Ok, I've been looking over the cardlist for the JLA recently, but I don't quite get the feeling that JLA is the best team in the set. Without any cards in front of me I can't really gauge their power level, but I get the feeling that they are not as great as they may seem.

Here are my concerns with the team:
1) Ally abilities may often require discarding to get a power up (although JLA has lots of alternate power-up conditions) at the same time they do not have a large deal of card drawing. Does this create problematic hand disadvantage?

2) Seems the deck is meant to be played on curve. Curve decks usually can't rely on power ups as you have to balance playing different characters (so you avoid replacing your characters) with having enough copies for power-ups.

3) Powering up can only occur during the combat phase, thus most JLA abilities can only be activated during combat and not before, does this hurt them? (Making them more vulnerable to decks that have off combat tricks ie exhaustion)

4) The team has few activated abilities, most are Ally based. If you can't power up you are basically running a bunch of vanilla characters, how often is this a problem?

Does anyone who has experience with the cards have any input on this?

I am conserned with Hero's Welcome. Seems in a JLA only build the only two seperate cards it can fetch is Wonder Woman.

Yeah I was a bit disappointed with the JLA as a whole myself as well. JLA seems to be meant to be played for standard curve with JLI going off-curve.

The JLA aren't that bad, however the one card that stops them in their tracks is Unmasked since the deck powers up like crazy with the Ally mechanic.

I wanted to make an off-curve JLA/Teen Titans deck abusing the Ally mechanic with Tamaran, Red Star, New Teen Titans, and Bumblebee but unfortunately I couldn't get the characters I wanted in the deck to make it work. Plus I'd had to exclude 7 drop Supes since I'll rarely get 7 resource points to spend by turn 7 due to the KOing of Roy Harper's effect. So I was forced to stick with a Spider-Titans deck instead.

Other than that, the JLA set as a whole disappointed me but I hope the upcoming X-Men set coming out next year will be better.

Aquaman, Black Canary, Martian Manhunter, Red Tornado, and Zauriel are great cards and only Canary needs a powerup to get its effect off.

Problem with JLA is that its power base is dependent on power ups.

If JLA were to actually be considered threatening, players would just run unmasked. This would then require the JLA player to run Monitor Womb Station, which is...well, bad.

Unmasked and bad locations aside, JLA itself actually has power. The Hawkgirl/Hawkman setup for turn 3 and 4 is ridiculously strong, 6 drop Batman is interesting insurance, Firestorm is STUPID, etc.

In my opinion this is the biggest weakness of the Ally mechanic. that and the fact for such limited abilities there are none that stand out as overly powerful or broken.

There are comments about firestorm being good but really compare him to the other 5 drop draw engine is he even a patch on Garth? In the current very aggro format you arent going to be spending too much end on Firestorm.

I will point out tho that the ally ability isnt really designed to trigger from natural powerups its much more likely that the JLA deck will run powerup support such as Nth Metal and Reform the League both damm good cards for the theme.

Finally yes sadly JLA are not the strongest team in the set in fact they are probably one of the weakest.

I believe JLA is one of those teams who needs to be teamed-up to really shine. They could be the next Gotham Knights I guess.

I built a JLA/GL deck based around the JLA Willpower chars and its a good deck.

We'll have to see what the pro's come up with in the next few months. We could be very suprised.

Wow I cant count the times Ive seen comments like this and just went ".... wow". Being "pro" doesnt give you the ability to make and explore good decks. Being a VS PLAYER is what gives you that ability. If you think pro-qualified VS players (as a group) are better at doing those things, your probably right, but that doesnt mean you cant think for yourself. If you leave all the work to the "pro"s then how do you expect to get better?

Anyway, on the topic of JLA as a stand-alone team... they have a load of really nice cards with attractive effects, but they just dont have that power to break through.... they always seem to fall just short of the competition.

However, New Era and the like do open up a ton of options. Possibly a TT/JLA(/MK). New Era for things like Tamaran and Titans Tower... and Garth obviously. But of course, this isnt the greatest of ideas, but its just an example of the potential behind JLA.

The JLA likes the Brotherhood. New Era lets you cycle between Avalon, Lost City, location team-ups (Metropolis & Stormfront-1) and a copy or two of that Womb Station. Zatanna's a 12/12 5-drop in this team-up, and you can use early Ally powers (like Hawkman) to set up the field for your big guns that work more off of the ally-assisting powers.

JLA/ Brotherhood could work but Ally would have to very much take a back seat for this one. On the otherhand Brotherhood with Nth metal would be particularly nasty!

I was saying this because I personally wont be working with the JLA team as of yet and I dont know if I will be in the future. My attention is more focused on the JLI and IJG. I've already explored JLA/GL but I dont feel comfortable with it and my team-mate is cracking at JLA/TT. As of the now I dont have any interest in exploring the JLA team any further.

Brotherhood + JLA seems like a good mix. Kam is already putting Nth Metal to good use in his BBH deck which is in the deck garage.

BBH has gotten a big help now... i know i'll pack 4 Nth Metal and 4 Straight to the Grave... that's all

You know you don't have to fetch separate version of the character card, right?

So you can Hero's welcome, pull Batman 6-drop Avatar of Justice, reveal him, and because he has an ally mechanic, pull ANOTHER Batman 6-drop which you could subsequently use to power him up for his ally ability.

Almost as if thats what the card was designed to do! :)

Personally, I think curve JLA can work, though Unmasked is always going to be a worry if it's proved that it can.

I played with it for a while but utlimately i found it really shines when teamed up to make use of willpower. It severely is lacking a decent 6 drop and thats what hurts it the most. Jordan isn't that impressive and flash requies to much work.

Batman would be nice but no flight/range plus you have to power up after an effect has started a chain and then discard seems a bit much. I do like the early synergy though ,especially the two hawks and what they can do when equiped with nth metal. I currently have them teamed up with GL and its working extremely well.

I've always said that the 6 drop was the most important factor in a curve deck. I'm liking both the General and Gorrilla Grodd alot right now. The problem i'm find with the whole ally mechnaic is a bit like cosmic from DSM. Cosmic never worked because there was no cheap easy way to replace the cosmic counters and some cosmic effects werent' that amazing anyways. For ally its easy to trigger the ability, but alot of the characters effects are just minor useful.

I would have prefered they made BETTER ally effects and made powering up more difficult. Nth metal is going to be scary good.... big brotherhood anyone?

I've been tooling around the Strategy and Deck forums a lot trying to get a handle on the affiliation. The one thing I always put first is that you need to plan for Unmasked- usually this means Monitor Womb Station. Sometimes you can nail it with Elongated Man, but against a good opponent this opportunity will be rare. MWS is by no means a bad card, it stops a bunch of commonly-played Plot Twists (I have a short list here.)

Gerad is right that JLA doesn't power-up "naturally" very often- more often you're going to be using Nth Metal and Reform the League to trigger your Ally abilities.

Batman isn't as bad as people are making him out to be. He has limitations, true, but he's still a beast on the board, as he can chew through all your opponent's combat tricks.

The discard problem is significant, but you have both Firestorm and Justice League Signal Device to work around it, plus an early Magnificant 7 can get you a leg up.