Thor’s Team Building Exercise

When Ant-Man came out, I toyed with some ideas on how to make use of the new Team-Building Exercise (TBE) card. I tried a Black Widow deck at first to make use of Spy and Avenger. I wanted to make use of the SHIELD keyword as well but that is only on her Alter-Ego side. That ruled out several good cards but still left her with tenish that qualified. But that wasn’t quite enough. So I went looking for another hero that might do better. And that’s when I stumbled onto Thor.

I’ve played Thor a few times but never with much success. His need for resources is great. He can pack quite a punch but only if he can afford things. With a reduced handsize, he’s struggling until he can get Asgard out, and then only breaking even. He likes things like Avenger’s Mansion, Quincarrier and Helicarrier but they are expensive to play. Even getting Asgard out on a turn costs the rest of the cards in your hand if you don’t already have resources cards in play.

The key feature that makes Thor a perfect candidate for TBE is that his keywords are Avengers and Asgard. Many of his personal deck have the Asgard keyword on it, including critically, God of Thunder, his main resource generating card. TBE coming out first allows you to use it to for GOT (or GOT could already help pay for TBE). When run in an Aggression deck, which Thor naturally likes, you can get twenty cards that are affected by TBE.

Avenger/Asgard Aggression Deck

• Asgard
  1. Lady Sif (Thor)
  2. Asgard (Thor)
  3. Thor’s Helmet (Thor)
  4. God of Thunder x2 (Thor)
  5. Mjolnir (Thor)
  6. Heimdall (Basic)
  7. Jarnbjorn (Aggression)
  8. Hall of Heroes (Aggression)
  9. Valkyrie (Aggression
• Avenger
  1. Hercules (Aggression)
  2. She-Hulk (Aggression)
  3. Tigra (Aggression)
  4. Sentry (Aggression)
  5. Hulk (Aggression)
  6. Spider-Girl (Aggression)
  7. War-Machine (Basic)
  8. Avengers Tower (Basic)
  9. Avengers Mansion (Basic)
  10. Quincarrier (Basic)

These twenty cards, plus the three TBE’s make up about half your deck. There are another nine cards in Thor’s deck that don’t qualify for TBE, leaving you eight to eighteen cards to round out the deck with. I’ve altered these final cards based on who we would be playing against. The three resource cards are usually among them, along with Helicarrier.

We’ve tried a few Heroic 1 games with him and while we’re still losing fairly often at this level, I’ve never felt like Thor wasn’t pulling his weight as I have in previous plays with him. In fact, more than once I’ve pulled off the dream: two to three Hammer Throws in one turn. It usually involves the following sequence:

1. Four hand deck + 1 from Asgard
2. +2 cards from a minion engaging Thor
3. +1 card from Avenger’s Mansion (8 total)
4. Pay for Hammer Throw #1 with 2x God of Thunder and Quincarrier (8damage) (7 cards left in hand)
5. Return Mjölnir to play with Team Building Exercise #1
6. Pay for Hammer Throw #2 with Helicarrer and a 2 Resource card (16 cumulative damage) (5 cards left in hand)
7. Return Mjölnir to play with Team Building Exercise #2
8. Pay for Hammer Throw #3 with 3 cards from hand (24 cumulative damage) (1 card left in hand)
9. Return Mjölnir to play with Team Building Exercise #3
10. Activate Thor (2 base + Mjölnir + Combat Training = 4 damage, 28 cumulative damage)
11. Trigger Jarnbjorn with remaining card (30 cumulative damage)
12. or if you’re really lucky, play Mean Swing as last card (31 cumulative damage)

With each new release it will be good to go back to older heroes that never quite felt up to snuff and see if they can find a new life.