MisterAnderson71 · 156
I decided to test my Always Be Ronin deck on Expert Magneto and Expert Venom Goblin and ended up clowning them both after tweaking it to this new version. Im fairly confident that the result would be the same for Expert Ronan too but I have a game in progress with other characters so I wasn't able to test this deck out on him at the time of writing this.
NUMBER 1 PRIORITY You should mulligan hard for Friction Resistance during setup, only keeping DEF upgrades and a double resource. Then you'll off be and running down easy street soon after that. If you don't get it turn 1 you should still be OK - it might just take a little longer to get into your stride.
With 20(!) upgrades it should be fairly easy to build him up quickly straight out of the gate. Most of his Protection upgrades are cheap (1 cost) so its not unthinkable to have 3 down right away - in fact it might be hard to choose if you have a hand full of them! You'll have Innate Reflexes on turn 1 so its just about shaping what ever else you want. You'll barely take any damage even on turn 1 with a free defend in both Hero AND Villain phases.
I'd probably go with getting as much Retaliate damage out early so that you could get extra card draw from defeating minions with Change of Fortune and Unflappable once you have them on the table.
Adding some Ripostes and Desperate Defense works so well to trigger these and getting extra damage and readies on minions and whoever the main big bad is. And you can pay for them all with Friction Resistance! It's a thing of beauty!
Having a maximum 7 DEF and a 2 Retaliate (with an extra point of damage from Electrostatic Armor if you defend) once your fully built out makes you fairly invulnerable. It jumps out to 10 DEF if you've managed to play Maximum Velocity and The Best Offense...
Then you can hit or Thwart for 10 with Basic Actions
Then do another 10 damage and 10 thwart by playing a In Harms Way
And at that point it should be pretty much game over for the big bad!
I found against both these villains that I waited until I went through my deck once to then put Symbiote Suit out, as the extra encounters on Expert can be brutal until you've built your DEF up to at least 4 or 5.
I'm so enamoured with this deck that I'm going to try to 'speed run' true solo on Expert through ALL the scenarios! Wish me luck...
Luck!