Shopping Spree

DIGGING DEEPER

9/1/202510 min read

Shopping Spree is a card with a very mixed reputation. Some love it, some hate it. I think this is because the strength (and fun) of this card depends on certain factors. Do you play solo or multiplayer? Do you have any cards that make it easier to trigger? Did you include any additional cards to take advantage of the effect? There's a lot to talk about with this card, so lets get started!

Shop or Save?

Before getting into all of the ways to make use of this card's When Defeated effect, lets go over the other way to use it: by NOT clearing it. There's two reasons to do this: 1) Masterplan bait and 2) threat dumping

When playing on expert, you don't want to reveal Masterplan with zero side schemes in play, as it will put one in play. Having Shopping Spree out gets around this. It will add 4 threat to Shopping Spree, but do nothing else. If you weren't planning on clearing it anyway, then it essentially negates the encounter card. It will have 6 threat on it now, which is not worth dealing with even if you wanted to. But there's no harm in just ignoring it all game.

The one card we are looking at with "threat dumping" is the basic Storm ally. You can use Storm's ability to move threat from another scheme onto Shopping Spree. Since you aren't planning on ever clearing that scheme, it's as if she is clearing the threat rather than just moving it, and this essentially makes Storm a 4 THW ally. If you want to see a deck make use of this strategy, check out my deck: Mutant Investors.

If Shopping Spree ever ends up with extra threat, whether intentional or through encounter card effects, you can always get rid of it by swapping player side schemes. In 1 and 2 player, there can only be one in play, 3 or 4 player there can be 2. Whenever another gets played, it replaces one that was already in play. So you can replace Shopping Spree with something like Build Support, and then all of that threat disappears. You can then put Shopping Spree back in play later, and it goes back to 2 threat!

Buying the Essentials

Shopping Spree lets you go shopping for Item cards, and the first ones that should come to mind are the two in her kit: her Coat and Sunglasses. These are really good cards that add a considerable amount of damage and threat removal to your events, so having a way to reliably get them into play is nice. But are we really getting a good deal, or are they overpriced?

Let's start with the most basic scenario, which is also the worst case: No extra Items, no ways to clear Shopping Spree easier, and no extra synergies. The only way to clear Shopping Spree here is by exhausting in alter ego twice. Jubilee has a lot of status in her kit, which makes flipping down to alter ego easy. You get Shopping Spree in play on turn 1, and can immediately clear the first threat. You will probably flip up to hero form, and then on turn 2 you can flip back down to defeat the scheme and get your item. 99% of the time, Jubilee exhausts for her ability to generate a resource rather than to activate. So by exhausting twice, you are basically losing out on 2 resources, over the course of 2 turns. The Coat or Sunglasses cost 2, but they are 3 effective resources, so you actually save one resource in the process.

So while its not very flashy, even in its most basic form, Shopping Spree is worth clearing. Most Jubilee builds will have some additional attack or thwart events to capitalize on her Items with.

So even in solo, you can get some use out of this card. But where it really shines is in multiplayer. So for the rest of this article, that's what we are going to focus on. We will go over all of the ways to replay it, clear it, and all of the rewards we can get!

Frequent Shopper

But in multiplayer, you can also rely on your teammates, and there's several that come with great options. She-Hulk has Legal Practice and Superhuman Law Division, Valkyrie's Flight of the Valkyrior (if triggered in alter ego), Spider-Man's Jefferson Davis, Spider-Man's Spider Tracer (alter ego), Storm's Hurricane, Gambit's Theif Extraordinaire alter ego ability, his Theive's Guild, and his Creole Charmer, Maria Hill's Illiad (in alter ego), Silk has J. Jonah Jameson, and the upcoming Tigra hero has Precinct HQ.

These abilities are not all created equal. While Valkyrie technically makes the list, using Flight of the Valkyrior on Shopping Spree is not very efficient. The best heroes to help clear Shopping Spree are going to be Gambit, Storm, She-Hulk, Silk, Maria Hill, or Tigra.

All the Items

Threat can't be removed from this scheme by heroes or allies. So how do you clear it then? You want to look out for alter ego actions, and supports. Its printed ability lets anyone clear 1 threat from it by exhausting their alter ego. This works well enough if you only want to trigger it once per game, but if you are building a deck around reusing Shopping Spree, this isn't going to cut it. In leadership, E.V.A. can clear it. In protection, we have the new S.H.I.E.L.D. support Ops Room. Aggression even has War Room. But Justice has the most options out of any aspect: there's Breaking and Entering (in alter ego), Homeland Intervention (in alter ego), Beat Cop, Surveillance Team, The Douglass, The Raft, and Disguise. Justice has by far the best options if you are looking for the easiest ways to clear it.

When you clear Shopping Spree, it goes to your discard rather than the victory display. This means that you can use it multiple times in one game. Jubilee's alter ego ability lets you search for it and put it back into play, but only from your deck. So you just need a way to get it back into your deck. You could wait till your deck runs out and you have to reshuffle, but this is way too slow if you want to go on multiple shopping trips. Mutant Education is the perfect solution. It gets the side scheme back in the deck, as well as another identity-specific card of your choice, like a Plasmoid Energy.

Mutant Education is fantastic, but now we have another option: Manifold. This ally will grab your side scheme from deck or discard and add it to your hand. The advantage of this one is that it finds any side scheme, and can be used for other players too. So we can not only go shopping, we can easily get powerful side schemes like Build Support and Call for Backup whenever you need them.

Payment Plans

There's about a dozen basic and aspect Items. The ones that stand out for me are Bloodgem, Cell Phone, Disguise, Energy Barrier, Invisibility Gear, and Side Holster.

