Be Air or Be Square

Magneto's days of mutant supremacy are behind him. Now decked out in white, he's embraced a new breed of supremacy... an aerial one!

The goal with this deck is to really maximize the power of the new card, Squared Off. The big discount it can give you on an ally is strong, but in most situations I don't think it's really worth the risk; all-in-all you're usually still spending two or more cards from your hand and the minion is probably going to be about as bad as the ally is good. But this deck can skew those numbers in our favor. Air Supremacy gives us a powerful source of multi-target damage, letting us deal with minions more easily as we bring them out. Magneto himself doesn't start with aerial, but he gains it from his cape, and thanks to his ability he'll usually find it fast. Once you do have it, Air Supremacy can hit as many as five enemies at once, though you're happy to have even two and thrilled at three.

As for the allies that we're squaring off with, it's the general who's who of Aerials. To highlight some of the more noteworthy inclusions: Adam Warlock can discard Master of Magnetism to simultaneously deal damage and heal a player, Storm can pile threat onto a side scheme you don't plan to clear like Rally the Troops, Hope Summers doesn't innately have Aerial but will gain it as soon as Magneto does, Pixie only has two targets for her ability but you're more likely to have them in your discard pile thanks to your self-mill (and at only 2 cost it's not the worst thing in the world to just play her with no targets), Cloud 9 can power up all your thwarting allies with Magneto being able use the boost twice.

You might have noticed that we're running a single non-Aerial ally in the deck; Beta Ray Bill. The idea here is that we can cheat him out with Squared Off or Call for Backup, and then he can both answer the minions you're squaring off with while also clearing the main scheme. And of course, since you're playing Magneto, sometimes you can just answer those minions with Metal Shards. We're also running the new Face the Past; Exodus is bad news, sure, but our deck is good enough at fighting minions that the numbers should still favor us.

Now, one might be wondering, "Can I run this with other aerial heroes?" To which I say, of course! There's some slight changes to make; some heroes don't have the superpowers for Deft Focus or Hope Summers, Magneto doesn't like Energy cards as much thanks to his armor but other heroes should heavily consider running Sunspot over some of the X-Men. I've tested this build with the likes of Spectrum, Angel, Nova, and Rocket, all of whom have their own advantages and disadvantages. In fact, before I realized how easily Magneto could gain Aerial access, this deck was originally designed for Spectrum. Try it with Magneto or with your favorite aerial heroes; maybe it'll even work with Thor... but that'll take a pilot braver than I. However you want to do it, take to those skies and get squaring!