Shadowcat - Ignorance of the errata is no excuse

So Warning was sitting there, staring at me smugly, secure in the knowledge that it would never, ever see play. And I thought to myself, "y'know what? Sod The Man and his so-called 'rules'. I'm gonna be a rebel, buck the system, bring the whole thing down, and play Warning in the one deck where it might have once had a role".

That role was in a Shadowcat deck.

...Pre-errata.

That's right! Eff, ess, gee and dee the po-lice, we are taking the law into our own hands and playing Warning as a Defense event. Now it's Defiance in grey, baby! - at least as far as Kitty is concerned. With Ready to Rumble at the, uh, ready, and the pairing of Quick Shift and Phased and Confused on deck, we can pack in ten cards that negate an attack without exhausting us, and that's only counting P&C once each rather than twice. Add in Professor X for an eleventh, and we're doing a pretty good job at suppressing villain activations with over a quarter of the deck, without adding a single coloured aspect card.

But why deviate now? I definitely want Deft Focus, the The X-Jet, Utopia and the Cuckoos (Kitty's obligation and nemesis are both quite nasty).

At this point, I threw in the rest of the grey X-allies and some filler and took the deck for a spin. It worked fine, I guess, but it was slower than it really needed to be. The reason one plays perfect defence in Protection isn't just that it's where all the defence events are: it's also the home of Unflappable and Change of Fortune, and without them mitigating the cost of the cards you spend in the villain phase you wind up with anemic hands in the player phase.

With that experience in mind, the obvious solution was to splash in Red to bring the villain's HP bar down that 20% quicker. I'm sure attentive and attractive readers such as yourselves don't need to be told about Surprise Attack (free after blocking!), or Goldballs (4 attack!) or Psylocke (two more villain activations negated!). I also concluded that seven attack events was enough to justify Martial Prowess, and threw in a Helicarrier to bring the odds of getting a resource generator in my opening hand up as high as reasonably possible. Normally the 'carrier would be bad with Shadowcat, but in this case Surprise Attack is the only card played during the villain phase that actually costs resources, and we're always paying for that with her Solid-form ability.

So is Warning overpowered when played rules-as-written-but-not-as-re-written? Nah. It's nice to be able to stay that little bit safer with Kitty outside of Protection, but that's nothing you can't achieve with any number of other heroes. The Aggression splash helps deal with minions against the more mob-happy villains, but it doesn't change the fact that you're playing Shadowcat and that she's not all that efficient on a resource-spent to problem-solved ratio, and is therefore prone to getting swamped by whatever it is the villain has to offer - be it damage, minions or threat.

If someone else wants to try the most rebellious and subversive action in all of human history - the ultimate form of punk rock anarchy - and pretend you're not aware that the text on a piece of cardboard has officially been rescinded, let me know the results! Especially if you had a non-Protection Shadowcat deck that was just 5% away from being broken, and the only thing it needed to completely destroy any semblance of game balance was three copies of an 0-cost Defense trigger.