Cell Phone is one that has the most generic value for any deck. If your teammates don't have any Items in their deck, give them a phone. Its 3 extra damage or thwart wherever you need it at the very least. But in multiplayer, it has a more important use of allowing off-turn activations.

Bloodgem is a very exciting purchase on the right hero. While it's only 0 cost, this card can only be played by mystics. Shopping Spree gets around this limitation, allowing anyone to play it! This is best with heroes that either have a large health pool, like to take damage, or really need a resource generator. Heroes that really want this include She Hulk, Hulk, Thor, Spider-Ham, Wolverine, and X-23.

Side Holster doesn't see play all that often, but for some weapon decks, insuring that you can get this into play is a big deal. Try it with an aggression deck, especially one running the new hotness, Firepower.

Try pairing your Shopping Spree deck with someone running a Repurpose build, or a Change of Fortune deck, with Energy Barriers.

Disguise is a perfect target for Shopping Spree, since it lets a player clear the scheme by exhausting alter ego a single time. Jubilee can bring 3 copies of this, and you can then pass them out to other players. Having an Invisibility Gear or 2 doesn't hurt either, its an okay secondary shopping item, and works as a good last defense against attacks.

Shopping List

The following is a list of all of the heroes with Item cards in their kit, with the cost of the card and how impactful it is to get it consistently with Shopping Spree.

Adam Warlock

Ant Man

Bishop

Captain America

Cyclops

Doctor Strange

Falcon

Gambit

Ghost Spider

Hawkeye

Iceman

Iron Man

Magik

Nick Fury

Phoenix

Rocket Raccoon

Rogue

Scarlet Witch

Spider-Man (Peter)

Spider-Man (Miles)

Star Lord

Storm

Vision

Wasp

Winter Soldier

Thats all this time! While it might seem like a bit of a niche card, I'm a big fan of Shopping Spree. I love cards like this that reference specific traits, as any new cards that come out with that trait can change how we look at it.

Shopping with Friends

I made an extensive list of every Item found in hero signature kits, but its a very long list, so you can find it at the end of the article. For now, I want to just go over my favorite shoppers.

My absolute favorites here are Storm and Gambit. They both have the ability to easily clear the threat on Shopping Spree, and they each have good Item cards.

Storm's Item is her Cape, which gives her Aerial and an extra ready each turn. It's normally 3 cost, so getting it for free is a steal. A cool trick that you can do is to attack or thwart first, swap the weather to Hurricane to defeat Shopping Spree, put her Cape into play, and then immediately trigger the Cape off of the weather swap that you just did and ready her back up. Yep, the timing on that works! Since she will have guaranteed aerial, going with an aerial build is a great idea here. Storm really wants Cell Phones too, so that you can better time when to swap the weather supports. And she can run a pretty strong Repurpose build alongside a Shopping Spree Jubilee deck. I have a repurpose Storm deck that was build specifically to go with Jubilee- Mall Rats: Ep. 2, but any Storm deck will work great!

Gambit has 2 Item cards. His Staff and his Armor. Both are cheap and of medium impact, so not the most exciting choices. But having 2 cards to grab, and having such easy ways to clear Shopping Spree, makes him a top pick. These two cards play well into a defensive Gambit deck, I suggest bringing Fortune Favors the SHY.

Iron Man is another big one. His Arc Reactor is one of his most important cards, and it's an item. He also wants more tech cards, and both Energy Barrier and Invisibility Gear are good tech cards that are Items as well. The classic Iron Man-Perfected is perfect for this.

Going shopping with Falcon so that he can repeatedly spam Talon Line is really interesting to me. This is something that I've been messing around with lately. I ran him in a S.H.I.E.L.D. justice deck to both take advantage of Global Logistics to improve his Eagle-Eyed ability, and make use of both Homeland Intervention and Surveillance Team to clear Shopping Spree. My unpublished deck for this can be found here: Falcon Goes Shopping for S.H.I.E.L.D.

She-Hulk is a fantastic shopper with her Superhuman Law Division, which lets her clear it with one mental resource. turtle-dude made a cool repurpose deck that would be great paired with Jubilee! The deck is called Legal Loophole, and it tries to use Tackle to keep the villain stunned so that you don't discard Superhuman Strength. This is even better with Jubilee around, since she can help keep the villain perma-stunlocked! The deck doesn't have much mental resources for the law division, so I'd add a Bloodgem here to fix that issue.

Ghost Spider has 3 Item cards and they are all pretty nice to have. Boomguy's Parental Disguise deck is perfect for shopping. It already has a copy of Disguise in it. I'd consider just adding Manifold to help Jubilee recur Shopping Spree.

Been Caught Stealing

There's a lot of ways that you can make use of Shopping Spree. You could simply throw a couple copies of Mutant Education into any Jubilee deck, and call it a day. Its not hard to clear the scheme in multiplayer. Exhaust Jubilee to remove 1 threat, then any player who wants an item just exhausts their alter ego to remove the second threat. If you just happen to be playing with someone like Storm or Iron Man who has a killer Item card, this is a really nice bonus.

But on the other hand, you can go all in on the support role, and that's exactly what I did with my featured deck today! The deck is called Been Caught Stealing, as that's what it feels like getting all these free Items. The deck write up goes into all the details, but in general it uses some stuff that we already talked about like Manifold and Disguise. We are even sporting The Douglass here, and it works so well in this deck! There's 47 cards because its a very fluid deck. Depending on what other decks I'm playing with, cards are cut, passed out to other players, or swapped.

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