X-23 - Aggressive Thwarting

X-23 is able to deal a lot of damage, that's for sure. When I started building a deck around her I just wanted to make sure she can hold up against incoming threat enough to be a good choice for soloing - and she did more than that. This young woman is meant for thwarting. And that with an average cost of less than 1 resource per card while none costs more than 2.

During the game, controlling the threat is the main focus - X-23 comes with a solid THW of 2 from the start, getting the Surveillance Specialist out makes this a 3, which means she can remove up to 9 threat in a single turn when Honey Badger is around. All while building up for a furious endgame.

Combat Training and three times Brute Force sum up to a nice +4 to ATT, as long as X-23 doesn't do a basic attack. So we turn this into damage with Quick Strike or by boosting Honey Badger with Sisterly Bond.

The 5 ATT also gives a nice additional thwarting capacity with Smash the Problem and Animal Instinct. Another help in keeping the threat down is Keep Them Busy if needed.

As X-23 can easily refresh twice per turn - once more for every Game Time played on a Honey Badger equipped with Attack Training - bonuses that last for a phase are far better than usual. So building up for the finale with bringing an Adrenaline Rush into play whenever convenient really pays off.

Ideally the final turn starts off with defeating Keep Up the Pressure, getting us a Quick Strike and +1 for each Quick Strike we play this round. If the turn started in Alter Ego, we should have 8 cards after that, which could let us play a Claw Mastery (payed for with X-Gene), two Quick Strikes (Grim Resolve + 3 hand cards) and two Game Times for a final round of two Quick Strikes with 13 damage each and, as the first activation was thwarting the side scheme, four attacks with 12 damage for the first and 9 for each following, while Honey Badger rounds up the score with three attacks for three damage each (Attack Training + Sidearm), dealing the villain 74 damage in total. Two more if Sunfire joins in with the other Attack Training, but he honestly is mainly there to get rid of pesky attachments. Well, more realistically there will only be one Quick Strike and one Game Time which means 25 damage less, but that's just details.

If you want to get even more damage while keeping the low average cost in this deck, you can swap out Endurance for "Now I'm Mad", which pushes the total damage up by another 6 points, but I have to admit that I'm a little more comfortable with the additional 3 life points.