Hello and welcome to Nope, my mono Cosmic Lockdown main deck, aka - my baby. 
This puppy is named for the sci-fi horror film of the same name, which is both one of my favourite movies ever, and for the feeling it is meant to invoke in my opponents, which’ll be apparent quickly. It is still a work in progress, but I am getting quite happy with it, and thought I would share it.
Cosmic Lockdown, for those not familiar, is a ‘control’ strategy based around the El Verde Entity x Flatwoods Monster loop. El Verde is used to recall Flatwoods back up into your hand, so you can play her contract ability again and again, which allows you to name a page type that cannot be interacted with until the beginning of your next turn. This allows you to control and ‘lockdown’ the board, meaning your opponent’s strategy is useless while you can take your time to setup your winning moves unheeded. I will go over how to play this deck later for those who want to try something similiar.
Tournament wise; I have only played an earlier version of this deck in a formal tournament, before I figured out how to play it properly - I am not a naturally good TCG player by my own admittance, so honestly its been a learning experience. I state this to say that if you decide to build some version of this deck, be prepared that I have missed an obvious hole, or that I might be totally wrong about all this. That being said, someone DID build a ‘hate deck’ to counter this, once, so that’s one review! But let’s have a look at the cards.
The Decklist - “Nope” (42);
Beasties (15);
- 1x Flatwoods Monster [UFO]
- 1x Reptoid Ruler [NF]
- 1x UFO [UFO]
- 2x El Verde Entity [WILD]
- 2x Dark Watchers [NF]
- 2x Kinderhook Blob [NF]
- 6x Lizard People [WILD]
Spells (6);
- 1x Powerup Red [CN]
- 1x The Empress [SEN]
- 2x Bookmark [CN]
- 2x Bookmark Blue [UFO]
Artifacts (6);
- 1x Appendix [SEN]
- 1x Chaos Crystal [CN]
- 1x Space Rock Dagger [SEN]
- 1x Black Shard Meteorite [UFO]
- 2x Black Hole Shard [CN]
Terra (5);
- 1x Planetary Alignment (Stars) [UFO]
- 1x Cosmic Rain (Meteors Shower) [WILD]
- 1x Nightime
- 1x Stars
- 1x Forest
Aura (10);
- 10x Cosmic Aura
Required 4th Wall Items: white clothing of some sort for Kinderhook Blob, and an Empress tarot card to play The Empress at anytime. Check new age/spiritual/witch shops for that one - many have baskets of loose tarot cards for spells/spiritual work, and that’ll only run you a dollar or so.
Archive / Other Cards: I don’t have a formal Archive / side deck for this one yet, and there are a few cards that are in flux here; I have run 2 UFOs before, and 3 Kinderhooks vs 2, and I might switch back. I am also considering adding another Dark Watchers, and adding the CN Flatwoods as well, as the Meteor Showers would let them hit for 100+ each. I do keep more copies of The Empress on hand, and may switch that up, and I have run Index before. I have Fresno Nightcrawlers, but I find the ‘no pants’ restriction a little difficult, given I live in Canada and its cold af here often. If I can get my hands on a nice-looking tracksuit thing or a funny monster PJ onesie or something, I may change that. I try to keep the deck to or below 45 cards, though I’ve run up to 50 before.
Other Notes: Some people play Atmospheric Jellyfish in these decks, as it generates you two cosmic aura if its the second beastie you play in a turn, but I do not; it is not a Beastie Alien, so you cannot search for it using Lizard People, and it does not count for Reptoid Ruler’s tribal boost. It also requires you to play it second to qualify for the aura boost, which does not work for my strategy - it could be useful for a starting boost, but it isn’t too useful for most of the game for me. Air Rods is also a 1 cost alternative to the Dark Watchers, but imo it is not nearly as useful, as you have to put it back in your deck after you look.
Inquisitive minds may note the lack of New Beginnings, Second Anniversary, Fourth of July or Prism Aura; I have played New Beginnings before, but as so much of this setup requires having specific cards in my hand, I don’t see the benefit of it. I don’t own Secondary Anniversary or Fourth of July, but admittedly these are both cards I might run, if I had them. From memory, I was more inclined towards SA than FoJ. Prism Aura I don’t need, as I am not splashing in any additional aura types for things like Morpheus or Dampen (though I’ve considered it), and I only have the one asides. I also don’t play Absorb Aura as I consider it a little bit of a dick move (do not do onto your opponent what you do not wish to have done onto you!) - but I might, who knows. I feel that one would be an Archive option for me.
