Plan A (high-tempo deck for difficult 2P scenarios)

This is a deck designed specifically to bring lots of tempo to high-difficulty 2-player scenarios. Although it shares many of the same features as the Star-Lord rush decks that came out to take advantage of Digging Deep and White Fox (e.g., KennedyHawk's Wilder Tutor, NelsonAllOver's Rush or Die Trying and my Nova Prime Digs Deep), in play-style this deck focuses on high-tempo play to get an early leg up on the villain.

In Season 02 of MODOK league, my team drafted Star-Lord, Storm, Leadership and Justice, but thanks to Leader of the Guardians, this deck often handled most of the team's thwarting, while Storm could focus on what she does best, damage.

Playing the deck

Star-Lord has recently displaced Rocket as my favourite hero, but one of the challenges with playing him is that the more difficult the scenario the more costly his "What could go wrong?" tends to become due to the average nastiness of cards in the encounter deck increasing.

Playing Star-Lord effectively depends on knowing when to show restraint. Daring Escape, for example, is one that you play either when you absolutely need it or when you are closing the game out. I tend to play a bit conservatively and consider the tempo gain or necessity of each use of "What could go wrong?", even with the helmet out.

With this deck, you're looking to have an explosive first turn where you get out an Element Gun, a couple of allies and some supports/upgrades. Dig for a Turn 1 Call for Aid, Star-Lord's Helmet and your card draw cards.

From there, control the board, continue to build things out, keep blockers in play and protect the team. Getting Leader of the Guardians out is expensive but extremely valuable. The second Element Gun is much less critical, but depending on your partner and minions having just the right amount of health, can do a lot of work. In 2P games with low threat thresholds on the main scheme, Bad Boy can also be extremely valuable as it soaks up a (potentially nasty) villain activation and gives you two cards (net cost of 2 effective resources), but importantly allows you to recover and use Crew Quarters when the need is there. This was a great card against Magog.

To finish the game out, you will be doing typical Star-Lord things, waiting for a Blaze of Glory or a stack of Gutsy Moves and Sliding Shots toward the end your draw pile. At this point a couple of copies of Call for Aid can also do a lot of work if all of your Avengers are in play since you can use and recycle Digging Deep and use the extra encounter cards from decking yourself to power Sliding Shot even further. However, it is important to note that this deck is not optimized to close out the game. For the final push you are trying to get Daring Escape, Sliding Shot and a first copy of Blaze of Glory, but Gamora will often stick you with your other events that are less desirable at that point. It's the price you pay for early- and mid-game tempo and flexibility.

Flexibility

This deck shell is extremely flexible and we used noticeably different versions of it against the four challenging scenarios in the MODOK season.

• Black Panther can be great to setup big turns with Blaze of Glory or to recur Ready for Action in your race for counters against MaGog. On the other hand, he is not a great tempo play including him is best when recurring those events is central to the game plan.
• White Tiger is great for villains that start on Stage II, but we played against MaGog and On the Run (Blockbuster), where her great card draw vanishes. She is typically swapped out for Black Panther
• Against the Taskmaster scenario, remaining healthy was such a challenge that ditched Digging Deep and White Fox, and leaned into Crew Quarters, additional copies of Endurance, Team Training and even Drax to give us the space to flip lots for healing while slowly pushing damage on the villain.
• Target Acquired showed up in 3 of the 4 versions of the deck because there were some significantly nasty boost effects that were worth the tempo hit to avoid.