Ant-Man Airlines: Quintumania

Card draw simulator

Odds: 0% – 0% – 0% more
Derived from
None. Self-made deck here.
Inspiration for
Ant-Man (SCL 13:5) 1 0 0 1.0
Ant-Man cambiante 0 0 0 1.0
ant test 0 0 0 1.0

VillainTheory · 28919


"...Do you guys just put the word 'quantum' in front of everything?" - Scott Lang


Quantumania is soon to be released at movie theaters, but until then? Here’s QUINtumania! A deck built around the semi-forgotten card that is Quinjet. Ant-Man is out to prove that it doesn’t take quantum physics to jet in the quintessential quintet of allies.

While there are plenty of old decks that take advantage of Quinjet with Ant-Man, most of them are outdated and don’t include the new Avengers that came in Wave 4 (in Spectrum and War Machine’s decks) or don't focus so heavily on Quinjet. And so here’s my take on it as Ant-Man opens his very own Quinjet Airport.


If you like this deck, feel free to give it a ❤ ! Thank you!


Ant-Man

At the time of posting, this deck has handily defeated Expert Magneto in both 1 and 2 player games. As an all-rounder Leadership deck, it will work well against most villains and will also work well at higher player counts.


Super Sonic Flight:


tl;dr? If you're looking for a quick summary:

  1. Play the already-cheap Quinjet for even cheaper with Team-Building Exercise
  2. Do awesome Ant-Man things + play cheap allies while you wait.
  3. Use Quinjet to cheat powerful Avenger allies into play.
  4. Destroy the villain with Avengers Assemble!

Quintum Physics:


If you're looking for the complete write-up: Quinjet is a 1-cost card that, at the beginning of each of your turns, gains a counter. Once you have enough counters, you can trade in your Quinjet to deliver an Avenger ally whose cost is equal or less than the amount of counters.

What makes Quinjet especially good for Ant-Man is that Quinjet has the Avenger trait itself, meaning it works with Team-Building Exercise. To this day, Ant-Man is one of the best characters in the game to use Team-Building Exercise alongside Spider-Ham, Phoenix and Thor. In this deck specifically, Team-Building Exercise works for 25/40 cards in the deck!

So, you can play a cheap resource generator (Team-Building Exercise) to play a cheap card (Quinjet) and, in return, you get powerful and expensive allies. And if that sounds like a good deal? That’s because it is.

The cost-to-effect ratio is enormously efficient. Captain Marvel, Giant-Man, War Machine? Normally these cards cost 5-6 effective resources in total and must be paid all at once. Quinjet reduces that to 3 which you split across multiple turns and, since it costs so little at a time, it’s very flexible - you can play an upgrade + event, and still sneak out that Quinjet for a big payoff in the future. Or use a charged-up Quinjet to bring in a big ally and still afford Avengers Assemble!


What Goes Up, Must Come Down:


The downside is that Quinjet takes a long time to power up. Ant-Man Airlines is definitely a luxury tour, ferrying your Avengers gently through a scenic flight - as opposed to, say, speeding them directly to the action. In essence, you’re investing 2 resources in the present (1-cost and the card itself) and waiting for it to gain interest. Ideally you want to use it on 4-5 cost allies. This means that, if you play one on Turn 1, it won’t pay off until Turn 5 or Turn 6.

So. It’s slow. Fortunately, time works differently in the Quantum Realm. Or, uh, rather Ant-Man is blessed with high hp, high DEF, and lots of healing. Which is to say, he’s reliable - never flying by the seat of his pants. He can take a punch or two and keep on going, easily able to spare some time until Quinjet pays off.

And then comes Turn 5/Turn 6. These turns should be a huge, giving you a massive upper hand over the villain when your Quinjet finally cheats a big ally into play! Especially with Mighty Avengers, one of your most important cards. The bigger the ally, the more hp it tends to have, and thus the more uses it will have while Mighty Avengers is powering it up.

