Summary

Bishop is better the more resource cards you have in your deck, since you get more Bishop's Rifle damage and more healing the more you have, but the more resource cards you have, the greater the risk of getting a hand with only resources, which would be terrible. He has a few tools in his kit to dump resources, with Malcolm, Randall and Super-Charged, but those are very cost-inefficient. What the deck needs is more reliable ways to dump resources. Enter Lockjaw, Starhawk and Nightcrawler.

Once you get those three allies out, most turns, you can play all three of them, depending on how hard the boss slaps, and how many players are in the game. Since they enter your hand or the discard pile after the step where you draw your hand, you don't run the risk of them getting shuffled in to the deck, except in niche interaction cases. On their own, they're pretty cost inefficient, but due to the fact that they allow you to max out on resource cards on the deck, the deck as a whole get better by running those three allies and 25 resources, than it would be with fewer resources and other generically good cards.

In a single turn, Bishop can take a slap to the face, defend for an ally, heal back to full health, tank an attack with Lockjaw, tank one with Nightcrawler (which cancels the damage entirely, so even works on nasty overkill things like Fanaticism), shoot something for around 7 damage and thwart 5-ish. That is, if you need that many tanked hits. If not, you can play some events. All in all, the sheer amount of work Bishop puts out per turn with almost no setup is staggering, making him a god-tier hero when played right.

How to play

Hard mulligan for your Rifle, Uniform, Lockjaw, Starhawk and Nightcrawler. If your Rifle or Uniform gets discarded by Energy Absorption, flip into Alter-Ego to get it back using Temporally Displaced. Get slapped in the face every turn, shoot every turn, heal every turn and burn your resources on events and allies. Get your Super-Charged out and dump extra extra resources into them if need be, but don't fire them off until it's time to end the game unless it's an emergency. Tank for your entire team, dish out lots of damage and thwarting, and be a god.

The maths

I talk a lot about cost-efficiency above, and I thought I should explain more in-depth, for those interested.

When comparing how good cards are, at least cards that do pretty standard things like damage, thwarting, healing, readying yourself and status cards, we look at how cost efficient that card is, that is how much you're getting out of it for what cost; how much bang for your buck. This we measure in [gains]/[cost]. Looking over the game's cards, we can determine the following standard "pricing" for common effects, for Good cards, that is, mostly identity-specific cards, many allies and some niche events: 2 damage costs 1 effective cost, or 0,5 cost per damage. 3 thwart for 2 effective cost, or 0,6666... cost per thwart. 3 healing for 2 effective cost, or 0,6666... cost per point of healing. 2 cost per canceled villain activation (tough, status, confuse, last hit point on allies to tank a hit) 2 cost to ready yourself

The effective cost of a card is the printed cost + 1, since a card is a resource itself. From here on out, I will refer to effective cost as just "cost".

Let's use Concussive Blast as an example. Its cost is 4 (3 printed + itself) and its output is 6 damage, which is worth 3 cost, and readying you, which is worth 2. All in all, you get 5 resources' worth of output for a cost of 4, making this a really good card, above the standard for Good cards.

Lockjaw, by contrast, offers only 2 thwart, worth 1,333... and soaking a hit, worth 2, at the cost of 4 (not 5, because we play him from the discard pile). That's an efficiency of 3,3333.../4 = 0,8333..., which is below average. That is why most good decks don't play him.

But in this deck, a resource card is so valuable in its own right, that anything that lets us spend those resources every turn is cherry on top. See, in this deck, due to Energy Absorption and Bishop's Rifle, a resource card, without even counting what you spend it on, is worth 0,666... for the point of healing + 0,5 for the damage from the rifle + 0,5 card drawn (the probability that a resource card you draw was drawn by Energy Absorption and is thus above your normal hand size. This probability depends on the damage you tank every turn, but in our testing, about half your resource cards came from Energy Absorption.) = 1,666..., which is REALLY good. That's before you even spend it.

But to get full value of them, we needs ways to spend those resources. Malcolm, Randall and Super-Charged help with that, but they're pretty small or limited resource sinks. Lockjaw, Starhawk and Nightcrawler, on the other hand, allow you to spend up to 10 resources per turn. This is why we need them, to fully unlock the promise of the resource cards.

So, in total, the value you get from the 4 resource cards (not counting that some might be double resources) spent on Lockjaw is: 2 card draw worth 2 (because half the resources, on average, were only drawn - by Energy Absorption - because they were resource cards) 2 thwart worth 1,333... 1 tanked hit worth 2 4 healing, worth 2,666... 4 damage, worth 2 Sum = 10, out of 4 cards. That's an efficiency of 2,5 which is absolutely insane. For context, some of the most effective cards in the game are Professor X at 1,5, Exorcism at 1,555... and Iron Fist at 1,8.

Thus, any deck that you can draw and play once, that then lets you spend resources every turn without having to draw and play that card again (which rules out events, allies, etc), will make the deck extremely efficient. That is why this "maximum resources + Lockjaw](/card/05018), Starhawk and Nightcrawler" build is absolutely god-tier, the only one I know next to "Bring it!" Vision.