 ATK”, you might ask, “If we aren’t using anything bigger than a 5-Drop, what does the 11 ATK stipulation mean?” It means that I am hinting at playing Darkoth, Major Desmund Pitt. Although not a Brotherhood character, he can KO a resource you control while attacking to go up to an 11 ATK (from a 4 ATK) for this attack. Now consider this: you have had to use a character early in the game as a resource, and you are sitting at four resources currently. What happens if you draw a New Brotherhood? It doesn’t do you any good in hand or on the table, as that would bring you to five resources. With Darkoth, you can play The New Brotherhood as a resource, attack with your horde of guys, and KO a resource to not only give Darkoth a +7 ATK bonus, but also bring your resource count back down to four, giving the rest of your team a +2 ATK bonus. He also works well on allowing you to drop Quicksilver, Speed Demon (Resource Cost: 5) and then go back to getting The New Brotherhood bonus.

+3 Darkoth, Major Desmund Pitt

The remainder of the changes to the characters I made are fairly minor. I brought the character count up to 36, I bumped the count on certain characters (like Pyro and Avalanche) up to four, and I changed the curve to look like:

8 1-Drops

11 2-Drops

8 3-Drops

6 4-Drops

3 5-Drops

This allows Casey to have a fair shot at drawing up a 1-Drop on turn one, an amazing shot of having a 2-Drop on turn two, and so on. Once he hits turn four, if no 4-Drops have come up, he can still fall back on the high number of 2-Drops in the deck to help his team out. The final changes to characters look like:

+1 Destiny, Irene Adler

+1 Phantazia, Eileen Harsaw

+2 Avalanche, Dominic Petros

+2 Pyro, St. John Allerdyce

+3 Toad, Mortimer Toynbee

+2 Mystique, Raven Darkholme

+1 Blob, Fred Dukes

PLOT TWIST, LOCATION, AND EQUIPMENT CHANGES:

The Plot Twists in the New Brotherhood deck are as important, if not more so, as the characters. Between The New Brotherhood and War on Humanity, Casey has all the tools to do enough endurance to his opponent to win the game within five to six turns. Looking at Casey’s original decklist, I see he is running three The New Brotherhood and two War on Humanity. Both of these can probably be upped to four apiece:

+1 The New Brotherhood

+2 War on Humanity

A major part of the New Brotherhood deck (not just the one being worked upon here) is making sure your characters are the biggest on the table. To do so, you may have to keep your opponent from going nuts by dropping guys like Hulk, New Fantastic Four or Thing, Heavy Hitter. To do so, we’re adding:

+4 Ka-Boom!

+2 Foiled

Not only will these keep Casey’s opponents from dropping their big men, it will also disrupt their game plan if their deck is focused around using cards like any of the team-up cards (i.e., Mutant Nation or Common Enemy) or certain locations, such as the Sentinels going nuts with South American Sentinel Base or Underground Research Base.

Unfortunately, with adding all of these stellar cards, I have to start cutting something. As much as I like some of them (especially Finishing Move), the following has to happen:

-4 Finishing Move

-1 Flying Kick

-2 Global Domination

-1 Mutant Supremacy

-3 Surprise Attack

-3 Personal Force Field

In fact, the only card I am really concerned about cutting here is Finishing Move, but there just isn’t quite enough room. If Casey doesn’t quite like a certain card in the final build, or feels he can get away with three of a certain card as opposed to four, I would say put in Finishing Move.

On Asteroid M, I won’t call it a bad card. I think the Asteroid could be good in almost any other deck, but Brotherhood’s strengths seem to lie in the rush of small characters early in the game, meaning Casey’s characters will generally be the same size or smaller than his opponents’. With this in mind, I suggest pulling Asteroid M and replacing it with something to help recover the cards lost from Sabretooth, Feral Rage or Quicksilver, Speed Demon: Avalon Space Station

-2 Asteroid M

+2 Avalon Space Station

If you are following the math, you’ll notice I should have about three slots left. These are going to be filled with one of the cards that make the Brotherhood as sick as it is: Savage Land. The ability to start doing another 4 or 5 damage to either a character or its controller is amazing (see: Savage Beatdown), and Savage Land lets you do it every turn. This card far and beyond deserves to be in the deck as a full set:

+3 Savage Land.

So with these changes, what does the final decklist look like? Check it out below:

FINAL DECKLIST:

CHARACTERS –

4 Destiny, Irene Adler

4 Phantazia, Eileen Harsaw

4 Pyro, St. John Allerdyce

4 Avalanche, Dominic Petros

3 Toad, Mortimer Toynbee

3 Rogue, Anna Raven

3 Darkoth, Major Desmund Pitt

2 Mystique, Raven Darkholme

4 Blob, Fred Dukes

2 Sabretooth, Feral Rage

3 Quicksilver, Speed Demon

PLOT TWISTS –

2 Flying Kick

2 Foiled

4 Ka-Boom!

2 Savage Beatdown

4 The New Brotherhood

4 War on Humanity

LOCATIONS –

2 Avalon Space Station

4 Savage Land

This brings the total to 36 characters, 18 plot twists, and 6 locations [60 Cards Total].

With the above decklist, Casey should be able to start layin’ the smack down with a horde of Brotherhood beaters while keeping his opponent from relying on his resources too heavily, thanks to Ka-Boom!, Foiled, and Avalanche.

That about wraps it up for this time; I hope it was a help to Casey and any other readers. Remember, to submit a deck or just to ask for a bit of advice, e-mail me at Hagan0001@aol.com and you could have your deck in the next VS Deck Garage.

-Paul Hagan

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