Moira the Magician

Is This Your Card?

Mundane Magician Moira MacTaggart Mystifies Mutants, Magik Massively Merry!

After playing several games with the excellent Night Guard deck for Colossus, I wondered if, thanks to Ready for a Fight, his Snowflake could do something similar, and along the way discovered Ms MacTaggart's own talents for prestidigitation.

Moira MacTaggert Has Been Holding Out On Us All

The idea for the deck was simple; Magik has an alter-ego ability that fires upon changing forms, just like her big brother - what if I can fire that ability every turn safely? First off, that meant a replacement for Armor Up that functioned similarly; thanks to Cindy Moon we now have Ready for a Fight to accomplish more or less the same thing, albeit without reliably shuffling it back into the deck. Also, Magik doesn't gain toughness for changing to hero form, so Protection aspect probably means leaning into defending instead; But that's okay - her Hero ability is once per phase, so she can use defense events to double-dip, relying on the good old Limbo shuffle to put the right card in place at the right time. Nothing really new or special here, of course.

Where I hit upon something Magikal during testing was slotting Moira into the deck, copying the value that she provides for Colossus directly over to boost the efficiency of Ready for a Fight. What I didn't expect until playing the deck was just how effective Moira became at not just drawing cards, but recurring spells specifically.

Pay No Attention to the Woman Behind the Curtain

The "trick" is a fairly simple one; when Illyana Rasputin changes to hero form, she places a spell on top of her deck. Moira then draws that spell into hand. If you've used Limbo to place a card on top of your deck already, its position is preserved and now you have one of Magik's excellent spells in your seven card hand for the coming turn, while being in Hero form ready to defend against a villain that thought they were about to scheme. Since she has a Spell for Every Occasion, you're recurring exactly what you need for the upcoming turn, and Magik's X-Gene loves making those cards cheaper to play turn after turn. If you're not sure what the future might hold, you could also just take a peek.

There Are No Snowballs In Limbo, Except All the Ones I Brought

Alongside this spell recursion engine, we also run a solid defensive suite, supported by Magik's Mystical Armor and a host of useful allies:

• Angel and Armor make for cheap ways to ready via Utopia;
• Charlie Boy is a staple in X-Person decks;
• Rogue provides a strong late-game all-purpose ally that can feed off of Colossus for some truly imposing stats, accelerating his journey to the discard pile where Stepping Disc can recur him again.

As for staying alive, having on-demand defensive spells, plus layers of armor and a point of retaliate mean that Magik will be looking to perform perfect defenses as often as possible, in order to benefit from multiple copies of Hard to Ignore to keep main scheme threat in check. Any extra damage that does make it through can be healed passively by Angel's Aerie since we're defending fairly often too. All that extra health means Magik has some blood to spare, and a reserved seat on The X-Jet means we can keep the top of her deck clear of pesky Resource cards.

Where's my Egg Roll!?

I've left one particular piece of tech out to encourage variations (such as more reliable ways to prevent or reflect damage to match more aggressive villains), but I leave it here for your consideration; Blondes have more fun; White Widow provides another (expensive) ally that helps keep threat in check for a reasonably long time for her initial investment, since we're looking to fire a preparation more turns than we're not. She doesn't provide further synergies since she isn't an Honorary X-Men but she's been a solid ally while playing through the Age of Apocalypse campaign where Piotr and his friends might be off on the other side of the world attempting a Mission for a few turns.

I've also left Hidden Base out of this version, despite using it, because the tough tokens it give you can be anti-synergistic with Bloodgem, since it requires you to take damage to function, which a tough token would block, but a bare minimum of planning means you'll be able to get use out of the base token when defending weakly (or if there are minions in play) and not have to worry about properly caring for her pet meteor.

Thanks to Herowannabe for the inspiration of playing the game in a totally different way, hope this deck shows someone a good time. Remember; a magician never reveals their secrets (unless they're a genius Scottish geneticist)...