Month: February 2019

Runek Laughs at Turn-One 0-Cost Blitzer, Dark Eyes Laughs Back

Runek, Dark Duelist

Draft: Always Acceptable
Constructed: Tier 8

Bad in constructed because it’s too small to race Wild, it has no evasion against Evil tokens, and it doesn’t provide any additional value (even though it does survive on-turn board clears). It is the only Ambush Ritual of Scarra enabler, but that’s not unfair enough to justify inclusion.

In limited, it’s a reasonable on-turn or off-turn gold-punisher. It breaks almost anything it blocks or is blocked by and survives attacking into anything. And, like all reasonably-sized ambush champions, it can be strong against attacking 0-cost blitz champions (especially since I’ve started to “disrespect” the turn one play and attack with a blitzing 0-cost champion while both players’ golds are up).

Turn-One 0-cost Blitz Champion is Over-Utilized

This tactic’s obvious strength lies in the fact that it allows you, the current player, to apply pressure without spending your gold. In most cases, your opponent, not wanting to spend their gold either, just takes the damage for free. In this most basic scenario it is amazing, but it relies on your opponent both knowing and respecting the danger of spending their gold first (in addition to not having a 0-cost answer).

If your opponent does spend their gold to deal with your 0-cost blitzing champion, for instance by playing Runek, Dark Duelist in an attempt to block, what then? Well, if you hadn’t thought that far ahead, you might just be trading a card to get your opponent’s gold down, while also getting yourself behind on the board. In this case, you both end up at 4 cards in hand, but your opponent has a flipped champion in play. I’ve been catching opponents in this state repeatedly. Further, I’m rarely punished for attempting it.

The real potential of the turn-one 0-cost blitzer is only unlocked when you can actually support it, by punishing your opponent for having the audacity to spend their gold first on your turn.

Fast Removal

Opponent ambushes in a 1-cost champion to block your 0-cost blitzer? Remove it before it can block. This usually enables your 0-cost champion to go unblocked, deal its damage, and survive until the next turn. The best card for this is Banishment because it also replaces itself, keeping you at 4 cards in hand (dipping down to 3 is a dangerous low).

This support is ineffective against cards like Medusa or Hunting Pack, fast 1-cost removal that leave one or more bodies.

Finishing Blow+

If you can’t remove the 1-cost ambush champion before the block, finishing off the blocker and gaining another strong effect can be just as strong, if not stronger. Buffs such as Smash and Burn or Winds of Change are nice to draw cards and protect your 0-cost champion. Restablishing champions (such as Kong) can avenge your 0-cost champion and retake control of the board. Cards like Blue Dragon are especially powerful here because they can potentially finish off the champion that blocked, leave you a threat in play, and replace themselves in hand. The best version of this type of support is Pelios, Storm Lord.

Pelios, Storm Lord

Draft: Situationally Desirable
Constructed: Tier 7

While bad in constructed because it does nothing incredibly well (no evasion/breakthrough, not enough tribute-damage to break most things by itself, and draw one isn’t enough to make up for the other two issues), in limited if already in Wild it’s actually quite solid because it does a lot of things reasonably well.

As previously alluded to, the best use scenario for this card is to play it after your opponent spent their gold for the turn to finish off a weakened champion. It can also be used as just a straight up establishing champion (effectively a better, Wild-only Mythic Monster), and/or it can pick off a Muse/deal damage to the enemy player directly. Overall, it’s just above average in a lot of different potential roles. One downside though is that if you do use it turn one to finish off an ambush champion that your 0-cost champion ran into, you end up revealing half of your 4 card hand

Aggressive On-Turn Gold Punisher

My favorite support for the turn-one, 0-cost blitzer is undoubtedly the on-turn gold-punisher, but only ones that can draw a card. While 14 damage from a Rampaging Wurm is ridiculous, I’d much rather use a White Knight and lose out on 5 of that damage to maintain a 4+ card handsize. Either way my champion will probably be removed fairly quickly and an extra card is frequently more impactful than 5 health. (The extra card gives you more options and enables you to go longer before needing to play a draw 2.)

On-turn gold-punishers are my favorite type of cards, and we just got arguably the best one in the game, which is also perfect in this situation:

Watch Dark Eyes (oh man) from TomSEpicGaming on www.twitch.tv

Dark Eyes

Draft: Always Desirable+
Constructed: Tier 3

This is my favorite card.

