VS Deck Garage
Spider-Friends Deck
by Paul Hagan

06.28.04  Hey all, and welcome to another edition of the VS Deck Garage! What is a Deck Garage? It’s where you send in a deck that you want help with, and I’ll adjust it to maximize its potential – free of charge! If you’d like to see your deck in the VS Deck Garage, feel free to e-mail me at Hagan0001@aol.com and I should get back with you within a day or two.

This week, we’ll be working on a Spider-Friends deck from Danny. In his experience thus far, the deck functions fairly well as-is, but it seems to have problems dealing with characters with a high defense. Danny also mentioned he wants to keep a full count on Punisher, Vigilante, so we’ll do just that. Here is Danny’s deck as is:

CHARACTERS (28):
4 Prowler, Hobie Brown
3 Solo, James Bourne
2 Madame Webb, Cassandra Webb
3 Spider-Man, Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man
3 Black Cat, Felicia Hardy
4 Punisher, Vigilante
4 Daredevil, the Man Without Fear
2 Nova, Richard Rider
2 Spider-Man, the Amazing Spider-Man

PLOT TWISTS (17):
4 Spider Sense
4 No Fear
2 Ally-Oop!
2 Crushing Blow
1 Surprise Attack
1 Medical Attention
1 Reconnaissance
1 Team Tactics
1 Flying Kick

EQUIPMENT (9):
4 Jet Pack
3 Smoke Screen
2 Advanced Hardware

LOCATIONS (4):
2 Daily Bugle
2 ESU Science Lab

I think Danny accidentally left off two cards, so we’ll just have to wing it when it comes to filling in those slots, which shouldn’t be too much of an issue. Before getting started, however, lets go through the usual business.

WHAT LOOKS RIGHT:

Obviously, Danny is playing with just about everything available to Spider-Man thus far and isn’t going too far off track. He’s also using a good mix of the different card-types (characters, equipment, locations, and plot twists).

WHAT NEEDS FIXIN’

Danny has too few early characters (four 1-Drops and three 2-Drops), so he’ll likely be playing catch-up throughout the entire game. I would like to up the character count, lower the equipment count, and throw in some better plot twists.

HOW WE DO IT:

I can’t dog Prowler, especially since he is the only 1-Drop available to Spider-Friends at this point. I can, however, up the number of 2-Drops dramatically. We’ll start by adding the fourth Solo, James Bourne. Unfortunately, there are no other 2-Drops available in Spider-Friends, so I’ll have to go outside of that affiliation. Browsing through the other 2-Drops available in Marvel Origins, I was able to find a lot of viable characters. After narrowing my search down to three or four 2-Drops that could go in and work well, I settled on Nightcrawler, as he fits in with the theme of “if my guys attack, they won’t get stunned”. The ability to attack as though he has flight and range helps, too.

+1 Solo, James Bourne
+4 Nightcrawler, Kurt Wagner

Next, looking to 3-Drops, we obviously want a full complement of the uber-powerful Spider-Man, Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man. I also opted to up the number of Madame Webb by one to give Danny a better shot at drawing a 3-Drop by Turn 3.

+1 Madame Webb, Cassandra Webb
+1 Spider-Man, Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man

~* ART SIDE RANT*~

If you don’t want to listen to me whine about bad art, skip down a few lines…this might take a while.

What happened to Spider-Man, Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man’s art? It is hideous! Normally, I’ll lay off mediocre art on the grounds that I can’t do better, but Matt Smith has to stick to locations! Not the Blackbird, not Spider-Man, not Doctor Octopus, not Xavier’s Dream. Just. Locations.

Baxter Building, Four Freedoms Plaza, and Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters all do a great job of showing what they are supposed to be. These pictures are all done by Matt Smith. We know he can do good work! Please, UDE, make Matt Smith quit doing the art for Characters, Equipment, and Plot Twists. Please!

~*END ART SIDE RANT*~

Back to the topic at hand, Danny’s 4-Drops and 5-Drops both look great as is. Having a count of seven for 4-Drops and a count of four for 5-Drops is more than acceptable. However, I would like to go ahead and add an additional Nova, Richard Rider. Ditto for the Amazing Spider-Man.

+1 Nova, Richard Rider
+1 Spider-Man, the Amazing Spider-Man

Danny has got the right idea when it comes to Spider Senses. If Acrobatic Dodge is good, then isn’t Spider Senses better? Heck yeah! However, most of the rest must go.

-4 No Fear
-2 Ally-Oop
-2 Crushing Blow
-1 Surprise Attack
-1 Medical Attention
-1 Reconnaissance

You’ll notice I didn’t cut Flying Kick, and for good reason. I’m not sure if Savage Beatdown is within price range for Danny, so I’ll go ahead and do the standard.

+3 Flying Kick / Savage Beatdown

You’ll also notice that Danny still has Team Tactics in his deck, and for good reason. As he mentioned he was having trouble producing enough damage, this card should help do the trick. We’ll add an extra, just to help draw it more often.

+1 Team Tactics

If you look through the Spider-Friends cards, you’ll notice that a good majority of them have a small defense. Combine this with the fact that Danny is now playing Nightcrawler, Kurt Wagner, and you’ll see a bad tendency of Spider-Friends players to take a *lot* of breakthrough damage. How do we fix this?

+4 Burn Rubber

This is one of those decks where Burn Rubber seems like an absolute necessity. Finally, I’m cutting the following equipment cards.

-4 Jet Pack
-3 Smokescreen
-2 Advanced Hardware

They seem a bit sub-par when compared to the two pieces of equipment that I’m going to suggest. First, I find range to be more useful that flight, especially in a deck with smaller characters, so I’ll be sliding in Dual Sidearms. Also, as Spider-Friends do have small defenses, Danny could probably use Unstable Molecules.

-3 Dual Sidearms
-3 Unstable Molecules

The rest of Danny’s cards look great. Here is the final decklist, improvements and all.

CHARACTERS (36):

4 Prowler, Hobie Brown
4 Solo, James Bourne
4 Nightcrawler, Kurt Wagner
3 Madame Webb, Cassandra Webb
4 Spider-Man, Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man
4 Punisher, Vigilante
3 Black Cat, Felicia Hardy
4 Daredevil, The Man Without Fear
3 Nova, Richard Rider
3 Spider-Man, The Amazing Spider-Man

PLOT TWISTS (14):
4 Burn Rubber
4 Flying Kick / Savage Beatdown
4 Spider Senses
2 Team Tactics

LOCATIONS (4):
2 Daily Bugle
2 ESU Science Lab

EQUIPMENT (6):
3 Dual Sidearms
3 Unstable Molecules

Danny is really onto a good idea here, readers. You’ll notice that there are a *lot* of characters that don’t get stunned while attacking, and combined with the Punisher’s ability to KO stunned characters, Danny has potential to completely dominate games.

I guess that about wraps it up for this week’s edition of VS Deck Garage; I hope everyone enjoyed and learned a few things. If you would like to see your deck in the VS Deck Garage, feel free to drop me an e-mail at Hagan0001@aol.com.  Just make sure to include any specifics about the deck, such as cards you want to keep, cards that you aren’t sure about, themes to your deck, cards you can’t get, etc.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see y’all next week.

-Paul Hagan

 

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