How to Play;
Opening Hand / Goal: your first step is to setup the El Verde/Flatwoods loop, so ideally in your opening hand, you have the ability to generate at least two aura, and either two Lizard People, or one Lizard People and one El Verde Entity. The dream hand is obviously to have both El Verde Entities and Flatwoods Monster (UFO), but the chances are low. Mulligan your hand if you have no Lizard People, even if you have Flatwoods or another good card - the only time I would risk an opening hand without Lizard People is if you have 2/3 of the cards needed for the loop already.
Other cards that are ideal to have in an opening hand; Bookmark, Chaos Crystal or Dark Watchers are the ones I look for the most. Black Hole Shard, or one of the artifact essences will also do, and Appendix is a nice bonus. I don’t really prioritize anything else, and I would not prioritize them over the ones above.
First Few Turns; play as many aura or aura-generating artifacts as you can immediately. You can put down terra or hold onto it (more on that later). If you get Appendix, or a bookmarking spell, play them right out of the gate, but do not play any bigger beasties, or any additional spells you may have added. As soon as you can, play Lizard People and use their contract ability to collect both your El Verde Entities first, and your Flatwoods Monster (UFO) last. Once you only have one Lizard People down, you can play El Verde to bring it back to your hand, and play Lizard People again for the second El Verde, which allows you to bring up that El Verde and the same Lizard People card again, which you can use to search for Flatwoods Monster (UFO). If you draw well otherwise, you should be able to establish the Lockdown loop by turn 3-4, assuming you have drawn at least one aura generating artifact, and enough aura (stay tuned).
I typically do not play any other beasties until the loop is established, with one exception - Dark Watchers. Dark Watchers allows you to look at the top three cards of your deck and put an aura or terra that is there into your hand. This speeds up your setup considerably, and helps thin out your deck, so you are more likely to pull cards you need every turn. It is the only card I’d risk playing this early.
The Loop: you will need six or seven aura on your board to properly play the loop. El Verde Entity is a 4 cost (3 cosmic/1 neutral), and its contract ability allows you to a) return any number of non-token cosmic beasties to their owners’ hands (including your opponent’s), and b) reduces the cosmic cost of the next cosmic beast you play by the number of beasties you returned. Flatwoods Monster (UFO) is also a 4 cost (3 cosmic/1 neutral), but once the loop is established, you should be paying only 1, or 2 at worst. That brings your loop cost to 5 or 6.
My preferred strategy, that calls for the seven, goes like this; assuming one El Verde Entity, a Lizard People or another low-cost beastie, and Flatwoods Monster are already on the table, I use 2 aura to play a Lizard People card to pick up later, or another low-cost beastie if I don’t have any Lizard People in hand. Then I play El Verde Entity for 4 (6 aura used so far), and pick-up the other El Verde Entity, the Lizard People/another low-cost beastie, and Flatwoods Monster, and then immediately play Flatwoods Monster again for 1, as the three cards returned reduce her down to just the neutral aura cost of 1, for a total aura cost of 7 overall. You could skip the Lizard People retrieval, which will reduce the Flatwoods to a 2 cost, but then you are still paying six total - the extra beastie is worth it imo.
Flatwoods Monster (UFO) allows you to declare a page type upon contract that cannot be used by either player in any way until the start of your next turn. This means the page/card type - not aura or tribe type, so you can say “Beastie Pages” or “Spell Pages”, but not “Lightning Pages” or “Fearsome Critter Pages”. Something to keep in mind is that if you declare Beasties as the type, you cannot play or use any of your own beasties after that. That means any attacks, abilities or effects you want to use need to be used before you play the loop (more on that below). Same goes for spells, artifacts - even aura. Time your turn carefully.
Inside The Loop / Midgame: once the loop is established, your next goal is to set up your endgame. This deck has multiple win cons, which I’ll get to in a moment, but I’ll first establish what I am doing while the loop is running.
First off; the loop ends the moment my next/current turn begins, so if I have pages of the type I want to use for the next iteration of the loop, I prioritize them before I play the loop again. If this type is beasties, which it may be, as beastie decks are the most common, then my first priority is using/fatiguing Dark Watchers to use its power to grab any aura/terra, and playing any extra Lizard People I have to get as many of my beasties out of my deck as I can. With the exception of the UFO, all my beasties are Beastie Aliens, which means Lizard People can look for them. If I have multiple Dark Watchers down, I will stagger using the second one’s ability until after I have used a Lizard People, as this means the deck has been shuffled.
As a note; if you are playing multiple Lizard People back to back, I would recommend telling your opponent you will play them all at once, and look for all the cards at once, instead of play, look, shuffle, play, look, shuffle. That just eats up a lot of time. I also suggest prioritizing searching for more Lizard People before you go for other beasties.
