"I can control it!"

Another X-Men deck geared towards new players, using only Core Set and X-Men cards. This time it's Phoenix's turn. Phoenix is kind of an oddball hero. She starts the game as a hero who is very good at thwarting and very bad at fighting, and ends the game as the polar opposite. Her preconstructed deck emphasizes her thwarting capabilities further, which might work out at higher player counts where other players can do all the fighting for you, but it's not very flexible. In my experience, it's best to be able to do a bit of both. So that's what we're doing here.

By switching to Aggression, first off we get access to Psychic Assault, a powerful Confuse card that, currently, only Phoenix can use. This lets us flip to Alter-Ego more freely, which is appreciated since Phoenix doesn't have too much health to work with, and would love a bit of freedom to recover. Hulk also helps with defense; note that we don't want to attack with him in this deck. Beyond that it's damage, damage and more damage. Psychic Assault for the villain, Relentless Assault for the minions, Tac Team and your allies as flexible options for both.

We don't need much in terms of additional thwart cards because 3 THW is a lot, but we can also support that with our two Team-Up cards. Phoenix is a pretty resource-rich hero, so she can usually afford to play the powerful allies she finds, and then if you flip enough you can keep them alive without necessarily having to chump block with them, giving you time to find the appropriate Team-Up card. Soul Sisters is the better card, though Psychic Rapport is associated with the better ally, but really try to play both.

This deck tends to spend most of its time in Restrained; 3 THW is a lot better than 3 ATK for most of the game. But eventually you will want to Unleash and once you do the villain should die very quickly, before Dark Phoenix ever has a chance to rear her ugly head.

Now if you're an attentive deckbuilder, you might notice that this deck isn't running Wolverine or Cerebro, two cards that would be very good here. By all means, run them if you want; they're a lot stronger than Tac Teams. But I want all of these decks to be playable together, and I think they'll be even better for Cyclops.

Big thanks to royal7 from Discord for coming up with the concept for these decks.