BASIC aggression

The community's focus is rightfully on the exciting new heroes, but the final X-Men wave has been pretty friendly to the ol' Canucklehead.

Wolverine is a hero with pretty defined strengths and weaknesses. His kit, particularly Wolverine's Claws, allows him to strongly interact with the encounter deck while still building out the rest of his strategy. His attack events can all have piercing and hit multiple targets, so he rarely has to waste damage or worry about getting swarmed. This makes him arguably the strongest hero in the game at efficiently dealing with minions.

Prior to the AoA box, the aspect events that worked well with the Claws mostly provided incremental value. A self-harmless 2 damage from Momentum Shift here, a resource-free 3 damage from Clobber there. There were no good big damage events that could be played off the Claws, meaning Wolverine could run into trouble finishing games if you weren't drawing Lunging Strike. Full-Body Charge is a big upgrade, allowing huge damage throughout each deck cycle, shortening games dramatically.

Having five 8-damage events also opens up Moment of Triumph to help address Logan's biggest weakness: if you aggressively use the Claws, your health can end up at a precarious level pretty frequently. This makes you vulnerable to high-damage villains and/or extra attacks, so most Wolverine decks are going to be reliant on allies to provide defense. Utopia provides a powerful incentive to focus on X-Men allies, but the bench wasn't particularly deep prior to the AoA wave. You had your essential Angel/Colossus/Forge/Professor X, but the Basic options after that were 4-cost with unreliable abilities. Most of the aspects had a couple of great allies and some clunkers, leaving Protection as the best option with Armor, Nightcrawler, and Polaris to keep Wolverine safe. Now, you have two stellar new Basic allies in Beak and Triage, plus Goldballs and Tempus as great additions from Aggression.

This deck started with a more varied suite of attack events, good-value stuff like Clobber and Into the Fray. The more I played it, the more I realized that really all you need is Full-Body Charge and Lunging Strike. Anything else is just not worth it. I also found I kept wanting more allies, so Shadowcat and White Queen squeezed their way in. The extra thwarting power has been very nice to have, even if their abilities don't always do anything.

Fun little bonus? The whole thing can be built with just X-Men products.

Addressing some individual card choices:

No Psylocke? - Psylocke is a great card that just doesn't fit well here. If you don't have some sort of economic help, she costs your whole hand and you don't get to use the Claws. It feels pretty bad to have her be your only play and then need to chump-block with her. In general, if a villain is reliably vulnerable to confusion, Wolverine probably doesn't need much help against them. You can pretty much dominate every expert villain at Magneto's difficulty or lower, and the others (Ronan, Loki, and Venom Goblin) can all have steady or stalwart. Tempus provides good emergency protection against scheming, and you can generally spend very little time in Alter-Ego.

No The X-Jet? - At its heart, the deck just wants to be able to play an attack and an ally every turn, and you only need so many resources in order to do that. It's just hard to reliably play a 3-cost resource generator and follow up with something else on a hero hand size. With 13 X-Men cards in the deck, Team-Building Exercise is a much stronger option and can crucially be played the same turn as a 2-cost ally without the need for a double resource. Leaving The X-Jet out does make Forge worse, but that is a pretty small sacrifice.

No Gambit? - Gambit certainly competes with Shadowcat and White Queen for one of the final slots, but I found myself hitting only 0-icon choices with annoying frequency. I prefer the reliable thwarting of the two ladies over the mercurial power of Gambit. Legion is out for similar reasons.