Katana Diplomacy

In an ideological age, diplomacy may seem weak and prosaic. But sometimes it is all we have. - Noah Feldman

Contrary to the above quote, diplomacy is definitely not all this Psylocke deck has, and when her Gunboat Diplomacy does come into play it's most assuredly not weak. For raw efficiency, it's one of the best damage cards in the game - if you can work around all of its requirements. Fortunately, Psylocke can do this with ease.

There are a couple of key ideas which have gone into the construction of this deck: What if you just never really needed to worry about threat anymore? And how high exactly can this deck boost the damage of a one-cost Justice card?

The answer to that last question of course is: ten damage for 2ER, Swinging Web Kick who?

Support the Power of Women

Like any good diplomat, Psylocke relies on a strong support system. In this case, our support consists of four cards, all of which are pretty good. We at least want to get Moira MacTaggert into play early if we can, with a second priority of Training Regimen. These two are going to be key in our setup play and to get everything else going.

Moira MacTaggert is going to give Psylocke an extra card every time we flip up, and we are going to be doing that a lot - almost 1/5 of our cards can confuse the villain, and a couple of those are going to be cycling a lot in the late game (at minimum one will be coming out every turn). So we can afford to flip down to alter ego often.

In the worst case scenario with a Steady or Stalwart villain, we still don't need to panic. We can rely on our powerful thwarting to keep schemes under control - our basic thwart starts at 3, will jump up to 5 pretty quickly (with Heroic Intuition and Surveillance Specialist), and will often be effectively 7 (with Making an Entrance).

Training Regimen is going to be used primarily to pull out Making an Entrance to keep our health topped up, and make our basic thwarting even more effective. It can also pull out Skilled Investigator and Heroic Intuition while we are getting set up, as well as all of Psylocke's Training upgrades. It's not the end of the world if we bottom-deck Training Regimen, but if we see it earlier it definitely gets our gameplan running more quickly and smoothly.

Cerebro is also good to get early, but it's not essential. It makes controlling the board state easier, but it doesn't matter if it's towards the bottom of the deck - it's only a nice-to-have on the first deck pass. It does trivialize incoming damage, so we do want to get it in play once we find it.

Our fourth and final support is Children of the Atom. It's a helpful card to set up some alternative ways of playing Gunboat Diplomacy when necessary, but it's the least important of the four supports. We won't be prioritizing this, but we'll play it when we can.

She Said I Take Care of My Resources

On first glance it might seem strange that I haven't included any resource generation cards in this build, like X-Gene or Team-Building Exercise. Early versions of the build had them, but I found they were unnecessary.

Unlike most 4-hand-size heroes, Psylocke isn't resource-poor. With two built-in resource generators, she has the equivalent of a hand size of 6 in hero form, or a whopping 8 if she starts in AE. We have all three basic doubles, which is plenty. Again, early builds had copies of the Power-of cards, but they just detracted from what the build is trying to do.

What we do have is card draw. One Way or Another is comparatively low risk in this deck, because we have such a silly amount of threat removal. We will also be drawing cards with Moira MacTaggert, Skilled Investigator, Surveillance Specialist, Training Regimen, Mental Detection, and Cerebro. With everything in play we will be running the equivalent of a 12+ hand size every second turn. One Way or Another is as much there to make sure we have something to use our massive thwarting ability on, as it is to draw cards.

Baby, That Ain't An Upgrade

We have quite a few upgrades in this deck (8), but we mostly don't care about any of them in particular. They all have some nice little effects, but they largely will serve to thin our deck and make it super efficient on deck passes 2+. Once we are set up, and with our trimmed down deck, we'll be decking out every second turn or so.

The ones we do care about a little are Skilled Investigator, for card draw; Heroic Intuition, because in this deck it boosts our thwarting and our damage output; and Justice Served, because once the deck is humming it will be giving us a ready every second turn.

The other one we care about, but only at the end of the game, is Mission Training. Late game this is going to boost Gambit to improve Gunboat Diplomacy's output, though it won't matter too much until the final villain phase.

But When You Think Of Me Do You Fill Your Head With Schemes?

We have just one Player Side Scheme in the deck, Specialized Training. We are going to use it to grab Surveillance Specialist, boosting our base thwart to 5 (with Heroic Intuition). We'll have no trouble thwarting the scheme down; in solo we can do it in a single basic thwart with Making an Entrance.

For multiplayer it may take a couple of turns, but that doesn't matter; the benefits for this are huge and are going to set up our end game against the villain.

Allies, In A World of Too Much Choice

We have six allies in this deck, and other than Angel they are all X-Men traited. These are going to be what powers our Gunboat Diplomacy.

