Black Widow - Love like an anglerfish

Female anglerfish look at black widows and are all, like, "hold my beer".

Also the whole 'luring in prey' thing, they do that too.

...

Natasha's problem has always been that she's just not very good at what she's supposed to do. You can throw out all those preparations, but odds are pretty good that the board will fill with minions and treacheries during the one turn you spent flipped down to try to get some benefit from those economy enablers.

This ultimately led me to give up on Yellow Widow builds that flip every turn - my decks all felt like they'd be better with Nebula, which isn't exactly the greatest of compliments.

Having given up on Sonic Rifles and Counterintelligences, the natural next step was to paint the deck red. Aggression:

• Is the second most generous source of Confusion (you want to flip sometimes).
• Is marginally better than Protection at pulling out minions so you can manually trigger your offensive Preparations, and unlike Protection makes you better at killing said minions.
• Now actually comes with some pretty serious card draw.

So let's do it anglerfish style: Pull as many minions as possible out of the encounter deck, attach them all to yourself parasitically, and weed them out at your convenience, drawing cards all the while.

Hand Cannons and Jarnbjorn give you that bit of extra damage you'll need to kill most medium-sized minions even after Widow's Bite or Lie in Wait (though don't forget your last ping of Widowmaker damage), and at your peak you can swing for eight between the cannon, the axe, the suit and Combat Training. Once you can do four damage at will (Lie in Wait plus Widowmaker will do) Face the Past becomes a draw-three card with barely any downside - I've killed Taskmaster three times in one game and barely noticed his presence except for the extra tokens on Hall of Heroes.

The card draw is probably what elevates the deck over a garden-variety just-doing-aggression-things build. Face the Past, Hall of Heroes and Espionage are all pretty good at delving into the deck, "Bring It!" is almost always at least a free cycle (and often nets cards), and that's without seriously considering Natasha's built-in card advantage from the Safe House and Mission Prep.

The ally selection is geared towards minion slaying (for obvious reasons) and status effects (to let you flip down and/or minimise the number of times you get punched in the face). On that last note, you will need to chump block more often than you might like, so try to keep a wounded chump on hand.

On the thwarting front, Looking for Trouble plus the Professor's kindly intervention will generally supplement your Covert Ops and baseline 3THW with the Symbiote Suit on - it's enough for solo work, though don't expect to thwart for the rest of the table in multiplayer.

The elephant in the room is that, while this deck makes the Black Widow better at doing Black Widow things, she's still not amazing at it. Against tougher enemies there's a real risk of being overwhelmed. If you find yourself thinking it's too risky to play Looking for Trouble or Angela, then you've probably found the deck's natural ceiling. Then there are matchups where you absolutely can't survive the extra encounter card from Symbiote Suit and have to downgrade to Endurance - but then you're giving up quite a lot of power in a deck that already suffers from not being quite lethal enough in tough fights.