Star-Lord - Shiny Guardians Justice!

Star Lord – Guardians’ shiny justice

I’ve been lucky enough to get my hands on Gamora and Star-Lord for a week now. I’ll admit, at first, I wasn’t sold on SL. Getting more encounters? Playing risky? And then I found myself grinning through every game played with him. He’s a really cool, unique, bold and strong character.

So after a few games with the pre-con, I switched to aggro, then protection as getting a few more encounters seemed to call for survivability. I then tried justice. It was just okay.

I built a Leadership OTK that seemed to be only possible with SL (https://marvelcdb.com/decklist/view/9624/star-lord-otk-leadership-1.0), but I’ll admit – besides crazy combos – I like this deck even better. It feels like it should: reckless, fun, wild!

Theme: Guardians

I wanted SL to FEEL right and started with my choice of allies – I felt like trying Guardians for a change: Drax, Rocket, Groot, Cosmo. Since they’re all basics, I choose to include The Power in All of Us. Then it lead, logically, to other basic allies: Nick Fury, Ironheart, Mockingbird, Spider-man (Morales), War Machine… This called for the inclusion of Knowhere. DON’T miss out on this card!

Economics

I hear you say “wow, that’s a lot of costly stuff!” Well, in between 5 double resources and SL’s “what could go wrong?” and the draw power/deck cycling you get from Fury, Knowhere, Ironheart, Clear the Area, Skilled Investigator, Star-Lords's Helmet, Bad Boy, Daring Escape… you won’t lack resources, trust me!

Justice cards

I choose justice specifically because it has cards that will let you draw more: Clear the area, skilled investigator. I also included Sense of Justice to pay for clear the area… what can I say, I REALLY like playing this card for free and getting a card out of it! Plus it thins your deck (and pays for Gutsy Move in part). Under Surveillance because it’s always awesome in solo, and Agent Coulson / Spycraft since, you know, you’ll be getting lots of encounters and may want to trade one off one once in a while.

I choose NOT to go for Wiccan / turn the tide / quake… it was at first a thematic choice but given the results, I’m very happy how it turned out!

Piloting this deck

OK. So if you’re playing this deck and not using “What could go wrong?” EVERY TURN, well, you’re doing it wrong! If you want to play safe and not take 2, 3, 4 encounters every turn, walk away! In fact, I found Star Lord’s kit more than able to handle the extra encounters.

To make the most out of it, you’ll NEED to priorize these permanents: Star Lord’s helmet (ending up with a hand of 8 in hero form? Yes please!) Knowhere (extra ally, extra draw!) Of course your Element Gun.

And then, those are the cards you’re looking to play, turn after turn. Use whatever you can to draw and find them:

Daring Escape

Sliding Shot

Bad Boy

Allies

Play allies to help THW, take out minions, ping off tough statuses and, most of all, block the hits from the villain!

Bad Boy is incredible, don’t sit on it! The villain attacks, you skip DMG, revert to AE with 2 more cards… if you ended up with 8 cards (with the helmet) before the villain attacked, you will start with 10 cards in hand on your next turn! This enables the following:

Play daring escape, multiple times if you can, to build a solid row of encounter cards in front of you. (What you do in between these Daring escapes is up to you… recover before going in, thwart, attack…).

Then, play sliding shot (multiple times if you can), paying for it with “What could go wrong” if you haven’t used it yet. The result is a sliding shot that does up to 13 DMG and, when you can play 2… or 3… You get the picture. Depending on the villain and factoring in your attacks and those from your allies, this can mean an OTK too.

That’s it!

Have fun!