Say hello to Nightmare, the scheming Fear Lord of the Nightmare World—his own little realm where nothing of consequence ever happens. Unless, of course, you consider the entire manifestation of the collective psyche of all living beings something of consequence. Don’t let the lack of fashion fool you—this guy is bad news. He feeds off the dreams of living beings as they sleep, drawing more and more power from them.
The only good news? He’s mostly stuck in his realm, as it's the only place where he can manifest his true power. The bad news? He’s often luring people into it.
Deadpool Annual (Vol. 5) #1
His only major weakness is his flair for drama. For example, you can always find him riding his favorite demonic horse—even though he’s probably faster than the horse itself. If you’re experiencing a nightmare with epic proportions, explosions, and dramatic irony, chances are Nightmare is directing it from behind the scenes.
But don’t mistake him for a weak demon. He’s as powerful as Dormammu and even Mephisto. If he’s after you, your only options are to never sleep again… or convince all of humanity to stop dreaming.
Dream Logic
Now this is what a Fear Lord looks like. Nightmare’s effect is so absurd that it’s only fair his body is a major drawback. His On Reveal replaces the text of each card in your hand with the text of a random card of the same cost. He can strip away harmful effects from cards with strong stat lines—and sometimes even grant them powerful new abilities. From Ebony Maw gaining Ant-Man’s text to The Destroyer inheriting Leader’s. Anything is fair game when the Fear Lord is at work.
Since no card in your hand is safe from Nightmare’s text-shuffling chaos, it’s smart to play your best low-cost utility cards before he hits the board. Cheap, impactful cards like Surge and Zabu, for example, are ideal to get out early before Nightmare rewrites your hand into a fever dream.
Sweet dreams? Not On His Watch.
When playing with Nightmare, look for cards that are well above the usual power curve. These typically come with a detrimental effect to balance their raw stats. With Nightmare in play, you get to keep the high stats while potentially replacing the downside with a powerful new ability.
That said, it’s important to keep the hype in check. Nightmare brings a level of variance we haven’t seen since Sersi, and every match with him will feel like a roll of the dice. Just because you’re removing a harmful effect doesn’t guarantee you’ll get something better in return. For every game where Starbrand gets replaced with Sage or Rocket & Groot, there’s another where it gets swapped with Electro or Corvus Glaive.
The silver lining is that Nightmare doesn’t auto-play those altered cards. You still get to decide whether to put them on the board, and that layer of control can be the difference between chaos and clever play.
Hurtful Words
The first place I’m gonna look at is Sauron’s. His gang features cards with some of the worst text we’ve ever seen and some of the highest power per energy cost. I’m talking about Ebony Maw, Lizard, Starbrand, Typhoid Mary, and even Redskull. Nightmare would not only offer another way to wipe away their effects, but it could also give you the chance to land some game-winning abilities in their place. My dream is Redskull wearing Iron Man’s Ongoing effect.
Since we just talked about Ebony Maw, there’s another clan he visits every other weekend: War Machine. These decks usually rely entirely on War Machine to do the heavy lifting of letting you ignore the restrictions of Ebony, Electro, and the Infinaut. With Nightmare, we now have another card we can count on for that important mission.
There are multiple cards with some form of harmful effects and not much going on in terms of synergy. Just at 1-Cost, we have Hydra Bob, Martyr, and Titania. If we’re playing with these guys, we might as well include some synergistic cards like Black Swan and Cull Obsidian. That’s already half a deck—I’ve got some ideas for the perfect 12 in my decks section.
Last one, Agatha is usually an awful card to have in hand. However, with Nightmare on the deck, we have another way of getting rid of her awful influence. Since she is just an extra card that starts in your hand, she gives you the possibility of having a bombshell of a card to play on the last turn. Imagine Agatha with Leader’s or Doctor Doom’s text. If you want an alternative playline with Agatha, we could go the discard route with Lady Sif, Moon Knight, Ghost Rider and the Black Knight.
Gotta Work On that Body
One other thing to keep in check is Nightmare’s awful body and how to handle it. There are plenty of cards that would usually be useful to get rid of his weak body. Since he replaces every text on every card in your hand, though, you can’t reliably use any of those effects unless you’re a top-deck god. However, Merlin changes that. With him on the field, you get one of his spells at the end of every turn. If you’re lucky enough to get Polymorph or Once and Future, you can turn Nightmare’s weak body into something useful, like extra Energy or a 4-cost card. I suspect these two will work great together, as Merlin has already proven to be a strong card.
Let me give you some decks to terrorize the dreams of your opponent.
Dualglove’s Day One Nightmare Decks
Flipping Nightmare
Nightmare’s most obvious home will look something like this. We have the Sauron Package featuring a ton of those bad Ongoing texts. We have three distinct ways of getting rid of those texts: Zero,Enchantress, and the new star, Nightmare. If for some reason we can’t get rid of those awful effects, we have Merlin to evolve them into more powerful cards. Just be careful with Shangchi, if you get your power controlled too often, don’t be afraid to slot in Armor in place of one of our cheap cards.
Black Unicorn
Big proof of concept. Let’s try mixing up Red Wing, War Machine and Nightmare. We have the usual War Machine Playline with Ebony, Electro and The Infinaut. We could use Nightmare to allow us to play with no worries about our Ebony and our Infinaut. Or we can follow through Redwing with our move cards in order to get our big boys onto the field. Electro and Luna can be swapped for our big cards with blink as well. So many play lines and so much to test, isn’t it fun?
Nightmare Drop
Dracula Dump is a deck that I like to play with from time to time. This powerful mixture is all about Nightmare. Dracula is the only card that you wouldn’t really want to scrub away the text with Nightmare as he’ll become a completely useless card most of the time. Everything else is fair game, specially those 1-Costed cards, keep them in hand if you have Black Swan on the field for a big surprise at the end of the game.
Surely It's Mephisto
Okay trust the process. This deck will play in many different ways depending on your draw. If you get Black Knight, you’ll want to discard Agatha by playing Lady Sif or Moon Knight, get the Ebony Blade and maybe bring her back with Ghost Rider. If you get an early Nightmare, don’t be afraid of playing him even if you’re ruining Iron Man or White Tiger, because you must get Agatha and a powerful effect just for the fun of it. The First Ghost Rider is here to both be a Nightmare Target and to also discard your 5-Drops for the other Ghost Rider to bring back.
Variants
Every Villain is Lime. Nightmare will have two options for you to choose but I hope you’ll enjoy green. Winking Studios Variant will be a “Spotlight” so be prepared to fork over 2400 golden bars. Perhaps Creative House Pocket’s will be the reasonable option costing only 1200 Gold.
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Final Thoughts
This is the FUN card of the season! If you enjoy doing random stuff and playing vastly different games every time then Nightmare is the card for you. Otherwise, I wouldn’t consider looking at the card. Also, I believe we aren’t at that critical mass level of cards that would be great with Nightmare, so perhaps his glory days are ahead of him when we get more cards to be played with him like we got Starbrand a couple of seasons ago. If you’re considering grabbing Nightmare, my suggestion is to wait a few days in order to better gauge how he fits the meta as his conditions won’t change for a while since our next few datamines have nothing that suits his playstyle.