Budget Cyclops Leadership

Hello everyone, and welcome to my Budget Series for Marvel Champions !

Since its original release, I have shown the game to a certain number of friends and new players, and often got the question "What hero/what deck could I build if I only bought a couple packs ?" asked to me by people wanting to get more into the game without having to buy an entire collection. Therefore, I decided to publish some decklists that could be built with 4 packs at most. While not being the most powerful lists ever due to the limited card pool we have access to within only 4 packs (at most), their goal is to be cheap and fun, allowing beginners to feel that they are doing relevant things to beat the villain even with a deck that's not fully optimized.

Here is the way I classified those decklists :

Budget = 4 packs needed

Super-Budget = 3 packs needed

Ultra-Budget = 2 packs needed

Here, we are looking at a Budget Cyclops Leadership list.

LOTS OF ALLIES

Being the Field Commander of the X-Men, Scott likes being supported by a full cast of his friends and get the job done as a team. His ability to include X-Men allies of any aspect in his deck makes him very potent and versatile in a leadership deck.

From his own pack, we are going to keep Beast and Blindfold, and add various others to complement them. From the Mutant Genesis expansion, we are going to include Professor X, who thwarts for 3 and can confuse the villain or ready an X-Men, Polaris, who can give Cyclops or any X-Men ally a very useful Tough status, Wolverine, who attacks for a lot, Magik, who we can use to get rid of a pesky non-elite minion, and Nightcrawler, who can defend our Hero or our allies very well. The Storm pack brings us Pixie, very useful to recur an important ally to our hand, but more importantly, Forge, who gets us our very powerful X-Men support cards.

SYNERGISTIC SUPPORTS

Among these, we have The X-Jet to generate some additional ressources, as well as Uncanny X-Men and Utopia. Each one of these two cards is already powerful on ist own, but they simply work like a charm together, allowing us to increase our limit of allies as well as their max health by one, while also reducing their costs and giving us a ready when an X-Men hits the battlefield. The Triskelion also gives us one additional spot for an X-Men ally, which makes it possible for us to have up to 5 at the same time.

Honorary X-Men is there to maximize our use of The X-Jet, since with it we also get to generate ressources with the latter while in alter-ego form. The Power of Leadership is really not at its best in this deck, since a lot of Scott's friends do not belong to the leadership aspect, and all of our non-ally leadership cards cost no more than one ressource at the exception of our one copy of Uncanny X-Men, but we have a nice replacement for it in the form of Effective Leadership, which gives a nice little boost to allies we play from our hand – in a pinch, it could even make Professor X or Blindfold able to attack since their Attack stat is simply 0 and not "-" !

TANDEM TACTICS

Finally, we play two nice Tactic cards in "To Me, My X-Men!" and Teamwork. These cards cannot be fetched with Scott's alter-ego ability (they're not Upgrades), but both can be returned to our hand with Tactical Genius. "To Me, My X-Men!" makes a very good job when we to find an ally faster and/or have more occurrences of their «Enter play» abilities. Keep in mind that our allies with "When played from hand" abilities won't trigger off of this ; however, they are going to be sent right back to our hand at the end of the round, so it can still be useful to sometimes choose them when you are in particular need of a certain effect. Teamwork acts as a mini-Mutant Peacekeepers or mini-Team Strike, by making a single ally avoid consequential damage. This effect is particularly interesting with Wolverine the turn after we attacked with him, or to have Pixie attack and not die.

UPGRADE THIS DECK

To upgrade this deck, the easiest thing to do is to buy the other X-Men Hero packs, as each of them will come with a couple allies who could grow our army. The Wolverine pack is very interesting because it gives us Psylocke (and Cyclops loves to have the villain confused so he can flip to aletr-ego and fetch a tactic upgrade), with Sunfire as nice bonus.