Black Panther vs. Ultron (Heroic Roulette)

Welcome to the third deck of my Heroic Roulette Core Set challenge, where I tune decks for a specific scenario and try to win on heroic difficulty. You can find the first two decks here:

Round 1: She-Hulk (Leadership) vs. Rhino: https://marvelcdb.com/decklist/view/32011/she-hulk-vs-rhino-heroic-roulette-1.0

Round 2: Captain Marvel (Justice) vs. Klaw: https://marvelcdb.com/decklist/view/32027/captain-marvel-vs-klaw-heroic-roulette-1.0

Matchup:

This was the first pairing I decided when planning out the Core Set game series due to the unique scenario feature of the drone minions. Since Ultron pops out 1-3 drones a turn, Aggression is an excellent choice to take advantage of cards like "Bring It!" and Hall of Heroes. Black Panther is the hero choice for this scenario because his built-in retaliate can pick off 1-health drones put into play by Scheme 2's response or Ultron 2's interrupt on attacks. If we are in Alter Ego form during the villain phase, Energy Daggers can just as easily sweep a horde of drones away after we flip.

I kept the recommended mod set for this scenario, Under Attack

Gameplan:

Priorities to play are Hall of Heroes and The Golden City, followed by BP's upgrades. There's also not a ton of thwarting in this deck, so thwart whenever you can, especially with BP's basic power. I will usually get the Vibranium Suit first with BP's setup ability to help stay alive while taking drone hits. One thing you should try to set up is to flip Ultron to Stage 3 when you have a "Bring It!" in hand since the Ultron's Imperative side scheme adds 2 drone minions into play.

Card choices:

Sunfire - Extremely strong in this scenario with 5 attachments that cost 3 resources to discard or 2 resources and a hero exhaust

Throg - There will always be a minion

Thor - Great for sweeping up drones on Ultron Stage 3 or when Upgraded Drones is out.

Fusillade - A great card for Black Panther since his weapon upgrades don't need to exhaust for anything else. Not important early game but helps close out Stage 3.

Build Support - Help get one of the busted supports - Hall or City. I'm playing Quincarrier to get one more target for later in the game, since playing the other two is such a priority early.

Lock and Load - Only gets Panther Claws and Energy Daggers, but we'll take anything to setup faster.

Game review: 2 win, 0 loss

I had a first deck that used Hand Cannon to attack drones while damaging Ultron, but I ended up thwarting almost every turn with my hero and making the Cannon go to waste. I still managed to win that one but swapped to the Fusillade strategy, which I feel more confident sharing to the community. My second game was long but under control. I drew 12 cards off Hall of Heroes, and drew at least 2 with "Bring It!" about 4 or 5 times. There are plenty of turns on stage 3 where you can't do any damage to Ultron because it takes all your effort to kill drones, so the game can seem to drag on, but you power through eventually.

The end

If you made it this far, thanks for reading! This wraps up my Heroic Roulette game series for the Core Set scenarios: She-Hulk vs. Rhino, Captain Marvel vs. Klaw, and Black Panther vs. Ultron. Of the three matches, this last one is the one I encourage you to recreate as it was a super fun play experience. If you want to see how I conducted the Heroic Roulette challenges against the Sinister Motives and Mutant Genesis boxes, you can check those out using the links below.

Sinister Motives: https://marvelcdb.com/decklist/view/22146/nova-vs-venom-goblin-heroic-roulette-1.0

Mutant Genesis: https://marvelcdb.com/decklist/view/30996/storm-vs-mansion-attack-heroic-roulette-1.0