5 Hour Energy | Captain Marvel Protection v1.0

Card draw simulator

Odds: 0% – 0% – 0% more
Derived from
None. Self-made deck here.
Inspiration for
Captain Marvel - Protection - Take all the damage 1.0 0 0 0 1.0
Lightning Bolts 0 0 0 1.0

ChaosTheory · 2609

"Higher, further, faster, baby!"

What if you never had to worry about taking too much damage? What if you never had to worry about not having the resources you need to pull off your big plays? What if you could live the dream with nothing to slow you down?

If this is what you're looking for in a Marvel Champions game, then get one of your friends to play this deck.

5 Hour Energy takes the concept of a "support deck" about as far as it can possibly go. Play this deck and you are Healer, Tank and Sugar Mama all in one. You take the hits so they don't have to. You heal them and their allies to keep them in the fight. You feed them resources that you aren't going to need because you're loaded and can do whatever you want anyway.

Oh, and you also do this:

Spirit Bomb, Baby!

This is a truly unique way to play Marvel Champions with friends. The goal in Multiplayer is to be as selfless as possible. Your turns don't matter. Your bombastic, powerful plays? They aren't important. What's important is making sure that your Thor teammate has 5-6 card hands in Hero before engaging minions. Your goal is to help your Black Panther friend chew through his deck like a madman so he can set up his suit 2-3 turns faster than normal and start Wakandaing the Forever out of everything. Your goal is to make sure those squishy Black Widows and Hawkeyes stay in the fight without having to recover.

In short, you're everyone's best friend and you get the satisfaction of watching your friends push their Heroes to the limit.

The Build

I'm going to start at the end game and work my way backwards. There are two key components to this deck that make it sing: Defense and Economy.

The defense package includes Armored Vest and Captain Marvel's Helmet to push your DEF to 4, which is enough to block most basic attacks in the game without taking damage. Energy Barrier's can push that number even higher. Once you're blocking 5+ damage on from every DEF, Unflappable is all but guaranteed to feed you more cards and Indomitable makes sure you can block multiple attacks in a turn. Defensive Stance can help you tank the really big attacks but most of the time isn't super necessary.

The other half of the deck is built around economy, but the key thing here is that most of this econ isn't going to benefit you -- it's for your teammates. That's why Quincarrier is not included here -- only you benefit from it. Instead we're rocking Avengers Mansion and Helicarrier, both offering resources that you can give to your friends, along side Carol Danvers's Commander ability. This means that on most turns you are going to be able to give out three resources to friends to smooth out their turns and make their best plays possible.

The glue that holds all this together and makes it sing is Captain Marvel's Rechannel ability and Energy Absorption. Rechannel ensures that you can filter through your deck even faster to both set up, find relevant cards for any given turn and stay healed up while you do it. Regenerating health lets you continue to take more hits for your friends so they can stay in Hero longer. And with 28 energy resources in the deck, you never have to worry about not being able to heal and draw.

Energy Absorption makes paying for your important econ cards, Helicarrier and Avengers Mansion, trivial. It also allows you to play expensive allies like Heimdall or Nova with ease.

Once you are fully set up, you are going to be drawing so many cards and your deck will be thinned out enough that you can essentially pay for anything you want while still being able to feed resources to your teammates. Nova will put in a ton of work by blasting anything that dares to attack you. Photonic Blast clears out beefy minions and guards so your friends can focus on the Villain. You'll get to the point where you have so many resources that you are practically begging for something to spend them on, which is why I've included some Med Teams, both to keep Allies in play and to keep your friend's health topped off.

The Setup

While this deck is blazing fast later in the game, it does take a bit of setting up. Your most important cards to get on the board are Avengers Mansion and Helicarrier for economy, and Armored Vest and Captain Marvel's Helmet for DEF. But perhaps the most important card to get out early is Cosmic Flight. It is essential that you get one of these down asap, since your Helmet and Crisis Interdiction need it to uh...not suck. Crisis Interdiction in particular is a card you want to be playing often since you have 3x copies in the deck and early side schemes can be a real pain.