It’s an evasive, blitz champion, that can draw cards, and hits the most important stat-breakpoints. Dark Eyes is the epitome of an on-turn gold-punisher: if your opponent has a gold available, almost all removal can deal with it, but if they don’t, playing it advances your board state, reduces your opponent’s health, and draws to replace itself/advance you towards decking out. In other words, it advances you in all aspects of the game.

The fact that it draws a card whenever it hits your opponent is critical for a few reasons. Against control decks, you absolutely need to deal enough damage to kill them. The main difficulty, however, is being able to supply a consistent stream of threats/damage to outpace both their answers and their healing, both of which are usually more efficient than any of your sources of damage. If you try to just force them down with non-replenishing threats and/or burn, you will eventually run out of cards, which forces you to spend time drawing, in turn enabling your control-opponent to stabilize, which almost inevitably leads to them winning. With Dark Eyes against an opponent who spent their gold, it either hits, which is amazing, or it essentially forces them to discard a 0-cost card to negate the attack. Either way, Dark Eyes will still be there to threaten them next turn.

Due to this, there is the possibility that Dark Eyes could draw more than 1 card for 1 gold. This is particularly strong if you are drawing 0-cost effects that help Dark Eyes continue to get damage through, Wither or Rage for example. Think of it this way though, it’s a Flame Strike, that drew a card and threatens to do both again next turn. If 1 card and 1 gold can deal 16 damage and draw 2 cards, you should win. Finally, having the card draw tied to damaging the opponent (and the blitz not tied to loyalty) makes it incredible with Army of the Apocalypse.

The reason this card might actually see constructed play, however, is because WWG gave it an aggressive statline. 7 defense means there is no 0-cost card that can remove this by itself (aside from Hasty Retreat/Vanishing). Further, 7 defense also means that it can’t be incidentally removed by
Smash and Burn the turn after it has its initial effect. Your opponent must spend a gold specifically to remove this. Even further, in combination with its 8 offense, it’s a monster in the air. Since the standard strong airborne statline is 6/8, Dark Eyes is positioned to beat a significant portion of playable airborne champions, and it even takes out Rescue Griffin.

This card has consistently been amazing for me. I used it repeatedly in limited to great effect, and I’ve even had some early success with it in constructed (significantly more testing required though).

Conclusion

Overall, I’ve seen a lot of people playing 0-cost blitz champions with no worthwhile follow up, and I’ve been punishing them for it. If your best follow up to a contested 0-cost champion is an “or draw 2,” it’s probably better to just hold that champion for later. However, this has gotten to the point where you can potentially bluff highly experienced players. If I know, that my opponent knows, that I know that I shouldn’t play a 0-cost blitz champion without support on turn-one, I can do it anyway and they might not risk spending their gold.

Also, Dark Eyes. Oh man, Dark Eyes, oh man.

Final Pantheon Card Reviews (First 4 of 24)

Foreword

It’s taken me a while, but I’m finally getting around to writing up my thoughts about the final two Pantheon packs, since my first reaction video on Twitch timed out and I’ve had some time to think about and/or test these cards. I also decided to break these out into smaller chunks (because I realized I could go into more depth/go on longer rants this way and you’d be more likely to read them as opposed to if I put them all together) to make them more accessible.

In addition, Origins 2019 has announced that there will be a 10k Epic tournament this year:

WWG has not yet provided any further information such as what/which formats, etc.

Card Ratings

Carrion Demon Rating

Limited: Always Desirable
Constructed: Tier 5

Great in limited for all of the reasons you would expect: 0-cost blitz champion, 4 defense, and mass discard pile banish. Currently unplayable in constructed because it’s a 0-cost champion (Raxxa’s Curse), it has no immediate effect, it has no evasion, and the deck that cares about its discard pile the most (The Flock’s Gift/Tatian’s deck) has blockers that don’t mind trading with it. The “Break any champion damaged by this card” allows this to “trade up” with 1-cost champions and activates Ritual of Scarra synergy, but neither of those enable it to compete for the finite constructed 0-cost slots.

Limited

Carrion Demon is better than the guaranteed mass-discard pile banish cards in more aggressive/”get ahead, stay ahead” decks, but it is worse in more control/deck-out focused decks. This is because control decks are frequently “threat-light” meaning that your opponent is more likely to have a better answer saved up for this card when you eventually play it. Therefore, it is less likely it will actually be able to hit your opponent, and as a control deck, you basically need a mass-discard pile banish effect, especially if you are trying to win by decking out. In non-control decks, it is primarily another immediate 0-cost threat in your onslaught, meaning your opponent is less likely to have a strong answer to it, and if they are forced to throw a 1-cost champion in front of it to protect their health and discard pile, trading your 0 for their 1-cost champion is a major tempo advantage.

