This is the best midrange deck in constructed Epic, currently. It has the biggest champions, utilizes the highest tempo removal, and sees/draws the most cards. It’s weak to ultra-aggressive aggro-combo and vulnerable to getting run out of threats. (I lost so many games against this in my testing for Origins.)
Brief Gameplay Overview
I’ve previously gone over the general playstyle of Get Ahead, Stay Ahead that this deck uses, and I’ve gone over how it specifically applies to Wild Midrange in the past as well. Therefore, I’m just going to give a quick explanation here. (The original decklist run by Sam Black/Mike Sigrist at Worlds 2017 ran 3 copies of Thought Plucker and 2 copies of Lightning Strike; I prefer at least swapping out those for 3 Ethereal Dragon and 2 Spore Beast.)
- Start the game by playing a strong (card-drawing), “establishing” champion. Raging T-Rex, Brak Fist of Lashnok, and/or Brachiosaurus/Mist Guide Herald
(Draka’s Enforcer/Surprise Attack to establish off-turn) - If your opponent can’t remove that champion on that turn or with a 0-cost card, spend the rest of the game spending your gold second on each turn to maintain at least one 1-cost champion in play.
If they did remove it on the same turn/with a 0, return to step 1
- Supplement with card draw, your 0-cost removal, and Draka Dragon Tyrant/Scarros Hound of Draka to deal damage and prevent your opponent from developing a threatening board
Brief Deck Strengths Overview
There are three primary aspects that make this deck a monster.
The Biggest Champions
If you aren’t also playing Wild, this deck’s champions will be bigger than yours. So, if you both spend a gold on a 1-cost champion, their’s will win combat, unless you spend additional cards (like Brave Squire). If you decide not to block and race instead, their champions will deal more damage and kill you first, unless you spend additional cards. Therefore, if you try to “fairly” fight this deck for the board, you are already committed to spending more cards then them.
The Highest Tempo Removal
If you do manage to get ahead on board or in a race, this deck packs some of the best high tempo removal to halt your forward momentum while maintaining its own. All of these are one-sided effects that only benefit your opponent, at your expense. Erase and Kong are hard removal with an upside. Draka and Scarros are board clears for small minions in addition to mostly reliable damage and big bodies. Further, they combine with Feeding Frenzy for big champion removal. Finally, Smash and Burn enables any 1-cost Wild card to also actively disrupt your opponent’s board (effectively pushing out most 6-or-less-defense 1-cost champions from the meta).
The Most Cards Seen/Drawn
Tying these two elements into a terrifyingly consistent deck is the amount of cards it can see/draw in a game. The most important card for this is Mist Guide Herald.
MGH early, essentially acts as three more of some of the best establishing champions in the game: Raging T-Rex/Brachiosaurus/Brak Fist of Lashnok + a 3/2 airborne body (Draka’s Enforcer and Thought Plucker being weaker yet acceptable outcomes).
MGH mid/late, is a filter to find either more of the above or finisher/utility champions, primarily Scarros Hound of Draka and Draka Dragon Tyrant (occasionally Strafing Dragon). Even if your opponent doesn’t flip over one of those champions with MGH’s tribute, they’re still 5 cards closer to drawing into them. Combined with all of this deck’s establishing card draw champions and incidental draw effects (Muse, Surprise Attack, Ancient Chant, and the recyclers Amnesia/Flame Spike/Wolf’s Bite), it can reliably find whatever it needs to finish you in the mid game.
Scarros with a hand of 6+ Wild cards is also nasty.
Card By Card Breakdown
Now that we’ve established high level what this deck is doing that makes it so powerful, I’m going to delve into why each card is selected and which ones are essential/flexible depending on meta and playstyle.
