Rogue Champions- Cyclops
Greetings! We’re returning to our look at the X-men. We’re moving up to the man at the top, Field Commander Cyclops.
Hero Summary
Cyclops brings a lot of unique design to the game. As a character he has two competing character features that the game could highlight and instead of going one way, they leaned into both. First, is the obvious. His name and costume immediately draw attention to the visor on his face. If a random person knows anything about Cyclops its that he shoots laser beams out of his eyes. His hero ability, Optic Blast grants him a fairly limited ability to fire off these blasts. First, it costs a resource to use, which is reasonable but second, he can only use it against characters that he has previously attached a Tactic Upgrade too. He has three different tactics in his kit, Exploit Weakness, Practiced Defense, Priority Target, each with two copies. Depending on what aspect you’re playing there are additionally a few more cards to build into your deck that play with your Tactics keyword (Marked, Befuddled, Coordinated Attack, Pinned Down). Aggression has one additional upgrade, Gatekeeper, though it is not a tactic. Additionally, both Spider-men and Phoenix come with upgrades in their kits that attach to enemies which can help you if you team up. Unfortunately, the cards enemies put on themselves are Attachments, rather than upgrades.
The upgrades from your kit have a drawback the aspect ones do not; the Temporary keyword. This means they’re not sticking around for very long so are best played when either you really need their affect or are planning to use Optic Blast. Unfortunately, that magnifies the cost of the whole operation. You have to pay the cost of the tactic upgrade card, the card itself, and the cost of Optic Blast. This is very inefficient. Fortunately, other parts of his kit help to mitigate some of these deficiencies.
Field Commander is an upgrade for Cyclops that removes that Temporary keyword. This allows you to get extra use out of them. This works well with Practiced Defense if you drop it on a minion with only one attack, they are effectively no longer a threat and you can wait to deal with them at your leisure. Ruby Quartz Visor generates a resource specifically for using Optic Blast which makes it so you can afford to use it more regularly. Additionally, your blasts also gain Piercing and Ranged which are very hand for swatting down juiced up minions with a bunch of nasty Attachments make them a pain to attack.
In comics and movies, the power of these blasts varies by plot contrivance, sometimes knocking a bad guy over, other times blowing up the side of a building. In the game, its given a middle ground base three damage. This can be magnified with Exploit Weakness but also with one of your events. Full Blast increases the damage by eight (so up to 11) and gives you Overkill. Unfortunately, there are only one of these in your kit. You also have two Ricochet Beams, which works as a partial Optic Blast, as it hits any target for three damage and then another target with an upgrade.
Your kit also helps you keep these upgrades in play with Scott Summers alter-ego ability, Constant Training. The ability to search your deck for any Tactic card you want and then draw it is very hand for ensuring you have the right card at the right time. If all your cards are in your discard pile, you’ll have to use one of your three Tactical Brilliance. This is your main Thwart with an added benefit of also letting your take a Tactics card from your discard pie and add it to your hand.
The second main character feature for Cyclops is his role as the X-men’s fearless field commander. His alter-ego deck building ability emphasizes this, allowing you to take X-Men allies from any aspect. Want to play a Leadership voltron style deck with Wolverine? Go for it. This opens up a lot of fun combinations and team up of allies. Most of your kit focuses on boosting your Optic Blast but there are also a lot of Tactic cards that boost allies you can fish for with Constant Training or Tactical Brilliance.
Obligation & Nemesis Set
Scott’s Obligation, Lost Visor, and the only possible route you could take for this card. What’s Scott’s biggest weakness in combat other than losing his visor? While losing the ability to attack can be disastrous at the wrong time, and losing an upgrade if you’ve already paid for it, this obligation can actually be beneficial if drawn early. Because it searches the deck for your Ruby Quartz Visor, and then adds it to your hand after removing the obligation, it can be a good way to get that upgrade into play. Notably, you can not switch to Alter-Ego when the obligation is drawn though, so no free flipping.
Mister Sinister is an appropriate villain for Cyclops to face off against as his nemesis. He’s fairly rudimentary, with only 1 attack and thwart, though he does have Villainous so that could get boosted all the way to 5. Six health is on the upper side of minion health, especially when combined with his Toughness, but its not outrageous. Stalwart is a bit annoying but not a huge deal. His Boost ability to stun is more annoying in some cases.
The side scheme, Genetic Manipulation, comes in as a more nuanced card. It only has 2/player threat on it, so relatively easy to defeat, but when it does it reveals a Gene Therapy. But you don’t want to ignore it as it adds Amplify which is very annoying for the villain to have. You will want to time it so that you can kill whatever minion is going to pick up that Gene Therapy. Two extra damage with Piercing and Overkill is nothing to sneeze at, especially if it somehow ends up on the villain. But at least it only works once.
