Uncanny Danger Room Instructor (w/ Expert Video)

Uncanny Danger Room Instructor

This deck takes advantage of having only X-Men allies with Uncanny X-Men and Danger Room Training.

You can see it in action here against Expert Klaw!

It started as a Sidekick deck with Side-by-Side (which is very good), but after playing a couple games I realized I'd rather just use Danger Room Training because it can attach to all 10 allies instead of only 2.

Granted, Danger Room Training only gives +1 HP and you don't get the readies which Side-by-Side provides, but +1 THW and +1 ATK are better IMO. Further, Game Time is cheaper to play than Side-by-Side and both Malcolm & Randall (the only targets for Sidekick) have their own ready-and-heal ability printed right on their card!

While I love Sidekick + Side-by-Side, I think one of the best (if not THE best) use for them is in X-23. Outside of X-23 I prefer Training Upgrades + Game Time (Totally personal preference of course).

I had White Fox in the deck for a while, but even with Domino I wasn't getting White Fox to the top of the deck when she needed to be there, so I cut both of them. She's not X-Men anyway (and neither is Domino), so the one time I DID pop her off the top of the deck I had to discard another ally because she turned off Utopia's increased ally limit.

Finally Gentle is a great minion-killer but is only a placeholder here until the new Phoenix ally spoiled in the Magneto hero reveal comes out. She acts as another form of ready-and-heal for my allies. With that said, Gentle did some good work in the video!

Utopia

Typically when I build a Utopia deck it's for readying my hero. In this case I'm happy to ready any of my allies that will be thwarting or attacking for 3 (thanks to Danger Room Training), but will also ready Bishop if I have a fully-charged Super-Charged!

Side Schemes

• Call for Backup has become an auto-include in all of my Leadership decks. In any build the ally you call pretty much depends on the situation, but my favorite is always Beast because you'll get a resource card as well!
• Build Support really has three targets, but the one I'm generally going to grab is Uncanny X-Men. This card may not even be necessary because there are so many 2 (or 3) resource cards in the deck, but with only one copy of Uncanny X-Men I want a way to get it back if it's discarded with Bishop's Energy Absorption Response.

I didn't include Superpower Training because both Bishop's Rifle and Bishop's Uniform have the Temporal trait. So if one of them gets discarded with Bishop's Response or an Encounter effect (I'm looking at you Caught Off Guard) I can flip down to Alter-Ego and get it back to hand.

Rally the Troops would have also been a good fit in this deck, but I didn't have room for it.

Resources

• I almost never use Band Together because with no allies in play it's a completely dead card since, having no printed resource icon, it can't be used as a resource! But I was able to consistently keep 2 or 3 allies out with this deck thanks to all of the ready-and-heal effects and extra HP, so I'm fine running it here. That said, I only want 1 of them because of my aforementioned dislike, and I don't want it in my opening hand!
• Effective Leadership is great with several already-strong allies, and if you can attach a Danger Room Training to that same ally it's +2/+2 until the end of the phase!
• Energy, Genius, and Strength... (of course)
• Innovation is one of my favorite "special" resource cards, and it definitely contributes to keeping my strong allies around longer!
• Stored Energy are not just doubles for Bishop, they also ready-and-heal Malcolm and Randall!
• I only have seven cards which need double blue, but I went ahead and added both copies of The Power of Leadership to get him up to 12 resources.

48 Cards

I was running 50 cards at one point, but paired it down to 48 so that exactly 25% of the deck is resource cards. 48 is still high for me (as is 12 resources), but Bishop wants resources for shooting with Bishop's Rifle, healing with Bishop's Uniform, and for super-charging his Super-Charged.

My Favorite Hero Card (so far)

A surprisingly fun card for me has turned out to be Energy Conversion! Having this in hand when your deck is thin is awesome, as you'll dump all of your resources back into the small deck and hit them with your Energy Absorption Response. The fact that you cannot take more than 3 damage from the attack feels like a bonus, but it's actually a limiting factor for healing (with Uniform) and dealing damage (with Rifle), because it also means you'll only get three additional resource cards at most into your hand with his Response.