Adam Thwarts Everything

Expert 2 Campaigns

In the downtime leading up to the next release, my wife and I started going through all of the other campaigns on expert 2. We did Rise of Red Skull, where Dr. Strange and Captain America won pretty handily. It was way more stressful than Expert. So now it was time to do the next campaign

Galaxy's Most Wanted Expert 2

Now, it took us a long time to settle on decks that we thought could take us all the way from Drang to Ronan, but after mainly failed attempts with Venom (him drawing Shadow of the Past on Collector 1 is an automatic loss). We decided to do Adam and Gamora. Each villain required a different set of strategies, and it took us some time to find what worked for our decks. Now, you might need a different strategy for these villains, but I'm going to give what worked for us.

Try your best not to defeat Badoon Headhunter more than 2 times before Ronan. You don't want the extra minion or side scheme that have surges on them.

Brotherhood of Badoon

It surprised us how difficult this situation felt on Expert 2. The biggest problems were: 5 threat per round catches up with you quickly, Drang hits really hard, and most of the boost abilities add extra boosts. So how do you survive?

• 1) Both players stayed in Alter-Ego that first round to set up more. If you're not careful, Drang will create so many fires that you'll lose space to build your board. Staying down one extra time allows a much needed way to get an extra ally or upgrade out.
• 2) Wraith (in Gamora's deck) can cancel bad boost abilities like Cruel Intentions or Slug It Out. So heal him using your Battle Mage so he can keep blocking bad boost abilities.
• 3) Always play the ally. This is true for both decks. You need allies to defend you when you get caught with extra activations. If there aren't extra activations, then you get an extra thwart because of how much thwart there is.
• 4) This will be the last point in every villain. Once Gamora has Conditioning Room, stabilize the main scheme so she can flip every turn. It gives her such a boost of thwart or attack events that it will always be a net positive from the flip down.

Collector 1

This took us forever to figure out. It was the hardest scenario of the campaign. We absolutely struggled to balance everything in order to pull off a win. We would have had enough time to do another campaign in expert 2 if it weren't for the week long effort to beat Collector 1.

• 1) Start with the 6 cards in the collection. Rarely choose to take the 3 damage. Because of Inconspicuous Box's boost ability, you want to get to and stay at 7 cards in the collection until Wraith is out or you've seen both Inconspicuous Boxes.
• 2) Finish Gallery of Splendor as immediately as possible. Mulligan hard for everyone's best thwart events. Finish the scheme when everyone has emptied their hands (or plan to put cards up to 7 cards in the collection). That extra encounter card will cause more minions and attachments to come out than you can handle with the collection.
• 3) Include currently in play minions and attachments in your collection count. So if you have 2 minions and 5 cards in the collection, you have space to get the 2 minions out. If you have 7 cards in the collection and 1 minion, then one person needs to get a card out of the collection even if you can't get rid of the minion right away. This way you don't get caught not having enough space in the collection to defeat the minion or remove the attachment.
• 4) Get the collection down to 5, then flip Collector from stage 2 to stage 3. Use your Warlock's Cape to get an extra ready so you can start focusing on collection control.
• 5) Use your Cosmic Entities to create space in the encounter deck. It feels inefficient until you realize how much breathing room a zero boost or a non-existent encounter card can give you.

Collector 2

While defeating Collector 1 was quite the feat, Collector 2 is no joke either. It's nice to feel freer to use allies to defend big hits. In our experience, pace this game exponentially. We stayed on stage 1 for 60% of the game. Stage 2 for 30%, and Stage 3 for the last 10%.

• 1) Flip down often to build your board state. Use Library Labyrinth's action to help keep threat low. If you can get a Cosmic Ward down to help just in case the extra card is a treachery when Adam goes down.
• 2) Once you get the Milano and have a built out board, spend everything to get through the stages. Always flip main schemes at the beginning of a turn. This doesn't matter as much between 1B to 2A, but each turn puts you in immediate danger of losing to schemes on an extra activation.
• 3) Have Gamora use Blindfold to plan your boosts on your flip down. This is especially nice while building, but it's just always good otherwise.

Nebula

We expected this scenario to take us a while, but it wasn't that bad. Either we were used to Expert 2 at this point or Nebula's difficulty doesn't spike THAT much from the actual encounter deck. At this point, some things always hold true. Keeping Wraith out to cancel annoying Boost abilities, and cancelling treacheries with Cosmic Ward are generally important. Nebula doesn't have many treacheries, but they are all generally big tempo hits. Here are some important things to consider:

• 1) Always take off ship counters, even if there's only 1 on there. Too many cards and Boost abilities add counters. It will get out of hand if you relax on the ship counters
• 2) Aggressively take out Guerrilla Tactics. We tried to get rid of it by round 3. If you keep the ship counters clean, when you finish the side scheme, it'll make the ship have 4 counters, then remove 2, and keep it up. You might lose the main scheme while trying to control the ship, but there's enough space if you lose 1B to get back control on 2B. But your goal is to delay that as long as possible.
• 3) Protect your hand. Wide Stance is worse than a stun or confuse because it reduces how many counters you feel comfortable removing while building board state and protecting yourself.

