Falcon's Height Advantage

This is a dedicated defend-the-table deck. Most turns, you'll be defending and only defending - but you'll be defending against pretty much every incoming attack, and not just from the villain.

That means this is a deck for a 3-4 player game, and probably better for the latter. It's not a solo deck, and you'd need to retool it a fair bit for it to make sense with two players.

The key card from Falcon's own kit is Draw Their Fire, which allows you to defend without exhausting for a full villain phase. Once you have your DEF up to 3+, this means you can tank every single minion attack (barring some of the Villainous ones and other outliers) without taking any damage, and you'll be able to take most villain hits without too much trouble. At DEF 5, even the villain won't be able to scratch you most of the time.

Since you only have one of this card in the deck, there are three Practiced Plan to recycle it.

To help you tank those hits a bit better early on, this deck includes the much reviled Height Advantage. I'm not going to argue that this is a strong card in general - in fact, I think a deck like this is pretty much the only time it's playable, maybe with the exception of playing against Ultron.

When you're tanking every single attack for a full table, -1 damage from each attack can be significant. Later in the game when your DEF is 4 or 5, this card loses some of its relevance unless you're playing against a villain that throws real haymakers.

Height Advantage also helps you with some of your other defenses on turns when you don't use Draw Their Fire, either because it's not in play yet, or because you don't have a Practiced Plan in play to bring it back to your hand. In particular it can allow you to tank the attacks from your own minions while taking minimal damage, leaving you free to use your defense cards and allies to protect the other players.

Your other defense events are there to keep you going for those turns when Draw Their Fire isn't available. Preemptive Strike allows you to jump in and take a hit from the villain without worrying about the boost card, though you'll still take the damage from their base ATK. "I Can Do This All Day" allows you to defend with your full DEF against any attack, and Cuts Both Ways makes you the defender against any attack but with no protection against the damage. If played early in the turn, it can also dish out respectable damage.) Of course, you also have your own Up, Up, and Away to take hits from the villain or Villainous minions. You usually want to use this early in the turn in order to draw extra cards and plan out your defenses, or for the last attack where a boost card is given out so you get the choice of setting the first encounter card.

Talon Line can be an emergency break if things go very badly, especially early on when you can't tank as well. It can combo particularly well with Up, Up, and Away: You play UUaA to take a hit from the villain, put a card with a suitable number of icons on top of the encounter deck, discard that card with Eagle-Eyed, trigger Talon Line to stun the villain and/or any minions you don't want to tank or who otherwise need to be kept down and/or ready yourself to block another hit and/or ready your allies to block weaker minions.

However, you will need some healing to keep this up, even with the extra hit points from Defensive Conditioning. That's where Angel's Aerie and Ready for a Fight come in. You will be defending a lot, and every time you defend you get a counter on Angel's Aerie. When you need to heal up, you'll most likely have enough counters there to heal you completely, and you shouldn't need to do so before you have a Ready for a Fight in play.

Aerial Evacuation also lets you prevent all damage to a character, including from things other than attacks, and with Ready for a Fight you can flip back to Hero form if needed. However, note that using Angel's Aerie to heal is an Alter-Ego action so you can't do that during the villain turn.

Your allies are also there to help you defend. Victor Mancha and Daredevil both effectively take one less damage from each attack (with the caveat that Daredevil has to survive the full damage), making them excellent for handling weaker minions indefinitely. Jocasta can bring whatever defense event you find yourself using the most from your discard pile and hold it until you need it.

The Quincarrier is there to give you a better overall economy but also to guarantee that you can meet the resource requirement for Ready for a Fight.

The double resources are not included, for three reasons. The first is that your cards are very cheap. The second is that you want to have a flexible card of hands for the turns when you're not using Draw Their Fire. The third is that on the turns when you are using Draw Their Fire, you're only spending a single resource on putting that back into play (hopefully, after recovering it with Practiced Plan), and since your job is to defend and anything else is gravy, it's fine if you can only play one other card.

Most of your expensive cards are ones you only play once, other than Jocasta. Victor Mancha and Daredevil can often stay in play for the rest of the game once you get them out, as with most of your upgrades.