Miles vs. Sandman (Heroic Roulette)

Welcome! This is a game project of mine I'm calling "Heroic Roulette" where I pair heroes with individual scenarios and tune them to win on Heroic difficulty. This deck write-up will kick off the Sinister Motives scenarios, each paired with a hero that came out in the expansion or the 4 hero packs released in the same cycle.

I first had to pair each of the 5 scenarios with a hero, and I added the challenge of using each aspect at least once. I landed on the following:

• Miles (Aggression) vs. Sandman
• Spider-Ham (Leadership) vs. Venom
• Sp//dr (Leadership) vs. Mysterio
• Ghost-Spider (Protection) vs. Sinister Six
• Nova (Justice) vs. Venom Goblin

I will explain the other matchups on their own deck pages. As for Miles, I thought him well suited to fight Sandman due to his ability to frequently stun and get tough - the best counters to Sandman's indirect damage attacks - and his ability to confuse, since the main scheme threshold is only 9 and might get 1-2 acceleration tokens during the game. The aggression aspect pairing is motivated by the access to cheap 3-ATK allies and Enraged, which will help fight City Streets.

Now let's dig into the scenario.

Big Picture

• This scenario is absolutely defined by the "Surging Sands" ability on City Streets. 9 encounter cards in the Sandman set trigger it, 2 trigger it in AE only (but make Sandman attack you in hero, which can trigger it if he damages you), and the final 2 have effects that scale with the number of sand counters on City Streets.

Modular Set: Power Drain (the Electro one)

• I often do the recommended mod set for the scenario, but this synergy is just too good to pass up. It's thematic for adding another Spidey villain and goes with the 'discard from encounter deck' theme. It is a pretty easy mod set, but so is Down to Earth, the recommended set, so I don't feel like I've undercut the difficulty that much.

Significant Encounter Cards:

• Tidal Sands, Sand Storm. If acceleration tokens and chunks of 3 indirect damage weren't enough to make you want to slow down the encounter deck velocity, these will really punish you for letting the sand counters creep up too high.

Card Selection:

• Wasp, Hulk, Enraged. These are the cards dedicated to the Hero Action on City Streets. They are the cheapest 3 ATK allies, and with Enraged attached can really help you come back from a high sand count.
• Thor, Mockingbird. More ways to blank an attack from Sandman.
• Vivian. Turning off a Sand Clone or Dirt Trap before you defeat them can help stop an early sand runaway.

The rest is pretty self-explanatory with many of the strong basic Web-Warrior cards and support with Web of Life and Destiny.

Game Review (1 attempt)

• Miles handled this scenario quite easily. The stuns, confuses, and tough cards meant Sandman's activation was almost always neutralized. An Enraged Mockingbird fought back the City Streets sand counters starting on turn 1. I only went through the encounter deck once and had victory on the following turn.

There are probably some improvements that could be made, and my easy victory made me wonder if Heroic 2 is a possibility. If you thought this an interesting exercise, stay tuned for my posts on the other scenarios in my Heroic Roulette! I assure you most were not quite as easy.