Spider-Woman - Sneaky Discount on Expensive Allies

DESIGN NOTES

How many of you have always wanted to include several expensive and cool allies in your deck like Multiple Man, Captain Marvel, Captain America, and Giant-Man, but could never justify the cost?

Worry no longer! This deck makes expensive allies viable and even efficient to play! You won't find any allies that cost less than 4 in this deck.

KEY CARDS

Sneak Attack is the magic piece of this deck. It lets you play a (trait sharing) ally of any price directly from your hand, but they only stay around for the rest of the phase. That means this card can help you cheaply play allies of any cost.

Captain Marvel is great ally to play with Sneak Attack in this deck. I tried to include a little extra energy (Leading Blow, Energy Barrier) to help her hit the powerful thresholds when played.

Before allies are lost at the end of the phase, it's a great idea to play Save the Day or Go Down Swinging to get an extra 4-6 damage or 4-6 threat removal.

Here's an example of how playing Captain Marvel could go. 1) Play Captain Marvel with Sneak Attack discarding the top 4 cards of the deck (let's pretend we are lucky, and 2 of 4 are energy resources). That means she does 3 damage and stuns an enemy. 2) We can do her basic attack for 3 more damage. 3) Play Go Down Swinging to discard Captain Marvel early and do an additional 5 damage. We just did 11 damage and stunned the enemy for very low cost.

Admittedly not every ally in this deck is as good as Captain Marvel. Protector is probably the least exciting ally in the deck, but I needed her to make sure the number of Leadership aspect cards and Protection aspect cards were balanced in my deck (a requirement for Spider Woman).

Multiple Man can't be targeted by Sneak Attack (doesn't share a trait with Spider-Woman)., but can actually be a very powerful first play. I didn't realize this at first, but playing one multiple man will trigger playing both the second, AND third multiple man immediately, as long as the others are in your deck or hand. This doesn't work if you have 1 or 2 Multiple Man in your discard pile.

It's really fun when timing works out for you to play Save the Day or Go Down Swinging on Captain America for a very cheap 6 damage or 6 thwart.

Leading Blow sometimes does damage, but the bigger reason we want this card is that it will boost Spider-Woman's basic stats +1 for 0 cost. That will often make it really easy to have +1, or +2 to her stats to do some extra thwart of damage.

OTHER TIPS

Spider woman is a somewhat fragile hero with only 11 health. Take advantage of her many ways of removing threat (via allies, hero cards, and Save the Day) to give her space to take an Alter-Ego turn when needed. Pheromones and Contaminant Immunity can also buy you some time with status effects. Spider-Woman's only 3 RECOVER means that it is often pretty inefficient to try to heal her back to health directly. Energy Barrier can also buy you a little time by protecting your health pool.

You won't always be able to play allies with Sneak Attack. I like playing Iron Fist, Multiple Man, and Captain Marvel with full resource when I don't have Sneak Attack.

If you have +2 to Spider-Woman's stats from playing some cheap cards, try to get a couple Self-Propelled Glide cards in to multiply it's usefulness. I'm finding that Finesse is also key to unlocking more powerful combos with Spider-Woman, so put those early if possible.