I Thwart, Then I Thwart, Then... – Quicksilver (Legacy)

The Plan

Quicksilver can make a LOT of basic thwarts in a turn. A ton, in fact. What this deck does is incredibly simple as a result, but also very fun.

The entire goal is to get Quicksilver's basic THW stat up as high as possible. This means succumbing to the temptation of Symbiote Suit, which is something I try not to do as I honestly believe that card is a mistake, but it's also so ridiculous for Quicksilver in particular that I can't avoid it.

Between the suit, Heroic Intuition, and Hyper Perception, we can get our baseline to 4. Maximum Velocity can take us up to 6 for a turn, and we can theoretically blow all 3 Civic Duty upgrades at once in order to up to 9 THW, then play Always Be Running 4 times for a total of 6 THW actions in a single turn. Somehow manage to also use 3 copies of Making an Entrance with three of those thwarts and our total hypothetical thwarting goes up to 60 threat in a single turn. Chances are you won't need to do that much, I don't know when you'd ever need to remove 60 threat in a single turn, and it'd require a magical christmasland turn (7 cards in hand is feasible with alter ego+suit, Friction Resistance, helicarrier, Deft Focus would alloy you to pay for them all), but you could and that's what matters.

Most of the time, it's more than enough to sit removing a minimum of 6 threat per turn with 2 basic THW actions. If threat stays under control, that's when you can start throwing some basic ATKs, confusing the villain with Upside the Head.

Clear the Area is basically here because of 2-player threat numbers. It's incredibly common for a Scheme to come in with 5 threat (3+1p hinder) which means with a basic and 2 you can clear it. It's also an incredibly resource-efficient way to remove Confuse, because there's nothing worse than getting Confused as Quicksilver. If his basic Thwart is cancelled, he doesn't perform the action, and thus cannot ready. Brutal.

Mulligan tips

In your opening hand, you're looking for at least one of:

• Hyper Perception
• Heroic Intuition
• Friction Resistance

You need your Thwart up early to do your job, and you need Friction Resistance because have you seen how many 1-cost cards are in this deck? It's 19. Deft Focus will help in a pinch, but only for Always Be Running. The reason we have two of them is because I actually found myself wanting to discount more than one card per turn once the deck got thin enough. You can't use them together, but they're cheap to play and can really help with discounting superpowers. Which leads me to a big...

Umm Aktchually

We need to talk about Speed Cyclone because the top Reddit thread on this question is an old one that I no longer believe is accurate to the current rules.

As of RRG 1.7, here's one the rules for X-values:

• For costs involving the letter X, the value of X is defined by card ability or player choice, after which the amount paid may be modified by effects without changing the value of X

Step 2 of playing a card (where you check how much it costs) involves the new line:

If a card has a resource cost of X, the player playing that card chooses the value of X during this step.

Then in step 4 you:

Apply any modifiers to the cost(s).

This means that you absolutely can specify that X is 2, then use Deft Focus and Helicarrier to decrease the amount you pay to zero. I'm so glad this is finally clarified because it was deeply annoying previously. Anyway, soapbox over.

Always Being Running

One thing that should be fairly obvious here is just how much of our deck we're dropping on the table at once. While you're probably going to win before you get to that point, you can theoretically get down to 19 cards in your deck and 20 on the table (16 upgrades, 2, supports, 3 allies in play). This means with 4 copies of Always Be Running you can... always be running. This raises your ability to thwart and confuse the villain significantly, and eventually even start doing decent damage due to Float Like a Butterfly - though you may actually want to consider giving this to someone else if you're not able to attack regularly.

I will stress that this deck is hyper focused on Thwarting and allowing a second hero to do most of the rest of the work, so I don't know if this would be as effective solo, but in 2-player we've been able to make threat a complete non-factor for some extremely thwart-intense villains.