Low and Slow

At a Glance - Player Counts: Solo Focused

• Play style: Control
• Strengths: High Minion/Threat/and Villian Management, lots of freedom for AE.
• Weaknesses: Heavy Bursts of repeated Activations.

With discernment, Jean Grey restrains the Phoenix, and uses its power.

Fuel for the Fire

Hello everyone! I have an old deck here and only just now am getting a chance to do a write-up. I had a rough time finding decks I enjoyed with Phoenix on release. It seemed there wasn't much interest in playing her outside Training-Room or Ready-focused strategies (which often would even be the same list) regardless of which Aspect you played. Justice decks that made her 3-THW feel particularly meaningful were something I liked though, and Aggression has some old pieces of the Aspect that even let that high Thwart ability out the gate feel meaningful.

Fan the Flames

Our centerpiece here is Hall of Heroes(HoH). Providing huge bursts of value when set-up, it's always been a nice tool for Aggression. Two areas have always been a struggle for it though.

1. Being an Alter-Ego action, threat control and possible confuse access is super important that utilizing this doesn't become a liability, especially for Solo Aggression.
2. YOU have to be the one to defeat minions to gain counters on HoH. Event and Basic Attack focused decks never had a problem with this. But Red TrainingRoom decks often would have an awkward time procing this, with your ally attacks being almost too efficient and your Activation best used elsewhere.

Phoenix definitely has the tools to solve number 1. Regularly having two 3-THW activations, and tons of economy pieces to play allies manages threat wonderfully. Psychic Assault combined with a Cerebro to grab Professor X or Psylocke even makes the act of flipping down super safe as well.

For point two, we got some help in the form of Lie in Wait and Plan B. Upgrades count as YOU for the purpose of defeating minions, and these two have advantages over events doing the same thing considering how on-demand their damage can be. You play them and then can access them later when they would be their most useful. Lie in wait can defeat a small minion, soften up a larger one, or even be saved if something small enough for Plan B to manage by itself drops in. Speaking of we like Plan B over a similar upgrade in Jarnborn, as we don't need to attack to proc it's damage effect, and can save our valuable activations for Thwarting. There's enough redundancy in the deck that the random nature of the discard for it isn't a huge issue, even HoH is backed by several other pieces of scaling.

Controlled Burn

So that encompasses our game plan. Phoenix herself mostly remains Restrained and manages thwarting, our upgrades manage minions, and all the while we're threading in Upgrades, Supports, and allies to eventually scale over our opponent into a finish. We're totally comfortable playing the long game, not to say 7-9 turn games aren't normal, but 12+ turns is pretty natural if you're playing risk adverse and letting your inevitability carry you to the end. You'll want to hold off on Unleashing unless you plan to close soon, but the extra oomph your cards have when this happens will help a lot smoothing things into the endgame.

For the card-by-card, we start with allies. Psylock and Professor X are valuable sources of confuse, and can easily be fetched with Cerebro the turn we flip down. Angel and Sunfire are cheap allies that make for good means to proc Utopia. Colossus is good value for the cost, and we definitely can slow the game enough that blocking an attack with his tough doesn't feel like a huge tempo loss. Wolverine might seem like an expensive inclusion if we're wanting to utilize Utopia, but Phoenix's inmate economy and what we can build up in her makes him very playable, while also having tons of utility. 3ATK is great, self healing is great, and piercing is great. Even just floating staying around for 1-THW every turn is useful. Forge is essentially a second copy of Utopia, but our other supports are still plenty valuable to grab if that's been taken care of.

Also considered Magyk and Dust for this list, but their higher cost was less appealing, especially with their affects not doing much for our game plan. Dust I feel has a place though if you want to tech in a upgrade package that does more for multiplayer.

Psychic Assault is obviously great just for the Confuse, and it's nice that we can even play it with Team Building Exercise. Don't be afraid to use this to clear a minion that has a problematic board presence though, anything that sticks around can be a problem for your health or the main scheme.

We now get to our wealth of scaling that presents our win condition. Cerebro is alive a lot with our confuses, and is plenty valuable to find an ally that fits our given hand/situation. Hall of Heroes has been discussed enough, and Team Building Exercise has a wealth of targets here between the Psionic and X-Men trait. X-Jet is a flat one resource every turn and also a valuable wild when helping with a problematic attachment, especially if we're trying to save counters on Phoenix Force.

Endurance and honorary both represent extra health to use as a resource, and give more room to REC multiple times and stack power counters better. Lie in Wait is good damage for cost for something that can also be played and held onto. Though it is Max 1 per player, so don't be afraid to use it if you can replace it quickly. Even if Plan B can answer the minion alone, we have enough value that turning Plan B on the Villian instead is valuable to find the finish sooner. X-Gene rounds it out with another resource, and is very playable with our freedom to go to AE in this list, and can help push up Phoenix events that will answer minions or side schemes that might need the resource to answer effectively.

Tending to the Ashes

Really like how this list turned out. Lie and Wait and Plan B interacting with HoH like that is very fun to see in practice. Phoenix is a great vehicle for it too, the imagery of Jean Grey keeping the Phoenix restrained and using her powers in a controlled and deliberate manner also feels great. Some of the already spoiled cards from the next wave are interesting and could find their way into this list, especially some of the Psionic support. Another thing is that this strategy could just be grafted onto Psylocke's kit without much issue, and possibly being even better depending on what her final list looks like. That's enough for now though, thank you to anyone who read this far, and happy gaming!