Bosom Buddies (AKA Solitaire)

If you are looking for a reason to hate the Marvel Evolutions set besides the hated Exiles deck, look no farther. This deck allows you to do as much damage as you want until it is ready to pop, then it aims to bury you under a mountain of damage. I've only been playing test matches with it, and not really keeping track of damage, but it's clear to me that it could sometimes do 200+ in damage on a turn 5 initiative. You read that right.

Characters - 18

[1 - 4]
4x Moonstar, Danielle Moonstar (X-Force, S.H.I.E.L.D.)
[2 - 5]
4x Deadpool, Independent Contractor (S.H.I.E.L.D., Weapon X)
1x Cable - Soldier X (X-Force)
[3 - 5]
4x Vision, Earth-10101 (Weapon X, Avengers)
1x Deadpool, Earth 5021 (Weapon X)
[4 - 4]
4x Cable, Dayspring (X-Force, Avengers)

Plot Twists - 40

[1 - 3]
3x Losing The Argument
[2 - 13]
4x Black Box
4x Intergalactic Summit
4x We Can Rebuild Him
1x Only Human
[3 - 18]
4x Bosom Buddies
4x Techno-Organic Virus
3x Cutting Loose
3x Bodyslide
2x Call in a Favor
2x Have a Blast!
[4 - 6]
4x Heroes of Two Worlds
2x Pathetic Attempt

Locations - 2

[3 - 2]
2x The Peak

I readily confess that I'm still learning to play the deck. It seems like it should be able to win on 4 pretty regularly, but so far I have only got it to go off on 5. Maybe I am being too timid with it. When the deck works, you draw your deck during the course of a turn, and you team attack with a Cable and a Deadpool over and over until you run out of combo cards. First you clear their board, then you team attack to the face. Over. And over. And over.

It seems to me that the mulligan condition for this deck is Moonstar. There are other decent opening hands you can have, especially ones with Vision, but Moonstar is what you want. Play her on 1, activate her effect, get 2-3 plot twists, then play her again on the next turn and do it again. Playing Vision to draw 2 is also a good move on 1, or you can just put a shift counter on a Deadpool or Cable.

My build of the deck is an amalgam of other builds I've seen. If I were going to try to play this deck in a tournament, I would probably experiment with playing more of the 3 drop Deadpool and less of the 2 drop, which I don't like. The 3 drop has shift, and the 2 drop requires you to attack every turn or get bounced. But I only built the deck to see what all the fuss was about, so I doubt I will do much tweaking of it.

The 4 drop Cable is significantly better than the 2 drop for the simple reason that it lets you draw more cards with Techno-Organic Virus. The 2 drop has a better effect, and is easier to recruit, but in most cases the 4 drop is the one you want.

There are four key plot twists in this deck. The first is Black Box, which should never have been printed. Even with its errata'ed text, it is horribly broken, as it allows you to take three spent combo cards (except itself, post errata), shuffle them back into your deck, and then draw a card. You have to play with or against this deck to fully appreciate just how powerful that effect is. The purpose of the one location, The Peak, is to allow you to put a single copy of Black Box back in your deck so you can use the effect five times instead of four. As if four weren't bad enough. 

The second is Techno-Organic Virus, which might as well read "Draw four cards and then discard one or two you don't need." Sometimes you only get two cards with it the first time you play it, but after that it is almost always three or four. Because of Black Box, you can generally play this card 8-12 times or more in a single match.

The third is Bosom Buddies. This is the card that allows you to team attack with Cable and Deadpool over and over again without getting stunned. It also gives them both +3 ATK for the attack, but the card would be almost as powerful if that effect were omitted. At some point it doesn't really matter whether they have 12 ATK or 18 ATK, because you are attacking with them so many times. As long as you can get through the biggest defender, it doesn't much matter, because there are only three possible outcomes: 1) they have a way to shut you down (Caliban, for example); 2) you are going to fizzle out of your own accord; or 3) you are going to do way more than 50 in damage in one turn.

