If You Can Only Play One Card, Play The Best One

Allies. Allies are the best card, in case that was unclear somehow from the deck list. Oh, also Mystic Only cards. Those cards are also the best card.

I think most of the more fun Adam decks are ones where you try and make some cool combo, or play a lot of weird cards that you never get to see interact together outside of Spider-Woman, or something like that. It turns out, though, that if you are only able to play single cards in your deck, the consistency kinda drops off. Add in the fact that Adam's hero cards like to chuck the rest of your cards in the trash, and putting together a combo becomes kinda hard too. This leads to not playing Adam's cards for fear of discarding parts 2, 3, and 4 of your really cool combo, and now you're just hoping to survive long enough to pull it off.

So yeah. Allies. This game has printed more and more fairly good 2-cost Ally cards, and gosh darn it, this deck plays lots of them. They come out, they do a thing, and they probably die fairly soon afterwords, but that's okay. They got some of the best value-per-resource-spent that you can get, and that's what Adam needs.

Several of the rest of the cards are the Mystic cards, as noted above, and that's because they're also just fantastic value for what you invest in them. The only one I'm not playing is Summoning Spell, and that's because with 10 Allies you probably already have one in your hand that you could play, so you don't really need to be discarding cards to go find one. But hey, if you want to play it anyhow, I'd probably replace Ant-Man, since he'd just die instantly if Summoning Spell found him. Plus, all the allies cost 2 anyhow, so it's not like you're getting any additional value from creating something like a 4+ cost ally.

Adam's Cape lets him ready once a turn, so it's worth it to play all of the basic stat buff cards, since they effectively double your output of attacking and thwarting, or let you defend and then still have a reasonable other basic action for your turn. The other cards in the deck either help buff your allies, or take advantage of the fact that, in addition to being a Mystic, you're also a Guardian. Honestly, if there were a better card for the slot than Boot Camp, I'd probably take it, since 3 is a heavy investment in this deck, but if you can get it out it can still do quite a lot. Worst case scenario, you toss it away to deal 2 damage and move on with your day.

At this point, there's kinda 2 ways you can go, I think. You can either play 1 copy each of all the 1-per-deck resource cards that Adam's pre-build comes with, and play probably The Sorcerer Supreme in the last slot (or maybe go to 41 to fit in Deft Focus as well), or play both Deft and Sorcerer Supreme and also play the 3 basic double resource cards. The first has the benefit of having more Aspect cards so his Cosmic Awareness and Karmic Blast have a slightly higher hit rate. The second has the benefit of providing more resource generation to a hero that, frankly, needs more resources. Given the list, I went the basic resource route. As with the Ally route, it's more boring, but it's more consistent.

As for playing Adam, play light with the discard mechanics of Karmic Blast and Cosmic Awareness, because you really want to see The Sorcerer Supreme, at least 1 copy of Mystic Senses, Soul World, as well as his Staff and/or Cape on your first time through the deck. After that, I'm usually pretty free with discarding cards as needed. Once you have Mystic Senses down, discarding a card a turn is quite good (although it's often pretty good anyhow), and if you can get both of them down it's downright ridiculous. With his Cape on top of that, Adam turns into an outright efficiency machine. Throwing Allies at the problem helps get you there.