Avengers vs. X-Men, Part 1

After two big recent projects based on DC characters, I was ready to work with some Marvel characters for a change. While poking around looking for ideas, I realized that there was a lot of art I liked that came from the Avengers vs. X-Men story arc, which I knew little about, so I decided to read the comics and find out what I had been missing.

I don't read many comics nowadays, but I thought those stories were pretty good. The basic idea behind them is that the Phoenix Force, last seen inhabiting Jean Grey, has headed back to Earth looking for Hope Summers. The Avengers are made aware of its approach by the new Nova, and they begin trying to find Hope to take her into protective custody. But Cyclops and the X-Men won't hear of it, and that is the beginning of the conflict between them.

When the Phoenix Force arrives, Tony Stark goes after it with his newly built Phoenix Killer armor, but when he attacks, he succeeds only in fragmenting it, dispersing the Force among five members of the X-Men contingent. The remainder of the story involves the clash between the Avengers (and converts to their side) and the newly created Phoenix Five (Cyclops, Emma Frost, Colossus, Magik, Namor).

After reading the stories, I decided I had some decent ideas for two decks. The Phoenix Five characters all grew more powerful as one of their group was defeated. When Namor falls, for example, the other four absorbed his power. Ultimately, Cyclops is the last one left, and with all the power to himself, he becomes the Dark Phoenix. So for the X-Men deck, I decided to go with a loner theme, taking ideas from the old Hulk and X-Statix decks. At each spot on the curve from 3 on, each Phoenix character who enters play absorbs the power of the previous character. For example, when you recruit the 6 drop Emma and she replaces the 5 drop Colossus, she enters play with five +1/+1 counters to go with her normal 12/12 stats. She also gains his Phoenix powers, including any that he had absorbed himself from Namor and Magik.

The idea for the Avengers deck was a little tougher to come up with. In the end of the story, the Avengers (spoiler alert!) win by combining the messianic powers Yin of Hope Summers (who switches sides early on) with the chaos magic Yang of Scarlet Witch (arch-nemesis of mutant-kind thanks to the events of the House of M story line). So I decided to emphasize the chaos magic theme. All the characters on the Avengers's side enter play with a "Chaos counter." This is basically the same as a cosmic counter, except that it doesn't go away when the character becomes stunned. Each character gets a plot twist-like ability that is triggered by removing the counter. In some ways the deck is similar to my Asgardians deck, but without all the equipment and with fewer counters to keep track of.

That's enough background info. In Part 2, I'll discuss the X-Men/Phoenix Five deck, and in Part 3, the Avengers deck.