Shadowcat - Long-term thinking

There I was, playing my bog-standard Perfect Defence Shadowcat deck, when I came to a sudden realisation:

Ready to Rumble is Kitty's best Perfect Defence card.

Sure, Jump Flip comes with valuable thwarting, and Defiance is free, but R2R is an infallible Desperate Defense (when phased) in the villain phase and an ultra-valuable Limitless Stamina for form-flippers in the hero phase.

On top of that, because the upgrade is played in the hero phase you don't have the defence event opportunity cost - where you have to either hold a card over into the villain phase (not using all your resources before you draw) or hope for a raw top-deck before the villain hits you. This also means you don't have to live with the usual Protection-deck frustration of having spent a substantial portion of your resources in the villain phase and arriving at the hero phase with a diminished hand.

The problem is that you can only have three Ready to Rumbles, and mixing them with traditional Protection events makes your forward planning awkward. So what if we dispensed with the events entirely?

Indomitable, at first glance, is strictly worse than R2R in this deck. Also at second, third and fourth glance - losing the ability to use the card offensively really hurts. It does have one subtle advantage, though: It's not restricted to one per player. This means that you can play out as many as you draw (on top of your single at-a-time Ready to Rumble), effectively setting yourself up defensively for multiple turns in advance.

Getting back into phased mode if you need to block multiple villain attacks in a turn (from treacheries, or intercepting for other players in multiplayer) or aggressive minions is one of Shadowcat's weaknesses, so I threw in Counter-Punch. At worst, it's an efficient two damage, gratis! If you wanted to stick more rigorously to the "everything is pre-planned" theme you could replace them with Perseverances and pseudo-block by tanking with Toughness cards.

Of course, you still have Quick Shift as a reactive card - but since you're planning everything in advance a top-decked Quick Shift is just a welcome excuse to draw two. You can also use it to phase for a second defence (multiplayer/treachery/minions) if needed as it triggers on enemy attack, not just the villain (unlike Armor Up).

Now that you're not dependent on top-decking or holding over a Protection event every turn, you can focus a little more on the hero phase and devote yourself to thwarting with Shadowcat, smacking the villain with your more aggressive events, and playing enough allies to smooth the game out. Your selection of the latter may vary - I picked an array of X-allies (because Utopia is just that good) that included professional speed-bumps Armor and Polaris (<- put her Toughness card on Kitty) to help you handle multiple attacks per turn, but you could definitely drop the X-crowd for other green favourites.

The other card selections are mostly self-explanatory. I strongly recommend keeping the The Night Nurse on call as Kitty needs to be able to do work in the hero phase and being stunned/confused can be crippling; all the more so in this deck as she also wants to trigger those Ready to Rumbles by attacking. I tried Hard to Ignore, but I've always found it too slow - it's like a Beat Cop that isn't guaranteed to trigger.

There's not a lot of reason to flip down in this deck, except that you are inevitably going to take some attrition damage from minions, treacheries and other effects that aren't just the villain attacking you. There's three confusions in the deck between Papa X and Phased and Confused, and it's generally worth taking advantage of them to heal for 3.