Ronan

This was the only scenario that we house-ruled. If we lost, we weren't going to restart the whole campaign. Also, we took advantage of the errata and did not play with the optional Kree Supremacy side scheme. You can try it, but that just sounds crazy to me.

• 1) Always cancel an extra activation and as many Boosts as you can. Use the campaign card Onrush to cancel a Fanaticism.
• 2) Get your Cosmic Entity cards into the encounter deck.
• 3) Prioritize statuses for breathing room. Get rid of the Universal Weapon with Sunfire and stun and confuse him with the team. Adam had the campaign cards to help with the other statuses.
• 4) Take turns handling Fanaticism. We had tiered Fanaticisms come over back to back. We took turns flipping down and healing. With Adam, Soul World is so clutch to heal and flip up. If you can get Shield Spell in hand, that's even better. For Gamora, getting to use Conditioning Room and her alter ego action always made monstrous turns. The hardest part of Ronan are his activations are brutal. His encounter set tries to make him activate multiple times and make those activations harder. Use your kits to reduce those activations.

Deck Sizes

You'll notice that deck sizes are unconventional or "unoptimized." However, we noticed the need to both center on thwart but have options for other problems. With Conditioning Room, Gamora can always access the thwart or attack cards she needs. Adam wants aspect cards for his powerful events. I also think there can be an unhealthy obsession with "optimized" and "40 cards". They can be the best in situations where versatility is less important than focused roles. We've noticed with GMW Expert 2 in particular that versatility is more important.

Be Patient

We did not first try any scenario. It took us a few tries to learn the pacing and tactics used to win each scenario. Here's how many tries each encounter took us:

• Drang: 4 tries (once we settled on Adam and Gamora...there were other games with Groot, Venom, and Gamora combos)
• Collector 1: 18 tries
• Collector 2: 3 tries
• Nebula: 3 tries
• Ronan: 2 tries

Adam's a Wizard

This deck is a classic Warlock deck with a little bit of crazy. The whole deck is a higher cost curve than a normal deck, so we make up for it with lots of resources. I know there's a risk of a resourceful hand toward the endgame, but it's necessary because once you're built, even an extra Power Of card isn't bad. It makes a great Battle Mage card where you can draw two more cards and the other resources can help pay for the new cards.

Cosmic Entities, Really?! Boo!

I'm pretty sure Cosmic Entity cards are deemed the worst, most inefficient cards that should never be included in a deck. Why are they here? Expert 2 has a lot of extra encounter cards and a lot of Boost abilities that draw extra boosts. It also has a fair amount of extra Surge in it. These cards break those trains. With all of the extra enounter cards, you are more likely to hit one of them. But trust me, when you're resolving your fourth card with Surge, and you see a Blue back on the encounter deck, you'll love these cards like we did. Don't sleep on how powerful breaking the villain tempo can be, even if getting a Cosmic Entity as a boost returns it to your discard pile.

Protection Is Nice

Adam has two great uses with Protection. First, Subdue can be a life saver for a hero on the table. It's nice to give a -3 ATK on an extra activation on another hero. Second, heal your powerful allies. Gamora's Wraith and Jessica Jones and your Marvel Girl are incredibly powerful control allies. Keep them in play as much as you can using Battle Mage protection cards.

Keep the Main Scheme Low

Support people doing powerful alter-ego turns by keeping the main scheme low. Crisis Averted is a powerful main threat cleaner. The pool resources are such a nice way to pay for it. Very few side schemes have the crisis icon in GMW, so it's less about needing to use to pay for it. Using Zone of Silence and Quantum Magic to call it back and use it again feels inefficient, but removing 8 threat keeps giving you space to do bigger tempo shifts next time. In fact, most of this deck is thwart with "You'll Pay for That!" and Into the Fray.

Put the Pressure On

Once you can do Battle Mage and control threat, hit hard. Karmic Blast will do 6 damage on average. Magic Attack does 5 damage, and you can call them back with Quantum Magic. At this point, you'll easily survive villain turns and do damage with allies and attack cards. It's only a matter of time.

I haven't used this deck in solo. You're welcome to try it, however, it's a lot of thwart for solo. Maybe that's not a bad thing; you'll be able to confidently flip down to heal to max with Soul World, which will help pool resources always be three.

That was a fun exercise. We were hoping to have moved onto doing Mad Titan's Shadow Expert 2 before Age of Apocalypse, but Collector 1 had other plans for us. That was brutal. We never felt so close to giving up on an idea, but when we beat Collector 1, it was new life to finish it.

If you want other Expert 2 decks:

• Solo: Spider-Man Protection
• General: Deadpool Pool
• General/RoRS Expert 2: Dr. Strange Pool