X-23 Suits Up Side-by-Side with Sis

Introduction

This deck revolves around maximizing the natural synergy between X-23 and Honey Badger.

This deck is all about finding, buffing, and healing Honey Badger. We're leaning hard into the Sidekick and Game Time packages for everything the sisters need to pop off. Suit Up helps us get there fast and reliably. Suit Up also does the most important thing in an X-23 deck; it finds Honey Badger.

If you're new to X-23, I recommend also checking out dr00's deck and detailed write-up: https://marvelcdb.com/decklist/view/33572

The Game Plan

This deck is honestly pretty simple to pilot for how incredibly powerful it can be.

• Find Honey Badger with Suit Up and Sisterhood.
• Buff Honey Badger with Sidekick, Danger Room Training, Clarity of Purpose, and Inspired, roughly in that order of priority. (Suit Up also helps with this.)
• Repeatedly heal and ready Honey Badger so we can get extra activations out of her ability to ready X-23. Phoenix, Side-by-Side, Game Time, Regenerative Longevity, Command Team, and Sidekick all help with this combo. We'll reach 6 max HP on Honey Badger, allowing her to get full value from our healing.
• Meanwhile, X-23 buffs herself with her natural kit and sometimes Side-by-Side.
• Once Honey Badger is fully buffed, we want to keep her alive. However, if she does accidentally get knocked out, simply go back to the first step and repeat. Our setup cards are so efficient that it's only a minor setback.

Mulligan Priorities

• Find a way to get HB.
• If we find Suit Up, we can exactly pay for HB and one upgrade (usually Sidekick).
• If we find Honey Badger or Sisterhood, dig for an upgrade or Suit Up (to find an upgrade).
• Beyond that, just adapt to the scenario.

Musings on Efficiency

This deck is absurdly efficient and powerful, but how does it compare to the recursion-based version?

I've run several simulations and calculations to explore this topic, but it's easiest to explain the results intuitively.

• Buffing and healing Gabby is way more efficient in terms of ATK and THW per ER. It's not even close. The requisite upgrades are somewhat comparable to recursion cards in terms of efficiency, but the events those upgrades enable (Side-by-Side and Game Time) are in a league of their own.
• A big part of the efficiency comes from the fact that Gabby's ability only triggers if she survives the damage. Every point we heal lets us trigger her ability, whereas the same is not true for recursion.
• Additional efficiency comes from buffing Gabby's stats.
• However, the cost to the buff/heal strategy is we have to keep Gabby alive. If she gets knocked out, we lose access to our best events and have to start building her up again. Therefore we can't chump block with her.
• In contrast, a recursion strategy can comfortably sacrifice Gabby as a chump blocker every single turn and just bring her back with Sisterhood. So what the recursion strategy lacks in ATK/THW output, it makes up for with chump blocks.
• The recursion strategy is likely more reliable. It has more ways to bring back Gabby and doesn't rely on finding a combination of upgrades and events in the right order.

Overall, this deck can be outrageously efficient, but it can get a little dicey if Honey Badger gets knocked out or the villain attacks us multiple times in the same round. Which deck style is better likely depends on the other players at the table and the scenario at hand.

Additional Considerations

• I originally ran one copy of Rapid Response for emergencies, but Sisterhood and Suit Up do the same job while also helping us during initial setup.
• I was initially reluctant to run Inspired because it's just a worse Danger Room Training. However, we're activating HB so many times that Inspired generates an insane amount of value.
• Double resources can help us get setup faster, but on our second pass through the deck we're rarely happy to see them. I replaced them with First Aid so we don't end up stalling due to lack of healing for HB.