Christmas Cruise Combo

At a Glance

Player Counts: 3-4

Play style: Classic Combo

Strengths: Good survivability, coupled with VERY high damage pushes.

Weaknesses: Damage can be lower with low or complicated minion setups. Assistance with control is also confined primarily to in-kit options.

By Design

Hello everyone! Luke Cage is out, and outside being a real TOUGH guy, he has some other unique tools in his kit to look at. Notably, what is quite possibly the most blatant in-kit combo of any hero to date, the interactions between Cruisin' for a Bruisin' and Sweet Christmas.

For those that don't know, we'll break it down. Sweet Christmas is an attack that damages all the minions in front of you. Cruisin' for a Bruisin'', buffs any attacks made against the attached minion, giving the attack +2 damage and Overkill. Now this is pretty simple if you're only engaged with the minion that CfB is attached to. BUT, if you have multiple minions engaged with you, Sweet Christmas damages all of them in one attack. And here's the sneaky part, it's ALL one attack, regardless of how many minions you're engaged with. So you're Sweet Christmas gets +2 damage and Overkill against the attached minion, as well as any other minions engaged with you (and bonus damage to the villain to boot!).

This can create very unique situations for Luke where attacking minions isn't damage lost against the villain, but actually damage gained! These work so well together, that's it's pretty obvious this is a big pushed combo built into the hero kits design. It's a similar interaction to the Popular Hone Bombs that have been toted in aggression lists for a while.

Another rules note for those not familiar, but if you have a guard minion in front of you, you CAN still play Sweet Christmas, it's just the default damage from Sweet Christmas won't be dealt to the villain. But if you have CfB out, you might be dealing so much overkill damage it doesn't matter lol.

Bruisin'

This deck has a pretty straightforward game plan, we are making the Christmas-Cruise Combo BIG and CONSISTENT. Now this list is certainly passable at low counts, Luke's kit is just good and you can push damage to cover outs in some games, but higher player counts is where you'll really be able to do what you want.

Into the card by card.

Psylocke/Sunfire/Professor X are main stay control tools in aggression, obnoxiously so at this point.

Directed Force combos with Cruisin'. Note you can use this even without Sweet Christmas (in fact you can't use it with Sweet Christmas without CfB or Marked lol) just whenever you attack the attached enemy!

Spoiling helps with leveling out threat control in multi while also collecting minions. Generally on multi, this will be beneficial, because of how much extra damage it adds to the villain. If you only play solo, well, you're smart enough to understand the consequences of this right? Play smart.

I am not a huge fan of Target Spotter, but Luke Cage is the third best user of it, and gets the best boons from the no attacking effect so that toughs aren't pinged with Quickstrike. It also is un-ironically a damage card with this setup. Air Cover is also happy to be given a place with Marked when you can't line up the Crusin' part of the combo. But do note it does not work with Cruisin' itself (because FFG may have overbalanced these cards...) so be prepared for a muted result if you go this route.

Aggressive stance is to find Sweet Christmas, and is the payoff for Spoiling. In addition, Warrior Skill is to boost the really big Sweet Christmas Plays you have.

Onto the PSS's, and there's something interesting here. Superpower Training is fantastic to save and bank Crusin' for the perfect moment (on top of being straight up fantastic setup). Due note the response is to playing it though, so you will not engage any of your teammates minions if it gets attached this way (which HINDERS your Cruisin' for Christmas combo, but could still be a necessary minion solve in a pinch).

Keep up the Pressure might be subtly one of the biggest parts of the deck. In Multi, you can easily hold it until later in the game when you line up your combo. It adds damage to the Sweet Christmas combo, but it also can always be cleared to get your combo on demand, and can really enable Knuckle sandwich Finishers. In my last game with the deck, if I drew either Sweet Christmas or Knuckle Sandwich on the last turn before Keep popped, I could easily have landed on a 63 damage turn (had to settle for 35 because I could not see either...)

Easy Options

Some other cards that might interest you are followed here.

Aggressive Energy is actually hard to line up with Sweet Christmas if you built lots of end game toughs, since it does not work if you overpay. But it does make the Sweet Christmas number go bigger if it can help pay.

A number of allies could have been added for the sake of efficacy, at the cost of compromising more of the decks character.... We tried to avoid that here lol.

Other minion summoners have their place, but usually we want a bigger reward, since the amount of Sweet Christmases we can play in a deck pass is pretty finite. Because of this, Second Chance is not a bad shout, especially with how easy Luke can weather many game states just with his identity cards. SPT and Keep up the Pressure are just such hard coded paths to get the combo that they jumped ahead, but if any of your teammates wants a Second Chance in rotation, definitely feel free to make some room.

Enjoy the Holidays with a Christmas Cruise

That's all folks! The combo is pretty clean cut, and always available in kit. But if you really want to see what it can do, maybe give this one a go. Happy gaming!