Scarlet Witch - Stand Together 1

This deck is meant to be played 2-handed alongside Drax - Stand Together 2. The idea is to play against the hardest hitting villains and use Stand Together every round, sometimes twice in a round. Therefore, both decks are playing 3 copies of Stand Together and 2 copies of Assess the Situation to try to draw into it and the resources to pay for it. This Scarlet Witch deck carries Nerves of Steel for both decks, Unflappable to play on Drax, and 1 copy of Defensive Training for recursion. It originally had some of the other good "play on any hero" Protection Upgrades like Electrostatic Armor, Armored Vest, and Dauntless, but I cut them to trim the deck down to 40 while keeping Assess the Situation, Spiritual Meditation and The Sorcerer Supreme for card draw. Trying to really lean into the Stand Together plan and think about tweaking it after some testing.

Defensive Training is really bad, being only usable in Alter Ego form, costing a net 2 resources, and only shuffling cards into your deck instead of guaranteeing them when you need them (although shuffling into the last 5 cards of your deck can help with that). It might even be the worst version of the Training effect since many of the Protection events you would want to recur are Hero Responses during the villain phase - so if you flip down to Alter-Ego and use it immediately, you're likely to draw the card while you're in Alter-Ego form and be unable to use it through the entire turn cycle. Having "Uses 2" on this card is just insult to injury as I'm not 100% sure it'd be worth it even with infinite uses. Still, I figured I'd give one copy a try.

So Stand Together - since it costs 4 resources (5 ER) and requires exhausting two characters, how much damage would it have to prevent and cause to be worth it? Well, it is helpful that both the 4 resources and two characters exhausted can be paid by any player, and you can exhaust allies (unfortunately, there's only 1 Protection Avenger ally and 2 Basic), but you have to factor in that, as an alternative, you could prevent all the damage by sacrificing one of those allies and could likely deal 2 damage with the other and a minimum of 5 damage with the resources. So, to really feel good about playing it, you want to prevent/deal at least 7 damage. (Note that preventing all the damage with the ally assumes no Overkill and no punishment for allies chump blocking - I'm kind of factoring those in as upside since I expect them to be more prevalent as the game goes on.) Playing Stand Together does keep both allies alive and doesn't deal consequential damage, so you could probably count preventing/dealing 5 or 6 damage as successful, but not incredible.

Stage 2 Ronan hits for 3 base, +1 for the Universal Weapon, +1 for the Power Stone when he has it and an extra boost card if he doesn't, +1 if he has Fanaticism (and overkill and piercing), +1 if he's attacking with You Stand Accused or 1 plus another boost card if it's drawn as the boost (so net +1 for You Stand Accused if it's the boost OR your encounter card), and maybe an average of +2 per boost card. So somewhere between 4 and 10 damage, but I think averaging around 7 is probably right. And if you're playing on expert, add an extra 1 at stage 3. So it's certainly possible to make it worthwhile, plus you can use Wanda's built in ability to re-roll the boost if you get a low one and Scarlet Witch's Crest to add an extra damage. I think the theoretical maximum damage is 14, if I didn't miscalculate something.

Honorary Avenger was a consideration, to turn Starhawk (or one of Drax's allies) into an Avenger, but I didn't really have room for it, and I figure I will probably just replace him with Victor Mancha or Jocasta when Vision comes out.