Phoenix / Justice - Thwart the World

This deck revolves around a few key pieces. It's not going to thwart high amounts of threat, but the point is to balance out the presence of Consume the World, while keeping threat in check and allowing her to spend her time burning down the villain.

First, the deck includes plenty of events like Clear the Area and Multitasking (as well as her basic thwart) that can remove low amounts of threat for great returns - this allows you to abuse Consume the World and Storm by moving small amounts of threat around which you can then remove to trigger Clear the Area, or just remove the extra threat using Multitasking. Unlike a lot of heroes, once Consume the World is in play, you're guaranteed to have a side scheme in play, making Storm considerably better. Justice Served then comes in because it doesn't care about the side scheme being defeated, only that the last threat is removed. It's not a forced response, so save it for when you need it.

Second, while restrained, the repeated readying effects of Soul Sisters, Justice Served, and Phoenix Firebird allow you to make a lot of use of Heroic Intuition and thwart a ton with your hero's basic powers. Once unleashed, those same readying effects allow you to turn thwarting into damage, as her ATK skyrockets at the cost of threat, while still having 2 THW (thanks to Heroic Intuition) to thwart when necessary.

3 copies of Agile Flight is a lot (perhaps too much, we're still tuning) so getting Phoenix Suit into play as soon as possible is absolutely crucial, but once it's in play, Team-Building Exercise will allow you to play it for 2 resources, making it your primary thwarting tool while unleashed so that you can focus on dealing damage. It's sometimes nice to have unplayable cards, as you have to throw away something to play your upgrades and Storm.

Storm is the number 1 target for Cerebro, and the X-Mansion will help to keep her in play, but once she's already in, Cerebro can be used to pull in your different allies, who are all made cheap to play by Team-Building Exercise:

• Angel is just a good, cheap, high-value card. He's not the highest priority, but being able to dump him out for 2 resources (1 with TBE) is going to give you a great return.
• Blindfold allows you to stack the deck and avoid high-value cards, like Phoenix's Obligation or cards that give the villain high values of boost.
• Cyclops allows you to effectively choose when to go Unleashed by throwing him under the bus to remove your final counters, giving you that important measure of control.
• Marvel Girl allows you to bonk away the toughness of minions like Dark Phoenix, while also removing threat, and in a pinch can just start thwarting.
• Professor X doubles down on the whole "Ready Phoenix" plan, as well as providing a handy blocker

For more info on how we like to play Phoenix, check out our guide to How to Play Phoenix where we go through the key parts of her kit and some important factors.