Spectrum can handle it

I feel like Spectrum is constantly under-appreciated and underestimated. I’ve had a Protection Spectrum deck built basically since she was released. I heard some comments at Con of Heroes 2024 about her being underpowered and in other conversations folks were surprised that I ran her in Protection so I’m laying out my arguments here.

She’s an extremely solid jack of all trades hero since she can get to base 3 in attack thwart and defense basically at will. Protection Spectrum in many ways is more flexible than other aspects - between Ever Vigilant and Pulsar Shield she can frequently defend for the entire table and still be able to contribute in the player phase. Her attack and thwart events are perfectly on curve for their cost and her economy is solid - high concentration of superpower cards for deft focus and two resource generators (which are superpowers so can be discounted with Deft Focus). Speed of light is a great zero cost card - change forms (and get the bonus from the new form, potentially also triggering Ready to rumble or Perseverance) and it draws a card to boot. The big weakness is she is dependent on events to be able to change form but with appropriate piloting it’s almost never an issue. I feel like if she had a once per round free form change she would be too powerful.

So this deck: there are a lot of singletons. This is the version I brought to Con of Heroes 2024 and I had reduced some cards to singletons to fit some of the Angel cards but I’m actually satisfied with it this way. Spectrum relies on basic actions and her hero events for most of her effectiveness - the singletons here are either max 1 upgrades or situational cards that are for specific problems. I originally ran more copies of Momentum Shift but found that they were dead more often than not because I wasn’t taking enough damage to be able to play them.

I have had amazing success with this deck in solo and multiplayer in both Standard and Expert. It is way more consistent than the number of one-off cards and Spectrum’s form restrictions would have you believe.