The fourth is We Can Rebuild Him, which lets you draw two cards, once you have a Vision in hand or in the KO'd pile. When you begin attacking on turn 4 or 5, you will have only a few of the cards that you need to really go off. At a minimum, you would want a single copy of each of these four cards (or two copies of Virus instead of the We Can Rebuild Him), plus Intergallactic Summit. That sets you up to attack twice and to draw some cards. Early on in the turn, you want to use Black Box to put back the two draw cards; once you get near the end of your deck, you can start putting back Bosom Buddies. As I said, I'm still learning to play this deck, so I generally wait for more than the minimum number of combo pieces, but I suspect that a more experienced player of the deck might be OK going with just the minimum.

The two tutors are better here than they are in most decks. Heroes of Two Worlds lets you discard any character card to get three copies of a character with a given name, and to keep one of them. Usually you would use this for getting Cable or Deadpool, but you can also use it to get Vision or Moonstar. Call in a Favor requires you to discard a character card with the same affiliation as the one you want to search for, then your opponent gets to do the same thing. That's not much of a downside here, though, since this deck doesn't really care much about your opponent hitting their curve. Note that once you have all your combo pieces in place, and you are starting to attack, you can and should play any copies of these cards that you have left to purge your deck of character cards, so that everything you draw will be a plot twist.

The team-up card in my build is Intergallactic Summit, which isn't technically a team-up card. I've seen other builds that play The Select, but it seems to me that Summit is more flexible, since you can play it from your hand and get the team-up effect for the one turn that you need it. If I'm getting ready to go off on turn 5, I don't want to have to forego playing the copy of The Peak I just drew, just because I still need to play my team-up. Summit also can't be countered with Have a Blast! or Death of the Dream.

Only Human, Have a Blast! and Pathetic Attempt are tech cards intended to counter cards that might otherwise prevent your combo from going off. Only Human shuts down Dr. Doom, for example. Have a Blast! gets rid of Omnipotence. Pathetic Attempt counters Reign of Terror, Mystical Paralysis, etc. I'm really not sure what the optimal number of copies of each would be. The one card that absolutely wrecks this deck is Caliban, Pestilence, but as far as I know there is no way to counter it. Only Human can't touch him because he's not in play.

Cutting Loose is kind of a win-more card, and I think if I needed more room for something else, this is where I would make cuts. It gives Cable and Deadpool each an extra +2 ATK for the turn. If they each attacked only 4-5 times, this would be a 4-of card, but they can attack so many times that this card isn't really needed.

Bodyslide allows you to go off on an off-init. Suppose you are on evens, but failed to go off on 4. On 5, you can just Bodyslide out Cable, and possibly Deadpool as well, before your opponent attacks, then bring them back at the start of your own attack step.

Losing the Argument is a draw two card with a caveat. You have to put two cards back on top of your deck. There have been a couple of times where it allowed me to keep going when I was about to stall out, so I think it is worth playing, but in general you have to be careful with it. Best time to use it is just before you play Black Box or search for something with one of the character tutors, because you are probably putting back two cards you don't want to turn around and draw again.

This deck reminds me of a couple of the OTK (One Turn Kill) decks I used to play when I played Yugioh. Somewhat interesting to learn how to play well, but not at all fun to play against. Say you are on odds. Turns 1-4, your opponent probably gets to swing freely to the face. Turn 5 comes, and they are way ahead. Then they get to sit for fifteen minutes and watch you play solitaire. Or, if they know what's coming, then will just wait to be sure that you have everything you need, then they will just scoop. Yawn. 

I've seen lots of people say that UDE just didn't care about the game any more by the time MEV came out, and didn't bother to test the new set as thoroughly as they should have. I knew some of the design team members back in the day, and I don't think that's true. I think they were just given limited time and resources to work with, and did the best they could under the circumstances. Some of the newer cards and paradigms are really good, and shift in itself is a fun and interesting game mechanic. But there were cards in that set that shouldn't have been printed, or should been watered down before being released, and some of them can be found in this deck. I'm glad I built and played with it, to understand what it is and how it works, but I would never play it in a tournament, and neither should anyone else.

Postscript: After writing this, I finally found Shadowtrooper's blog post about this deck on tcgplayer.com. I had seen references to it before, but had never read it, because the blog is no longer accessible. You can, however,  find it on the Wayback Machine. More and better information about this deck than I can provide.