Groot - Spidersilk armour (spoilers for a Silk card)

Spider-Tingle = Ready for a Fight (spoilers, if you care).

Did you hear that slight crackling noise? That was the sound of Black Widow, Iron Man and She-hulk's ears picking up at the news that Protection now has access to Armor Up.

But first dibs have to go to Groot, a character who was seemingly designed for Protection play except for the fact that if you do it in true solo you can't flip down without risking being one-shot by an Advance. Conveniently, his character cards are heavy on fist icons.

Now, it's not 100% optimal, as Groot likes to use Growth Spurt and Fertile Ground ground twice when he flips, and Ready for a Fight only lets him do it once. But it's the best we have until FF sees the light and re-works Not my Responsibility as either a green or a red card (...probably without the ally provision, to balance it as a 3x).

Since we're still in the experimental stage, I decided to focus the deck on what it's trying to achieve: generating tokens and preserving them for Groot to use himself - on his upgrades early on, and for big fat "I. AM. GROOT!"s later on. That meant including Protection's only other scheme-mitigators in Black Widow and Professor X, and Forcefield Generator, Preemptive Strike and Northstar as they're among the few ways you can get around Flora Colossus's Forced Interrupt trigger to protect your growth tokens without having to basic-defend.

Groot is meant to do most of the work himself - don't be embarrassed to use Lashing Vines plus at least one other of the Vines upgrades every single turn. Starhawk, Rocket Raccoon and Martinex are just in there as cost-efficient ways of chipping away at threat and minions. Dauntless is there to help you win more. The rest of the Perfect Defence suite doesn't make the cut in this incarnation as you're mostly taking hits on the chin/forcefield rather than going into Defend state, but you could definitely rebuild it as classic PD by squeezing in Desperate Defense.

I took this for a spin against Expert Rhino, since he's the poster child for "what do you mean he accumulated seven threat in one villain phase?" syndrome... And it worked pretty flawlessly. More side-scheme heavy villains might be more of a problem. Forcefield Generator was particularly good in multiples (so don't skimp on the resource cards or Helicarrier), tanking multiple consecutive turns of angry pachyderm.Preemptive Strike and the spare allies are flex spots, but I'd keep the ally count high, and didn't have great results with extra "the villain attacks you" cards like Taunt or Bait and Switch.