A 14/14 ambush champion that turns into an 8/8 or an 8/8 that boosts a champion for one turn. The most straightforwardly-valuable thing about this card is that it can ambush in front of Kong/Sea Titan/Steel Golem (or almost any other champion) and break them in combat. Then, as an 8/8 it wins fights against a lot of other utility champions including all of the 6/8s (Medusa, Palace Guard, Ice Drake, etc.). Unfortunately, if your opponent’s gold is up and you play it this way, it’s vulnerable to fast targeted (non-damage) removal (Erase, Banishment, No Escape), however, that category is not currently valued highly.
On the other hand, using it on a champion you’ve already declared as a blocker is fairly safe and solid (assuming the attacking champion doesn’t have breakthrough). If your opponent has the targeted removal, you’ve already locked the block in, so you won’t take damage to your face, and, if they spend their gold just removing your blocking champion to save their attacking champion, you still have an 8/8 to block this turn then attack next turn. However, if you use this to effectively save one of your champions and break one of your opponent’s champions while their gold is up, you risk overextending right into a board clear. Further, this also relies on you having another champion in play that can block, but demon tokens become 10/10 and wolf/zombies become 8/8, so that isn’t actually too hard.
On the attack, this is probably most useful as the first of a double burn-out. For example, if you have this and Flame Strike in hand, your opponent is at 16 and you have a wolf in play, you attack with the wolf, if unblocked buff it to hopefully deal 8. If your opponent has 1-cost health gain, they can dodge the Flame Strike to the face on their turn, but you still at least developed an 8/8 to attack with next turn.
Spending all of this time thinking this card through while typing this up has convinced me to tentatively promote it to an internal C-Tier over D-Tier. That being said, I can’t imagine wanting it in constructed. Fighting for the board with non-evasive 8/8s in constructed has never been a thing (although it is a human for Faithful Pegasus), and a 6/6 buff by itself doesn’t seem anywhere near enough. (Briefly expanding on the 8/8s not being a thing in constructed, they are either overshadowed by big Wild champions, chump-blocked by tokens/0s, or flown over. Mid-sized, non-evasive bodies in competitive constructed Epic are essentially meaningless.)
Maybe it finds a home in a deck with Royal Escort if Kong/Sea Titan make a major resurgence in constructed, but including a 1-cost card that is only reliable when you have another 1-cost card in play against a tempo deck is doomed to fail. (On rereading, it is even more doomed to fail since you couldn’t target your Canopy Ranger with Canopy Ranger’s tribute while you have Royal Escort in play, whoops.) Competitive constructed games are way to fast right now to manifest such small targeted synergies. You need to be immediately moving towards a win as soon as you spend your first gold with Aggressive/Midrange Wild and Kark being the two most represented decks. If you can’t deal damage, you’ll get Karked out (unless all 3 copies of Kark are near the bottom of your opponent’s deck). If you get hit once by a single big Wild champion, you’re in range to be burned out. That being said, those aren’t the only two decks in the meta, and there might be exceptions.
Invoke Pact in Good, but it can only target Good champions and has an Or that gains health instead of drawing cards, boooooooooooooooo … that primary ability is sweet in Good champion-based Midrange though … … dang it, why must I love things that will only disappoint me.
Rant
First off, I personally do not like the direction of printing cycle-like cards where Good gets shafted by being the only alignment that doesn’t get a draw 2 stapled to it (to be fair, this is only a two-card “cycle” and this is more of a rant against Angeline’s Will). If I’m in Good, I have much better specialized health gain cards to choose from if I want health gain. I don’t want my Good-Specific, incredibly powerful, interesting, and niche effects tied to health gain too, instead of card draw. If I’m in a game where I can’t get the niche effect to be valuable, I want to be able to cycle it (use it to draw cards), I don’t want it to either rot in my hand or be used to gain potentially meaningless health because I have no other off-turn gold play in hand. If this and Angeline’s Will didn’t require you to either have Good champions or Good 1-cost cards in your deck, the Or health-gain option might be more interesting, but when the Good pay-off cards have an option that is only valuable in specific archetypes, feels bad man.