Wild Core Four
All decks that run at least 33 Wild cards want 3 copies of each of these cards. Raging T-Rex is a 10+ defense champion that draws 2 cards, insane. Brachiosaurus is a 10+ defense champion that is essentially free while also being immune to Raxxa’s Curse, can stack ally triggers such as from Fire Shaman, and has breakthrough. Strafing Dragon is an incredible gold punisher, on-turn or off-turn, and it is direct damage that effectively can’t be bounced. Smash and Burn is a draw 2 that breaks a 6 defense champion incidentally; it can even be combined with other effects like Scarros to take down bigger champions (sometimes the +5+5 is even relevant).
Essential Seven
Surprise Attack and Draka, Dragon Tyrant are two more Wild cards that are almost essential to all Wild decks; they can be excluded in some, but only with incredibly strong reasons. This is not a deck that can exclude them. We have more than enough 1-cost champions that can be put into play with it, plenty of them are disgusting when played off-turn, and we want to draw through our deck quickly. Draka is brutal against all decks that rely on non-demon tokens or 3 or less defense champions, and it is both a strong on-turn gold-punisher and Feeding Frenzy enabler.
Mist Guide Herald, as a 5 card filter that comes with a free 3/2 airborne body is overpowered, explained above. This along with our other card draw enables us to run only 2 each of Draka and Scarros, preventing us from getting 3 copies of either stuck in our hand at inopportune times.
Scarros, Hound of Draka is the main game-ender. With the amount of cards we draw, Scarros will frequently hit for 6+, clearing boards and being essentially unbouncable.
Feeding Frenzy is a 0-cost card that breaks 1-cost champions. It enables us to come back from behind and otherwise break the 1-gold a turn stalemate.
Wolf’s Bite and Flame Spike are both solid enablers for Feeding Frenzy, can clear out Muse/Thought Plucker/other lone chump blockers, and recycle helping us to churn through our deck.
Additional Threats
One of the most important parts about this deck is its ability to play a continuous stream of threats. Any turn where you do not end ahead on the board and threatening to damage your opponent is a reprieve you can’t afford to give. None of these individual cards are critical to the working of the deck, but the roles they play are.
Brak, Fist of Lashnok is an on-turn establishing champion that is big and essentially unblockable. It is great for getting damage through, outside of bounce effects, and it is even immune to Medusa the turn it comes into play. Another possible card in this slot is Herald of Lashnok which trades the size for blitz/breakthrough and greater card selection (although the ability to whiff). Without buffs and due to the slightly grinding nature of the deck, I like Brak better here.
Draka’s Enforcer is a solid off-turn, evasive gold punisher that gets above the 6 defense threshold and draws a card. A solid midrange champion.
Kong is a brutal swing card that can stomp on other midrange, board centered decks. Strong against other Wild decks but weak against control and the burgeoning combo decks. Sam Black ran one, Mike Sigrist ran two.
Thought Plucker v Ethereal Dragon: Thought Plucker is even more card draw and it can shut down decks that don’t immediately have either an answer or mitigation for it. While running the more aggressive Wild deck with Force Lance, Thought Plucker played an enormous role in beating me in one game against Sam Black and one game against Calvin Keeney. It is a powerful card. I don’t think it is right in this deck because it is too bad against Evil Scara’s Gift control though.
Scara’s Gift decks are generally more than happy to spend a turn drawing in response to Thought Plucker to help get through their deck, and they have both mitigation and 0-cost removal for it. Further, the 1 damage a turn can’t actually threaten to kill the Scara’s Gift player quick enough. Ethereal Dragon, on the other hand, is an evasive off-turn punisher that is immune to almost all off-turn removal the Scara’s Gift deck runs (aside from off-turn board clears), and six damage a turn is enough to actually force the Gift player to spend gold to deal with it.
Flex Cards
Ancient Chant and Erase are theoretically flex cards, but they are both incredibly powerful. In a world where Thought Plucker is still over-included in decks, Ancient Chant is practically indispensable. All it does is draw cards, but it draws more than any other. If you just play it and recycle it, you net gain two cards in hand. If you recall it from your discard pile, that alone net gains you two cards in hand. It can also be discarded and used to fuel even bigger Scarros Loyalty X reveals. If the meta ever moves beyond Thought Plucker, then maybe we can replace this slot with another threat.
