"Unworthy": Thor & Leadership

Let's address the elephant in the room: Thor is not very good.

His low base stat total and small hand size are not compensated by his fixed card pool. Defender of the Nine Realms is his only native threat management tool but often mills so many cards that it pushes closer to an acceleration token making it moot. Hammer Throw is clunky, essentially costing 6 cards. Lightning Strike requires an huge resource investment and two copies doesn't make it reliable.

So with all this stacked against the son of Odin, this deck was born out of a desire to fix Thor's problems and build something that, frankly, doesn't suck!

Concept

The core idea is to hide out as Odinson and let your continual ally spam stem any threat buildup until you can set up one of your hand fixes. Each turn you will summon Mjolnir to your hand - and then drop it to your discard pile to pay for something else because Gorr was right and you are UNWORTHY. Seriously, don't freak out about the hammer, you don't usually need it in play to win. What you do need is card draw...

Yes, you are seeing triple: this deck uses 3x Avengers Mansion! In testing Thor, the games where you get early card draw are so much easier, so mulligan everything for either Tony's house, Asgard, or For Asgard!. It cannot be overstated how much the early card flow helps the Strongest Avenger.

Once you have escaped the crippling flaw of hand size 4, everything works a little better and you should be able to remain in god mode almost indefinitely. Sometimes you even reach the lofty heights of 9 cards in hand!

The deck deliberately does not focus on maximising Lightning Strike or Hammer Throw, but that doesn't make them dead cards. Use them to clear out Ultron drones or wallop Tiger Shark or something, but know that they play second fiddle to allies in this deck so don't forget where your focus should be.

Card Selections

• Quinjet: Underestimating this is a mistake. Great fire-and-forget card. Prioritise playing them ASAP and notice how easy it becomes to keep the ally train going in the mid-game. Theorycrafting did not prepare me for the utility of this card; I would play 6 copies if I could.
• Lockjaw: MVP. If you have nothing better to do, a "Lockjaw locked" turn (play the dog, thwart with dog, defend with dog, repeat) means you don't fall behind, and you can bide your time for your power spikes (encountering a minion, fully stacked Quinjet).
• Make the Call: The best card in the Leadership aspect, and along with Quinjet one of the reasons the deck flows so nicely. Helicarrier doesn't interact with it but that is the only downside.
• First Aid vs Honorary Avenger: The ratio is to personal taste. You facetank fairly often and healing Thor without changing form helps avoid those feel-bad moments when you draw a minion as Odinson.

Notable Exclusions

• Nick Fury: You can't afford the -2 card advantage. Reasonable if you're playing it for threat management, but Lockjaw is better because he costs 4 "cards" rather than 5.
• The Triskelion: Ally limit 3 is actually to your benefit; when fully set up it is possible to juggle the same ally for their response a couple times in the same turn, which is almost impossible to do at ally limit 4.
• Teamwork: Poor man's Honorary Avenger.
• Avengers Assemble! / Lead from the Front / Strength In Numbers: These are for a different style of Leadership deck. Thor values incremental consistency over burst effects. You still have some big blowout turns without needing the stars to align for these.
• Enhanced Reflexes: After moving away from pumping Lightning Strike to the exclusion of other strategies, this was an easy cut. As a hero-only resource that doesn't stick around as long as you need it to, it is inferior to Helicarrier. God of Thunder x2 is enough.

So, grab your hammer, drop it again for being UNWORTHY, and go lead some Avengers instead. Have at thee, villains!