Phoenix - Storm 'n' Havok

Other deckbuilders have made decent strides towards making Storm decks work for Jean. And if you're playing Storm, then you obviously want to play side schemes for her benefit.

So if Mission Planning is ever going to be good, it's got to be in this setup, with Command Teams and Psychic Kickers to extract extra value from it. And if Havok's ever going to be good, it has to be in a deck with Mission Planning.

(It's entirely possible that Mission Planning and Havok will, in fact, never be good. But you gotta try them out to be sure!)

With those initial parameters in place, the rest of the deck feels obvious in hindsight. There are various other choices of allies that take multiple points of consequential damage (to make you feel like you're getting extra mileage out of Mission Planning), but maybe that's getting a little too cute?

This isn't a Voltron deck. Your allies get a couple of additional swings, if they're lucky, from the bonus Uncanny X-Men health and Mission Planning, and then you either faceplant them into the villain or he faceplants into them.

You'll want to play and thwart down one side scheme immediately (while you still have 3THW), in order of priority Build Support (for Uncanny or Utopia) -> Call for Backup (for Beast or the Professor) -> New Recruits. Recruits made it in over Superpower Training as it gives more consistency in providing much-needed early chump blockers and (more importantly) because it costs zero up front. 66.6% of the time this will be the side scheme you leave out for Storm to move threat to, though.

There is an entire suite of alter ego supports and upgrades (Danger Room, Cerebro, Moira MacTaggert) you could add to the deck, but that mostly just slows it down. Phoenix kind of does her own thing in the background, and the total effect is relatively aggressive. The deck follows the typical Jean curve where she's thwarting or even blocking early on (...9 HP really hurts in this deck), and then finishes the villain off with a 9-point Telekinetic Attack on turn seven or eight - not quite a rush deck, but faster than you might see on a full build-out Leadership deck. Let's just say it's rare for the game to last long enough for you to cycle through the entire encounter deck.

I originally ran 2x Squared Off, but with no direct way of benefiting from the summoned minions (a la Hall of Heroes) I concluded it was better to run The Power of Leadership instead for only one less cost reduction - but gaining the ability to use it on Command Team and Mission Planning.

I've tested the deck against a moderate array of Standard villains in true solo. I haven't tried the Big 3 (I suspect that Ronan would beat you to death in a couple of turns), but was successful against some 'easy hard' fights like En Sabah Nur. In each case the point of failure was simply running out of HP - ESN would've run over me if not for a clutch Rise from the Ashes - but there's limited options to fix that without giving up consistency in a deck that's already slightly less consistent than I'd like. Maybe I'll try Symbiote Suit instead of The X-Jet and report back.

Assuming you don't put on the Venom costume, I imagine this deck would perform fairly well in multiplayer. Storm plus Psychic Kicker gives you some large-volume thwarting, and once you go Unleashed your events have very good board presence. If teammates complain that you're putting them at risk of a Dark Phoenix appearance, threaten to play in the 'pool aspect next time.