I will also cycle late game cards back in using Appendix if I have them, and try to get my bookmark cards if I can. Dark Watchers and Lizard People thinning the deck will make this easier. Terra goes down at this stage if it already hasn’t. I do not play Kinderhook Blob, or Powerup Red during this stage, and I do not typically attack my opponent much during this timeframe unless I need to.
A typical turn at this stage will be; draw at start of turn, cycle with Appendix if I need, use one Dark Watchers, play any extra Lizard People I can afford to, play another Dark Watchers, and then play the loop. At this point, if I still have beasties left in my deck, I may use El Verde Entity to draw up more Lizard People than I need, so I can reuse them next turn.
The Win Condition Setup - Reptoid Ruler Version: this is the method most people use, I believe, with my own twist. The goal is to get as many Beastie Aliens as you can onto the board, and utilize Reptoid Ruler’s ability to generate tribal boost for Beastie Aliens for a turn. Once my loop is established, I set this up by getting as much aura as I can out onto the board, and slowly flooding the board with all the Aliens I can while using the loop as a shield to ensure my beasties aren’t taken out before I use them.
Once I am ready, I end the loop to attack (assuming I am restricting ‘Beastie’ pages). Usually, I like to wait until I have UFO in hand to play Reptoid Ruler myself, as UFO gives a Beastie touching it flying - which means he is much harder to hit, and will last longer. Once he’s down, however, the slaughter begins, and it is delivered primarily through the Kinderhooks, my beautiful, awful babies.
Kinderhook Blobs are a beautiful, beautiful, terrible, 1 cost beastie, and your opponent will hate them. They look cute, and kinda harmless, but their mechanic is that their attack (“Pasty Menace”!) is considered to be “X”, where “X” is that Blob’s current LP. An undamaged Kinderhook has 35 LP out of the gate, with a LP10 gain from Stars terra, and another LP10 gain from Forest terra. It also has a 4th wall meta that gives it another 10 LPs if you are wearing white clothing. Assuming you’ve activated all that, this is a base LP of 65 before any additional modifications.
Tribal Boost is where Kinderhook gets nasty, because tribal boost gives a boost to the attack AND the LP of a card. This means Kinderhook is double-dipping on tribal boost, and if you are using Reptoid Ruler’s tribal boost on a table full of Aliens… let’s say you’ve got five other aliens out, in addition to that fully buffed Kinderhook that’s about to attack; that’s a 50 boost to LP, which brings your Kinderhook up to 115 LP, and then adds an additional 50 to your Blob’s attack, which means this beautiful little 1 cost beastie is hitting for 165 damage in one swing. If you have ten other aliens out, that’s 265 damage in one blow from one Kinderhook.
And you’re allowed up to six. That’s what we, the people, call a big fat ‘nope’, heheh. Throw Powerup Red onto one of the Blobs for another double-dip, and in theory, even with defenders, you should be able to take out your opponent in one round, or close to.
The Win Condition Setup - UFO Version: this is my backup strategy of how to win, if I have for whatever reason lost my loop or Reptoid Ruler and the Kinderhooks are unavailable. It is also available as a sneaky win, as not many people run it, and they may be so focused on ruining the loop or setup that they don’t even see you going for the UFO.
UFO has an alternate ‘win con’, or win condition, with ‘Returns Home’; which states “this must be the first action of your turn. Destroy this Beastie, a Meteor Shower Terra Page, a Stars Terra Page, a Nighttime Terra Page, and any combination of other Beastie Aliens with a combined Aura Cost of 5 or more. If you do, you win the game.”
Assuming you can get away with nobody removing your Terra, and you still have enough Beasties (not hard, if you have El Verde or Flatwoods still available, at 4 cost each), you can go for UFO’s win con instead of taking out your opponent. This is a nice secondary ‘nope’, in my opinion, because if you hold back your UFO until the end, nobody will be watching for it. It takes a little longer to setup, as I didn’t include any Terra searching cards, but it is absolutely an option.
Closing Notes: if you’ve lost the loop components, or Reptoid Ruler, it is still possible to do alright with this deck; Powerup Red is vital, for these reasons, along with the Kinderhooks. Fresno Nightcrawlers, which I am not currently running, is a good backup in that case, as they can hit for 75 with their terra bonus.
The Empress card(s) I have are designed as a counter for Permanent Possession and other insistences where I may lose control of one of my loop components - I would really only ever use it on Flatwoods or El Verde. It can also nullify tribal boost for my opponent. In most cases, if I am running against a deck that isn’t a threat in that way, I would use the Empress card(s) to feed Appendix, cycling them back into my deck to draw a different card.
I’ll update this as this deck changes, since I am currently tweaking it and it hasn’t been played in tournaments recently. Hopefully this is useful to anyone else looking to build or play a Cosmic Lockdown deck! If you’ve got any suggestions or feedback - please let me know!