Spreadsheet: 0-Cost Cards
Category: Tech
Internal Category Tier: D to S Depending
Tier 4
The first Tech-Tier card. This card still scares me. Best case scenarios are deal 7 damage for 0, stop up to 10 breakthrough damage potentially from Lash/Rage for 0, save a champion that would otherwise break for 0, or use it on an incidental champion in combat to trade with an actual threat. All of those are actually really powerful. The problem though is that they’re all also preventable. If you give an unblocked attacking champion +7 offense, that champion can still be removed before it can deal damage, same with all other scenarios for this card. In other words, this card is never guaranteed to give value and it can put you into a position where you get two-for-oned (opponent uses one card to remove two or more of yours). However, if it does give value, it gives serious value.
A couple ways you can mitigate the risk are to
- Use it on a low value token, when you’ve had tokens remain in play, unremoved, for a while; if your opponent hadn’t removed them yet, there is a better chance they can’t now, especially if their gold is down.
- Play this on a breakthrough or unbreakable champion and follow it up with Priest of Kalnor with Loyalty (or Angelic Protector) before attacking.
- Use it on an unbreakable 0-cost unblocked champion, such as Dark Knight.
In general, I wouldn’t actively draft this card unless I am an aggressive deck and/or I haven’t been able to draft a mass-discard pile banish effect yet. In either of those situations, I would say this card is actually A edging on S-Tier. Otherwise, probably D-Tier.
I have used it in constructed with a “Draw 2 And” focused incidental-token deck, and it was pretty solid at pushing damage through when my opponents weren’t expecting it. Theoretically, if my opponents start to expect it, Arm could work as a pretty nice deterrent to my opponents actually using their 0-cost removal on my cards otherwise, due to the threat of Arm, even if I didn’t actually have it in … … hand (couldn’t quite think of a Good Arm pun).