Big Drax Energy 2.0

Alright this is an update to my previous Drax + Energy Shield deck after a bunch of testing. The changes are big but the thesis remains the same. Instead of trying to do expensive setup with cards like Booster Boots and Med Team, we use Energy Shield to pay-as-you-go for the Mantis Health Care plan.

Drax is a numbers game. He isn't good at thwarting and he takes a lot of damage. Most Drax decks can heal Drax for 3-5 damage per turn and are just crossing their fingers that it will buy enough time to overwhelm the boss with massive damage. I'm not a fan of decks that just straight up don't work against certain bosses, so let's think about Drax purely in terms of numbers. Can we get damage output higher than damage input consistently enough to take down any boss?

Drax can heal for 3 per turn with Mantis, assuming we keep her alive with Energy Shield the whole game. Drax's initial health pool will have to last long enough to get through the deck. While we may be tempted to run Taunt to get through the deck to Mantis faster, that's a mirage. Taunt has a worse draw to damage ratio than taking another turn, so better to just build the deck to mitigate damage however long it takes to get through the deck instead of getting greedy. This means the goal is to consistently mitigate enough damage with every 4 card hand that we only take 2-3 damage per round from most expert villains.

I've removed allies entirely because while Drax does need their damage mitigation, they slow down his card draw. We're going to look for other sources of damage mitigation. Since we're using Energy Shield to keep Mantis alive, and using Jump Flip, let's build out for energy resources as much as possible. This also lets us use Energy Shield on Drax as a way to absorb indirect damage from effects like Badoon's Ship. We drop Genius and Strength because nothing in the deck but Mantis costs 2 or more. Preservation is a wonderful overlooked card here.

The resulting deck consistently draws enough mitigation that you can dump your hand each round confident you'll draw new defensive cards to survive the next turn. There's no need to dig for Mantis because you will survive long enough to see her. Once you have her, you'll see health-positive turns as your mitigation cards can buy you an actual healing surplus. Any unused defensive cards go straight into CITT on your turn since you'll just draw new ones next turn.