Card draw simulator
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None. Self-made deck here. |
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None yet |
Tensuun · 27
Stack the aces, load the dice.
Strengths
- This deck is relatively more reliable than most Iceman decks at regularly re-readying and being able to play expensive events, which means the villain will often have multiple stacks of Frostbite and/or Frozen Solid each round to help slow down the villain. These effects ignore "Stalwart" and "Steady" and can stack on top of existing "Stunned" and "Confused" cards, so you'll be preventing or mitigating a large number of villain activations.
- You rival Ghost-Spider in the ability to dredge up a lot of wild resources for discarding villain attachments, situationally pay for other players' Alliance cards, etc. Sometimes better, since you don't need to flip down to be able to do it.
Weaknesses
- Thwarting is the glaring one -- Iceman inherently has a low base THW and his special ability doesn't trigger when he uses it anyway; he's almost always better off attacking first. Unfortunately, the allies in this deck don't help with this either -- while you do get the main benefit from Domino using her basic thwart, her low THW makes it too tempting to attack instead. And Snow Clones are never allowed to thwart at all. Your best bet for thwarting is Chill Out! but you're not even going to keep up with Step One Of The Villain Phase with this alone, so you'd better play with friends who can thwart.
- While not overly reliant on any specific game state, you do need to get -- and keep -- a fair amount of Things on the board before you can play efficiently. That combined with poor thwarting makes the early game a bit rocky, and continues to be a weakness later in the game if too many effects forcing you to discard upgrades/supports land in quick succession.
Primary interactions
Domino, of course, can swap any Ice card from your hand to the top of your deck before you make your basic attack, which ensures Cryokinetic Perception will ready you. Downsides are that this doesn't work with basic defense and we don't have other re-ready effects of our own, so we need to be prepared to block with other allies or use other mitigation to avoid taking too much damage too quickly. A secondary effect that can be situationally useful is that she can instead put an X-Men ally on top of your deck before you play "To Me, My X-Men!" to guarantee it actually works.
Beast is always amazing, but he's extra amazing in decks that can find 3-resource cards like (potentially) Band Together.
Mutant Mayhem is part of what makes this whole thing viable in the first place; it effectively heals and re-readies Domino, refunds its cost if you can flash Beast with it and have 3+ allies out (not uncommon!), or if anyone else at the table is running something even more powerful, sure, why not. Notice Hope Summers will be both types of eligible target, and she'll get played "from your hand" if using this effect.
Secondary interactions
Med Lab, Stepford Cuckoos, and Make the Call are in case of emergency; sometimes an encounter or similar thing comes at just the wrong time and we'd be forced to sac one of our best allies or upgrades after sacrificing a bunch just to set them up. It's helpful to have an additional chance at getting them back. Occasionally, it's an actually-good play.
Team Training is mostly to give Domino one more activation, but it also gives your other allies a small chance to survive a villain activation or usefully soak smaller sources of damage before Mutant Mayhem would bring them back.
The Triskelion is the only way we can get +1 max allies while Domino is in play, and this is mainly so we're allowed to chump block without defeating the purpose of Band Together.
Band Together just ends up being really, really good for landing expensive cards, and Bobby has a bunch of them: Ice Blast, Ice Wall, and Frozen Solid are amazing cards, but they can be really hard to afford otherwise, and while Power Belt, X-Gene, The X-Jet, etc. can help, getting these set up is pretty expensive too.
Options
It honestly might be worth throwing in even a third Band Together. It's a little risky because drawing 2 or more cards that really are only useful as resources can heavily limit options.
X-Gene's usefulness is kind of dubious. Deft Focus and Power Belt already fund all the same cards plus a couple others. But, if you like having lots of resource generators on the table, it's one more, and it can be kind of satisfying to play something like Ice Blast "for free".
Team-Building Exercise is a lot better for Iceman than for most heroes, but I'm still not entirely sure it's worth including two of them since you can't target the same card play with both anyway; this'd probably be the first thing I cut, if I find something decent to add in.
Gameplay, setup, mulligan priority
I haven't played this enough yet to be confident in describing things down to fine detail, but the deck seems to function at least decently by just going with the flow -- stuff always happens during the "reveal encounter cards" phase that messes up The Plan, which is part of the fun of this whole thing. With that being said, the top priorities are of course Cryokinetic Perception, Domino, and Power Belt -- if you don't have any of these in your opening draw, mulligan hard for them. If you have to allocate resources somewhat inefficiently on an early turn to get one of these out, do it. The interactions these have with almost all of your other cards will make every subsequent turn so much smoother.
It's almost always better to defend with a Snow Clone than to defend with Iceman, but don't forget to trigger Freeze! followed by Cryokinetic Perception if you do make a basic defense -- just in case, you know?