The Ace of Spades

♪♫♪ "The only card I need is the Ace of Spades! The Ace of Spades!" ♪♫♪" - Motörhead

Charge de Card? Throw de Card! It's simple, mon ami! Simple, effective, and fun! Here is a deck all about Gambit focusing on his signature cards with a few key combos!

Boost your attacks with Aggressive Energy and Warrior Skill, cycle your best cards back in with Mutant Education + X-Mansion, and thwart twice in alter-ego by readying with Honorary X-Men on Gambit + Utopia!

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

Dealing Damage

Looking for damage? I got you~

• Warrior Skill and Aggressive Energy boost all your attacks! Combine them with Charge counters!
  • Royal Flush can deal up to 15 damage!
  • One by One can deal up to 14 damage and is easier to trigger!
• Use Mutant Education to recur Molecular Acceleration and Royal Flush for crazy resources + damage!

Royal Flush is your flashiest move with the most damage. Use it cleave through minions and blast the villain down to size. This is one of your highest priorities when it comes to Warrior Skill and/or Aggressive Energy and you always want to try and maximize its damage where possible.

Charged Card is a good damage card. If your others aren't in hand? Use it with X-Gene to bring its cost down. The piercing and ranged can both be useful when facing Tough and Retaliate especially, but don't hesitate to throw it without a single Charge counter boosting it.

With One by One, it's double or nothing. If there are no minions, you likely have better things to do and should not play it. If there are minions? It's normally most efficient to spend the exact amount of Charge counters/uses of Warrior Skill to defeat the minion, without excess damage.

Threat Removal

Sick of struggling with threat in Aggression? Check it out~

• Put Honorary X-Men on yourself, then use Utopia to ready yourself up in alter-ego - you can use your alter-ego thwaring action twice!
• Use X-Mansion to heal 2 THW allies Psylocke or Rogue for repeated use!
• Choose Creole Charmer when you use Mutant Education to have a constant supply of threat removal!

Creole Charmer is excellent, and you can use allies to get schemes in range of it. Gambit's alter-ego thwarting action can also help to set it up.

Speaking of Gambit's alter-ego thwarting action? If there's threat to remove, there's threat to remove - but it also lets you scout out your boost card or, if your deck is about to run out, your extra encounter card. Sometimes, if a scheme only has 1 threat on it, you can discard a 0 boost icon card and use The Thieves Guild to draw card.

Survivability

Your defense? That's covered too!~

• You have 3 DEF and 2 defense cards - Natural Agility gives you a charge counter too!
• Between your allies + Creole Charmer, you have 14 blocks for villain activations per deck pass!
  • Note: you won't be able to block 14 per deck pass. The point is the crazy availability!
• You can heal yourself with X-Mansion! This is particularly good when healing allies would cause problems with the ally limit.

It's usually best to block with allies, but with 3 DEF and Gambit's Guild Armor? Gambit can do it, especially when Natural Agility is in hand!

You can even ignore a minion once your Gambit's Guild Armor is out, defending against it and readying as if nothing had happened while using allies to block the villain. This can be a good way to close out games; why deal with a big 6+ hp minion when you can hit the villain a couple of fully-charged Royal Flushes and win!

The Basics - The House Always Wins

X-Mansion, X-Gene, The X-Jet, and Utopia are your top priorities when you mulligan. Forge is great too, especially with a double resource card, as he can grab your other X-Men supports!

We want to turn on our Mutant Education engine with X-Mansion - it's just a house, but it does a lot for us! We also want to get some reliable resource generation beyond recurring Molecular Acceleration with Mutant Education, and readying is always great.

While it's not a priority, don't forget to sneak an Honorary X-Men on yourself so Utopia can ready you in either form!

Play Your Cards Right

The nuance in Gambit and this deck comes from how you flip between hero and alter-ego forms and how you manage your counters.

When it comes to flipping to alter-ego, try to ensure the villain is confused or make sure you're willing to deal with the consequences of the main scheme potentially being completed. With 5 confuses in the deck, and ways to recur them with Mutant Education, you should ideally be changing form on roughly 4 out of 5 turns! Flip, flip, flip - with confuses up on the villain.

(Note: This is less effective against steady/stalwart villains. You can swap Psylocke for Magik or Wolverine.

While it can be tempting to stay alter-ego sometimes, every turn spent in alter-ego is one less Charge counter gained from your hero ability. Keep flipping!

When it comes to counters, try to build a small reserve of Charge counters to power up Natural Agility and stay ready for any nasty minions. Spend smart~ Use what you need to deal with the problem in front of you and get efficient damage on the villain.

There is no point saving up 10 counters and losing before you spend them - but flying at 0 counters is bad news and leaves you at the mercy of Lady Luck!

Get Educated!

Mutant Education is an amazing card once X-Mansion is in play. Before that, it's low priority and should only be used if you can't spend your whole hand efficiently. Use it with X-Mansion in play to fill your deck with your best cards and replace itself!

Mutant Education's best targets are Molecular Acceleration, Rogue, Royal Flush, and Creole Charmer.

As a rule of thumb, I recommend shuffling 1x Molecular Acceleration back in at all times if there is one in your discard pile, and then one event appropriate to the situation.

Is the threat fine? Perhaps you have Psylocke on the board? Don't worry about Creole Charmer. But if you need to remove threat or heal? Put it back in the deck!

Sitting on a big stack of Charge counters? Grab yourself a Royal Flush! Forced to use them all? Maybe go for more counter generation.

And Rogue, while lacking special synergy with the deck or our gameplan, is just very, very good. With 4+ counters, she is reduced to 0-cost! 0-cost?! Yes, a 0-cost ally who can remove 4 threat and block twice. That's just silly value.

With Mutant Education, Gambit always has a trick up his sleeve.

Charge de card, throw de card, and have fun! (Thanks to the users of the MC Community server for the feedback that helped shape the deck!)