Gambit - Every part of the buffalo (Shakedown edition)

Version 2.0

This continues to be by far my favourite Gambit deck. It flows seamlessly across multiple playstyles, and unlike the lol-so-random vibe of an Adam Warlock pile, all the individal pieces play nicely with each other.

That said, after a dozen or so extra games I was finally ready to acknowledge that certian cards in the original version just weren't pulling their weight - plus there were some other new toys to test. Therefore!

Removed:

• X-Jet (too slow at setup), Chase Them Down (too circumstantial), the X-Mansion and Mutant Education suite (not enough board impact), Forge (not enough X-supports remaining in the deck for him to be worthwhile).

Added:

• The two missing dual resources: having those extra doubles makes for much quicker starts than the old X-Jet.
• Synch: who else remembered that there's another way to get +1DEF from a Basic card? Blocking for five (with Def Spec) even without Natural Agility, then readying from the power of pink kevlar, turns out to be really good against the vast majority of villains - and if they hit for 6+, well, at least you blocked the first five! Synch also has natural synergy with a certain other card below...
• Keep Up the Pressure: being able to 'store' a copy of Royal Flush until you're ready to offload with charge counters, Aggresive Energy and Warrior Skill makes the deck feel more like it has a real offensive combo rather than a fun thing that sometimes happens by accident. It also raises your theoretical maximum damage from a single Royal Flush to 21 - it turns out we were playing Blackjack, not Poker!
• Stepford Cuckoos: I'm probably over-paranoid about Advance, but I've been burned too many times and I'm naturally the risk-adverse type. Between this, Tempus and the three sources of Confusion, you're generally safe to flip down against virtually any villain, and sometimes hang around in Alter Ego for several turns. Honestly, if you're more of a risk-taker than I am you can probably ditch Tempus for Beak or Sunfire.
• Honorary X-Men (attached to self): If you are going to spend multiple turns in Alter Ego, why not benefit from the Professor X and Utopia readies for multiple Thief Extraordinaire activations? The extra hit point might even matter some day...
• Shakedown: The newest tech on the block. Between charge tokens, Warrior Skill and Synch, Gambit can pretty much guarantee that he will always kill minions with exact damage, so the card's value depends on the number of minions in the encounter deck and whether they lean nerdy or beefy. In my experience, this typically removed ~4 threat during the course of a game, which is good enough to justify a single 1-cost Upgrade in my book, especially in Aggression. Of course, there'll be matchups where it massively overperforms, and a few where it'll be functionally useless. Its real virtue is that you don't have draw it on a specific turn - you can play it when there's a lull, and leave it out until some victims come along. My one-sentence review would be "It's good enough that I'm keeping it in the deck, and definitely better here than War Room or Gatekeeper".

Version 1.0 Writeup:

The ragin' cajun's kit is notorious for pulling you in too many directions at once. He allows for some interesting and unusual builds - he's got the best alter-ego-only support in the game, f'rinstance - but each of those builds means treating some of his other cards as dead, or at least undesirable.

Want to play 100% in alter ego? Great! Pity about his now-useless character upgrades, not to mention his neutered hero ability and attack events. Playing him in Protection to turn Gambit's Guild Armor into a permanent Bamf! is also appealing, but now you've got no support for flipping down in solo and are no longer a Thief Extraordinaire (though Ready for a Fight is the cardboard exemplar of that meme where the guy's head is turned by another girl and his girlfriend is indignant, so I'll probably come back to that someday.)

But today's deck that attempts to ensure that every card in his kit is supported and enhanced is going to start from Aggression. There's no way of replicating Warrior Skill outside of Red, and the aspect is now versatile enough that you can scrounge up bootleg versions of other colours' effects in either Aggression or via Basic filler. Let's see what we've got!

• Since we're actually playing Aggression, we can bring Warrior Skill and Aggressive Energy to for pumped-up Royal Flushes. The dream is to play both Energys with a WS out plus three charge tokens for a maximum of 18 damage, but in practice you'll usually play it for twelve and be perfectly content. I didn't add other multihit attacks like Melee as I wasn't a fan of the cost curve - Precision Strike with Throw de Card provides some cheap, consistent minion control and healing, and that's good enough.
• Aggression also gives us Psylocke and Tempus for flipdown protection and, together with the ubiquitous Papa X, they unlock the Thief Extraordinaire+Thieves Guild and Creole Charmer thwarting suite (plus extra confuses from that last one). I added a couple of Chase Them Downs to round my thwarting out; I found I was mostly struggling with side-schemes, so Looking for Trouble and Into the Fray weren't particularly helpful.
• Speaking of high-threat side schemes, we have a perfectly cromulent Protection card at home in the form of Defense Specialist. 4DEF and a ready from Gambit's Guild Armor absorbs most of the damage put out by low-ATK villains, and if a point of damage dribbles through at least you got to draw a card out of it. Against serious villains you'll still be able to negate attacks occasionally with Natural Agility, and if it's not in hand you can at least block a minion with impunity for a free draw.
• With fewer recursion options than we would have in Leadership, two copies of Mutant Education at least let us play free Rogues slightly more often than we otherwise would. I'll confess that that's sophistry - they're really in there to cycle whichever is more urgent of Creole Charmer or Natural Agility. Usually not Royal Flush as the charge tokens don't accumulate quickly enough to make that worthwhile.
• The remainder of the deck consists of economy, enablers, and Goldballs. The man with big, golden balls ultimately persuaded me to take the Mutant Education/X-Mansion set, as the mansion's healing enabling him to swing for four for as long as I'm able to stay in alter ego is a highly seductive proposition. They're seductive balls.
• (Gambit also needs the healing more than you'd like. And Endurance!)

The end result really is toolbox-y, and gameplay shifts dynamically depending on what you have on the board, what you have in hand, and what obscenity the villain has brought out most recently.

It's likely that this isn't the most competitive way to play Gambit - picking a more unbalanced gameplan and sticking to it will produce showier results. Still, he can hang in most environments, and I was at least able to beat some of the easier end bosses with the deck. Too intimidated to try against the Big Three killers, though! And as with most Confusion-heavy decks, he loses a lot of steam against Stalwart.