Drax - Damage Mitigation

“Nothing goes over my head. My reflexes are too fast. I would catch it.”

My thoughts are two parts with this deck.

1) Drax likes to stay in Hero form. 2) Drax’s hand size sucks.

As for #1, Drax wants to collect vengeance counters to boost his Attack. This pretty much powers all of his cards. This requires staying in Hero mode as long as possible. One very effective way to have Allies block, but that’s not a great option here because Drax wants the Villain to attack him directly. The other option is Protection, which he comes in so that seems kind of obvious.

As for #2, there’s no good way to increase hand size right now for most heroes. Assess the Situation artificially increases your hand size, but I think just focusing on low cost cards here will do the trick.

So that theory is what drives this deck. Low cost Protection cards that minimize damage.What’s included here is:

Preemptive Strike - Not only damage reduction, but can be important solo to get damage done to the Villain. This obviously works best when against Villains with big boosts, but the extra damage is worth the bit of a more narrow application.

Side Step - Prevents three damage. Maybe does a damage back, not that important.

Subdue - Also prevents 3 damage from an Attack. You can also help out your teammate with this multiplayer. (Rules lawyers: hmu if I’m wrong.)

That’s 11 damage mitigation cards when including Parry as well.

You can’t only just sit there and sponge up damage. You need some proactive cards as well. Here’s the rest of the deck:

Bait and Switch - Drax has trouble with threat reduction. This will help, and hopefully you can use Intimidation to take down the side schemes. You can also stack vengeance counters too.

Get Behind Me! - This will stop those terrible treachery cards from ruining your day and turn them to something else you’re better at, getting punched in the face.

Leading Blow - This is a good card if your needing to deal more damage. While at low ATK it can be a gamble, when you hit your 4 ATK it’s guaranteed extra damage.

First Hit - This is pretty much included to get rid of stun. Sure you can play Athletic Conditioning, but you might find more other uses for First Hit as well.

Adrenaline Rush - A boost to your ATK when you need it. Maybe you want to make sure that Leading Blow gets through, or more bang for your buck with "Fight Me, Coward!". It will also work well with other of Drax’s hero cards.

Starhawk & Cosmo - Cheap allies for those times you bite off more than you can chew. Sometimes you need a chump block. Guardians are included for flavor, but if you really want to min/max toss in Clea and Ironheart instead.

If your playing with multiple heroes, I would probably swap out the Bait and Switch because hopefully your friend can thwart better. In this case you might want to run Counter-Punch for more damage, or maybe some cards that can give you a Tough status. You can also toss these if you’re fighting a villain that doesn’t Scheme a lot.

I wanted to run some cards that heal, but they are a bit expensive when compared to just flipping to Alter-Ego. While that does set you back in vengeance counters, you can build it back quickly with all the cards that force the Villain to Attack you.

I also wanted to include some cards that give you Tough status, but they are also expensive. They can be worth it in Multiplayer.

The biggest threat to this deck is side schemes, so make sure that your Intimidation is being used at the right time, and Mantis is probably better off Thwarting than blocking or healing.

It is also pretty worth it to mulligan hard for Drax's Knife, as this plays pretty hard into a lot of his cards as well.

If playing multiplayer, try and convince your Aggression friend to drop their Combat Training on you as well. or at least run a second one.