Further, if you look at other events that don’t have Or Draw 2s attached, they fall into one or more of a few categories: Fail Case Still Advances Card’s Primary Function, Token Board Clears, Burn, Discard Reward, Cycle, and/or Bad.
Cards like Drain Essence, Hunting Pack, Wolf’s Call, and Insurgency fall into that first category. You include these cards because their optimal state is amazing, but you don’t cut them because even their fail case is helpful. Drain Essence, it’s in your deck because you want to remove a threat and gain health. If you can’t remove a threat, you can still gain Health. Same with Hunting Pack but gain tokens instead of health. Wolf’s Call always gives tokens, either on-turn with blitz to potentially punish a Wave of Transformation or off-turn to start with a board of tokens (that might force your opponent to Wave of Transformation). Insurgency works similar in that it ideally is your finisher on-turn as hard-to-remove tokens, but it can also be your initiator as off-turn hard-to-remove tokens. No matter what, you can always use cards in this category to advance your goal even if it is sub-optimal and your only gold play. I like these cards.
Token board clears work because the board clear is either incredibly valuable, such as being usable off-turn (Martial Law), and/or you’re a token deck, a deck that needs board clears (Reap or Sow, Law Claim) to stay alive and enable their onslaughts. Burn can always go face. Reduce your opponent to 0, win the game. Cards like Necrovirus are Discard Rewards because even if they sit dead in your hand, they are great fodder for discard against opposing Thought Pluckers or because you purposefully overdraw yourself. All of these can work well.
Then there are cards that can always at minimum Cycle themselves and they usually still gain a bit of bonus value, like Surprise Attack, Quell, and Temporal Shift. Surprise Attack can always be cycled for free anytime you would play a champion, so it’s fail case is never bad. Quell and Temporal Shift see a small amount of play because their effects are either excellent or reasonably powerful and the fail case isn’t completely dead, but they are very close to the final category: Bad. Bad cards have an unreliable/weak effect, no-value fail-cases, and can’t draw, sorry Chomp! and Angeline’s Will.
Breath of Life is dangerously close to that Bad category, but the pure power of it’s primary effect might save it. Now you might argue that gaining 12 health isn’t a no-value fail-case, but Kark. While Kark can kill with damage, it usually won’t, and if your Kark-opponent isn’t trying to damage you out, 12 health gain is literally pointless for you.
Review
Now that that is out of my system, this card’s potential is enormous, and I plan on experimenting with it and would even if there was no Or option on it, so that can be viewed purely as a bonus option (that taunts me with what could have been, ahem). This is a Resurrection that doesn’t need to be used immediately after your champion breaks! Since most people aren’t as in love with Resurrection as I am, it is a Surprise Attack-like effect in that it can let you play Slow (non-ambush) champions on your opponent’s turn, as long as they’re Good; unfortunately, most Good champions aren’t good (so far).
In Draft, I don’t want this card. There are very few Good 1-cost champions I want to draft and almost all of them have ambush, so using this on-turn to get them back is underwhelming, and using this off-turn is actually worse than playing that champion normally (since you give your opponent two human tokens for the privilege). Further, I don’t generally want a card that just gives 12 health, I want cards that affect the board or draw cards. However, if I’m on track for card draw and I’ve passed a lot of burn and/or I know my opponent likes drafting Burn, this can be a lifesaver. And, if you are at 7 or 8 cards in hand, 12 health can arguably be better than a draw 2. Finally, there are a lot of cards that aren’t yet on the app yet that I would happily draft this to support.
