Pshadowcat - Psynergy

Sometimes you come across a synergy that is cool, but not powerful enough to build a deck around. I bumped into one of those, and decided to build a deck around it anyway!

A couple of deckbuilders have noticed that Pulse Grenade is a useful safety for Shadowcat, giving her an attack event she can keep in her back pocket to trigger at the end of the hero phase if she's at risk of ending her turn Solid and needs to phase.

Two resources is a lot to pay for a single-use safety that doesn't even ready Shadowcat. Unfortunately, there are very few support or upgrade options which have attack-keyword activations - Plasma Pistol doesn't, for example, even though it clearly should.

There are two re-usable attack events on Basic upgrades, however. The first one is Telekinesis, which there is (unfortunately) no way of cheating into play for true solo Shadowcat due to Superpower Training being limited to character-specific cards. I'm definitely considering the possibilities for a two-handed pairing with Aggression Psylocke or Justice Phoenix.

That leaves us with the one attack-on-a-stick that Shadowcat can play:

Aaah! A talking Psimitar!

Psimitar doesn't require you to be Psionic to play it, only that you play Psionic cards to trigger it. Bad news: you can't play any of the events, so no triggering it outside of the hero phase. Good news: There's four more Psionic allies in the Magneto pack, bringing the total psi X-Men you can play in Leadership up to seven, plus a handful more if you stretch to X-Force. And Stepford Cuckoos as a Psionic support.

(There should be even more - Cosmo not being a psi is a travesty).

From there, the deck mostly builds itself. I opted for an all X-Men suite just to get full benefit out of Utopia and Uncanny X-Men. No Make the Call as you need to play the card for the Psimitar to trigger. It also doesn't trigger off Rapid Response, but Won't Stay Down is so much slower and less efficient that Response is better even without the psynergy. Ready to Rumble, as I have previously noted, is so good with Shadowcat that three copies of it are always the first thing I put in her decks.

So what does all this psynergy get you?

A fairly basic minion swarm, honestly. I did say at the start that the effect isn't powerful enough to carry a deck on its own!

With Psimitar and Utopia in play, the first ally you play in each turn readies you, lets you change mass forms via the attack trigger, and then potentially lets you change mass forms again if Shadowcat attacks. In practice I found that its main utility was being able to change mass forms if locked in Solid while exhausted after basic-defending. If you start the turn exhausted it also lets you ready->change forms->thwart with Selective Intangibility, which is useful reasonably often.

Doing the math on how many times you'll change forms in each hero phase actually gets complicated (especially with Ready to Rumbles making things even more dynamic). I found that I was frequently getting the count wrong at the start of the turn and occasionally had to give myself a do-over to wind up where I wanted to be at the end of the phase. This is generally a sign that there's some power in there waiting to be untapped, I just need to get better at playing the deck to see if I can make it worth the opportunity cost of having the entire deck built around the gimmick.