The best offense... is apparently a really high defense.

Alright. If you're building around this, there are two things you need. Defense buffs and readies.

The core defense buffs are...

• Armored Vest
• Defensive Conditioning
• Innate Reflexes

All three are needed if you're building around this.

Specialized Training can be worth considering for an extra boost too since this will help you thwart it. (Although it's best in multiplayer with a Justice player.

Next, you need to decide if you're going to use allies or no allies.

No allies gives you access to Ronin for higher defense and Army of One for readies.

BUT there are readying cards for different traits that require allies to work.

Avengers decks have access to Earth's Mightiest Heroes which readies you by exhausting an ally. Web Warriors have Spider-Man who can provide readies whenever he activates. X-Men have Utopia which lets you ready when you play an X-Men ally.

Consider these when deciding whether to go Ronin or not.

Other sources of readying include CITT for Guardians, Reboot for Vision and Limitless Stamina for characters with 14 or higher base HP.

When every good option for readying is exhausted... we also have a bad one...

Let's talk Tenacity.

Tenacity is a terrible card under normal circumstances, being a massive 4-ER investment in total. But what it does have going for it is being able to trigger it at any time you want, which actually works well with this type of strategy.

Let's say you have a hero with 3 DEF. On turn 1, you play Innate Reflexes, raising it to 4. Now you can lay down Tenacity, and then when you play The Best Offense, your DEF raises to 5. Trigger Tenacity and then either attack or thwart for 5. That's a pretty decent return. It's hard to say a card in Protection that's essentially "choose to either deal 5 damage or remove 5 threat from a scheme" is bad. And this worth naturally increases the more upgrades you have. If you have all your base defense upgrades, that's 7 thwarting or attacking with a 4-ER investment.

So Tenacity... and I can't believe I'm about to say this... might actually be playable in this one specific sort of deck. Not great. And still by far the worst readying option you have. But it is an option once all the others are exhausted.

BUT... even then, I'd only use it in the ally-builds since FNE also gave us In Harm's Way which attacks AND thwarts equal to your defense for the same ER investment if you're going Ronin. And then the problem with the ally builds is that they do require so many card slots for allies that there's rarely room for something like Tenacity. But if there was ever a good deck for Tenacity, it would be this one.

I like this (along with children of the atom) on mutants with useful signature allies such as x-23's honey badger. This allows x-23 to reset honey badger's hp, get some dmg/thwart in and get another ready. Bounce the cyclops ally and you can stack a bit of dmg.

Cyclops, phoenix, rogue, angel, psylocke and wolverine's allies can leverage this well too.

Of course, this is still useable on non-mutant heroes that pack alot of x-force/x-men allies.

Solid card for Justice builds. What does Justice lack that Aggression has in spades? Stun! It's cheaper than Sonic Rifle and basically gives you unlimited stuns. The downside is that it requires you to thwart (can be a thwart event) and defeat a side scheme exactly. So if you over-thwart, it won't trigger; that means you'll need to be more strategic in your thwarting. This card would be perfect if it also worked on the main scheme, but at least it does work on player side schemes

I have mixed feelings about this one. It's definitely too pricey for non SPY/Martial Arists characters for a temporary card. It will probably good in Black Widow justice decks, because she can easily pump out preparation cards in a round once she has her Black Widow's Gauntlets down. The same goes for Spider-Woman with her Finesse cards in play. I haven't seen the future martial artists yet: Iron Fist & Elektra, so we'll se how well this will slot in their builds.

Justice Scarlet Witch or Star-Lord loves this card! Also, good for any scenario that can pile on the acceleration tokens because you go through the encounter deck faster. I don't have to go into how good player side schemes are in general, but they help thin your deck to get to the good cards. The trick is finding the right time to play it because too early means you're clogging your player side scheme limit before acceleration tokens start to become a problem. The one ding I would give this card is that it doesn't have a 'mental' resource on it, which powers a lot of Justice cards, and you could have used this card to pay for it before playing it.