No Quarter! Optic Blast!

Cyclops decks have a reputation for having Scott Summers play a supporting role to a menagerie of colorful X-Men. Those decks are fun! But maybe you want a Cyc deck that really leans into a big, optic blast. Maybe you've been Looking for Trouble and are excited to have found it. If you have been, this is the deck for you.

The Core

We have the aggression card draw trinity of No Quarter, Follow Through, and Honed Technique. Angela is here to summon minions and The X-Jet can consistently provide the required to trigger Honed Technique. Cyclops' hero upgrades give him some extra ways to play with this. Both Exploit Weakness and Priority Target can further increase his card draw from No Quarter. NQ's absolutely silly card draw (upwards of ten cards if you line up NQ, HT, 3x Follow Through, and Priority Target on a 1 HP minion) gives us the cards and energy we need to bring out our even bigger guns.

Behold! Optic Blast!!

Who needs Dive Bomb? We have beam supers worthy of a Marvel vs Capcom game. In most decks, Take That! suffers from the same problem many of aggression's expensive damage cards face: too little damage for the effort. Honed Technique ups the damage to 10, making it competitive with many hero cards and Cyclops' hero deck allows us to consistently meet the upgrade requirement. Aggression's tactics cards, Marked and Suppressing Fire, means we can play Take That! with just the cards we draw from No Quarter. Into the Fray also gets in on the action when combined with Marked and 3x Follow Throughs, clearing the main scheme and smacking the villain for a heap of overkill damage. This deck is never far away from big villain (and minion) damage.

Modularity

This deck has two, inter-related, clunky areas I plan to work on.

The first is thwarting. Cyclops' 2 THW just misses the cut-off for clearing most side schemes on its own. Into the Fray is great at clearing the main scheme, but it needs a minion and it can't' touch side schemes. Looking for Trouble can clear most side schemes, but you risk milling the encounter deck. This deck uses Psylocke and Suppressing Fire to either cover Cyc as he flips down, or to provide some hero-side healing to make flipping down less necessary and this indirectly helps keep the threat low.

Relatedly, low minion villains occasionally yielded dead hands, with minion-facing cards and upgrades having no effective target. Cyclops' Optic Blast ability and Field Commander card can help spend excess resources but these aren't great turns, even if they're rare. Machine Man might be a solution to both these problems. I haven't yet tried the deck with him, but a resource sink that can thwart for 4 sounds great on paper.

Lastly, the double resource cards would sometimes painfully whiff after an otherwise great No Quarter. You may want to consider swapping out one or two of them for Digging Deep. Losing doubles hurts but the The Power of Aggression covers most of this deck's expensive cards and Digging Deep provides a resource that can be used in HT or to flexibly respond to encounter deck requirements. I would keep Genius to proc HT but Energy and Strength can be swapped out relatively safely.

That's everything -- I hope you enjoy the deck! Thank you to both journeyman2's Drawn and Quartered deck for Rocket and to VillianTheory's Master Blaster deck for introducing me to what a blast-y Cyc could look like.