Psypool: Tickled Pink

Stick-To-Itiveness seems great for Psylocke! A built in ready seems like just what she needs to keep her damage output strong. Good stuff, thanks for sharing!

Just running this idea by to see if I am comprehending correctly, the reason you are only running two of the doubles is because you already have the three pool resources. Genius is naturally the one to take out because of the large amount of mentals in the deck already and you want to have good resource variety for TicTacToe.

As a Psylocke man, this will probably be the first Pool deck I play once I buy the Deadpool pack. Awesome deck as always!

@corbintm Yeah! Although it's a control deck at heart, it puts out a lot of constant damage.

@SupremePhoen1x Yes and no! Mostly yes. Firstly, I haven't found more than 5 resources beneficial here due to the risks of drawing too many/having fewer options in hand. It matters when you start in hero form with a hand size of 4 and need to solve problems.

I'd advocate keeping Genius/6 total resources if we were running either or both of Telepathy/Telekinesis. I actually really like Telekinesis in particular, and it almost has great synergy with Mulligan here since using it is not "playing a card", but unfortunately misses the mark.

(The odds of being able to power Telekinesis with mentals from your hand, have Mulligan in hand, and also pay for Mulligan without using your resource generators to pay for it, all when starting from hero form, is very low. And beyond Mulligan, I felt they were too slow/unimpactful in a deck that speedruns its way to Stick-To-Itiveness.)

So, since we have the 'Pool resources which are almost always triple resources for us, running 5 resources meant cutting a regular double. Since nothing in the deck requires a specific resource type, mentals are our most common type plus we have Psi-Knives, Genius was the obvious one to drop. But really, the most important thing was keeping Energy in.

Tic-Tac-Toe only actually lets you spend 1 resource at a time on it, so doubles and triples don't matter to it very much. The variety of resources do matter, though, and you can use a double on it for 1 resource of value if you have no where else to put it, so there is still a grain of truth there!

But mainly I wanted that variety of resource types to deal with encounter cards that demand specific ones, notably those that ask you to spend at least two energy resources. We have mental resources covered, and the Katanas also cover physicals, but energy resources are the one type we don't have consistent access to.

Wow, this turned out to be an essay! But hopefully it's interesting/helpful to anyone reading.

Hey man, gotta say I love your decks and all your online content, especially your hero analysis and the top5s you do with Nelson.

I was wondering, what do you think about swapping the pool allies and nick, for Hope Summers allong with Telepathy (or even ( Telekinesis) so she can fetch it, and Negasonic Teenage Warhead, this way all your allies would benifit from Team-Building Exercise.

Another suggestion would be to include Psimitar instead of Assess the Situation, I know you would need to sacrifice 1 Psi-Katana after you lay it dow, but you seems to me that you will be playing at least 1 psionic card per turn.

Am I crazy? anyway, love all your work keep it up!

@Kazlavitz The 'Pool allies are very swappable, I mostly just wanted to use them for the fun-factor. With that said, Negasonic Teenage Warhead is too risky in my eyes and I would just stick to basic allies at that point. I'd rather use the discount from Team-Building Exercise elsewhere and, even with it, the hazard icon is just the antithesis of what a control deck wants.

While it will take a few months, we have new basic X-Force and Psionic allies on the way which will probably be "optimal" here! Especially alongside Team-Building Exercise.

I'd definitely keep Nick Fury. While he loses value once the Professor X loop is up and running in solo, he is amazing to help you set that up via his card draw and still useful. In multiplayer, he never really loses any value.

Hope Summers would be a great addition and I've used her in a couple of 'Pool decks - it's nice that she can grab Healing Factor.

In regards to Telepathy or Telekinesis, I would go for Telekinesis every single time, at least in solo play. (This deck has a ton of thwarting.) You would then have to add Genius back in too for them, but that is easily done.

Now I'm in the minority but I don't love Psimitar in most Psylocke decks.

I do think it's good, but I don't think it's "optimal" most of the time. Now, not every deck has to have every card be "optimal", far from it - this one doesn't already by virtue of the 'Pool allies alone. But I've basically stopped using Psimitar with Psylocke outside of certain situations (namely if I expect to use my basic THW on most turns, e.g. Justice Multiplayer).

You either need to find Side Holster first or you're stuck at one Katana. And that's problematic here.

My problems with Side Holster are minor but numerous: it's taking another deck-slot, effectively inflating the cost of Psimitar by 1, and is useless until you find Psimitar. And if you're under pressure or have better upgrades in hand, you might not even play Psimitar.

And being stuck at one Katana is even worse if you do find Psimitar before Side Holster.

If Stick-To-Itiveness is out, you're losing 2 damage on most turns anyway from basic ATKs and so are not actually gaining anything except the ability to split where that damage goes. And if you're looping Professor X, the villain is permanently confused and the threat will likely be at 0 - this means you almost always want the benefits from your events for having 2x Psi-Katanas out.

An of course there's a small chance you don't find a psionic card. Notably when starting the turn in hero form. You can go alter-ego and grab Professor X but Psimitar only triggers in hero form.

Which is a long way of me saying it's good, and the deck would still do well with it, but it's my opinion you have to choose it for fun/variety.

Sorry for another essay!

@VillainTheory you don't have to be sorry at all, as always it was an excellent read with all your points well explained.

I will play around and test with Hope Summers and Telekinesis, the rest of the changes you completely talked my out of them.

thank you

Didnt journeyman patent that professor loop? Maybe this article should give him some credit?

@tjjj If I had seen it from him, I would 100% agree! Journeyman2 makes great decks and has great ideas, so I'm sure he has talked about it or posted decks with it, but I didn't get it from there. I came up with it. How? I actually think it's fairly obvious to anyone who deck-builds and experiments a lot, and I saw many people pre-release talk about looping psionic allies (mostly Karma and Prof. X) on Psylocke.

I don't really understand how you can patent things in a cooperative card game, but I first posted about a guaranteed Professor X loop back in my Domino Deep Dive article on reddit 8 months ago a couple of days after the preview article dropped. I posted about the Psylocke version with Cerebro in my Psylocke Deep Dive 6 or so months ago.

It's also pretty similar to running 3x X-Men Instruction on Phoenix~

But I'm sure lots of people saw it immediately anyway.

@tjjj maybe you could just enjoy the deck?