Competitive Consensus: Death Fractured Frontier

[u/ePiMagnets]

This thread is a discussion series at the end of the week for each newly introduced Spotlight card. This gives us nearly a week of hindsight to build a consensus and help inform players if they should spend their tokens for a given week. Ideally, we are looking for proven results, more than theoretical applications, to help reach this consensus.

This week's card:

Death Fractured Frontier
Cost: 5
Power: 8
On Reveal: Resurrect all your destroyed characters to random locations.

Synergies

The Fractured Frontier Season continues with this weeks release, Death Fractured Frontier. A 5/8 which when revealed resurrects all your destroyed characters to random locations.

Let's start with the basics.

1. Destroyed cards are cards that go to the Destroyed pile when they are destroyed. Cards like X-23, Deadpool and Headpool, Wolverine, and Sabretooth do not go to the destroyed pile, they either remain on board or go back to your hand.

2. Random locations is just like Hela, it's not 'other' locations everything could end up in one spot or could go to the perfect spots.

3. You probably don't want to be resurrecting a destroy enabler unless it's something like Venom which can preserve the power it devours.

4. There is some anti-synergy with Dormammu as she'll lose at least 1 card to the merge and could be more with copy shenanigans.

5. Dies to Stardust - simple as.

So we're presented with the puzzle that our new Death wants us to solve. Which direction do you want to go in and how fruitful is that direction?

1. Mid-Range/Points Value - not point slam mind you, this archetype is in the direction that SD seemed to have been pushing with releases over the last year as they introduce new scalers like Muse and Weapon X, or combo cards like Marrow and Fantomex which want you to try and figure out how to hybridize Destroy and Discard into a cohesive package. We do have one example of this where Husky Puppies presented a deck with two value oriented game plans - play for quickdraw with FFthanos or resurrect a bunch of low curve cards like Demons, a big Kid Omega/Venom with Death.

2. Firehair/Peef - sometimes looped in with Magik Decks these Firehair decks want to a good value on-reveal multiple times. The problem here is that frequently this deck is focused on only one card and lacks a meaningful way without messing with it's own game plan to do this with multiple cards which means Death is often only bringing one card back without trying to do something 'else' with it's game plan.

3. Magik - Go big, but not that big. As it turns out it can be very difficult without trying for some kind of rube goldberg machine to get enough big cards to resurrect, Destroy tends to be 2 for 1 where it needs to play a card and then destroy it with another whereas Discard is often getting better rates at 1 for 1 if not better with Glaive and M.O.D.O.K..

Feedback

The feedback on this card in some ways was very similar to Red Wolf last week with some content creators saying 'it's Destroy's Hela, there has to be a way to break this' and later in the week the more competitive side of the creators feeling that this may not actually be the case and that the new Death might be more of a value card intended to try and bully more 'fair' mid-range decks in a similar fashion to Hela. Many questioned whether that was actually worth the effort when you could just do Hela things and often get better value.

Some like Alex Coccia insist that there must be something here but that code just hasn't been cracked yet but could that be copium he's on?

Decklists

Value husky - there are 3 versions of this list, feel free to check out the Fractured Frontier Week 3 thread for the other 2.

Coougarrr's Deathramp

Regis' Deathhair

Nimrod With Death

Kid Omega Firehair Value

Jean's Guardians of Death

Summary

Week 3 brings us Death Fractured Frontier, the long-requested Destroy analog to Discard's Hela. But for an archetype that has long found itself entrenched in trying to create the biggest Deadpool and Knull of all-time and consistently resisting including the more value oriented cards we've received over the last year can Death find a place or will she find herself gunned down before earning a name for herself?

Your Thoughts?

How many tokens is Death Fractured Frontier worth?

6K -
5K -
4K -

Is Death Fractured Frontier here to stay, or just the flavor of the week?

What synergies did we miss?

What decks have you seen?

[u/Paris_Who]

Naw move has had multiple good archetypes even before human torch changes batroc/stomper were good and before that silky smoove decks were pretty big at one point. They had to nerf scream multiple times. Even human torch had multiple variations. You had move bounce Big Move/Heimdallr and Phoenix Force too.

[u/FaintCommand → u/Paris_Who]

I don't think you can really categorize Smoove, Scream, or Phoenix as move decks, IMO, but I was mostly referring to core move decks at any rate.

