Combos with Avalon Space Station - Phil Last time I reviewed a pretty obvious and useful combo in Colossus and Jean Grey. Today we move on to one of my favorite combos that I use in my current deck, which is a Brotherhood/X-men deck. As the name of this article implies - its negative zone and avalon space station. Lets start with Avalon Space Station. This card is simply awesome. Its great in any deck. I read the 2 winning decks earlier today on pojo and even the FF deck is running one. But this card is indispensable in a brotherhood deck. So lets look at it: Avalon Space Station: Discard a card from your hand to return a target character from your KO pile to your hand. *****OR***** Discard a Brotherhood character from your hand to return 2 characters from your KO pile. Can we say hand advantage.... Every turn starting on turn 2 your KO pile will be free of characters. They will always be in your hand. Each time you use the station you get +1 hand advantage. Some people think hand advantage isnt important in Marvel cause you get to draw 2. Keep in mind every turn you will be putting 2 on the field (a resource and a character). That leaves you with 4 cards for almsot the whole game to do stuff with. Playing plot twists from hand, powering up characters, discard costs like Sabertooth, Gambit, or Negative Zone (hint hint). All you get is 4 cards to last you the game, unless you dont recruit that turn, in which case you have only saved 1 card. And that doesnt even cover recruiting and using free equipments and such. Cards that make you discard usually have REALLY good effects. So use them! Avalon Space Station will let you. Its amazing. So the combo is with Negative Zone. People think Negative Zone is only good to bring out the negative zone creatures, which are good - but not great. Well it has a 2nd, more costly effect that is far superior. So lets look at Negative Zone: Negative Zone: As an additional cost to flip Negative Zone, discard a card from your hand (BOO!!!) *****AND***** Discard 2 cards from hand to KO a stunned character In other words, its practically finishing move. But if you are keeping up with the resource curve you rarely have a spare character to exhaust each turn to play finishing move. And, you can only use finishing move once. Negative Zone, on the other hand is a location - you can use it every turn starting on turn 4. You essentially get an infinite finishing move without the exhausting character part, leaving your recruited characters to attack other things, reinforce other characters, or atk directly. BUT... 2 cards from hand is hefty when you only have 4 cards to play with in your hand. Even the flip cost is kinda hefty with only 4 cards in hand. So you have out your space station already, right? Problem is now solved. Your quicksilver went to the KO pile turn 3. So toss a 2nd quicksilver from your hand with the space station and take them both back. Remember, the discard is an activation cost - so its in the KO pile for the resolution when you take 2 cards. Now you have constant fodder for your negative zone. Anytime you stun ANY character just toss 1 to KO him. Now thats a great effect! And any turn you dont use negative zone you get +1 hand advantage from Avalon anyway. Which leads me to a great combo i use in my current deck until turn 4 or any turn i dont use negative zone. And thats x-corporation and avalon space station. x-corporation: discard a card from your hand to gain 2 endurance OR discard an xmen character to gain 4 endurance. And you say: but one's an xmen location and other is brotherhood. That means you need mutant nation to use them together effectively. Now you are talking 3 card combo here, and thats hard to pull off for such a mediocre effect. And I say yes and no. Technically, you dont need an xmen to use its effect. Just gain 2 by discarding a brotherhood and then get him back along with the activation cost of the space station. That's 2 free endurance every turn, starting on turn 2. On turn 6 or 7 you have amasses 10-12 extra. Now thats not too shabby. But lets take a closer look. Obviously this combo works great for an xmen/brotherhood deck, and when you do get mutant nation it is just awesome. But you dont need mutant nation to work it well in the combo deck. You will have both xmen and brotherhood in your deck. So toss an xmen character to get back 4 endurance. And then toss a brotherhood for the space station, and get both back. This combo is especially good in turn 5-10 (the end of the game) when you have left over worthless 1 and 2 and even 3 drops still in your hand. Just recycle them each turn for 4 endurance. A tourny level deck that gains 4 endurance each turn is really tough to beat over the long haul of 8-9 turns (and an extra 4 end. each turn will ensure its makes it that long if you dont end it yourself). The lone problem with these combos is that they rely on the Avalon Space Station. If you dont get it fairly early (by turn 3-4) you have really diminished or even stopped the effectiveness of either combo. And the negative zone combo really needs you to keep your KO pile empty and your hand full. To remedy this you obviously play 4 space stations. But even that wont guarantee you get it. There are always games when you get all 4 of them clumped together as the bottom 4 cards. Some cards to help ensure these combos: The first is not a card - its your mulligan. Jsut toss 4 and draw 4 new ones. Its especially nice when you have a crappy opening hand. It gets you 4 cards closer to drawing it. Even if you have an OK or even good hand, you can mulligan anyway. It all depends HOW good that hand really is. Base of operations will help, but keep in mind you are running 3 locations (probably in multiples), so another location may not be very smart, especially when you may also be running savage land, asteroid M, or another really nice brotherhood or xmen (or if you combo brotherhood to a different affiliation) location. 3rd card, and a good one: as mentioned earlier mutant nation helps. Not only does it let you use the other affiliation for EITHER effect, it also lets you draw a card. Other cards like longshot that let you draw cards are nice as well. Cards that help thin the deck or let you get a location (like pogo plane if you are running FF/BH) also help. So once again, without outlining a whole deck, as the negative zone/Space station combo will fit into any brotherhood or BH combo deck, and the x-corp combo fits into any BH/xmen deck I will give the basics. First, 4 space stations. It is great without any of its combo partners. If you draw a few, just use the extras as discard costs OR save them incase of a Kaboom. The negative zone I run 2 of. It is usable in late game for one KO without a space station to help. And the + side is you dont need to run finishing move, so you have a few free spots in your deck. The xcorp i run 1 of, although you could run 2. But you are already running 6 other locations, so you dont want to run too many. And if you are really fond of your savage land or danger room then use these combos as spare bonus combos you only get once in a while and run less copies of them. Thanks for reading my 2nd article! Send any comments, questions, and etc to bob4marley@aol.com Phil Moravec