Lockdown -- Venom Stun Aggression

Venom's hero power is strait up nuts. It gives you a wild resource up to twice a turn, if you can activate it on the villain's phase as well. The only downside is that pesky damage. If only there were something to be done...

Stuns for days So Grasping Tendrils is a pretty crazy card. It's a stun-on-a-stick for whenever the villain decides to attack. Sure, you only get the stun if you spend only physical resources, but guess what? You produce A WILD on demand! This means you need only one physical resource in hand in order to pull off both the attack cancel as well as an additional stun! The damn thing puts Webbed Up to shame.

But there's only 2 Tendrils in the deck. Venom's not below Drop Kicking a few dudes to make a point, though. With Venom's ability, a Martial Prowess, and a Helicarrier, Drop Kick costs 0 and replaces itself from the draw. Good times. Also, Mockingbird exists (and has a physical resource, should you need to chuck her away for a Tendril or a Dropkick). All things said and done, the deck has 8 attack-cancel effects.

Non-Stun Cards, Too FFG has yet to print more stuns that I can use, so until then, we've gotta use this stuff.

With his Pistols, Venom is effectively a 3/4/4 hero. Combat Training makes that 3/5/4, which I enjoy. Skilled Strike is in the deck mainly because it features a physical resource and doesn't suck (looking at you, Uppercut). It's also free, which is a good price point.

Press the Advantage is a card I rarely use, but found quite good in this deck. The villain is often stunned (and thanks to Behind Enemy Lines, sometimes confused), so this draws a card fairly often. It's also a cheap attack to knock off tough if needed, and also is good for if you get stunned yourself rather than wasting your basic action to remove it.

Flash has the slight downside of yeeting away a good portion of his deck in order to find a gun, so I've included 2 copies of both Martial Prowess and Herlicarrier in order to increase the chances you'll see one on the first pass. These help you find those extra physical resources needed to make your stuns work, and have the upside of being physical resources themselves as well, so the extra copy doesn't feel bad in the future.

A Stunningly Good Hero I just want to kind of go off on how crazy Venom is here for a minute. Firstly, in this deck, you just stun-lock the villain, using taking damage to create resources for you to do so. But when you flip to heal back up, not only do you have a REC of 4, you also have Project Rebirth 2.0. This card heals for 6 every time you flip to Alt-Ego: 3 for when you flip, and 3 the following turn before you flip back. Assuming you even want to exhaust to REC at this point, this means that you can heal for 10 every time you flip. The dude only has 12 HP, and you get to heal TEN. Most times I don't bother using REC; I'd rather just use a basic hero action instead. You still heal for 6. I mean... fuck, man.

As I said, his guns make him a 3/4/4 hero, but you also get Multi-Gun on top of that in order to do more damage or thwarting. I used to have Hand Cannons in this deck, because I really liked the Overkill and I was like "More weapons!" However, lowering the chance of finding one of his Hero weapons just wasn't worth having it in the deck. Also, when I removed them, what I realized I really liked was having more reasonable cards with physical resources on them in the deck. Upping the number of Helicarriers and Martial Prowess in the deck cured that, plus I got to take Side Holster out as well, since Hand Cannon means you need 4 slots dedicated for Restricted cards. Anyhow, his guns are insane. And then they give you a card to tutor one up on a silver platter as well.

Beyond that, it's relatively trivial to make powerful decks to make use of either Grasping Tendrils (which I've done here) or Behind Enemy Lines (which I'll leave someone else to do), given that Venom himself takes care of 1 of the resources in question. You get 3 cards to ready him and all his weapons.

He gets Spider-Man's hero ability as a card. An entire hero ability. Yeah, you don't get to draw with it if the villain is constantly stunned but you almost never get attacked, so that's a nice consolation prize.

Anyhow, this deck is pretty nuts, but Venom is pretty nuts, so it's hard to go wrong. Have fun, and happy hunting!