Triple Your Profits

Unusual X-Men Decks #8 - Triple Your Profits

Tripling your profit is good. Tripling anything good is profitable. Good things generally just come in threes! And here we have:

• Three Band Togethers that can each generate three resources
• Three Superpower Adaptations to make sure you can play one of your three Strength In Numbers almost every turn
• Three 1-cost resource generators

And I could keep going!

A few marvelcdb decks have used Strength In Numbers and Band Together on Rogue before, but never have I seen one that leans into three of each! In fact, as you may have now noticed, the entire deck is dedicated to resources.

Rogue comes with 13 events already, so we're focused on bringing the money to play them and the draw to find them. Unlike most Rogue decks, we aren't trying to get fancy - we're just trying to get rich!

Watch as Get Up and Game takes the deck up against the formidable duo of Kang and Mystique here on YouTube! Multiverses collide as modular Mystique and nemesis set Mystique chase Rogue through time!

• Archetype: Strength in Numbers
• Difficulty: Above Average
• Recommended Player Count: 1-4
• Ideal Aspect Partners: Any
• Ideal Hero Partners: Anyone with good + expensive signature cards for Superpower Adaptation + Band Together, anyone who can go Aerial, or both such as Storm.
• Scenarios to Avoid: N/A

Quickstart Guide:

1. Play cheap allies quickly to build a large board of allies. This is to enable huge card draw from Strength In Numbers.

2. Play Gambit to enable Superpower Adaptation shenanigans. He is your most important ally, notably in solo play.

3. Draw tons of cards from Strength In Numbers. Don't have it? Find it with Superpower Adaptation.

4. Spend loads of resources with Band Together. Don't have a great target to spend it on? Find one with Superpower Adaptation on Gambit or another player.

5. Rogue is a tank. 11 hp, stuns, heals, and Bulletproof Belle. Blocking with allies is low priority, you generally want to keep them alive for Strength In Numbers.

6. The ideal line up of allies is Gambit, a Leadership ally and a basic ally so that Superpower Adaptation can find anything.

7. If you draw multiple Strength in Numbers early, consider holding one or a Superpower Adaptation so you can guarantee using a Strength in Numbers on the following turn. This helps prevent dips in output.

8. In addition to using Make the Call, you can put Touched on an Avenger to play Stinger directly.

9. Rogue's Jacket is just amazing. Play it as a high priority!

Mulligan Priorities:

• Gambit
• Rogue's Jacket
• Any cheap allies

Strategy:

It's no secret that Strength In Numbers is an incredibly powerful card - but it's my opinion that Rogue is among the very best users of it in the entire game. Why? Because of Superpower Adaptation.

If we're building up a big board of allies for Strength in Numbers, then Band Together is its natural partner. And what if I were to tell you I think Rogue is one of the best users of Band Together...?

Superpower Adaptation lets us find Strength In Numbers on turns we don't have it. Superpower Adaptation also lets us find an expensive card to spend Band Together on. Now we have consistent mass card draw and masses of resources we can consistently spend!

With this in mind Gambit is your top priority! Once you have him in play, not only can you grab any of your discarded signature events with Superpower Adaptation, but Beauty and the Thief is online.

In short, you ideally want Gambit in play alongside one Leadership ally and one basic ally so you can grab anything you need at any given time. Once Gambit and a basic ally are in play, you can also start to grab Beauty and the Thief on repeat which is extraordinarily powerful.

...You could say, Rogue is one of the best users of Beauty and the Thief. ;)

Now, most Strength In Numbers decks focus on a tribe such as the Avengers to use the increased ally limit from their support card such as Avengers Tower.

We don't do that here.

Instead, we're focusing on cheap allies from any tribe/trait. This lowers our ceiling of potential cards drawn, but greatly accelerates our setup. Note that Rogue is extremely tanky with 11 hp, 3 stuns, 2 heals, and two amazing defense cards. This means you should only rarely block with an ally, letting you build up a huge board with ease.

Cheap allies, including those that partially refund their cost with card draw, also tend to be among the most powerful in the game. And with Stinger and The Triskelion, we still have a ceiling of 5 cards drawn with Strength In Numbers - and it's very easy to get there.

The other advantage of these allies (as opposed to focusing on a tribe) is that their card draw helps us to accelerate through our deck and see even more cards per turn than just Strength In Numbers alone. This helps us find Energy Transfer a lot, which really means we can use Superpower Adaptation and still end with Touched on the villain to use Bulletproof Belle. And, by not leaning into a trait-strategy with Rogue, Touched will just often be on the villain.

Something else to note about Energy Transfer is that you retain the traits. Which is to say, if you can grab Aerial from Angel or another player and then transfer Touched onto the villain, Southern Cross and Goin' Rogue are going to trigger both the status card from Retaliate and the +2 from Aerial.

Now we have one of the strongest events in the game and some of the most efficient allies in the game. Tons of card draw, tons of resources and, thanks to Rogue's events, tons of status cards.

Love them or hate them, they are all extremely effective.

The icing on the cake is that Rogue and Leadership have great access and make great use of three of the best resource generators in the game - Clarity of Purpose, Deft Focus and X-Gene. You needed more money? You got it.

The cherry on top of that icing is Beast. Play him with Band Together and watch as he grabs it back for you. What a guy!

And Machine Man is here for any leftover crumbs. Too many resources? Feed them to him if he's not already exhausted.

Note that this deck accelerates fast and makes you very strong, very quickly. However, what that means is you will also find yourself making some inefficient plays later on. The price of setting up quickly and reliably is having too many allies for the late game when our board is already built up. Sometimes you will just have to overwrite one because of the ally limit.

You can remove a couple of allies if you like, or at least drop the deck back down to 40 cards, but you risk an early Band Together that's worth 0 resources and slowing your progress on big Strength In Numbers.

Also? Don't worry too much about Bulletproof Belle! If it lines up? Amazing. If you can afford to hold onto it and use it on the next villain turn? Great. But if Touched is in the wrong place, or you draw it on your turn, no big deal. With so much card draw, you will draw it on your turn at some point. With so many stuns and confuses, the villain won't often be activating anyway rendering it useless that time.

As a final note, Avengers Mansion is amazing but a huge tempo sink. Ideally, unless the board is particularly calm, skip it unless you have a powered-up Band Together in hand. But with a powered-up Band Together? It's so easy to play! And everyone loves more card draw.

(You can substitute Avengers Mansion for Helicarrier or The X-Jet, but the deck values card draw far more than resources. You are looking to find targets for the resources you already have!)

(Vivian is also a great inclusion in this deck, notably in multiplayer. Swap her in for Angel or Beast.)

Good luck out there! Thanks for reading!