Falcon, Guardian Angel

Theme

This is a multiplayer-focused deck that tries to defend for the whole table as often as possible. The gameplan for how we are doing that is:

1. Recurring Draw Their Fire with Practiced Plan to play it on as many turns as possible.
2. Exhausting our Aerial Allies for Aerial Intervention.
3. Saving our friends with Aerial Evacuation, which can also be recurred with Practiced Plan.

Step 1: Putting out the Fire

The most "traditional" way to defend for the table is with Draw Their Fire, and this option works the best at 3 and 4 players. This option takes the most setup, but is extremely powerful when it is online. Your critical cards on the first deck pass are Armored Vest, the Microwave (Vibranium Microweave), Angel's Aerie, and of course Draw Their Fire. Once online, you can reliably defend every villain/minion activation for the majority of turns.

Height Advantage is included to provide some defensive value early on, allowing you to defend for others and take less damage before you have your DEF boosts online as well as helping with higher ATK villains. Unflappable is here to provide some economy, but we are not going to try to play specifically for it and instead counting on the high quantity of defense attempts to hit the trigger.

Step 2: Falcon's Angels

This option (along with step 3) is much stronger at 2 players, but can still provide some value at higher player counts as it only requires an aerial ally and Aerial Intervention to get online. The plan is to play our allies, use them like we normally would, but anytime we draw an Aerial Intervention we instead exhaust the allies to block attacks for other heroes. This won't fully defend most villain activations, but should reduce it substantially and allow the other heroes to stick around much longer. And, as always, you can chump block with those allies as you get close to a reshuffle.

Step 3: Soaring to Safety

This option works best at 2 and 3 players, but should still be used at 4 players for tempo. Here, we pivot away from Draw Their Fire and instead focus on supporting Aerial Evacuation. This would mean using cards like Practiced Plan to recur Aerial Evacuation, and using it any time you can both defend for yourself and take another player to alter-ego (you are not the last player in the turn order).

In 4 player, this option is best used when you have depleted Falcon's Flock, as it provides an easy way for you to flip down and tutor it again while also healing with Angel's Aerie. A side note of this is that it's very useful for helping your teammates with good alter-ego abilities who may not need to flip otherwise.

General Support

Our turn 1 is basically always going to mulligan/tutor Falcon's Flock, and if you plan on supporting Options 1 or 2 I would also keep a copy of Practiced Plan if you draw it. If you have Falcon's Flock from your mulligan, instead tutor Redwing. While this deck should build out faster than most perfect defense decks, I would still make sure you are providing value early through Ever Vigilant and your 3 cheap allies. Cannonball should be used either when you have 2 aerial cards in your hand or for Option 2.

Finally, I would recommend exclusively using Up, Up, and Away to draw a lot of cards and not to reduce damage. You should end up with enough defensive options to avoid dying, so what you really want is to get online quickly.

As a quick note on Aerial Recon, I would suggest thinking about what encounter cards are the best ones to get before the game starts, and then aggressively grabbing them every time they come up. There are other considerations too, like grabbing a minion for your aggression player or a side scheme if the justice player has some synergy, but I recommend trying to grab an encounter card every turn once Aerial Recon is out, and then either using the counters as you get them or banking them for bad turns in the future.

Deckbuilding Considerations

The decklist I have is closer to a 4 player deck. As you move towards 2 player games, I would cut the Height Advantages and instead replace them with player side schemes or Blade and some copies of Earth's Mightiest Heroes.

For player side schemes, I would suggest you (or another player) always run Superpower Training, and depending on how much thwarting your partners can do I could also see Specialized Training being useful too.

The Blade/Earth's Mightiest Hero package is mostly to provide more tempo in the form of readies. Blade will mostly just sit there and not do anything (you can always use him as a resource sink or a chump in a pinch), and then get exhausted to ready you with Earth's Mightiest Heroes.