I've got a pretty strong contingent of Sentinels players at my local hobby league. And because I simply refuse to play Sentinels to combat it, I've been trying to come up with "I Hate Sentinels and don't care if I lose to anything else" strategies.

So my question is this, why doesn't Scarlet Witch (brotherhood 5-drop) see more play. It seems like the Sentinel player will have to go 'all-in' to gang tackle her, or take a ton of damage from Bastion activations. Especially if you can get her into the Hidden area.

Other ideas?

Bastion's powere is a PAYMENT power, not an ACTIVATED power. Bastion doesn't care about Scarlet Witch. He eats her for breakfast. Activated powers ARE payment powers, but payment powers are not necessarily activated powers. The little arrow indicates when a power is a payment power, with the payment occuring before the arrow. In an activated power, the payment is that you exhaust your character (activate him).

Peep the X-Men thread for a deck that is designed to do well against Curve Sentinels, but tends to suck against other match-ups.

won't work because Bastion is not an activated power, maybe that's why...

The ability of Scarlet Witch (Wanda Maximoff) only works on activated character effects (i.e. effects that require the exhaustion of a character as part of the cost - as denoted by "Activate-->"). Her ability has no impact whatsoever on Bastion.

If you're looking for cards that can nerf Sentinels, then you might look at Team Superman - Matt Meyer's "Phantom Phone Booth." Phantom Zone can wreck Reconstruction Program, and Gangbuster is an absolute army destroyer.

MKKO is also good, as it has a much stronger early game field control and power base. Usually, Bastion is a non-factor because the games never reach turn six.

Finally, my personal favorite is Xavier's Dream. With some of the new Avengers cards (such as Beetle, Armorsmith), I think it has an almost autowin matchup against CS now that Overload is gone. Of course, it is the toughest of the three to play, so it would take a lot more preparation to be proficient at it.

Decks that beat CS are all over the place. People choose CS, however, because it is the most balanced deck in the game. If you know its weak points, though, you can exploit players who only play the 'bots.

The CS hand and KO pile is very important. If you can KO their board and use Lockup. He can really ruin CS.

Also Underworld has some stuff for them. Total Anarchy hurts them even tho they run it as well.

Dick Grayson 4 drop really hurts them. Gang buster is another bad boy. Cracking the vault from AI is awesome.

Death of superman is nasty. Teams like RS, AI dont see much play cuz they arent great teams and not too many people like them.

But they have a lot of answers for some big versus problems.

Avengers team attacking I feel has a real good shot at CS.

Good luck.

My lord, I was so confused when I first started reading this thread because I thought you were all talking about the Avenger's Scarlett Witch which has:

"Discard an Avengers character card >>> Your opponents cannot use character payment powers this turn. Use this power only during the combat phase."

And I was thinking to myself... Wait... she does affect payment powers not activated powers, Bastion does get affected... which reminds me, Repulsor Ray does the same thing:

"If that attacker has the Avengers affiliation, your opponents cannot use character payment powers this turn."

The reason I bring this up is because it is actually a method to deal with Bastion, NOT THE BEST WAY nor even full proof, but it is still a way to do it. Here's how this works.

Yes, in response to you using these tricks, your opponent can easily say: In response I pump.... I find having them doing this very useful for reasons listed below:
1. Forces them to use his ability right then and there.
2. It burns their hand and maybe even reconstruction.
3. The element of surprise is more managable.
4. What size each character is this turn and obviously less cards in his hand for next turn.

It basically limits your opponent's options and gives you a better understanding of your options. That's why it is a useful play against CS decks.

yah there are a lot of decks out their that beat cs... basically x dream has the best win percentage against it. i lost about 6 in a row the 1st time i tested against x dream with cs.

All the anti-army cards in the world combined is not enough to stop Nimrod and bastion....

I remember that. We had so many people crowded around our game. Everyone was shocked when I kept winning even though you had me at like 3 life by 6th turn.

This is all too true. CS provides an easy-to-access win condition that's fairly reliable and incredibly good for what it is. Any deck you're putting together to deal with CS needs to be able to overcome this. Furthermore, with their natural anti-tech of the Mark II and the recent addition of Null Time Zone, you cannot rely on a single non-ongoing plot twist to do the work for you.

If NTZ didn't exist, the Thunderbolts would be a nearly auto-win against CS, with the pumping power to negate the effectiveness of Bastion's power. However, it's unsafe to rely on Team Tactics to do the big lifting for you.

Likewise, using my own Sin City as an example, Dr. Light is a monster against most decks because of his ability to ignore combat entirely. However, CS has itself a few ways of managing against Shimmer, Sunfire, and Dr. Light in the Mark II. If they play Bastion on 6, so good for me. If, however, they decide that dropping two Mark II's is the better answer, they're usually right, sadly enough. Thank god that Cover Fire's going out of vogue, at the very least. SC can take CS very well a vast majority of the time if the opponent doesn't play a very intricate mid-game to deal with the SC threat.

The easiest way to overcome CS is to make turns 6 and 7 not matter. Two options exist here: win before turn 6's combat phase, making the turns obsolete; or, gum up the game for those turns so the opponent can't 'go off' with the Bastion super-pump or the superior Genosha-fueled ultra-pump. The last part makes running Global Domination a very good idea (searchable by Thunderbolts, Doom, and GK). The Avengers give you a way to make their plans obvious with Scarlet Witch; this doesn't STOP him, but makes the requirements clear (so having a means to overcome him would help immensely). NTZ, calling Reconstruction Program, can perform a lesser version of this for any team.

