Venom - Speed Draw (Smashing Expert)

Venom is a beast. Once he got his signature cards out, he is nearly unstoppable. Hence the idea of this deck; go through the deck as fast as possible and find those juicy cards to make him “nearly unstoppable” as soon as possible. This deck is mainly created with true solo in mind.

Edit:

Drop one "Think Fast!" and replace it with Gamora. After some play testing this has proven to be ideal to go through the deck faster.

The idea

Pairing him with leadership would be a very viable option to accomplish the idea behind this deck, however with the recently released card One Way or Another, justice becomes as good as if not even better than a leadership draw deck. In my opinion, it is currently the strongest card justice has to offer. Moreover, justice pairs very well with Venom, allowing him to confuse often and switch to AE and heal up with recover + Project Rebirth 2.0. This is crucial since you want to abuse his hero ability which drains his health fairly quickly.

The strategy

Okay, so this deck is about board control. You want to keep the board clear of all minions and side schemes as much as possible. You can control the villain very well with confusions, stuns and ally blocking. Once you have your hero specific cards out you will be able to down the villain fairly fast.

You want to find his weapons as soon as possible, which is pretty easy with Locked and Loaded and his setup ability. Hence, you want to mulligan for these cards. Despite being a justice deck, it only has 3 thwart cards apart from Venom’s own cards, Multi-Gun is therefore essential to keep the threat in check. With all his weapons out, he can thwart for five every single round plus another five if you play Run and Gun, which is insane! Both Project Rebirth 2.0 and Spider-Sense are important but not crucial for this build as they help you go through the deck faster, so be on the look out for them as well.

The rest of the cards are simply there to support Venom. One of the allies you want to prioritize is Groot which is a real MVP when it comes to tanking. I suggest you only exhaust him for defending to keep him in play for as long as possible.

Noteworthy Cards

Helicarrier is simply great, and together with your hero ability you will be sure to reap the benefits of Behind Enemy Lines and Savage Attack. However, you can’t exhaust Helicarrier during the villain phase, and this build doesn’t give you that many physical resources which is why I decided to add Enhanced Physique. Try to save it for Grasping Tendrils.

One Way or Another is insane for any justice build really, but you should still be very thoughtful when using it. I suggest you look up all side schemes in the encounter deck in advance, so you have a rough idea of what to expect.

"Think Fast!" is there together with Behind Enemy Lines to help you switch to AE w/o too much worry about the threat level.

Considerations

I haven’t had any trouble with threat in general. If you feel like you want more thwarting I’d look into swapping out Turn the Tide for Multitasking. This will give you a few more physical resources to help you trigger the stun on Grasping Tendrils.

You will swap to AE every now and then, and Quake could thus be a viable option. It’s very situational tho and this deck tries to keep the board clear of all minions but feel free to try it out if you wanna.

Smashing Expert you say???

Well yeah, thus far this deck has cleared all expert challenges up to date farily easy apart from the Hood which I haven't received yet. I will update the text once I've cleared something new.

Any feedback is appreciated. Cheers!