But...what if time did work differently in the Quantum Realm? If you're playing in multiplayer, you can call for an action on someone else's turn before yours and thus use the action on Team-Building Exercise to play Quinjet ahead of your turn. And when your turn rolls around, you can put a time counter onto it as per its wording. In other words, you can often use the turn order to accelerate your Quinjet counters by 1 when first playing them.

LaWPrCb.png

Flight School:


As ever with Scott Lang, Ant-Man's Helmet is your #1 priority to find and play, followed by Mighty Avengers, Team-Building Exercise and Team Training. If you don’t find any of these in your opening hand, mulligan hard in search of one. If you do have one, consider not mulliganing any cards - you don’t want to find too many key upgrades/supports and have to pay for one of them with the other.

Lean on allies for threat removal. Damage and defense can come from a mixture of both Ant-Man and your allies. Build up your board, slowly launching your Quinjets, before watching as - seemingly out of nowhere - your huge allies arrive and start dominating the game. As usual for Ant-Man, try to swap between your giant and tiny hero form every turn!

It’s fine to use Quinjet on a cheaper ally in a pinch, but between Team-Building Exercise and Avengers Tower, you should be getting huge discounts on them anyway. (Just remember the Quinjet doesn’t play your allies, it just “puts them into play” - meaning White Tiger should never be used through Quinjet!)

And don’t forget that, in addition to Quinjet, your allies and your giant/tiny-traited hero cards, Team-Building Exercise also works on Avengers Tower and Quincarrier. It makes it very easy to build up a huge board while keeping control of the game.

If you’re wondering why there are 12 allies, it’s because you’re only looking to play 6 of them normally. The more expensive 6 are there to give Quinjet ample targets and are definitely best cheated into play through Quinjet (though are also often great to play through Avengers Tower + Team-Building Exercise). It’s perfectly fine to spend allies as resources if you draw too many of them in one hand.

You’ll be flying high once your Quinjets have built you a formidable line-up of allies - but Avengers Assemble! is the finishing touch. Use Avengers Assemble with 3-5 allies out to hit the villain for tremendous damage and likely end the game! You can often hit for 50+ damage, enough to destroy both stages of almost any villain when solo in one fell swoop!

So let's meet the team~

3Eqa61D.png

Ace Pilots (Expensive Allies)


These are your 4 and 5-cost allies. These are the prime targets for Quinjet, though can easily be played through combining Avengers Tower and Team-Building Exercise for big plays.They also benefit the most from Team Training and Mighty Avengers due to their solid stats and high hp.

  • Black Panther - This is the ally that most benefits from Team Training, giving the king of Wakanda one extra use due to the high consequential damage he takes. His main use, however, is to search our discard pile and grab hold of Avengers Assemble! for the perfect moment.
  • Captain Marvel - One of the very best allies in the deck, Captain Marvel comes in swinging. The deck has more energy resources than any other. You should be getting the 3 damage 90% of the time, and the stun roughly 50% of the time. And once your Team-Building Exercises and Army of Ants are in play, energy resources take a bigger majority and your odds get even better! Use her to control threat unless damage is a priority.
  • Falcon - While costly for his stats, Falcon makes up for it with the potential to blast away threat and quickly. With treacheries by far the most common type of encounter card in the game, he’ll often remove 2 or even 3 threat with his ability while preparing you for what’s coming up next.
  • Giant-Man - Big guy, big stats. He already hits hard but he loves Team Training to give him one more big swing. Often, Giant Man will be able to destroy a minion with a single activation all by himself.
  • Goliath - Mathematically, ignoring those that draw you cards, Goliath is one of the best cost-to-effect ratio allies in all of Leadership. He can thwart three times before flipping the switch and dealing huge damage - and it’s still great value to block with his last hp instead if that’s what you need. And if Avengers Assemble! is available? You’re really going to want to use Goliath’s action first and attack twice for some crazy damage.
  • War Machine - Easily forgotten, War Machine is one of the two basic Avengers and loves to be played through Quinjet like all these other big allies. While easily overlooked for his slow tempo, Mighty Avengers turns him into a powerful force who can easily spend his Tough status card on consequential damage without you feeling bad about it.

