Cable - X-Shot

"Give me a little credit, Dom. I wouldn't bring a gun through security. Least not a metal one..."

Hey all! I'm excited to finally try out some Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. cards with some older heroes and I went straight for a deck that tries to make Slingshot shine. And, as it turns out, this weapon will set off security's metal detectors.

The Mission

This deck centers around using Slingshot as often as possible to benefit from her bouncing back to your hand. We do this primarily through Psychic Kicker, but Command Team is great too. Each offers a second activation with no downside since Yo-Yo will come right back to our hand at the end of the player phase.

The other neat thing here is you can keep your Uncanny X-Force team pure by playing her after your other allies have activated so they can always take advantage of the extra THW and -1 consequential damage while thwarting side schemes.

Primary Objective

1. Because we want to utilize Psychic Kicker, we'll typically want to grab Technovirus Purge with Soldier X to give us the Psionic trait. In rare cases or in solo you might want to pick Build Support to nab Graymalkin early on.

2. Prioritize Graymalkin and Mind Scan in your opening hand so you can generate for Slingshot and easily clear Technovirus Purge quickly. You won't always get them early, but it doesn't hurt to try.

3. Build out our board state a bit with our various resource generators like Graymalkin, Clarity of Purpose, Helicarrier, and X-Gene, in order of my personal preference. Other very useful cards to build out our board are Professor and Mission Leader. Drawing extra cards or finding specific side schemes is incredibly valuable, especially in multiplayer. Both of these are great to invest in early.

4. Complete whatever missions you can while setting up your X-Force team for efficient thwarting. Cable has several fun tools in his kit to give you a leg up in almost any situation. Once your victory display starts filling up and you've got a decent board state, you can start going straight for the villain with powerful Telekinetic Blasts and boosted allies.

Mission Debriefing

In solo or against heavy hitters, you might find yourself using allies to block, so you don't need to stress about prioritizing Uncanny X-Force. It's great, but will get overlooked if you just need to keep up the tempo.

If you find yourself in the opposite situation, with too many allies and not enough room for Slingshot, you can start using your other allies more liberally to attack or block. This is one of the reasons I've kept the ally count down. Remember, that your X-Force allies will still keep their THW boost against the main scheme, they just don't benefit from the -1 consequential damage.

And that's pretty much it! I've had a blast playing all kinds of scenarios with this deck in my own 'gauntlet' of sorts, and I'm really enjoying Cable again with it.

Let me know if you give this deck a try or if you have any ways you think it can be improved! Cable is so versatile between PSS selection and which upgrades you choose to play, so you could probably craft a solid side-board with a handful of cards that you could swap out depending on the scenario.

Until next time,

Peace!