Local Spider-Woman Defeats Heroic Campaign

The deck-building flexibility and sheer power of Spider-Woman strike again! This deck has beaten the Rise of Red Skull campaign on solo heroic, as well as Zola and Red Skull heroic standalone (without any campaign buffs).

How it works: your early game is mostly devoted to landing your key permanents: especially Hall of Heroes but also Jessica Drew's Apartment, 2x Finesse, Under Surveillance, and Skilled Investigator (loosely ordered by decreasing priority). Buy time with cheap allies, the occasional thwart or heal, and Pheromones (probably the best stall tool of all time).

Once you are "built" you will have a much easier time setting up huge turns that will allow you to eventually outpace the relentless encounter deck. At your peak, you'll fall into a 2-turn rhythm that goes like this:

BIG TURN aka "any turn beginning in alter-ego mode"

Draw 3 off of Hall of Heroes

Tap Jessica Drew's Apartment and grab the most relevant aspect card you find.

Recover if needed (and if you can afford to be exhausted), then flip to hero.

Clear a side scheme (ideally with Clear the Area) and draw 1 (or 2) more (thanks, Skilled Investigator). Stats boosted because you just played Justice.

Then, look at the board state, the humongous pile of cards in your hand, and your win/lose conditions, and figure out how to get as much work done as possible. (This is the fun part!)

Pay special attention to how many times you can reset Spider-Woman and how high you can get her stats. Don't always prioritize playing more aspects, especially if the cards themselves are not impactful. Notice that resetting a 3/3 Spider-Woman once is better (and usually cheaper) than making her 4/4 or even 5/5.

LITTLE TURNS aka "any other turn (beginning in hero mode)"

These turns are nowhere near as impactful. Prioritize landing Allies, Pheromones, and anything that puts 3 counters on Hall of Heroes. If you haven't reached 3 counters and have a comfortable board state, consider remaining in hero for another round. When you do flip, it is almost always wrong to trigger Hall of Heroes at the end of such a turn unless you have 6+ counters on it somehow. We need those counters for big turn! In dire situations, do your best to have 1 or 2 alter-ego actions available if you ever do this (namely, allies to drop). Keep Jessica Drew's Apartment in mind whenever you flip to AE, too, even at the end of your turn it is at least a resource. Fish for the weakest aspect card in your top 5 and pitch it to play the ally you're sitting on.

And that's how it goes! Even if drawing 12 billion encounter cards in a turn gets you down, you'll always come back around to BIG TURN and claw yourself back into the lead! I personally have a huge amount of fun playing this deck and I hope you do too! Below I'll talk about some of the card choices in a bit more detail:

Energy, Genius, and Strength are HUGE enablers and I wouldn't dream of cutting them. A great majority of your most impactful cards are 2-cost. These are obviously great for BIG TURN, but really anywhere, having a double resource card allows a 5-card hand to play 2 2-cost cards even without Finesse. Once you've got both of those, a double-resource will let you play 2 2-cost cards and a reset. And that's not even big turn!

Earth's Mightiest Heroes was actually NOT as broken as I thought if would be because, in Heroic, your allies are going to die. They will die often, and the chances of triggering EMH on a given turn are a lot worse than you might think they are (at least they were for me). This card is still amazing (it's bonkers at lower difficulties), although these may almost have been be my next cuts.

Hall of Heroes and Under Surveillance are, in my estimation, absolutely essential for taking this deck up against heroic solo play, and they are basically the two reasons I consider this aspect combination to be the very best for this particular application. The card advantage from Hall of Heroes is vital to keep up with the encounter deck at all, and the breathing room from Under Surveillance is really the only way to stay afloat against the endless storm of threat (once Zola has 4 acceleration tokens on his main scheme, for example).

Skilled Investigator is a standout as well. A cheap permanent that boosts your stats the turn you play it and is really easy to trigger (easier and easier the more encounter cards you're resolving each turn!) and basically increase your hand size by 1 permanently. Remember that you must be in hero mode to draw off it.

You need your cheap allies (Hulk, Spider-Girl, Quake) for chump-blocking, EMH-triggering, and occasional chip thwart/damage. (I usually didn't attack with Hulk, but when I did it's best if I could peek my topdeck with Jessica Drew first.) Agent Coulson is almost a 2-cost 2-thwart ally who can also fix your hand a bit. The preparation(s) you bring with him feel pretty flexible, I personally found Spycraft to be the most helpful in heroic play, so helpful I packed 2 of them. I often find myself resolving 4+ encounter cards and being able to survive basically anything except direct damage, or a scheme, and Spycraft is there for you just when you need it. Valkyrie is the only "real" 3-cost ally that makes the cut, because her immediate impact of deleting (at least) 1 minion the turn she lands makes her actually worth it. (A note, you'll very rarely have the resources lying around to land Captain Marvel, I never try very hard to.)

The remaining cards in each aspect are a bit more flexible. Combat Training and Heroic Intuition are each nice to have, powerful permanents that keep on giving (they each make it that much easier to reach relevant ATK or THW thresholds, when you just need to meet a certain minion's health or delete a certain side scheme), although they are far less essential than most of the other permanents in the deck.

In the Justice half, the constant pressure of heroic makes it hard to afford to land Beat Cop, so I complete the list with 3x Clear the Area. Combined with the modularity of Inconspicuous, it's pretty easy to get the kicker of Clear the Area off of almost any side scheme, so it will totally replace itself and its cost with the help of Skilled Investigator. It certainly wouldn't hurt to flex in Counterintelligence as a second Under Surveillance as well as an Agent Coulson target, and perhaps Jessica Jones if you feel like she'd be worth her cost.

In the Aggression half, I wouldn't leave home without the 3x Relentless Assault and 2x Battle Fury in minion-heavy scenarios (Zola and Red Skull each pump out plenty), but in minion-light scenarios these can flex to options like Skilled Strike, Press the Advantage, or Tigra.

A note RE: minions: If the scenario is too minion-light for Hall of Heroes to do any work, then it's very possible that Justice-Leadership is a more powerful option for that scenario (with cheap allies, Make the Call, and Rapid Response - Agent Coulson reliability), although this list did find the first 3 scenarios of the campaign less difficult than the last 2 (the minion-heavy ones), and is tuned mostly to succeed against those (even without the campaign buffs) so if you're looking for one aspect pairing to take on all 5 scenarios in solo heroic I still recommend this one.

Thanks for checking out this list and writeup! I hope you have fun playing it and find success, be sure to reach out with your own thoughts and feedback!