Which brings us to constructed. Silver Wing Savior, Silver Wing Lancer, and Silver Wing Paladin are all solid on-turn gold-punishers. Playing Breath of Life on-turn gives you a nice bonus of two chump blockers to protect against a potential swing-back attack (better than Invoke Pact). Being able to play them off-turn is also excellent, especially since the tokens you give your opponent either can’t block your champion or are a potential liability (and they’re less stats than Invoke Pact‘s demon for a swing back). War Lion of Valentia also abuses those small chump blockers, by threatening a major damage boost, assuming Lash/Rage support. Finally, we have two cards from Guardians of Gowana (rename of Epic Jungle): Respected Commander (a solid card for Good decks) and Bold Leader (yes, the four human tokens netted could all gain blitz from this on-turn). With so many of these champions drawing cards with Tribute/Loyalty effects, maybe this could see play as a card that’s neither a guaranteed champion nor guaranteed card draw, and maybe your handsize stays large enough that you might even want the health gain option over an “Or Draw 2.”
More realistically though, this could be a pretty reasonable card in Kark decks. 12 health for one gold, is a big deal. Replaying Angel of Light, is a big deal. Using Frantic Digging (a card some Kark decks already run) to win with Kark off-turn, is a real thing. In Kark, there are plenty of other excellent “Draw 2 Ands” you already want, so the 12 health gain is actually a potentially more desirable secondary/primary effect than card draw, which means it might actually make the deck for off-turn Kark wins over cards like Surprise Attack or Final Task that saw only fringe play.
Overall, I think it has solid potential for constructed play. The health gain effect isn’t something I generally want for my preferred playstyle, but it might enable the card to actually see play in a competitive deck. In Draft though, Good is currently just too weak to draft in general (almost always), let alone to draft a Good specific tech card.
While technically an alignment-independent re-establishing champion, 3 health on a 1-cost champion (especially a slow one) is a massive liability which threatens to remove the actual “establishing” part of the card. Since it can die to a lot of high-quality 0-cost removal or incidental effects that your opponent will generally want anyway, it becomes only a bit more than on-turn removal, that can’t be used in combat, and doesn’t have an “or draw 2” option.
In the current draft meta, 0-cost champions are valued significantly more than 1-cost champions, so having a 1-cost champion that generally aims to remove another 1-cost champion could leave you with a dead card for a while. Further, 0-cost cards that can answer this effectively like Wither, Consume, Fireball, etc. are all drafted highly, to answer those highly valued 0’s, so your opponent will be more likely to have an easy answer to the body.
In constructed, 3 damage sweeps are also common (Draka, Scarros, Draka’s Fire), as are 3 offense ambush champions (Brand and Mobilize). I haven’t even had much success with Palace Guard performing the same role, since reacting by spending your gold first just to remove 1 champion and gain a 6 offense champion (or 8) with no evasion is so unimpactful.
An alignment-independent card that clears all tokens, most 0-cost champions (Little Devil), most unblockable champions (Knight of Shadows/Temporal Enforcer), deals 4 damage to the opponent, and is a champion so a body persists that can be returned to hand to do it all again. You really can’t ask for much more from a card in Dark Draft, and I would absolutely take this over Scarros in all but the most super-duper Wild highroll decks. (Which reminds me, I added this line to my && explanation: “This happens incredibly infrequently and shouldn’t be relied on almost ever”)
This is also a perfectly solid card in Constructed; although, you would only want it if tokens/0-cost champions (particularly demons) are popular in the meta and/or you have a very specific role for it (and you have 1-cost slots available). If neither of those things are true, it’s too small and doesn’t do nearly enough by itself to be valuable. I used it in my 51 Sage AoE bounce deck (along with Javelin Thrower and Surprise Attack) to clear out any opposing 0-cost champions my bounce couldn’t deal with, and it worked great. Time Walkering this back to hand was pretty nice too (unfortunately that deck was too slow to outrace either Burn or Kark going in opposite directions).
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).