The Ground Crew (Cheap Allies)


Your 3 or less cost allies. These allies are mostly here to defend you and help control the board while your Quinjets power up. They all take advantage of the discounts from Avengers Tower and Team-Building Exercise and should rarely ever be played for their full cost.

  • Hawkeye - Kate Bishop is, on the surface, underwhelming. But a 2-cost ally with 2 ATK is always good, and she only gets better and better with your support cards. If you can’t spend your whole hand efficiently? Feel free to use her action and shoot it at the enemy to preserve her hp.
  • Kaluu - While usually a powerful ally, the low amount of events in this deck make Kaluu’s response unreliable. Yet, he’s still a 2-cost Avenger and will still often land his response. He’s still good - just avoid making any plans that require him to draw a card, else you might end up one resource short.
  • Squirrel Girl - Always a solid ally. While she benefits less from your supports than Hawkeye, coming and dealing 1 damage across the board is always useful, even on a hero with Army of Ants. Bonus points if you can defeat the villain with her response!
  • Stinger - Small but infinitely useful, Stinger is one of those cards that is cheap enough to simply play and forget. If you need her? Use her. But you can often play her, save her hp, and wait until both Mighty Avengers and Avengers Assemble! are available to get 5 damage from her! Best of all, she doesn’t take an ally slot.
  • Wasp - An absolutely excellent ally, Wasp’s response means she can make a big impact when she arrives and provide burst damage or threat removal wherever necessary. And while Quinjet is generally better saved for more expensive allies, she’s good enough that you can use it on her and not feel bad if you've an overabundance of jets in play or are in desperate need of her.
  • White Tiger - With a THW stat of 2 and the ability to draw cards, White Tiger is excellent - particularly on Expert mode where she’s guaranteed to draw at least 2 cards from the beginning of the game against most villains. Use her to control the threat, block, and draw through your deck. Just remember never play her from Quinjet, else you won’t be able to trigger her response!

Fight or Flight (Events)


  • Avengers Assemble! - Expensive but powerful, Avengers Assemble is one of the most satisfying ways to win a game. While you can use it part way through a game, especially in multiplayer, it’s typically best used to bring a game to a sudden end - use all your allies and Ant-Man himself to attack, then ready all of them for +1 damage. We run two of these to improve the odds of at least one being in the discard pile when we play Black Panther. While good when played from hand, playing it from Black Panther is the smoothest way to use it.
  • Giant Stomp - Not only is it powerful enough to take out most minions in one go, but it will pop the Tough on any other minion in play. You can even use your cards such as Army of Ants to bring one or more minions down to 1 hp, then use Giant Stomp on the villain - wiping out those weakened minions in the shockwave while taking a huge chunk out of the villain! Don’t forget Team-Building Exercise works on this card!
  • Hive Mind - A little underwhelming at first, this card is best used in an emergency. Leave it to your allies to take care of the threat removal! With that said, this card does work with Team-Building Exercise and works great once all your Army of Ants are in play.
  • Resize - One of the few 0-cost cards in the game that draws a card AND does something good for you. In other words, unless Taskmaster is your villain and punishes you for swapping hero forms, you play this card every single time it enters your hand no matter what. It replaces itself, and you profit. At a baseline, you trigger either 1 threat removal or 1 damage from simply changing form. But once Ant-Man's Helmet is in play? This card gives absolutely incredible value.

Powering the Engines (Resources)


  • Energy, Genius, Strength - Combine these with Avengers Tower and Team-Building Exercise to straight-up pay for a big ally if your Quinjets aren’t ready yet! Energy and Strength also make excellent fuel for your Wrist Gauntlets.
  • Pym Particles - Need healing? We got you. One card short of a combo? We got you. This card is a ton of fun and creates interesting sequencing puzzles, especially when combined with Resize. Just remember that, if you don’t need the healing, try to draw a card as early on in the turn as you can, so you can plan the rest of your turn around what you draw. Finding a key support card or double resource can turn your plan on its head.