So, in order of importance:

  1. Cosmic Flight
    1. Nova (You kinda need to get him on the board whenever he hits your hand.)
  2. Economy (Mansion, Helicarrier)
  3. DEF Upgrades (Helmet, Vest, Indomitables)

And, while I know I've been saying to give resources to your friends, make sure you are communicating with them early in the game. If you're still setting up, you need to gauge how important it is for them to have an extra card vs you having one. If they say they don't absolutely need it, keep your resources for yourself so you can set up faster. Communication is key!

Card Choices

There are a few cards I haven't talked much about that might need some explanation.

  • Heimdall is a fantastic Ally that puts in a ton of work THWing and can snipe some key encounter cards from the deck, but he's hella expensive. Fortunately, Energy Absorption makes paying for expensive cards like this a lot less problematic. Between Absorption and one of the double resources, you can pay for Heimdall with just two cards.
  • Enhanced Reflexes is a very divisive card amongst CM players. Some people hate it, some swear by it. I'm in the latter group, obviously. Even though you have 28 energy resources in the deck, there is still something to be said about storing resources for later turns. And there will certainly be turns where you don't have anything better to spend your money on. Enhanced Reflexes not only represents stored energy for later, but with Rechannel it's essentially a 2 cost Heal 3 & Draw 3. It would be worth it just for that ability alone, but it also can feed Photonic Blasts, Energy Channel and Nova. Personally, I never build CM without it and it's especially relevant in a Protection build.
  • Nova -- this might be just about the only deck in the game (aside from Iron Man Protection) where Nova is relevant at all, but in this deck he is insane. He represents soooo much damage and is essential for helping you stay on top of minions that are engaged with you. (Minions normally being kind of a problem for CM, but Nova makes them so much easier to deal with.)

Closing Thoughts / Solo

Even though I'm mildly obsessed with She-Hulk, Captain Marvel has always been my first love in this game. There are so many interesting builds with her and I think she works well with just about every Aspect, but there haven't been many people trying to play her with Protection. I think this deck is a really unique way to play both CM and Marvel Champs in general. It doesn't have the firepower or thwarting potential of other builds and it's never going to do the kind of crazy stuff that Black Widow or Iron Man can in the end game, but it's satisfying in an entirely different way -- You get to be the enabler for your buddies to have a blast doing what they want to do knowing that you were the one who made it all possible.

Also, I should mention that this deck is entirely viable in Solo play as well, with the disclaimer that games tend to be really grindy and take forever. But once you get set up, it's nearly impossible for you to die so as long as you can kill the Villain before acceleration tokens pile to the sky, you're generally going to be fine, at least on non-Heroic difficulties.

I hope you try and enjoy this deck! Let me know what you think in the comments, and feel free to ask any questions. :)

Happy Blasting!

14 comments

Oct 10, 2020 ImpossibleGerman · 13933

At one point, I watched this deck, going last in the turn order, give myself and another player all of it’s distributable resources- Mansion, Carol’s draw, Helicarrier. Those resources smoothed out our turns and we squeezed out all the damage we could, leaving Taskmaster with 18 health.

ChaosTheory then casually finished loading up his Energy Channel with two more energy, popped it for 10 damage, laid down another, loaded up that one, and ended the game.

...the deck is good.

Oct 10, 2020 Schmendrix · 4209

Really like the angle taken for this deck and write up. It's awesome!

Oct 11, 2020 neothechosen · 9806

Great deck!! I wanna thank you for two reasons:

  1. the deck itself. I once tried tanking or gifting with CM, but somehow you managed BOTH much better in this masterpiece.

  2. Being obsessed with CM and She-Hulk, who both deserve much more love IMO!

Also, one question: is there a reason not to include Quincarrier? I usually use it to trigger Rechannel instead of Enhanced Reflexes because it doesn't run out of fuel after a few uses.

Thanks again!!

Oct 11, 2020 ChaosTheory · 2609

@neothechosenThanks for the kind words!