Going for the auto-stun works well, too, depending on how you do it. SC's method is Dr. Light, who only cares that you've kept 6 other affiliated cronies on the field on turn 6. Adding in NTZ into SC might be required, though, to overcome the NTZ "Fizzle" / Flame Trap / Total Anarchy CS can possibly hit to wipe the field before or during Dr. Light's power use. The X-Men provide two ways to do this via plot twists: Power Nexus and Fastball Special. The former requires a good bit of a swarm build, looking a little like SC; FF/X-M with the possible third team with card search could do a good job of making that work for you. Fastball Special is another one that works decently with the X-Men, and lends itself to abuse with another team, particularly the Thunderbolts.

While less impressive, exhaustion techniques can keep the CS player from being able to hit your field as he'd wish. Mystical Paralysis stands out, but it does have the weakness of being telegraphable. The 4-drop Dr. Doom with a Latverian Embassy does, at the very least, keep your opponent from being able to play NTZ more than once per game, and that's a fairly big deal for a stall-based deck. The Masters of Evil can lock up characters on earlier turns, like using Sonic Disruption on a defender against Nimrod on 5 or Bastion on 6 to keep them from swinging again, or Adhesive X, which will accomplish roughly the same goal. The Adhesive also syncs well with cards that remove your own characters from the attack, like Evil Reborn, Oscorp Board Room, and so on. A variety of characters exist which can exhaust smaller characters than themselves, and combined with the ultimate curmudgeon, Puppet Master, you might be able to lock up most of their field. Again, these options can be stalled a bit by the Mark II's, but unless they're stopping a bigger character from being locked down, this doesn't accomplish as much.

Off-curve strategies would normally be a strong idea against CS for either goal, since they can usually perform the most consistently well with the rush plan, and it's harder to deal a ton of damage against a large field of small, reinforcible characaters. However, this explains why CS has been running some form of anti-swarm hate for such a long time.

Related to that idea, having means of gaining reinforcement and/or invulnerability can help to prolong the game, and will make the CS player have to manage his limited pumping resources over a longer period of time. This is why I like the Avengers She-Hulk so much, and it's a reason Phantom Phone Booth was able to do well. That deck also provides a means of making Reconstruction Program useless, by popping away some or all of the character carsd they'd target with Recon Program to draw. The 5-drop Mephisto also works well for this purpose.

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With Null Time Zone, this is the time for a robust deck to take over the environment; while NTZ punishes the player that relies on a PT at a given time (Titans, anyone?), it becomes weaker against a deck with a variety of options. CS is only capable of a few big tricks, and if you can deal with them in multiple ways reliably, even with the Mark II's and NTZ, the CS player will have a hard time dealing with you.

A Titans-based deck that has more of a focus on doing things other than abusing the hell out of Roy Harper could take people by surprise. Try abusing the big pumps possible with Titans Tower and big character discards, for example. Raven can give Starfire an ATK of 19 with one shot, and that's fairly significant against CS.

MKKO and similar builds (like an AI/MK build) can do well against a CS player not running enough No Man's because CS has its biggest advantage in being able to overcome an opponent's field, which being hidden makes impossible. I prefer AI/MK because Johnny Quick and Thunderous Onslaught is monstrous, and the team-up provides a more robust set of options against CS, including ways to handle anti-concealed tech.

Somehow, my suspicion is that the best deck in the current GA format will be something which starts with GL or GLEE and adds to it. The beauty of The Ring Has Chosen is that it can grab ANY affiliated character if you control sufficient WP. That means you can grab options from anywhere more efficiently than even the Marvel Knights if you can keep up a sufficient field. Loyalty is a problem, but there are still many good options that don't fall with that problem. Imagine grabbing Dr. Doom (4) or Dr. Light (6) with TRHC, teaming them up with the Lanterns. You can likely assemble a strong field for offensive runs that has control and beatdown options at its disposal depending on the opposing setup. You can even do something like grab a GCPD Officer for the discard for the Fizzles you're running to counter Flame Trap. ;)

The Thunderbolts are a similarly good team for the current metagame. Since any Marvel card is fair game to MMW, there's a lot of potential for mid-game tech from that side of the game. Dr. Doom is again an option, along with some of the more fun X-Men characters. Imagine, your CS opponent puts all his characters in the support row on his initiative on turn 6. Search for the 6-drop Storm, and laugh as his characters lose any ability to attack. ^_^ In fact, the Thunderbolts have a few different card-drawing abilities, which would help out the discard-hungry X-Men. TB/X-M has a good bit of potential to it right now.

I think the best way to deal with CS is going off curve with a definite way to stop Flame Trap and Total Anarchy. Few decks can accomplish this, but anything that teams up with GK for the Fizzle seems like it would work.

This thread is a miracle. It is information like this that spreads the wealth down from the top of the competitive pyramid. I would like to thank all those who dedicate themselves to this game enough to help it grow through community support... then I would like to print this thread and get to work on a new deck.

Thanks guys.

Stu

Yeah, but fizzle doesn't stop total anarchy.

Have a Blast does.

The problem is that a GK-heavy(aside from schools) deck would most likely be curve based, and therefore is more or less already immune to TAFT..