Atlas Hulk Gamora

Deck concept

This is a deck built around Atlas Bear's ability to look at the top card of your deck before Hulk discards it. If Hulk hits a every time he can do 25 damage, which is great value even if you factor in the 4 resources you paid for Atlas Bear.

My first attempt to use this interaction was a Black Panther deck, but that didn't work so well because both the Hulk/Atlas Bear combo and Black Panther's upgrades need setting up, so that deck was too slow to get moving. What I needed was a hero with lots of in their base kit who gets up to speed very quickly, and Gamora seemed ideal.

Card choices

Whilst Atlas Bear can ensure Hulk only hits , if the deck has a mix of different resource types then on many turns neither of them will make an actual contribution, so to make this concept work a lot of is needed.

Gamora will wind up taking a lot of hits herself, since there's only one spare space for an ally once the dynamic duo are down. That means she needs to be able to visit alter-ego regularly to recover, so plenty of sources of confusion will help a lot. She will also provide almost all our thwarting, so plenty of thwart events are needed.

Those two factors drive most of our card selections. Concussive Blow and Multitasking are both . The damage from Concussive Blow will be easy to secure but we mostly rely on Keen Instincts to get the second use of Multitasking. Looking for Trouble is another thwart event and finding a minion is an advantage if we have Hall of Heroes in play.

Hall of Heroes itself isn't , so might be worth pulling out of the deck if there aren't many minions in the scenario, but otherwise it works well because Gamora will be visiting alter-ego pretty regularly anyway in order to heal. You could consider Sidearm instead, but I felt it already took too long to get both Hulk and Atlas Bear into play, I didn't want to have to wait for an upgrade to come out too.

Playing the deck

The first run through the deck is to find Atlas Bear and Hulk. Conditioning Room helps a lot as well because of frequent trips to alter-ego allowing it to be used most turns to generate an extra resource. You should try to get both Keen Instincts down because they are , which you don't want in the deck, as well as being good cards themselves, but it isn't critical if one of them has to be discarded.

Other than that, the objective is just to stay alive and you can play each turn as it comes.

Once Hulk is out, focus his attacks on the villain. As you cannot guarantee a on the top of the deck he may not be able to attack every turn, so he is not completely reliable in removing minions regardless of whether Hall of Heroes is in play or not. Now and again you may find that you don't need Atlas Bear to baby-sit him (for instance on a turn when you used your alter-ego action to look at the top card of your deck, and it wasn't an event), in which case she can thwart if it helps. Remember that the damage from his forced response doesn't have to go on the enemy he attacked, and isn't itself an attack so you bypass retaliate and set up opportunities to ping minions with Precision or Gamora's Sword.

How to lose with this deck

The first weakness of this deck is card draw, which is a bit anaemic for true solo. I think Conditioning Room helps a lot, but any villain who punishes you for going into alter ego (such as Taskmaster) will make things harder, as will anyone steady or stalwart like Venom. The other weakness is that Gamora's hit points and Rec are on the low side for a hero who is going to wind up taking lots of hits. Down Time and (again!) Conditioning Room help a lot.

Conclusion

I'm not sure this is the best combination possible for these two allies. There's almost certainly something janky that Spider-Woman can do, so I may come back to her later.