Ninja Defense

The Best Offense Is A Good Defense

Psylocke=Unpstoppable:

I love Psylocke but I play her alot leaning into cards like Psychic Kicker and other psionic events or buffing allies.

I haven't seen alot of decks centered around her ability to perfect defend. On the surface it doesn't seem like she'd be built for it but she really has the tools in kit to build a base for achieving it.

Martial Arts Training provides +1 defense and she can ready from it if you choose to discard it after defending.

Weapons Training provides retaliate 1.

Just those 2 cards push her to 3 defense, ready after defending and retaliate 1.

While readying only once seems like it's not beneficial, we can bypass this. Psylocke has a ton of confuse in kit and can use Training Regimen to search for a skill card in deck.

How will we search for a card in the deck if it's in discard? Flip down with the villain confused, use Mutant Education to shuffle martial arts back in and then use Training Regimen to search for it.

We can cycle it repeatedly to get multiple uses out of it.

On the flip back to hero, Moira MacTaggert provides card draw jumping us to a 7 card hero hand.

Ninja Training:

3 defense isn't enough to run perfect defense so how will we get there?

Armored Vest boosts her defense to 4.

Clearing Specialized Training and getting Defense Specialist boosts her to 5 defense and adds a card draw.

Unflappable provides card draw when we defend without taking damage.

Electrostatic Armor provides another 1 damage when we defend.

Judoka Skill can be searched by training Regimen and is an emergency for hard hitting villains to drop their attack by 2.

Psionic Redirect also provides the ability to negate any damage that gets through our shield.

In all Psylocke would have 5 base defense, with 3 retaliate, access to multiple readies and 2 card draw in the villain phase.

In testing I was routinely able to perfect defend against villains attacking for 7.

Training Montage:

This is a deck centered around Psylocke and accentuating her kit so I'll explain some of our allies/events.

Why What Doesn't Kill Me if we're aiming for perfect defense?

Rogue can ping our health turning into a 3/3 ally while also allowing us to play WDKM and get another ready. The katana's mean we have a resource to meet the requirements.

Grant Ward seems put of place but a 2/2 zero cost ally?!?! He provides some extra damage/threat removal and we can use our knives to fulfill the resource requirement.

Marrow just provides some cheap damage and can be brought in cheaper with Team-Building Exercise.

Professor X provides another confuse as well as great threat removal. Can be played cheaper with TBE as well.

The allies are here to help but are not the focal point by any means. The goal of this deck is to showcase Psylocke's kit

The gameplay is pretty simplistic but really fun.

Let villain attack, defend taking no damage drawing 2 cards and dealing 2 back to the enemy.

Ready from indom or martial arts.

Have a 6 card hero hand to play psionic events confusing the villain when we need/want to flip.

She has the ability to potentially attack or thwart for 3 every turn. WDKM can add another basic action to our turn. Using Rogue to ping off some health allowing for WDKM to meet the requirements.

Flurry of Blades can be a 4 attack event with a confuse or a 6 damage event if they're already confused.

Flip down with villain confused to cycle Martial arts training back in as well as other psionic events like Telepathic Suggestion with Mutant Education and her AE ability.

Use Training Regimen to grab Martial Arts back or if we already have it grab a copy of Judoka as an extra resource or Target Acquired to keep on board negating boost effects.

Overall the deck has performed extremely well and provides quite a bit of control. Even against steady/stalwart villains flips have been a part of the gamplan just less frequent.

Using Mutant Ed to cycle back in Telepathic Suggestion and Martial Arts allows you to cancel treacheries more consistently as well as keep her perfect defense strategy online.

I'd love to hear any feedback or experiences with the deck!