"Fools! You dare to trifle with the Phoenix?" - Jean Grey (X-Factor Vol 1 #48)

Phoenix aka Jean Grey, has quite a past, coming into her mutant powers when she was 10 years old. Power level wise she is above and beyond most though controlling it is another thing entirely. How about in VS2PCG?

Leveling

Level up (1) The Sum of All Life and Death.: When a character appears, if there are 20 or more total supporting characters on all sides and/or KO Piles, Phoenix gets an XP.

Leveling her up is going to be a waiting game. It is going to take a while. She does have 7 health which will aid you in lasting a while, but it still will be hard to do and may not happen before the end of the game, if Thanos's Court Death or Satana's Consume Soul has anything to say about it.

Super Powers

Level 1 Power: Life Incarnate - Main : Heal a wound from a supporting character.

Simple enough on paper to what it does. This helps Phoenix keep board presence which is nice, though overall it doesn't relate to her game plan as much as many other characters powers do.

Maintaining board presence is nothing to be scoffed at though, though there are SC's that do the same thing and they aren't very playable at the moment.

Level 2 Power: From the Ashes - Main : Put a character from your KO pile onto your side.

The ability to bring something back from the KO pile is huge, though it does cost both a and a . Ideally you would want to get something big in the KO pile, then bring it out without paying the recruit cost... yet her level up condition is so slow that you can't optimally cheat something into play this way, it is more for just late game value.

Deck Construction

Creating a deck that takes advantage of her first ability to heal with multi-health characters I think would be a step in the right direction, biding your time until you do level and can gain even more board control from returning something back from your KO pile into play.

So how can we do that? Emma Frost can discard your hand or your opponents hand when she comes into play. Drawing extra cards is always good via female Loki. Combining both of those seems like a pretty decent start.

Phoenix also has pretty low stats until after she has leveled, so playing characters that can protect her for the late game is crucial.

Pixie with singularity help get more characters into play, and even without singularity help by adding it to the KO pile.

I had a cheap deck with ramp cards, pixie, singularity, Moon Knight, Female Loki, Iron Man, and the Valkyrie-Iceman-Wasp combo I had tested around with before and it did decent when it got the cards it needed, though it flat out folded to Thanos's Court Death and would struggle against Satana. The idea was to get Valkyrie out with lots of resources and recruit everything back and combo off.

With it being so dead to Thanos's Court Death, I'm not sure how comfortable I would feel playing it in a tournament. While he has been banned and changed, once the legacy set comes out who knows what the meta will look like and if Thanos will be in it. I think Legacy would need to bring Phoenix something amazing to make her viable, but I don't know if that is even possible without making everything else stronger as well. This character has fallen flat for me, but if you have a decklist you'd like to share, feel free to send it to me.