It's easy to look at deck building (or squad building, as I've come to refer to it in this game) as a tedious task, but sometimes it can be a lot of fun. It's all about the approach. Today, we'll go through the process, deciding on a win condition and building a deck around that.

Planning with the end in mind

How will you win? This is the question that needs a definite answer and where your deck must begin. If you don't know how you'll win, how you'll chip away at life, then you don't have a working team. So let's start with a card that's really good but underplayed. I'm going to take Beast: Genetic Expert.

This guy is a bruiser, though under-appreciated due to the quality of Mutate 666. He's the best Tsarina-counter in the game and if you play your game well, can get in a healthy amount of damage.

He's at his strongest on level one, so we can't leave it up to chance. We'll have to include Focus Power so that we can spin him down when we need to. I'm not the biggest fan of basic actions myself, but:

1. This requires it
2. If your opponent wants to stop you, (s)he'll be wasting time and energy buying basic actions

The Support Staff

We don't have "Mutate 666" so we need something that help us with the prep area and a little extra drawing when we need it. I feel safe going with Silver Surfer here. Beast will give us some life, so we're likely to get back some of what we spend when we surf for a die.

Another tool that I'd like to include is the means to damage Beast during the attack step, ensuring that he'll be KO'd while in a blocking state even if my opponent tries some funny business when distributing damage (still a grey area). For that reason, I will add Green Goblin: "Norman Osborne" to the mix. I've already discussed how he can operate similarly to Surfer; but I'm likely to buy and field this one so that I can get more energy and sidekicks, so that I can KO more sidekicks and/or Beasts, so that I can get more dice in my prep area. His global is a strong tool for this squad, and his character ability offers support as well. Not to mention his bolts.

While we're damaging characters, let's get a little more flexibility. Beasts will be rolling in and out quite a lot, and Sidekicks might as well, so how about Human Torch: "Flame On!"

Why not Johnny Storm? Because of the flexibility that "Flame On" gives me. Here, I have the option to damage who I want to damage instead of being forced to hit a player and a character. The global is also exceedingly useful, and with enough bolts it can be a force. Further, we don't yet know if the global must be used against the same character; the card would indicate that it doesn't. Therefore, assuming level one Beasts, we could be knocking out multiple  blocking Beasts even if we don't have the sidekicks fielded to pay for multiple uses.

Contingency Plans

The Story So Far: