A Thief and his Dog

Gambit has one of the most interesting Alter-Ego abilities, being able to exhaust to remove threat. With the The Thieves Guild down, he is able to manage threat quite well without flipping to hero form. The Honor Among Theives deck that journeyman2 posted already has a pretty amazing write-up on how to play Gambit on that side, so check that one out if you haven't already.

However, one of the most interesting interactions for Gambit's Thief Extraordinaire ability is that he gets to use one card to thwart, but see the next card. This could be used to prepare either your boost card or encounter card for the next villain phase. But... what if you used this knowledge to feed your good boy, Cosmo??? Get where this is going???

So once you know the next type of card on top of the deck, you can use Cosmo with abandon, knowing he won't take any consequential damage. This is amazing in Aggression now that you can equip Cosmo with an Energy Spear and Enraged. Enraged is the real winner, because that extra point of consequential damage really doesn't matter anymore, and now Cosmo is attacking for 5 free damage every turn with piercing. So then lets add in a Sidearm, Boot Camp, give him an Honorary X-Men and Attack Training, and now he can swing for 8 per turn! That should solve most of the Alter-Ego damage problems.

Final pieces then are to help with being able to stay in Alter-Ego all game. Being in Aggression, we have access to the best confuse-locker out there in Psylocke who we can just leave on the table for turns that we didn't pull Creole Charmer. Professor X is also here when we find him, but we also are including all three copies of X-Men Instruction to shuffle them both back in quickly. Three copies of Mutant Education are also used to get Creole Charmer back into our hand again. But best of all, these 6 cards effectively let us run a 34 card deck with the X-Mansion out, as they'll just draw us a new card. They'll let you cycle your deck pretty quickly to find what you need.

If you do flip up for a turn (which you will need to do for Honorary X-Men on yourself and Cosmo), if you get to 4 counters, you can also shuffle Rogue in again with this combo and keep playing her for free every time you find her. With the X-Mansion down, you can also heal an X-Men ally over and over again, which is awesome for being able to use Psylocke still, while saving her confuse counters for when they are needed.

Marked may seem like an odd choice, but we are hoping to get so much of our attack out of Cosmo in one go that a poorly timed minion can wreck our plans. With all of the attachments out, Cosmo will be be ranged and have piercing, so Marked helps to provide some timely overkill if the cards line up.

The best combo you can hope for would be to use Thief Extraordinaire to remove threat and then use the card knowledge to trigger Cosmo. If you can also play Professor X while you have Honorary X-Men on both Cosmo and Gambit, then with Utopia down, you can actually ready both of them... and do it all over again. Amazing!

Thanks for checking out this deck... hope you're all enjoying exploring Gambit as much as I. Until next time Champions!