Helpfully, they all have a minimum of two thwart except Gambit (who's going to have somewhere between zero and three in a regular game). Both Dazzler and Professor X can confuse an enemy when they come into play, which is helpful for us flipping down to AE and for Float Like a Butterfly.

Three of the allies are psionic, meaning we can use our AE ability to shuffle them from our discard back into our deck. That means unless something goes terribly wrong, we shouldn't ever be lacking a target for Cerebro. If we want to, we can cycle Professor X every turn.

What you probably will notice is that the allies in this deck are expensive. They are all three or four cost - because for the most part, we aren't going to be chump blocking with them (Professor X excepted, that wheelchair is going to take a hammering). We want them to stay in play to power up Gunboat Diplomacy, and to use their base stats to control the board. If we do chump block with anyone else, it's likely to be Blindfold, or an early Gambit who picked up a weak boost card.

Speaking of those two, they form one of the key components of our end game. We are going to set it up by using Cerebro to make sure we have both Blindfold and Gambit in our hand on a turn we start in Alter Ego. Then we are going to flip up and play Blindfold, stacking the encounter deck to ensure that when we play Gambit he gets a three-boost card to maximize his stats.

He can do some work for us as-is, but we want to keep him in play until we can get Mission Training on him. Then he's going to be half of our Gunboat Diplomacy to finish off the villain.

The final ally is Husk, who is there to keep our board state ticking over in the early-to-mid game. With her abilities we can keep her alive for the whole game by healing her with a Psi-Knife every time she activates.

To Be Flexible When The Boat Comes In

The final part of our whole puzzle is Gunboat Diplomacy itself. The cost for this card is 2ER (one resource plus the card itself), and you must exhaust an X-Force and an X-Men character - seemingly a fairly hefty expense. In return for that, you get to remove threat from schemes and deal damage to enemies, each equal to the total thwart of the exhausted characters.

This is amazing value.

You are getting threat removal equal to thwart, so the value of exhausting the two characters is balanced out immediately. (Additionally, if they are allies they won't take consequential damage, which is worth a resource in itself). Then you get damage equal to the thwart values, for essentially the low cost of just 2ER. Aside from how good the value is, the fact that we can split the damage and threat removal amongst enemies and schemes as we like makes it incredible.

So how much damage are we getting?

Our options for the two exhausted characters are initially either Psylocke and one of the X-Men allies, or Angel and one of the X-Men allies. Once we get Children of the Atom in play, we can use any two characters.

At minimum, with any two of the possible characters we will be getting 4 damage for our 2ER, which is a good return. If one of the characters is base Psylocke, Professor X, or Gambit with a +3 boost card, we are getting 5 damage and we are well ahead of the curve.

But how high can we go?

By the mid game, we should have Heroic Intuition and Surveillance Specialist on Psylocke, boosting her base Thwart to 5 - so with Professor X, we are hitting an amazing 8 Damage for 2ER, and with our Cerebro trick we can hit that every time Gunboat Diplomacy comes out. But this isn't our limit.

We established earlier how we are going to use Blindfold to ensure Gambit gets a three-boost card. We are then going to put Mission Training on him to raise his thwart to 4. With Psylocke at base thwart of 5 and Float Like A Butterfly in play, we can get a whopping 10 damage for 2ER.

It's a pity we can't play a second high-value Gunboat Diplomacy, because Psylocke is already exhausted from the first one...

... Unless we play Professor X when Children of the Atom is in play, meaning we can use his response to ready Psylocke, and use the two of them to play a second Gunboat Diplomacy for a further 9 damage.

... Can we get a third in one turn? Yes we can. If we cleared a scheme with the 17 threat we just removed, we can discard Justice Served to ready Psylocke, then play a third Gunboat Diplomacy with Husk. That one will only be hitting for another 8 damage.

All up, that's 24 threat removed and 27 damage on the villain in one turn, which is a pretty tasty way to simply nuke a final villain stage.

Now, all of that may sound improbable - you have to get all three Gunboat Diplomacy in hand in one turn, plus Professor X. But, we've already established we will be drawing around half our deck per turn, and we can find Professor X with Cerebro. In a pinch, we can also use Angel instead of Professor X to ready Psylocke, and it only reduces our damage output by 1.

Of course, if there is an enemy with Guard in play they are going to reduce our damage output a bit... Just kidding. We should have Psionic Training in play, so we ignore Guard.

The Final Countdown

This is the first deck where I've tried Gunboat Diplomacy; it seemed the obvious choice to use it with an X-Force hero and X-Men allies. And it's terrifyingly effective.

Much of the above discussion is with regard to solo play, but this deck rocks in multiplayer as well. I recommend it with Shadowcat or X-23; you'll take all the need for threat management off them and you can let them do what they do best.

Let me know what you think, and especially if you take this deck out for a spin; I promise you won't regret it.

Peace :)