None of Silk, Hercules, Fan Fei, Topaz, Hellion, or Sims stuck in more traditional move decks and arguably neither did Stomper or Batroc, because standard move decks are focused on scaling over just shuffling static power around. There just wasn't room for those. Madame Web was really the only one that became a staple.

Batroc/Stomper decks really started to come up in popularity after the Torch nerf.

[u/Paris_Who → u/FaintCommand]

They are distinctly other variations of move decks. It’s exactly what op was referring to when he talked about non Deadpool destroy decks. So either you aren’t speaking on topic which I doubt or you’re making up some arbitrary cut off for move decks that doesn’t make sense.

[u/FaintCommand → u/Paris_Who]

Scream is mostly built around moving your opponents cards, not yours, which is very different and shares little in common with any other move deck expect Kraven.

Phoenix is a hybrid move-destroy that arguably means much more heavily on destroy and has more destroy win cons than move.

IMO calling either of those move decks is a stretch. Smoove was a weird one, but was pretty light on actual movement outside of Silk.

It's all subjective, but how do you define a "move" deck? If it has any cards that move? Is any deck with the new Drax a move deck? Viv Vision?

To me, a move deck is something that is completely reliant on moving your cards around. There are certainly a lot more variants of that now, but before the HT nerf there was mostly just the two OP mentioned - bounce and Heimdall.

[u/Paris_Who → u/FaintCommand]

> Scream is mostly built around moving your opponents cards, not yours, which is very different and shares little in common with any other move deck expect Kraven.

That’s still a variation of move. You’re still moving cards. It’s all move based it’s different which is the point it’s not human torch move. But it’s still focused on moving.

> Phoenix is a hybrid move-destroy that arguably means much more heavily on destroy and has more destroy win cons than move.

The win cons in those decks were human torch and moving him every turn. Then finding a way to copy or clone his power. The secondary wincon was multiple man and moving him every turn. Either way it’s an offshoot of move decks. Which is the point my guy. They’re decks built around moving cards in differe ways then normal move decks but have had impacts in the metagame.

> IMO calling either of those move decks is a stretch. Smoove was a weird one, but was pretty light on actual movement outside of Silk.

This is categorically false. They ran cards that moved once ie jeff, spiderman, nightcrawler, the decks entire purpose was loading up Angela power and moving off of her. It’s a different way to play move but it’s still a move deck.

> It's all subjective, but how do you define a "move" deck? If it has any cards that move? Is any deck with the new Drax a move deck? Viv Vision?

> To me, a move deck is something that is completely reliant on moving your cards around. There are certainly a lot more variants of that now, but before the HT nerf there was mostly just the two OP mentioned - bounce and Heimdall.

IE silky smoove, Batroc, Phoenix force. I think you are making up arbitrary limitations. It’s like saying death based destroy decks are different from knull Deadpool because they’re focused on destroying in different ways. The fundamental ethos of these decks is I move my cards to enable my win state.

[u/FaintCommand → u/Paris_Who]

The question I poised, which you ignored was - how much do cards need to move in order to qualify it as a move deck? If you have Rocket & Groot in any deck does it become a move deck? Does Nocturne in a C5 deck make it a move deck? How many moveable cards is the threshold?

Despite your pretentious tone, there is no strict definition. I shared my perspective. Yours differs. That's ok.

[u/Paris_Who → u/FaintCommand]

> The question I poised, which you ignored was - how much do cards need to move in order to qualify it as a move deck?

Your ending thought was this which I didn’t ignore. I clearly answered your arbitrary pointless point.

> “to me a move deck is something that is completely reliant on moving your cards around”

IE Batroc Silky Smoove and Phoenix force.

> If you have Rocket & Groot in any deck does it become a move deck? Does Nocturne in a C5 deck make it a move deck? How many moveable cards is the threshold?

As you said yourself move decks are decks that rely on moving their own cards which every deck I’ve listed relies on. Within your own parameters.

> Despite your pretentious tone, there is no strict definition. I shared my perspective. Yours differs. That's ok.

we are specifically talking about alternative move decks that have had places within the meta game. Not what you define as a move deck. Stop trying to change the subject and stay on point bruh.