This Card is for the Birds

Boomguy's deck challenge this time was for Joining Forces...and boy, this is a card that exists. I tried a few different things, and I gotta say: this card is for the birds!

It's an alliance card, so its main value comes from using it with teammates who have the appropriate allies in multiplayer. But what if they don't have any Avenger or Guardian allies? Or you want to play solo?

There are two obstacles to making work by yourself: needing both allies in hand, and not having enough resources to pay for it without spending those 2 allies. Redwing solves both problems. With its ability, you can return him to hand at any time. This means you always have the avenger part of Joining Forces covered, and since it's an extra card added to your hand, that frees up one more card in your hand to play the event.

Nerd Math

Before going further, I want to go over some quick maths. Joining Forces is a 4 cost event, but its effective resource cost is 5 since you have to factor in the card itself. You need it to put allies with a combined cost of at least 5 for it to break even, and anything above that is a discount.

In this deck, we are using Redwing (2 cost avenger) with a guardian ally. Yondu would bring it up to 6 cost, which would give a -1 discount, but the rest are either 3 or 2 cost. So outside of Yondu, we aren't getting any discounts. Why bother running Joining Forces then? Two reasons:

• Joining Forces "puts allies into play", which gets around any Play restrictions.
• We can use it to pay for our basic allies and Redwing with The Power of Leadership, which can also be used for Suit Up.

Cheaty Guardians

Some of the best Guardian allies can only be played by Guardian heroes. Drax, Gamora, Rocket Raccoon, and Groot can only come into play with Joining Forces in this deck, but they are all really good. Groot is especially interesting with Falcon. Since you can control the top card of the encounter deck, you can try to get a zero boost card, and then use him to block. He will heal 2 damage, which will usually be the whole hit, or maybe he'll take 1 or 2 extra damage. He can stay in play most of the game just blocking the villain like this.

Suiting Up

Suit Up has a ton of uses in this deck.

• It can grab the any ally that you want to use with Joining Forces. But there's some issues with this. It's an alter ego action, and Joining Forces is a hero action. So you need to start in alter ego form, suit up, flip, then use Joining Forces. Suit up also has its own cost, that you need to add on top of paying for Joining Forces.
• It can be used to grab an upgrade for an ally, or Clarity of Purpose for your hero.
• It's a , which can be used with Captain America

Everything else

Redwing and Cosmo are your best friends. Cosmo should be your first priority to get all of the upgrades. He will never take damage all game, and you can use him to reset the top encounter card. Star-Lord can also reset the encounter card, and you can control which encounter card you have to get.

If you end up stuck with Joining Forces or restricted allies you can't play in hand, its no issue at all. We have 2 excellent resource sinks that you can toss them into: Redwing and Captain America.

Don't forget that Falcon's Flock is a bird card, so it can be tutored with Sam's alter ego ability. It might not seem that great at first, since its a resource generator with limited uses, but this card is fantastic. Since it doesn't exhaust, it can be used multiple times a turn. It lets you spam redwing over and over again, or easily pay for Bird of Prey or Bird's-Eye View when needed. Use up those counters as fast as you want, then flip to alter ego and grab it again!

Making Joining Forces work isn't easy. If you are playing in multiplayer, and your friends bring a few Avenger or Guardian allies, it's actually quite good. But in solo, you might just not get all the right cards at the same time. But don't worry, this deck still works great regardless! I played a game against expert Drang without ever playing the alliance card, and it completely dominated.

Psssst....if you don't care about Joining Forces, just swap them out for 3 copies of Make the Call and you'll have an even better deck. But don't tell anyone I told you that ;)