Building the Airport (Supports)


  • Army of Ants - Super cheap, can be played with Team-Building Exercise, and it’s not an attack and so dodges all those nasty things like Retaliate. Also excellent for popping Tough status cards. If playing multiplayer, your Aggression player will love you using this on their turn to sculpt minions’ hp to the perfect amount for them.
  • Avengers Tower - In this deck, Avengers Tower is our airport’s Flight Tower. Increasing your ally limit? Excellent. Reducing the cost of Avengers? We got 12 of them. Playing this card is high priority. Don’t forget it works with - you guessed it - Team-Building Exercise.
  • Mighty Avengers - Bigger stats for all your allies. Big allies hit for bigger numbers. Bigger number, better ally? This is all a silly way of saying that this card is immensely powerful and you need to play it. Weirdly, despite its name, this does NOT work with Team-Building Exercise.
  • Quincarrier - Sadly, I’m all out of quin-puns. We’ll just have to quietly carry on without them. This card combines well with Ant-Man’s Wrist Gauntlets and is often vital to remove attachments. Can be played through Team-Building Exercise!
  • Quinjet - The central card this deck is built around. Haven’t you read enough about it already?
  • Team Training - In reality, +1 hp means your allies each get one more use. If Giant-Man is hitting for 5 damage with Mighty Avengers, this card gives him 5 more damage on a following turn. This lets you use your big numbers for longer and results in huge gains in efficiency.
  • Team-Building Exercise - Almost as vital to the deck as Quinjet, the first copy of this card you play is effectively a reduced-cost Quincarrier in terms of playing your cards, since the majority work through it. It will always have a target. What I haven’t mentioned is that, since it’s an action, you can request an action on someone else’s turn in multiplayer to play cards you couldn’t normally play outside your own turn. Need one more card to play an ally? Maybe your Justice player can’t remove the last threat on a side scheme until their turn and thus let you trigger the Skilled Investigator they gave you before. Maybe someone isn’t sure whether they need to use their Avengers Mansion on themselves yet. Whatever the case, with Team-Building Exercise, waiting is not a problem.

Building the Ant-Man (Upgrades)


  • Ant-Man's Helmet - This is, without a shadow of a doubt, Ant-Man’s best card. This effectively gives both of his hero forms a handsize of 5, and the self-healing is unbelievable. If I’m at 11 or 12 hp? I recommend just letting the villain hit you, sparing your allies and leaving you ready. You will heal the hp back quickly through the next few turns, just keep swapping forms normally and using Resize.
  • Giant Strength - Easily the lowest priority upgrade/support card, Giant Strength is still cheap and - you guessed it again - works with Team-Building Exercise. In particular, this card combos well with Resize and Avengers Assemble!
  • Wrist Gauntlets - With so many allies and Ant-Man’s excellent healing, stunning enemies isn’t essential. Ant-Man doesn’t want to go alter-ego either, he gets benefits for changing hero form - especially with his helmet - and so confuse isn’t as valuable in solo play. Yet this is still a great card, both for multiplayer and for helping to spare your allies - if the villain is stunned, you don’t need to block with an ally and can thus more easily build a large board of allies for Avengers Assemble!. Quincarrier means that you can almost always pay for whichever status card you want from it - any time, anywhere.

Alternative Cards


I’ve played and tweaked this deck several times, and I am happy with the final decklist. With that said, there are so many excellent cards in the game that it’s impossible to add them all in one deck. Here are some alternative cards that work with the deck, why you may want to try them, and also why I ultimately haven’t used them here.

