Kergy’s Korner #60: It’s All About Theme Decks!

This week’s crazy challenge revolves around team theme decks. Here are several ways to build fun team decks and theme decks while trying to stay true to the theme of the deck. And so, I present to you:


KERGY’S FACTION CHALLENGE!!

A bit short this week, as I prepare fervently for my trip to PCNY, only one day after returning from Ottawa, where I attended CanGames 2005.

Still, there’s more than enough in here to keep you busy until I get back – so read up and start building!

Challenge #1) Build a deck limited to a mono-faction, where the only cards you can use must have a character from your faction in the artwork – for example, you can only use Rapier if you’re playing X-Men. Alternately, you can limit it to faction cards with no generics at all.

With this kind of deck, you’re trying to stay true to your team of choice – thematically, why would you play Borrowed Blade in a Spider-Friends deck?

I like to call these kinds of decks ‘Flavour Decks’, because they remain true to the flavour of the characters.

If you really want to get into details, try to limit every card in your deck to those that feature characters in your deck (Rapier can only be played in a deck that uses Nightcrawler), or, like Avalon Space Station or Sonic Gun, fit the deck thematically. As well, you may want to disallow something like Finishing Move in a Wolverine deck, since he’s getting curb-stomped.

Challenge #2) Once you’ve gotten the team challenge done, it’s time to branch out. Within the faction of choice, try to build a deck from a certain age:

-The original X-Men, with only Cyclops, Iceman, Jean Grey, Angel, Beast and Prof. X as the characters, and every card in the deck must thematically fit with the characters.

-The X-Men from Giant-Sized X-Men, with Cyclops, Banshee, Storm, Colossus, Thunderbird, Nightcrawler, Wolverine and Professor X.

-The Dark Phoenix-era X-Men, with Jean Grey, Cyclops, Wolverine, Storm, Nightcrawler, Shadowcat and Dazzler.

-The Fall of the Mutants X-Men, with Storm, Dazzler, Longshot, Rogue, Wolverine, Colossus and Forge.

And so on.

You can try this with the Brotherhood (from Magneto’s original Brotherhood, to the New Brotherhood, to the Freedom Force, to Masque’s later Brotherhood (sans Masque, of course); the Sinister Syndicate or Teen Titans, with a gazillion different combinations; or the Fantastic Four’s and Revenge Squad’s various lineups…

It’s doesn’t work as well for Spider-Friends, Marvel Knights, Sentinels, or Fearsome Five, and is iffy for Batman, Crime Lords, League of Assassins and Doom. But with a bit of free-thinking, you can maneuver it to work.

As well, you can implement several house rules:

-You can add characters from other teams that would fit on your team, removing loyalty restrictions (or changing them to your current team) if necessary.

-You can use any version of a character (here aren’t enough versions currently to be [i]too[/b] picky about versions).

-You can change the non-army character restriction from four copies to six, or even eight, copies to make it less difficult to fill in drops.

3) The final challenge is to go beyond the obvious factions, and start to fill out the Marvel and DC Universes with what’s available. Want to play Avengers? We’ve got Beast, Sub-Mariner, Spider-Man, Wolverine, Invisible Woman and Mr. Fantastic, Black Widow, Moon Knight, Luke Cage, Jessica Drew, etc. Heck, two thirds of the New Avengers lineup is available. Defenders? Start with Dr. Strange, Sub-Mariner, Angel, Iceman, and work your way up. Champions! You have ‘em all save Hercules, thanks to Ghost Rider and Black Widow in the Marvel Knights set.

And teams aren’t the only way – you can recreate the Secret Wars, with a Heroes and Villains team. You can have your own Contest of Champions! (oh yah, we already covered that one…my bad!). You can even build your own Exiles teams!

Then we can start in on DC – JLA is a good one, with Batman, Supes and several Green Lanterns to start you off. Try a mini-Crisis, with drops from several Earths on the field simultaneously. Or make a deck solely consisting of Sidekicks!

Once you have your themes, create a casual tournament scenario, with different teams facing off – either heroes vs. villains, or maybe a multi-player battle royale! You can have a tournament where every player plays a different lineup of the same team! Or take that mini-Crisis to a new level and have several players build decks consisting of a single character – all the versions of Spider-Man and Scarlet Spider in one deck, all of the versions of Batman/Azrael and Robin and Nightwing in another, a Wolverine deck, a Superman deck, a Daredevil and Black Widow deck – the possibilities are endless! Now make those characters nonunique, so that you can recruit multiple versions of the same character and have them fighting side by side!

So what are you waiting for? Get building and start playing!

I gotta print this out for my buds to see. Then maybe I can make my Titan enemies deck work (uses only characters that have a history against the Titans).

Yet another Kergy's Korner that must be brought to the attention of my local hobby league. These are very fun and are a needed break for the casual player from the hectic pace of competive tournaments.

in this style.....you could just basically run mono doom........or fantastic four for the most part.

Well, you COULD - but where would the fun be in that??=)

a fun midnight sons deck with morbius from syndicate not bad

I'll have to tell one of my friends about this, since he makes decks this way already. His rules:
- the art for each card must feature a character from the team he's playing, or be team-stamped to that team
- the characters in the deck must be "feature" members of the team (i.e. no Punisher in Spider-Friends)

He actually does very well, though nobody around here plays anything terribly competitive.

Have a good one!
Cap'n Jay