Doctor Strange Brains, Brawns, and Boot Camp

Brains, Brawns, and Boot Camp

One of Strange's weakness is his inefficiency with dealing with multiple 3-5 HP minions. Crimson Bands of Cyttorak is great for dealing with a single 6-7 HP minion or stunning the villain but his kit doesn't have a good way of dealing with a lot of little things. To cover for this weakness, Aggression has a lot of nice tools like Thor, Tigra, and Spider-Girl to help handle a swarm of minions. With Boot Camp out, they'll likely even one-shot a lot of minions.

The second part of the deck is using Earth's Mightiest Heroes combined with cheap Avenger allies (Blade, Wasp, Spider-Girl, etc) to allow Strange to play multiple Invocations in a turn. While there are some nice non-Avenger Ally options, the deck plans to use Avengers Tower as a way to squeeze the 4th Ally in by putting Honorary Avenger on Wong. Your allies have enough staying power thanks to Seven Rings of Raggadorr to warrant this inclusion.

Gameplan

• Mulligan: look for The Eye of Agamotto, Cloak of Levitation, and The Sorcerer Supreme. If Winds of Watoomb is the top card, also look for Master of the Mystic Arts. Keep all Spiritual Meditation since it's always better to play it instead of mulliganing it.
• Early Game: use Spiritual Meditation to find your setup pieces. Use Natural Talent depending on what's on top and what the encounter setup looks like. Generally you want to ditch most things that aren't Winds of Watoomb but there are reasonable situations to keep any of the Invocation on T1.
• Midgame: after your setup pieces are out, you want to try to cycle through 2 Invocations per turn to let you play the strong ones more often. Use a combination of Cloak of Levitation, Earth's Mightiest Heroes, and Wong to do this.
• Endgame: you want to get to a boardstate with all of your support and upgrades out + 4 allies that's some combination of Wong with Honorary Avenger and 3 other allies. With these, you'll most likely be going through 3-4 Invocations/turn and can deal with everything the game throws at you while dealing damage to the villain.

Notes

• At the start of the game, Winds of Watoomb is the best card but it's also reasonable to keep the other Invocations in the following situations:
  • Crimson Bands of Cyttorak: you have more double resources than you can use.
  • Images of Ikonn: there's a side scheme with 3-4 threat on it.
  • Seven Rings of Raggadorr: you're able to play 2 allies and your setup pieces. Most likely involves something like a double + The Eye of Agamotto + Blade + Wasp + 2 other cards.
  • Vapors of Valtorr: the villain has toughness.
• Otherwise using Natural Talent before you flip is always better because it gets you closer to Winds of Watoomb.
• Pay attention to the remaining spells in the Invocation deck. You can sometimes setup a combo play by knowing which spell is coming up. For example, you can use Rings to give the villain toughness if you know Vapors is coming up to change it to stun/confuse.
• Crimson Bands of Cyttorak and Images of Ikonn do not count as an attack/thwart respectively. This means they get around things like stun, confuse, Guard, Patrol, Retaliate, etc.
• Most of the time you want to keep a stun/confuse on Strange to turn into a tough at some point. If you are both stunned and confused, prioritize removing the stun so you can play Magic Blast and Magic Attack.
• Astral Projection is useful in deciding whether to flip to Alter-Ego or not. You will often have a stun or confuse on the villain so after looking at the top card, you can decide whether you want to have it dealt as a boost card or an encounter card. Alternatively, you can also choose whether to stun/confuse the villain after looking at the top card. Also since the card isn't discarded, you can line up 2 in a row for big thwarts if you know the top card has 2-3 boost icons.
• It's okay to use a basic DEF early on after you have Cloak of Levitation out. Chances are you won't have the economy available to play 2 Invocations/turn in addition to setting up so using Strange's basic activation instead of playing 2 Invocations lets you spend less resources.

Tested against

• Heroic 1 Klaw: prioritize dealing with The "Immortal" Klaw at the start and setting up a way to deal with his attacks. He can activate multiple times per turn. Sonic Boom can exhaust you so it's usually better to DEF and then ready up later.
• Heroic 1 Mutagen Formula: Thor is MVP at clearing multiple Goblin Thralls so you want to find him ASAP. If you find him on T1, don't use him until T2 when it's more likely that there are multiple minions out from the 1 boost + 4 encounter cards on T1.
• Heroic 1 Zola: Zola can activate multiple times in a turn so you have to pay attention to that. Also use up your tough ASAP so it's not eaten up by Concussive Blast.
• Expert Venom Goblin: the most important part in this matchup is juggling threat to activate the least harmful Special on the main schemes. Early on, the damage from Midtown and threat from Upper is easier to deal with but you have to know when to start switching to Lower before you get overrun by threat. Strange can power through the Steady so negating an activation is something you want to do as much as possible. An interesting interaction when you're in Alter-ego is when the villain schemes, it'll add threat to the lowest threat main scheme and that means the special will activate on the 2nd lowest instead. Also this means all minion SCH goes on the 2nd lowest main scheme.