Recommended:

  • Avengers Mansion - To no one’s surprise, drawing a card is excellent in a card game. Always has been, always will be. This card can even be discounted by, you guessed it yet again, Team-Building Exercise! But this deck already has plenty of resource generators, so the problem lies in what to cut~ Team-Building Exercise is so much cheaper and two copies makes it so much easier to find early, Quincarrier works so well with Wrist Gauntlets and the deck’s theme, and Avengers Tower is essential for also increasing your ally limit. Personally, after testing, I found I preferred to go without this card but Avengers Mansion remains an amazing option. If someone else at the table wants Quincarrier? Take this instead without hesitation.
  • The Triskelion - A pretty standard card for any deck that wants to build up a big board. Personally? With this deck, I've always found myself burning through allies quickly in the early game while our Quinjets are building up, to the point that the ally limit isn't an issue. And that, later on in the game with multiple expensive allies, that a limit of 4 with Avengers Tower (or 5 with Stinger) was more than enough to close out 1 and 2-player games with a single Avengers Assemble!. But in a deck with so many allies, The Triskelion is never going to be a bad call.

Not Recommended:

There are plenty of other good cards, from Black Knight to Inspiring Presence as well as classic powerhouse cards like Make the Call and Regroup. But I'd be here forever if I had to talk about all the great cards in Leadership. The deck can easily be tweaked but, for the full Quinjet experience, I recommend it as it is.

And I think that covers pretty much everything!


Leave a comment if I missed anything or you have any questions! Good luck, have fun, and thank you for flying with Ant-Man Airlines.


15 comments

Jan 28, 2023 DarthCanuck31 · 7

This is the Ant-Man deck I've been waiting for! Always such a thrill seeing what you come up with.

Jan 29, 2023 Marctimmins89 · 310

This looks like great fun. Made me want to get back to my favourite 3-sided, shrinking and enlarging cat-thief.

Jan 29, 2023 KennedyHawk · 18246

I didn’t get to read the whole write up (it’s king! :p) but I will soon. The best thing about Team-Building Exercise and Quinjet is when you play Quinjet before your turn begins in multiplayer to accelerate the build up time by one round! Love this can’t wait to try it out.

Jan 29, 2023 adsarf · 463

Quinjet is a great card, and I think under-rated. I tried something similar to this with Captain America a while back and found it was a surprisingly effective deck (https://marvelcdb.com/decklist/view/21484/the-captain-and-the-cavalry-1.0). Ant-Man is a better choice, but I never thought of that at the time...

Jan 29, 2023 VillainTheory · 28919

Thank you everyone! I had a blast making and playing this deck. Ant-Man is such a fun hero and, as good as all the new cards are, going back to the Avengers feels like coming home.

@KennedyHawk Thanks for the input! I hadn't put that in the write-up but it's an excellent point that deserves to be shared. I've added it now. Time really does work differently in the Quantum Realm...

Feb 02, 2023 takabrash · 1

Super fun deck. Takes a while to set up, but then BAM. OTK. Bye bye villain.

Feb 03, 2023 GrizzLee971 · 1

I played this last night with Clarity of Purpose instead of Quincarrier and it was amazing. Ant-Man's Helmet just regens the health you spent!

Feb 03, 2023 GrizzLee971 · 1

Feb 04, 2023 VillainTheory · 28919

@GrizzLee971 Nice, Clarity of Purpose is great and I used it in an earlier version of the deck. Forgot to put it in my alternative cards list!

The reason I dropped it is as follows:

If you change form once a turn, that's 2 healing from Ant-Man's Helmet on one turn and none on the other. So, an average of 1 healing per turn. If you use Clarity of Purpose once a turn, you're taking 1 damage per turn. Which is a long way of saying that Clarity of Purpose + Ant-Man's Helmet is a very expensive version of Quincarrier - and you can discount Quincarrier through Team-Building Exercise to make it even cheaper.

Resize does get you more healing, but I don't think it comes up often enough to outweigh how much cheaper Quincarrier ultimately is. Perhaps it's my playstyle, tanking villain attacks every so often with Ant-Man to protect my allies and build up a big board for Avengers Assemble!, but I always have plenty of damage to heal with Ant-Man's Helmet. And so Clarity of Purpose had to go!

