Phoenix Honed Aggro

Phoenix has been my favorite x-men, unfortunately she has a slight economy problem, and not very good defense if you aren't chump blocking. This is in my opinion the best deck to solve those problems without playing x-men leadership obviously. When facing regular villains the gameplan is as follows;

We want to confuse the villain and flip down as often as possible. Prioritize playing White Hot Room asap so that we can either heal more or add counters to phoenix force. The goal is to have all of our resource gens out while we are still restrained and use the counters to build fast. I have found 2 gens and the doubles have been enough economy to afford 2 to 3 cards a turn. Flipping down can also help with the increased hand size. Stepford Cuckoos also helps us flip confidently since we can cancel advances or extra activations. The upgrades like Honed Technique and Psimitar are not necessary on the first pass through but they help your events pack a bigger punch and can end games quicker.

Now the big outlier is of course steady and stalwart villains. Against normal villains going unleashed early is fine and you can pretty confidently run through with the statuses available to you. Against stalwart and steady villains that changes, now you want those upgrades out on the first pass if possible since we want to stay restrained and rely on our aggression events for damage. The 3 readies in our kit, being Professor X and Phoenix Firebird are also very useful to help have burst turns. The Phoenix Suit also gives us steady which can provide a lot of tempo against difficult villains but isn't a priority. As long as they don't have retaliate once the Psimitar is out you can ping the villain for 2 damage every turn from playing a psionic card, which includes 4 of our allies. if they do have retaliate Psi-Bow Attack has ranged to limit the damage returned.

All in all I think this is a very strong deck, I really enjoy Phoenix and feel aggression is the best aspect to pair her with in true solo. I hope the deck is as good for you as it was for me.