Back on track!

Well I just got finished talking with the guys from The Ring Has Chosen (the absolute best pod-cast on the inter-webs!), and was gently reprimanded for not having updated my blog in almost a week. We'll talk more about that later on...for now I thought I'd get back to my regularly scheduled programming, and start talking about the rest of the teams from Marvel Evolution.

I believe the next team I said I'd look at would be X-Factor. Even if it wasn't, well...it is now! From a broad perspective I like how they were handled. All three eras of the team were covered: the original five X-Men, the government-sponsored team led by Havok, and the current X-Factor Investigations. I know the first two teams best, as X-Factor was one of the books that I read for the longest back in the day.

Keeping with the X-Men team, the original five has some great recovery effects from Angel and Jean Grey, some stun and don't-get-stunned shenanigans with Cyclops, and Beast / Iceman rounding out things nicely with other spiffy effects (exhaust, card draw, pumps).While I don't particularly dig the Cyclops legend I do have to admit that he deserved it; if only because he's been the field leader of the X-Men for...like 40 years. He's got some great cards and I'm sure we'll see a lot of legend decks pop up over the next little while.

It seems like the character drawing much more attention however, is Multiple Man. This (odd choice of) legend has the potential to be really powerful with only a few cards. Just flipping through my MEV binder, I think if I made an X-Factor / Madrox deck it would look something like this:

Multiplicity
Characters:
14x MEV-021 Multiple Man, Army (1)
4x MEV-025 Rictor (2)
6x MEV-015 Jamie Madrox, Army (2)
2x MEV-016 Jamie Madrox (5)
4x MEV-028 Strong Guy (6)
Total = 30

Plot Twists:
2x First Class
2x Cracking the Case
2x Multiplicity
2x One Man Army
2x Re-absorption
4x Vocal Minority
4x The "X" Factor
4x Black Box
Total = 22

Locations:
2x Fall's Edge
2x X-Factor Investigations
4x Alias Investigations
Total = 8

While this isn't an ideal build, I think it has potential, and is something I could actually build with the cards I have right now, barring needing one or two more copies of some rares.

Basically you drop and keep as many army Madroxes as you can on the board until turn 4, dropping Rictor to gain endurance over two or three turns (possibly more than once per turn). On turn 5 bring in the 5-drop Madrox if you can find him, otherwise just keep dumping army guys. The ideal situation is to have a ton of 1-drop army guys available on the board when you recruit Strong Guy. Use a few of the smaller army guys to pump up others (with a little help from The "X" Factor).By this time you should have a Strong Guy with something on the order of 10 counters on him, and hopefully have been able to stomp your way through most of your opponent's board with your army dudes. Attack with Strong Guy for the coup-de-grace and celebrate your victory!

It might not be a super solid deck, but I think it would be fun to play, and very flavorful. If you wanted to round it out with a few more different characters you certainly could, but you really want to try to maximize the number of activated effects you have control of.

So there you have it...a deck and a review (sort-of). Now go play some cards!