Feb 19, 2023 chaodck · 70

This is a fantastic deck. Just had the biggest turn of my life, dealing 57 damage and annihilating Kang in his stage 3, merely a turn after he entered play.

I was preparing for this, for a while, even before revealing stage 3, even efore killing off my own stage 2. I was playing alongside Wasp (against Kang with the Doomsday Chair modular) and she was struggling a bit against the Scarlet Centurion. Ant-Man had beaten Rama-Tut last turn and I had a good setup, Avengers Tower and 4 beefy allies Captain Marvel, Giant Man, Goliath and Black Panther, I was taking care of my allies to preserve them for Stage 3.

Eventually Wasp, with Ant-Man's help killed the Scarlet Centurion and we were off to the races. Both heroes had good health and Wasp had a tough (Perseverance is a huge card in her decks as it has a mental resource) and Ironheart as a blocker so I was covered for the Villain's turn. The nemesis minions did a bit of damage, but meh.

Wasp's turn was first and didn't do much, her retaliate had taken care of Kang's tough, and even had taken him down to 39 with Electrostatic Armor. And then, Scott, commander of the Quintumania Fleet took over.

I was in tiny mode, and the 3 ants did 3, then flipped to giant, dealing one and I attacked for 4 (3 + 1 from Giant Strength). Kang was down to 31 and I hadn't even touched my Allies.

Capt. Marvel attacks for 4, Goliath attacks for 6, Black Panther attacks for 3, Stinger attacks for 2 and Giant Man attacks for 5. All had enough health to keep them alive, barely. And then, the pièce de résistance.

AVENGERS ASSEMBLE!

With Kang down to 11, it was over obviously. But for bookkeeping purposes I'll detail all the attacks

Ant-Man attacks for 5, Capt. Marvel attacks for 5, Goliath attacks for 7, Black Panther attacks for 4, Stinger attacks for 3 and Giant Man attacks for 4.

Big total of 55 damage dealt in one turn, 57 if we count Wasp's help. Thanks a ton for this mate, really had a blast playing it, it might be my favourite Leadership deck (it's my least liked aspect so I don't play it much).

Feb 20, 2023 VillainTheory · 28919

@chaodck Nice! Sounds like a really fun game! Always satisfying when a big Avengers Assemble turn comes together. Thank you for the kind words!

Leadership used to be my least-favourite aspect too but it can do some really fun things. Here are a couple more unique Leadership decks I've made if the mood takes you:

Beast of Burden - Ironheart Leadership (recurring Beast for Stroke of Genius): marvelcdb.com

Power Overwhelming! - Phoenix Leadership (readying up allies with temporary stat boosts): marvelcdb.com

Feb 22, 2023 Weenkster · 31

Tried this deck yesterday in our SinMo campaign vs Sinister Six and I loved it. It was only on standard difficulty but nonetheless it was still a blast. Great deck! Thanks for putting it together. I'm excited to try it out against some tougher scenarios. Venom Goblin is up next so wish us luck.

Feb 22, 2023 VillainTheory · 28919

@Weenkster Oh wow! Venom Goblin is a huge step up! But I believe in the little guy! Ant-Man can do it. Good luck!

Apr 24, 2023 Mozilla552 · 7

@VillainTheory Absolutely fantastic deck. Thank you very much, spot on. Ive made only a few changes. Captain America does seem like a little bit higher value than War Machine and I did add The Triskelion instead of 1 Avengers Assemble! . You would be suprised how often you do get to play Cap for cheap when you have multiple allies with the increased limit. I also changed Kaluu for Black Knight. As I have lowered what is already a lower number of events, kaluu didnt have much value, while Black knight can sometimes hit annoying toughness.

Jun 20, 2023 Onsentape · 1

@Mozilla552 Great changes ! Very clever thanks for your comment I'll try it your way ;)