Uncanny X-Men #281 (1991, Gold Team)

Uncanny X-Men #281 has the debut of Gold Team as the X-Men split up to tackle multiple threats, with Storm as Gold Team leader alongside Archangel, Colossus, Iceman, and Jean Grey. This deck takes a few liberties and isn't exactly thematically "pure" due to the cards available and trying to adhere to deck building rules. Iceman is in protection, while Phoenix is in leadership.

I wanted to build a Storm justice deck because Gold Team, justice = yellow, and Storm is team leader and all, sooo... I had to cheat the theme a little here. In #281, Jean Grey "dies", but in #282 she possesses White Queen until she gets her body back, so it kinda works...? Sadly there's just no way to legally get Iceman in this deck as of now. With the release of Cameo however, you could switch to leadership, swapping Bishop out for Phoenix, Mission Training for Danger Room Training, Mutant Peacekeepers for "To Me, My X-Men!", and then sort of sliiiiiide in Iceman via his Snow Clone ally. It's not perfect but the only other way to get a full Gold Team theme is to build it as an Iceman deck, and that didn't feel right to me. Then again, you could always just put leadership Phoenix and protection Iceman in the deck anyway, bending the rules for sake of the theme. It's not like this is a regulated game and you'll get banned from playing for doing it. But strictly by the rules, there's just no way to get the fire psychic and the ice guy to play nicely here.

While he doesn't appear in #281, Bishop becomes a major player with Gold Team a few issues later, as does the support of Professor X and Forge, so I added them just to fill out the allies a bit. If I'm already pulling from #282 for a pseudo-Jean Grey, I figure might as well grab a few others that appear not long after who are pretty iconic to Gold Team.

Mutant Education and X-Men Instruction to allude to Storm being an excellent instructor at the X-Mansion. Mutant Peacekeepers is sort of the big struggle of Gold Team as Sentinels threaten one side and Bishop wanting to push back during the Gold Team run in the nineties. You could play with the numbers of copies of these events or swap them out for other events if you want.

Coming "soon": I've worked out a Blue Team deck, which is yet another Cyclops leadership deck for the moment, but I'm still tinkering around with it. :)