Constructed

In an environment with plentiful chump blockers, Raxxa’s Curse, and fast enough decks to ignore your 3 attack minion (and their own discard pile), this just isn’t impactful enough. It does have the Demon tag for Raxxa’s Displeasure synergy and what not, but if it can’t connect with the opponent, it’s just a worse Little Devil or stronger-starting but non-growing Thrasher Demon.

Rant

I spent a lot of time thinking about and trying to write this rant about how Carrion Demon illustrated the midrange-tech 0-cost problem, related to the lack of constructed-playable 1-cost discard pile removal, and the non-viability of Sage-based decks due in part to the meta-shift towards punishing discard effects (Plucker). But I couldn’t figure out how to do it adequately.

The gist of it was that if you wanted to consistently attack an opponent’s discard pile, against Scara’s Gift or Nashville’s heavy-recycle combo-Kark-like-decks, you needed to commit at bare minimum six 0-cost slots (Guilt Demon, Keeper of Secrets, Amnesia/Heinous Feast); this in turn prevents you from including otherwise synergistic 0-cost cards, which locks this line of attack off for most decks. Erratic Research and Grave Demon are technically 1-cost cards that can attack your opponent’s discard pile, but they seem just too weak to be worth much: they are one-time effects (so they’re pretty ineffective against decks that consistently burn through their discard pile and keep it at only a few cards at a time) and a draw 2 or an 8/8, evasion-less champion, isn’t worthwhile for most decks.

However, I kept running through potential scenarios that potentially invalidated these thoughts. For example, hard control decks could theoretically run Erratic Research since they need to use draw 2s throughout the game (but hard control is currently ill-positioned against the crazy draw potential of Wild/Sage midrange). An aggressive Raxxa’s Displeasure/Dark One’s Fury/Rift Summoner deck, on the other hand, might be able to run Grave Demon (assuming it can actually break through Scara’s Gift decks before running out of resources). However, even if neither of these are true, I’m not even sure if it would be desirable for every deck to have reliable options to attack discard piles, especially since Amnesia is still reasonably popular anyway.

So, I don’t know…

To address this potential problem, I have been fantasizing about a midrange/aggressive, 1-cost Sage champion with a Sage-specific, repeatable, targeted discard-pile banish effect. Such as

  • “Ally->banish 2 cards in a discard pile”
  • “Whenever a (Sage) champion you control deals damage to a player, banish a card from that player’s discard pile,” accompanied by a Loyalty effect that deals damage multiple times
  • A Carrion Demon effect attached to a 1-cost Sage champion with either unblockable + loyalty 2 -> blitz or ambush + loyalty 2 -> unblockable (probably at 4 or 5 toughness).

Dark Prince

Limited: Frequently Desirable
Constructed: Tier 7

It’s an 8/7 airborne blitz demon. Solid gold punisher, matches up great against 6/8 airborne champions, and you can effectively ignore the expend text, because it’s bad. However, without the demon tag, this would be Tier 9 for constructed because there are better blitzing airborne champions.

Ritual of Scarra

Limited: Situationally Desirable
Constructed: Tier 4

A couple reminders,

  • This only counts your evil champions (yo Dark Leader or more practically Zannos)
  • It does make your evil champions do the damage, so if you have a “break any champion damaged by this card” champion in play (Carrion Demon), this is effectively a 0-cost “break target champion” (even off-turn)

Therefore, if you have any of those cards in draft, this card is nuts (especially since it’s also an “or draw 2”). Even without those, it is solid in an Evil deck.

However, all of the champions with “break any champion damaged by this card” are weak in constructed. It can still be decent in aggressive, wide Evil token decks because it can let you focus your 1-cost cards on offense (Plague Zombies), but in chip-damage-based control decks it is generally either a worse Consume against small champions or a win-more card when ahead.

Red Mist

Draft: Always Acceptable
Constructed: Tier 6

The dream: play Ice Drake on your opponent’s turn then play this on your turn. The reality: 1-cost Evil draw 2.

I may have used the non-draw effect on this once, and it was a pain to set up, just to break one or two champions. The fact that you generally can’t even attack before playing this, to give your opponent a chance to spend their gold first on your turn (since this would expend one of your champions), holds this back even more.