Quincarrier is a fine inclusion, there's nothing wrong with it. The reasons I don't include it in this list are

  1. It kinda fills a similar slot as Helicarrier, except Helicarrier can be given to teammates, and I'd really prefer to only run one of the two.
  2. It's a Mental resource and I'm trying to maximize the number of Energy resources in the deck.
  3. Enhanced Reflexes works similarly but at a cheaper initial cost. I can also run multiple copies of Enhanced Reflexes to find it sooner, and can have multiple copies in play. Plus, Enhanced Reflexes is an Energy resource itself so if I can't afford to play one at the moment it can be fed to Photonic Blast, Rechannel or Energy Channel.
  4. It's a Unique support that's in high demand, and I don't want it to be a dead card if a teammate needs to play theirs more than I need mine.

Finding Energy in this deck is also largely trivial, so I prefer to have cards that I can cycle with or play cheaply.

At the end of the day, it's not going to hurt the efficiency of the deck at all to throw it in, it's just sort of my preference.

Oct 12, 2020 neothechosen · 9806

Makes a lot of sense. Just the "unique" argument by itself makes perfect sense in a multiplayer game, I didn't think of it (been mostly playing solo lately...).

THX!

Oct 14, 2020 Novawyrm · 156

You could go even harder into buffing your teammates in multiplayer games if you added enough copies of Endurance and Down Time for each of your teammates.

This would allow you to further buff your teammates AND allows your teammates to not need to run these cards in their decks. I always run these two cards in my decks. So if my teammate was running them it would let me put other useful cards into my build. It is surprising how often those 3 hit points and slightly larger recovery are critical.

In a three player game you could add 3 copies of Endurance and two copies of Down Time. Everyone including you gets +3 HP. Plus if they need to flex down to heal that heal is more effective, keeping the hero in the future fight longer. Plus if a encounter card makes a player discard an upgrade they can just toss Down Time into your discard pile and keep all their build critical upgrades.

Endurance is an so it would also fit the build thematically.

Oct 18, 2020 dafair · 7

I have a very similar CM Protection deck I call Goddess of Energy that I love to play when my daughter plays Hulk Aggression and my son plays Ms. Marvel Justice. Commander, 2xAvengers Mansion and 2xHelicarrier means Hulk has up to 7 cards in hand and a 2 resource discount, making him truly a beast. And he can stay Hulk the entire time as i soak up all the damage and Ms. Marvel's events keep threat in check.

The three of us played that setup all the way through RoRS campaign, never switching out a single card until Red Skull, when Ms. Marvel added Spider-Man and Jessica Jones to the deck, dropping Daredevil and Quake.

Oct 22, 2020 M3t4lB0x (TLM) · 3037

@ChaosTheory you strike again! I've been dying to play CM in Protection and I've dabbled with her, but didn't have the time to find the balance needed to make her work. That you've put together a full on support deck like this is right up my ally. I have a Spider-Man protection deck I built to do the exact same thing. Pure support of your friends with defense and encounter card cancelling. That's my preferred play style in multiplayer, so any deck that achieves this is a prefect deck for me!! I cannot wait to play this next week!

Oct 22, 2020 M3t4lB0x (TLM) · 3037

ps, Since day one, I don't think I've ever called Energy Channel, but instead called it Genki Dama or Spirit Bomb. lol.

Oct 25, 2020 gustave154 · 21

Double spirit bomb wombo combo is actually possible with this deck. Love it

Mar 05, 2021 szuper · 1

I was playing this deck in the past with great success. Then I had a little break. However with the new cards like the power in all of is could be a huge improvement. Do you plan to update this deck?

Mar 05, 2021 ChaosTheory · 2609

@szuperI don't think The Power in All of Us would be a good fit here at all, actually. There are only 6 targets in the deck currently for it to hit and I'd have to take out something important to fit it in. Plus this deck has absolutely zero problems with economy.

I would consider putting in Miles because Carol can struggle with smaller amounts of damage. Also one card I actually think would be really good here isn't new at all: Luke Cage. He could potentially block three full villain attacks single handed, he offers a lot of attack value, and he is an energy.

But other than a few minor tweaks I don't think any of the cards that have released since I published this are worth swapping in over what's here already.

Mar 15, 2021 M3t4lB0x (TLM) · 3037

Now that I'm back to playing again with my group, this is one deck I am really looking forward to playing! Can't wait to break it out, and I like the Luke Cage addition, he's a great tank for this deck.

Jun 16, 2022 ryusora · 7

This deck seems like a lot of fun!