Erase is particularly powerful in this deck because our champions are so big. Bouncing a high value card like Raging T-Rex is less of an issue because your opponent will have less time to replay it before dying. It is also amazing against unbreakable/unbanishable/unblockable blitz champions. Card draw is always great too. However, there are plenty of instances where it is pretty bad.
Muse, like Thought Plucker, is absolutely insane if unanswered. Having more ways to draw into our critical cards is solid, in addition to the fact that it can ambush, airborne chump block. Further, it draws removal away from our Thought Pluckers, Fire Shamans, Spore Beasts, Mist Guide Heralds, and vice versa. Not absolutely necessary, but feels powerful when it works.
Amnesia is strong primarily as a way to shut off potential outs for our opponent. It can hit any discard pile specific cards like Ancient Chant, Smash and Burn, Soul Hunter, Army of the Apocalypse setups, etc, but it can also be pretty backbreaking after a Scarros board clear to effectively nullify any recycle cards in our opponent’s hand for a few turns.
Hurricane is a one-of-out for an opponent that is able to develop too much. Won games in my testing but was also frequently rotting in my hand.
Fiery Demise is another draw effect with a slight upside as either direct damage, small champion removal, or Feeding Frenzy enabler. It’s fine. A one-of Fires of Rebellion is potentially better in large part due to the pressure it puts on your opponent when they know it’s in your deck.
Fire Shaman is another way to deal that final damage to finish off an opponent, particularly with Brachiosaurus bonus triggers. It is much better while we are running other small champions like Muse/Thought Plucker to draw removal away from it. Maybe should be Flash Fire if scared of human tokens, which is a strong deck that crushes this one.
Lightning Strike is another solid removal option, importantly breaking Angel of Deaths that can block our airborne champions. That being said, I like the Spore Beasts better for dealing with attacking based decks, like the one Pluck U ran at Worlds. It can also clear the way for Brachiosaurus to deal full breakthrough damage.
Weaknesses
In my testing, Scara’s Gift control won the games in which they were able to run this deck out of threats. This was particularly the case when this deck included Thought Plucker over Ethereal Dragon. Essentially, if the control deck can kill all of the threats you have in your hand and you are forced to spend a gold just to draw cards, they can also spend a gold just to draw cards; since that is exactly what they want to do anyway, this scenario is much better for them. Once they find their Gift, they can slam the door shut on you by gaining health and dealing damage with every gold spent. If, however, you never have a turn where you aren’t ahead on board, which isn’t unreasonable for this deck, they can crumble before they can grind you out. I’d say this deck is favored against Gift when both are played at top skill levels (but I also might just not be a skilled enough Gift player). (Planning on going over the Scara’s Gift control deck at a later point.)
Aggro human tokens, on the other hand, is a horrible matchup for this deck, especially with no Flash Fires. Essentially, if you don’t draw Draka, Dragon Tyrant, you’ll get comboed out/out-raced in the first couple turns and there won’t be much you can do to stop it, especially since you won’t have enough time to fill your discard pile for your recycle cards. (Planning on going over the human token aggro combo deck at a later point.)
Conclusion
This was the deck I beat my head against the most in my testing. I threw a bunch of different midrange ideas at it, and it crushed them all. Frequently, I was able to get off to a promising start and get this deck down to around half health, and then the Scarros or Draka turn would hit and blow me out with Feeding Frenzy assistance.
If your brew can’t beat this deck, keep brewing. That’s what I did. It was quite painful. I’d also highly recommend playing this deck yourself, specifically against other top tier decks such as Gift so you can understand how they work. When I eventually “gave in” and did this myself, I learned so much and now actually feel pretty comfortable with constructed when I never had before.
Anyways, I kind of forced myself through my acculated rust from waiting to have a computer again to write this, so if I didn’t go over something as much as you would have liked, I missed something entirely, you think I’m wrong, etc., let me know, and I will happily elaborate.
