The game starts on turn one for the deck. Here’s an overview of how I play the list above on a turn-by-turn basis. The curve builds I tested were no better or worse at stalling, but they were a lot more consistent and less dependent on luck of the draw. You could play something like Crisis on Infinite Earths to help with the uniqueness, but that just introduces yet another crucial effect the deck needs to find. The “team” just needs a lot of specific cards to get going, and it’s tough to dig through the deck and find them while dropping multiple low drops with possible uniqueness issues at the same time. They played like A Child Named Valeria decks that were worse in every way except for their ability to run The Elektra Situation. A lot of people prefer to go off-curve with the Illuminati, and that’s fine, but I personally found in testing that those builds can be really finicky.

There are a million ways that an Illuminati deck can be built, but here is my personal list:Īs you have probably seen, I chose to run a curve deck. The fact that Elektra Situation is a card is the reason I think that the Illuminati are not just an OK stall team for fans of the group, but a powerful force that can be very effective in the hands of a good player who can sniff out the right metagame to play them in. It is an incredibly good card for shutting down specific characters, and in a lot of cases it just beats Legend decks (or any decks that rely on specific drops) outright. For the Illuminati, I feel that The Elektra Situation is that reason. It must do something relevant, and it must do that thing better than any other deck can do it. One of the most important things a good competitive deck must have is a reason for existing. Taken at face value, it would seem that Illuminati is just a little too low on oomph to be a serious contender. Their endgame is strong, but it doesn’t just win outright. Their gameplan is solid but fragile, reliant on recruiting a specific mix of characters and ensuring that they don’t die.

They are competent at stalling games, but they don’t have the oppressive stall suite that teams like Spider-Friends or even Green Lantern do.

This time I’d like to tackle the Illuminati, a group of characters that do not belong to any single team but nevertheless have been given a considerable amount of support cards with which a stall deck can be built.ĭespite having some access to some really good cards, however, a lot of serious Illuminati players quickly realize that the Illuminati don’t work particularly well as “team” in general. As promised, I’m back with another deck discussion post.

Illuminati playing cards list of cards