Concussive Force rounds out the Nemesis set. I like the design here where it does two different things depending on if Mister Sinister is in play. Most cards would have opted for gaining Surge if the target nemesis were not in play so this is a nice change. It is almost better to have Mister Sinister in play because then you at least have to chance to draw a zero boost card and only take 1 damage/1 threat. Or be able to defend the attack, which you can’t do with straight damage.
Sample Decks
Cyclops Unleashes the Wolverine (Leadership)
- Allies
- Armor
- Colossus
- Nightcrawler
- Pixie
- Polaris
- Sunfire
- Wolverine
- Events
- 3x First Aid
- Resources
- Energy
- Genius
- Strength
- Supports
- Team Training
- The X-Jet
- Uncanny X-men
- Utopia
- X-mansion
- Upgrades
- 1x Clarity of Purpose
- 3x Coordinated Attack
- 1x Danger Room Training
- 1x Honorary X-men
- 1x Inspired
- 1x Reinforced Suit
- 1x Sidearm
In many ways this is your standard Voltron style leadership deck. The main twist is that you’re building up Wolverine who is an aggression ally. Wolverine makes for a good Voltron candidate thanks to his self-heal. With all the upgrades he can get up to 6 Attack (w/ Ranged and Pierce), 4 Thwart, and 10 Health. That ten health gives you some breathing room for using him several turns in a row before needing to take a breather and heal. With First Aid and X-Mansion you also have some good secondary healing for him or Cyclops as needed. Coordinated Attack also allows him to reduce his consequential damage to one against a priority target, which he’ll naturally heal.
With Clarity of Purpose, you can ping Wovlerine for a damage in exchange for a resource. If you get both out early, you can use him as a resource generator until he’s powered up. This can help you build up Cyclops upgrades as well.
The rest of your allies serve primarily as cannon fodder. Several of them have, or in Polaris’ case can hand out, Tough. They absorb hits for Cyclops so he can focus on tossing out damage. Polaris can also toss that Tough on Wolverine so you can get a second use in a round if you ready him with Utopia.
- Allies
- Armor
- Beast
- Iceman
- Marvel Girl
- Pixie
- Polaris
- Sunfire
- Events
- 3x Outta My Way!
- Resources
- Energy
- Genius
- Strength
- Supports
- Boot Camp
- X-Jet
- Utopia
- War Room
- Upgrades
- 3x Attack Training
- 1x Combat Training
- 3x Gatekeeper
- 1x Jarnborn
- 3x Marked
- 1x Warrior Skill
This variation on an Ally focused deck makes use of the extra upgrade card that can be attached to minions that Aggression has. Gatekeeper has the unfortunate side affect of giving the minion extra health and the Patrol keyword. If you can kill it right away, or the minion is engaged with a hero who wasn’t going to thwart anyways, Patrol is a minor tradeoff for the cards secondary affect of removing four threat when its defeated. Normally, Outta My Way! is not a very good card, given the condition to get the full damage. But here it shores up the other weakness of Gatekeeper by doing extra damage equal to the extra health the minion gained. This combo deletes a minion and removes four threat for 4 effective cost.
The rest of this list revolves around pumping out damage. You have allies to drop in and get boosted from Boot Camp and Attack Training. Then they serve as your shields to keep Cyclops in the fight. War Room helps them round things out by gaining a little bit of thwart if they kill something.
Cyclop’s Peacekeepers (Justice)
- Allies
- Armor
- Blindfold
- Marvel Girl
- Pixie
- Professor X
- Psylocke
- Storm
- Events
- 3x Mutant Peacekeepers
- Resources
- Energy
- Genius
- Strength
- Supports
- 1x Danger Room Training
- 1x The X-Jet
- 1x Utopia
- 1x X-Mansion
- Upgrades
- 3x Befuddled
- 1x Heroic Intuition
- 3x Mission Training
- 3x Overwatch
- 1x Sense of Justice
- 1x Skilled Investigator
One danger you have when leaning heavily into thwarting decks is having nothing to do. It is possible to thwart too well. Course, it’s very easy to not thwart enough as that line is very nebulous. This deck uses Befuddled and Mutant Peacekeepers to tow the line between the two. With Mutant Peacekeepers, you can dish out some major thwart in a big blow. If you have Overwatch in play, then you get to double that power. This can clear out some major side schemes and the main scheme all at once. In the interim, you can also dish out a bunch of damage to clear the minion field using Cyclops usual tricks, plus thwart enhanced allies punching hard using Befuddled.
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