Psylocke isn't leadership material

It's been a while since I posted a decklist, having taken a break from the game and fallen behind on the hot new cards - not that I had much choice re: falling behind since as far as I can tell there isn't a box of Fear No Evil to be had anywhere locally for love or money.

Instead, I've been trying to polish my old decks to handle some of the nastier threats, and I thought I'd post this one while I'm riding the high of beating Ronan and Venom Goblin with it in quick succession.

(...in Standard difficulty, mind you. I am not masochistically inclined!)

My goal was to be able to field a Psylocke deck that soft-locks all the lesser villains out of the game with the usual cycle of flipping every turn and using Cerebro and Papa X as a confusion/chump blocking infinity pool thanks to Betsy's alter ego ability, but which could still handle the villains that explicitly punish chumping or are resistant to confusion with its sheer deck quality.

I think I was mostly successful in that regard - I beat Ronan solo by stripping the Universal Weapon on sight and using the confusion lockdown above; whereas I beat Venom Goblin without even attempting to power through his Steady since all his schemes are high-threshold enough that it's OK to flip down unprotected against him occasionally. I haven't tested against Thanos, but I'd expect to be able to do the same with him.

Apropos of nothing, I ran the deck past Stryfe out of curiousity as I hadn't played him in a while and wasn't sure how it'd perform - and it turns out that having a free 3 attack 3 thwart ally who doesn't take consequential damage in a deck with three copies of Psychic Kicker makes the scenario laughably easy.

Since this is a bit of a 'refine an obvious idea' deck - in this case giving yourself a Cerebro toolbox - most of the interest comes in the non-obvious cards I included and the staples that I didn't.

In:

• Noble Sacrifice: When you're endlessly summoning chump blockers, cashing a few of them in for HP and a toughness card instead improves your longevity against the inevitable chip damage you take from the various vicissitudes of Marvel Champions. A toughness card is better than a chump against many enemies, and because the allies are discarded rather than defeated you're better off against Operation: Zero Tolerance or Gene Pool. Plus it gave me something to name the deck after.
• Team Training: While testing the deck, I saw and tried out TeleportingKnight's Cameo Wolverine deck and concluded that it was a lot of fun but probably not worth the tempo hit of the initial two-card loss. In the process, I had added a copy of Team Training to allow the JubeVerine to attack twice before needing to heal, and was impressed by how much better it made Kid Omega and M, so it made the cut in my 'main' Psylocke LD deck too. Obviously letting M kill 4HP minions outright is nice, but the real benefit comes from them getting in that extra Psychic Kicker swing and still having 1 HP to tank with. And giving Professor X a fatter butt to block Overkill attacks with has come in handy more than once. It's a pity you can't count the +1HP for Noble Sacrifice, though.
• Directed Force 5 ATK with (piercing) dual Katanas lets Psylocke take out almost all non-Elite minions with one swing, and since it's a Skill it keeps Training Regimen live as a "draw one in alter ego" option that much longer. Speaking of which:
• Weapon X: It took me an embarrassingly long time to realise that "Alter Ego Action: Take 1 damage to draw a card" for only 1 cost was easily the best of the additional draw engines (see below!). The milling isn't really relevant, though you probably don't want to fire this blind if you haven't found Cerebro yet.

Out:

• Moira: For twice the cost of Weapon X, I get to draw a card every two turns instead of every turn? Sign me up! Wait, no, the opposite. I think I'm done with Ms. McTaggert unless it's in a multi-Mutant multiplayer game. I had better results with IPAC. In fact, I had better results with X-Bunker, but that also got cut after being a dead card one time too many, since my only player side scheme was -
• Build Support: The third copy of Cerebro (the second one obviously being Forge) is by no means a bad card to have in the deck since Betsy can oneshot it (in solo) with her knives out. If I was going to run a 41st card, it would probably make the cut, but I just found I didn't need it and opted for my next-most-marginal cards (the third copies of Directed Force and Noble Sacrifice) instead.
• Clarity of Purpose, X-Gene: These were weirdly bad in my experience, as I found myself needing the resources more in alter ego when I couldn't use the Psy-Knives, particularly on turns where I'd started in hero mode and flipped down to fetch someone with Cerebro. The occasional sugar hit from 2x The Power of the Mind has been far more useful in practice. Plus it's been good to reduce the number of supports and upgrades I have to lay out on my little portable card table!