If you're playing this bunch of greaseballs, you've got to play dirty. This is the best defensive team on the court, as three of the five Players have 7's and 8's in the block column. If you focus your energy on your opponent's plays, you can keep the score in the high single digits, which is where this deck excels. The Cruisers' shot values are just high enough to make most of their unblocked plays, so if you're dropping Blocker after Blocker, the plays you do attempt should go down.

If you're playing a mostly defensive game, Trip's +2/-2 to succeed might be necessary on offense. In this style of game, every play you do make has to count, so dropping it on a play with an opponent's Blocker might help blunt that effort. Trip is also a good disrupter of high-scoring plays that need a lot of effort to succeed, like Double Shot. That card's -3 to succeed becomes a -5 when someone gets Tripped.

Body Slam ("This shot fails.") may be the simplest Special Effect in the game. That said, it can be a tough decision where to use it. It's the perfect Special Effect counter, scuttling that Human Pyramid or Fast Break/Double Shot combo. But don't hold it back waiting to bust up a big play. Simply dropping a Body Slam on a play that might succeed - a center in the paint, say - may cause your opponent to abandon a fruitful opportunity.

You've got two Sabotages, each allowing you to replace it with a copy of a card in your discard pile. At minimum, such a card can be used as another Blocker, hardly a bad thing. Or it can be used to get a different Ball or Shot than the one already in the stack. Maybe the best use, though, is to copy your solitary Body Slam - twice. If Body Slam is in your discards, the two Sabotages can make two plays fail instead of one. That's a tough move to complete, though, so only try it if you draw the Body Slam right after you play an early Sabotage as a defensive play.

View the Cruisers' Deck List.