Adam x Yondu - Space Lovers

Welcome to my Adam Warlock deck. It’s gone through many revisions and fine-tunings and is finally in a state I’m comfortable with. I have constructed this deck with his main strengths of flexibility and multi-aspect synergy along with his main weaknesses of early squishiness and slow’ish starts in mind.

The deck is based around a few ideas: An efficient Yondu setup, Agent Coulson recursion, early chump blocking defense, and more flexible Quantum Magic card pull.

Yondu is an intriguing ally, one able to attack with no consequential damage. Unfortunately for many heroes, his best card, Energy Spear, is in Aggression rather than his own aspect of Leadership. I’ve added this card along with Laser Blaster (both 1 cost cards) to set him up as a strong and flexible Voltron ally with 4 attack, ranged, piercing, and overkill. This makes him highly useful against any minion or villain (sometimes both!). The Justice card Agent Coulson is also paired with the Leadership card Rapid Response to set up their very useful infinite loop which provides 2 thwart and a block every turn for 2 resources each time, a highly efficient combination that can protect AW throughout the entire game and scales with more difficult hard-hitting villains.

In lieu of using the common AW card inclusion Summoning Spell, I’ve decided to call one of these allies with the side-scheme Call for Backup. Although very powerful, I feel Summoning Spell works against AW in many decks, as it is most efficient when paired with high cost, natively harder to play allies. When Summoning Spell is not available this can make the early game more difficult for AW, as he often wants to stay in Hero form until Soul World has been set up and the 1st deck run-through has occurred. Quantum Magic can be used to grab Summoning Spell for re-uses, but in these early stages when he is most vulnerable his Hero setup cards are often high priorities and ally play is more for emergencies. The use of Call for Backup allows us to pick exactly who we want (either Yondu if a strong attacking Voltron is desired or Agent Coulson if the scenario is threat heavy or has a hard-hitting villain), whenever we want as we can keep the side-scheme on the board, while keeping more useful early game “chump” blockers in the deck. A stun deck focus can be used to allow AW to stay safely in hero form as well, but chump blockers are generally a more flexible plan as steady/stalwart I feel is a bigger problem than overkill. This deck includes a stun option if necessary though with Iron Fist. Call for Backup also has the benefit of allowing us to avoid playing Summoning Spell roulette, which for me always turns out to be Pip for some reason. Grr!

For Soul World use, which can be difficult for AW to use in low threat or steady/stalwart villain scenarios as he needs to flip to AE, I’ve included Under Surveillance and Counterintelligence (to use in low threat scenarios against stalwart/steady type villains) or "Think Fast!" (very cheap confuse option, and the 1 damage penalty will be healed anyway) and Psylocke to confuse villains without steady/stalwart. Quantum Magic can be used to choose which is most appropriate when the time comes if the cards have gone to the discard pile.

Note the use of allies in each aspect, fulfilling different roles. Iron Fist for stun, Psylocke for confuse, Sunfire for attachments, Agent Coulson for thwart recursion, Yondu for attack and tough/retaliate bypass, Black Widow for nasty encounter cards, Kaluu for Tutoring. These provide a “Buffet” of options for AW to pull from depending on the scenario and situation.

Choices that will appear quite poor to those unfamiliar with AW include a larger than 40 card deck and the inclusion of “The Power of …” aspect resource cards.

As AW is an extreme deck-churner, even from the very beginning of the game, encounter cards will come far more frequently than they will with many other heroes (every 2 rounds is not uncommon for AW). This causes the extra encounter card to change from being the minor nuisance it may be in other decks, to a constant and painful presence in AW game play. AW has a reputation for being a slow-setup deck, and these early (and often) extra Encounter cards are an extremely under-appreciated reason why. Pushing the extra encounter card off one round has a much larger positive effect on a deck that would otherwise face it during round 3 than one that won’t deal with it until round 6. AW decks also rely more than others on picking and choosing cards from the discard pile with Quantum Magic, making a “consistent” deck a little less important than it is for other heroes. Because of these reasons it is generally fine to break the 40 card “rule” that seems to be so dogmatically applied. More games than not I find myself counting cards at the end of the deck early in the game, making sure to leave 1 card when my turn ends, to avoid facing that early encounter card. With a 40 card deck I may face the Encounter card in round 3 or 4. With a few extra cards in the deck I can put it off a round (and have more flexibility to use extra cards on Magic Attack, Zone of Silence, Cosmic Awareness, or Karmic Blast). This matters more when it’s early!

The inclusion of “The Power of …” cards is also related to AW’s Quantum Magic card. A protection resource card with only 3 apparent targets (the 3 protection allies) would be a poor choice in most decks. In an AW deck, however, the Quantum Magic card itself can be seen as a potential “target” as it can be used to pull a matching aspect card from the discard pile with 0 net cost. The 2 resources lost playing the Quantum Magic card are regained from the received card itself and the extra Power of resource. Ordinarily using Quantum Magic on allies or aspect cards would be an inefficient move and rarely used in an AW deck except for very specific cards/builds, but with their inclusion these aspect cards all become efficient options available to AW … particularly chump blockers early on when he is at his most vulnerable. Their inclusion essentially opens up the “Buffet” table much wider. This is why 2 cost chump blockers for each aspect have been included except for Justice, which includes the game’s best infinite blocker in Agent Coulson. Whenever Quantum Magic appears in conjunction with any of the Power of resource cards in a hand (which is quite common since there are 4 of them, and Mystic Senses will add more card draw later on), a matching ally from the discard pile becomes an efficient possible play. Due to his identity's Battle Mage skill, an aspect card will often be used here anyway as this skill is nearly a MUST play every round as Mystic Senses and his Warlock's Cape are contingent upon its use. The decision essentially boils down to including a lower priority aspect card which is unlikely to be played and unlikely to be called upon from the discard pile … most likely getting used for Battle Mage or its innate single resource or instead including a Power of Resource card which can also serves the Battle Mage function or can open up Quantum Magic to call on any of its aspect cards from the discard pile without feeling bad about it (or used on a card in the same hand if somewhat lucky). A subtle distinction, but hopefully explains why this is not as cut and dry as one might think.

Some of the other inclusions like The Night Nurse, Target Acquired, or Endurance are more scenario dependent and can be tossed or exchanged for other scenario useful cards (I would keep The Sorcerer Supreme and Deft Focus). I like to use Target Acquired as I tend to think of Encounter/Boost cards as its own hurdle to overcome, along with causing enough damage, and thwarting. Target Acquired is part of that package along with Night Nurse, AW’s Cosmic Ward, and Black Widow. Endurance also has more value for AW as he is one of the rare heroes that will heal completely back up to full health regularly and take advantage of that higher limit. And as mentioned previously, a bigger deck isn’t a bad thing for AW, so including a few extra things is fine as long as there is a high enough proportion of aspect cards to provide enough targets for Battle Mage.

My deck-building knowledge isn’t encyclopedic, so if you’ve got ideas for card exchanges or improvements please leave some in the comments. Thanks for reading this particularly long write-up. Yikes! You should’ve seen the first version that timed out and didn’t get saved at all!