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Aggro Brotherhood
Mark Slack
3/10/2006 
 Click here to discuss this article!Everyone is talking about the possibilities of combining Brotherhood and Avengers reservists into The Reservist Deck of the Future (tm). Apparently the Brotherhood reservists and Avengers reservists’ combo into a curve deck with off initiative tricks like Hawkeye and Wonderman and quite a bit of sheer plot twist power in the form of The Acolytes and Heroes in Reserve. But who wants to play that crud? The Brotherhood was founded in speed. TNB was the very first big deck way back in 2004 when Versus was released. People seem to be ignoring the aggro possibilities of the Brotherhood in favor of the more curve-oriented Brotherhood/Avengers combo. I wanted to take a closer look at what we've got in the way of sheer aggression. You'll note that this is not a Freedom Force deck. Since none of the Freedom Force characters are reservists, running a Freedom Force deck makes you ignore reservists almost entirely. Freedom Force will get you a few points of damage, but Boot to the Head and Ruins of Avalon will get you a lot more. The difference between +1 and +2 has never been so great.
First, let me answer the obvious question: where are The Acolytes? Simply put, it's awful in here. You'll never get more than a +3 out of it, and at that point Kill or be Killed is better. All your good characters are physical or huge anyway. The Acolytes is fine for the curve-to-seven Brotherhood reservist build, but this deck will have faceups. It won't have many, but it'll have enough that The Acolytes is not effective. The same logic keeps Heroes in Reserve out of the deck. Another notable absence is Sovereign Superior. The reason I chose not to run it is that you don't care enough about what drops you hit to waste deck space on this card. Every single slot serves as a resource in here. Sovereign Superior is not a reservist and it causes you to discard a reservist, which is very bad times when the deck wants a constant supply of reservists it can replace. This deck thrives on replacing its resources as quickly as possible. In a reservist deck, every replaced resource is the same as a drawn card. The only card in the deck that you can't play from the resource row is Crimson Commando. He's only here because the deck wants more than eight 2-drops, and you don't ever want to actually pay resource points for Amelia Voght if you can help it. The idea is to run as many effects that replace reservists or replace themselves as you can, in order to dig through your deck for your drops and as many pumps as possible. The character choices, for the most part, are obvious. You play every single reservist that costs 3 or less. At 4 and higher, you play reservists that replace reservists. This keeps your cards rolling through your resource row at as quick a pace as you can manage. However, there are a couple unusual choices. Crimson Commando Crimson Commando made the cut because of Amelia Voght's unusual situation. He's not a reservist, but he's extremely aggressive, and in this deck triggering his ability will be relatively easy. That said, if there were another Brotherhood reservist at 2 I'd be running him instead. Oh well. 4 Polaris, No Sabretooth Polaris cycles reservists and Sabretooth doesn't, but that's not the reason I cut Sabretooth. Polaris' ability will do much, much more damage than Sabretooth's 11 ATK. This team, and this set in general, are woefully short on guys with flight. Aside from Polaris, this deck actually has no characters with flying, which is a terrible thing for a deck focused on doing as much damage as possible as quickly as possible. Polaris makes sure that your opponent can't reinforce twice in a turn and makes sure he can't reinforce his smallest guy, both of which are a whole lot better than 11 ATK. Plus, if you're going to turn 6, Polaris will save you your best characters for that turn by removing flight from your opponents' characters. Shake, Rattle and Roll I'm undecided on this. Right now it's in the deck because you can replace both the Shake itself and a Ruins of Avalon or Wundagore Citadel, which gives you two new resources to play with and lets you flip up a new copy of the location. There aren't any more replacement effects I can run, so if I take this out it probably becomes Flying Kick or another combat pump. That may or may not be better than Shake, Rattle and Roll. However, you can occasionally screw with your opponent, especially Hellfire Club, by replacing their locations. Also, it allows you to replace non-reservist row cards, which can be extremely helpful. That little bit of added flexibility is what gives this card the nod. Click here to discuss this thread!
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