The Good Doctor

Cardboard Jungle # 1

The Silk hero came with a bunch of really good protection cards. Ready for a Fight and "Stop Hitting Yourself" (dubbed "SHY" by the community, which I love btw) are all the rage, and I see Spider-Byte and Energy Shield being used in a lot of interesting ways. But there was one card in this pack that is still underappreciated: Dr. Sinclair

When you look at this card, the most obvious comparison is to The Night Nurse. Similar effect, but they only have 3 uses, only ever heal 1, and forces you to lose a status (including tough!) While the doctor has unlimited uses, heals for at least 3, and the status cleanse is optional. The downsides being that you have to pay 1 mental resource each time and it's alter ego only.

The value you get from that 1 resource though is fantastic. The lowest recovery among Alter Egos is 3. So at the very least, this is 3x more cost effective than First Aid, and you will always have access to it as long as you flip down and have a mental resource.

I can see this card being a staple for a lot of decks that can jump through the minor hoops to make it work. But it's general useability isn't what got me really excited for this card. Instead, I want to explore an unusual archetype that it enables: Health Tanking

Hit Points are a resource. Heroes that have a lot of them have more opportunities to push the game state forward than a similar hero with less of them. More hit points to work with means less time exhausted by basic defense or recovery. This lets you use your basic activation for damage or thwart instead. And you will spend less resources on defensive events and allies to block with.

To make a Health Tanking deck centered around Dr. Sinclair, I first narrowed my search to characters with a Recovery of at least 5. These are what I consider "high recovery" heroes. 5 is enough to recover from the average expert villain attack. There are currently 6 heroes in the high recovery club: She-Hulk, Ms. Marvel, Spider-Ham, Wolverine, X-23, and Deadpool.

There is a number of cards that I would add along with Dr. Sinclair that make up what I consider the "Health Tanking archetype." You can make a deck with all of these cards and use it with any of the above heroes. You can even try it with any other hero in the game, with varying results. This suite of cards includes: Down Time, Endurance, Symbiote Suit, Front Line Specialist, Taunt, and Ready For a Fight. The first 4 in the list provide the additional HP and Rec to better take advantage of Dr. Sinclair. Taunt and Ready For a Fight (RFAF) are fantastic ways to leverage your extra survivability by trading some damage from the villain for extra cards. Taunt directly drawing you cards, while RFAF lets you flip down to alter ego (where you draw more cards), without dealing with the villain scheming. Also consider some other healing cards, the best of which being Crew Quarters, "Come Get Me, Bub!" and What doesn't Kill Me.

Out of all of the high recovery heroes, Ms. Marvel is the only one who doesn't have any synergy with building around hit points. While most of her protection decks should probably include Dr. Sinclair going forward, I don't see it being something to build around.

Putting Kamala aside, the other 5 heroes all have cards within their kits that directly treat health as a resource. She Hulk has Gamma Slam. Spider Ham has Spider-Nonsense on his hero card. Wolverine has his Claws of course, but he also has his Healing Factor ability and a few more cards that deal with taking or healing damage. Similarly, X-23 also has her Claws, and other cards related to taking and healing damage. Deadpool has 2 cards that let you directly trade HP for damage/thwart, in Maximum Effort/ "Yoo-Hoo!". He also has This Card is Fire, which is a lot like Gamma Slam.

At some point I want to build some Health Tanking decks for She-Hulk, Wolverine, and X-23. Those sound really fun. These aren't the only heroes that could be build like this too, I just felt that it was a good place for us to start. Who else would you think would make a good health tank? Build your own deck and let me know how it goes! Or publish it yourself on Marvelcdb!

But for todays CBJ deck build, I am going with Deadpool. This deck that I made for him is hilarious. With how high his base Recovery is, you can do some outlandish things here. With Chimichanga Truck and Dr. Sinclair out, you can heal 33 health in a turn! Can he even get that much health? No...but in this deck he can get to 27!

Here's what the deck looks like. This one is intended for multiplayer. Why? I find that in solo, its always a better play to just rush with Deadpool's events, since they do so much damage. In multiplayer though, you can't burn down the villain by yourself, so these long build out decks become more viable.

I played this two handed, with this Psylocke deck from Castlefrank47 that I've also been enjoying. My first opponent was none other than Baron Zemo. It was a pretty great fight, except that I lost Dr. Sinclair early on! Things still turned out fine, but there goes testing out the new card...

After beating up on Helmut, I wanted to test Wade out against someone who was more of a...heavy hitter. Of course, I had to break out the classic matchup for Deadpool: The Juggernaut. For "fun", I added another big boy: Atlas, and his "Growing Strong" mod set.

Both fights were on expert.

Wade can really take a beating. Against Zemo, I was able to pretty reliably take some hits, flip down to alter ego, and flip back up (maybe with Ready for a Fight) without taking any acceleration tokens. When it came to Juggernaut, it was a different story. I was still able to keep both heroes alive, at least. Psylocke only took 3 damage the whole game, and it was from a treachery. And she only had to chump block once. By the end, I put 6 acceleration on the main scheme with Deadpool's ability. That's more then I had hoped, but still less then I usually would get in multiplayer!

End of game mess. Sweet victory against the two Brutes!

I actually forgot that Atlas has the "Victory 1" keyword, so I never sent him to the victory display. Instead he came out 3 times! We would blast away at his 20 hp and then he'd come right back with the Growing Stronger treachery. Oops! I just made the fight even harder, but still won out in the end!

This combo came in clutch! Montage to get 4 energy resources, preventing 4 damage with Energy Shield kept me alive in the late game!

Face tanking...I mean health tanking with Deadpool was a blast. Not only is it viable, it feels like an entirely fresh and new way to play the game for me. If you want the full deck write up, check out my post on Marvelcdb: Health Pool