Captain America - Strength in Numbers Combo

This deck is designed to push Strength In Numbers (and to a lesser extent Avengers Assemble!) to their limits by getting 4 or 5 Avengers into play at once and drawing tons of cards.

The fact that Avengers Assemble! assemble says 1x / round is the only thing keeping this deck from being able to loop through the deck. This often means you'll end the game without it. However, one Avengers Assemble! with a Lead from the Front or 2 is usually enough to win the game even in multiplayer. In solo, 5 Avengers plus Lead from the Front is usually enough to end the game.

You start the game by defending and thwarting with Cap while you build as quickly as possible to a board with 4 or 5 Avengers allies thanks to Avengers Tower and The Triskelion. The early game priority is playing out all the economy cards like Super-Soldier Serum, Helicarrier, Avengers Mansion and Steve's Apartment and drawing through your deck with Maria Hill and Strength In Numbers. Of those, Super Soldier Serum and Steve's Apartment are the most important cards to a fast start. In this phase you want to balance using your avengers to draw cards with Strength In Numbers and keeping the board clear. You should block with Maria Hill and Agent 13 pretty aggressively if you're running up close to your ally limit.

Once you're all set up, you'll have a pretty thin deck. (As few as 23 cards with 2 cantrips.) Then you can play Strength In Numbers to draw as many cards as you need, hopefully drawing into an Avengers Assemble! and untap each character to power up your board. Once you get to this point you can smash through anything pretty easily.

If you're not quite in range of killing in one turn with a combo finish, the best thing you can do is usually Heroic Strike to get the villain into a stun lock.

Often, you'll want to power up Vision and not have him contribute to Strength In Numbers because it's so easy to have him attack for 10. Also, with all the focus on Allies, remember that Cap is also an Avenger who can assemble and he's the one leading from the front. It's very common for Cap himself to do 11 damage on the final turn thanks to "I can do this all day!"

We've chosen Cap as our hero for a few basic reasons:

1) Living Legend on Steve Rogers helps build our board of allies quickly.

2) Shield Block, Heroic Strike and Captain America's Shield all help him tank hits while we build up the team.

3) Shield Toss gives us something else good to do with all the cards we're drawing.

4) Super-Soldier Serum and Steve's Apartment contributes to a very strong permanent-based economy. These cards are just outrageous. We want a character where we can thin out our deck and set up our economy in the first pass through the deck and then just combo off until the villain is dead. Cap's great in this regard even though he only has 6 permanents (Captain America's Helmet, Captain America's Shield, Super-Soldier Serum, Steve's Apartment, Agent 13), because his deck has 2 cantrips (Fearless Determination) and because most of his permanents are cards we're very happy to play out in our first pass through the deck.

Near Misses:

Quinjet : It might be sort of surprising that there's no Quinjet given the theme of the deck, but it's just way too slow. If you play one on turn 1, you're still not netting a resource until turn 4 (!!) and even if you can wait until turn 5, there are only 2 4-cost cards to play anyway. We want to deploy our allies fast.

Nick Fury and Mockingbird were recent cuts as well. They're allies but they're not avengers and there are already plenty of good options in Leadership. The stun Mockingbird gives you is actually really valuable, but you already have 3 copies of Heroic Strike which you can reliably stun lock with.