Love getting this card in Dark Draft. In today’s meta, the Re-establishing, One-Sided, Multi-Targets Small category is my most valued category (at least at the start of the draft before other considerations start to potentially outweigh it). I would draft this card just as highly even if it didn’t have blitz because that 3 damage clear to only opponent’s champions on a 10/9 body is enormous. Frequently in Dark Draft, due to the strength and popularity of mass 0-cost cards, boards will slowly and incidentally fill up with a bunch of small champions, especially if neither player gets far enough behind that they feel forced into a board clear. Anguish Demon’s tribute hitting that 3 damage breakpoint clears the way for your attackers (including this because blitz), and it lessens the potential retaliatory attack on your opponent’s turn. Frequently this will remove multiple cards worth of value for your opponent and result in you getting damage through, with no alignment requirements.
However, the lack of evasion, the lack of direct damage, the lack of a repeatable clear, and the inability to hit bigger 0-cost cardslike demon tokens destroys most of its constructed potential. When against a constructed token deck, even if you clear out all of their tokens, they can frequently get a new one into play to block this card the turn you play it and then get more tokens to swarm over it afterwards. Further, most successful constructed token decks are either demon token decks (tokens to big) or human token decks (too explosive with few to no openings to play this to clear, unless Surprise Attack). That being said, as an inherent blitz, big champion Lash, Rage, and Army of the Apocalypse makes this card a lot more interesting, but it would only be a tech card at best in those situations, and I just think it gets pushed out by so many other card choices and deck archetypes in the meta. I’ve tried including this card in multiple decks, but I’ve ended up cutting it in all of them.
It’s a slightly better off-turn Demon Breach, without recall, that is generally worse than Demon Breach on-turn. Three ambush bodies isn’t terrible though and making Demons and Zombies bigger than your opponent’s counterparts does have serious combat-value, more so for attacking since your opponent won’t initiate more bad attacks once this is in play. As a follow up to a Zombie Apocalypse, this is fairly reasonable in Draft, but in Constructed there are much better choices like Raxxa Demon Tyrant, Anguish Demon, Ascendant Pyromancer, etc.
In both Draft and Constructed, there is a massive list of cards I would pick over this one, but maybe it has a home in Evil token centered lists that benefit from having 1-cost champions (Zombie Apocalypse, Mist Guide Herald, anti-bounce). Also worth noting, in the September no-core Constructed monthly, I got destroyed on my Midrange-Combo Evil Token deck against a Control Evil token deck in large part because my opponent’s demons were consistently bigger than mine. That was due to constant Raxxas though and neither of us were playing this.
It’s a “Draw 2 And” so it’s inherently a powerful card. Frequently other “Draw 2 Ands” will net save you more than 4 health though. For example, if you play Urgent Messengers and one of your human tokens blocks a 5 offense attack, Urgent Messengers effectively gained you 5 health, and you still have another blocker. Erase a Draka, Dragon Tyrant? You’ve effectively “gained” 9 health and gained back some tempo. If you would have played Absolve in either of those situations you would have net lost 1 health and net lost 5 health while a Draka remains in play.
That being said, as health gain, it can prevent your opponent from getting you into a health threshold from which they can burn you out. Since it costs 1 gold though, it can’t save you in the gap between your opponent playing a 1-cost burn card on your turn, after you spend your gold, and then playing a 1-cost burn card on their turn, before you can spend your gold. 4 health isn’t a ton either.
So, in Draft/limited, it will frequently be one of the best cards you can take in the pack, as a “Draw 2 And,” but in constructed, you will usually be better served by Urgent Messengers. However, if you’re overflowing with chump blockers already, if you’re just trying to survive one more turn against hard burn, if you want more 0-cost Good cards and you’ve already taken the rest of the strong splashable 1-cost cards, or maybe if you’re playing Chamberlain Kark, this isn’t an unreasonable card for Midrange, Control, or Combo.
Falling in love with Legends of Runeterra, spending $100 on it, and then just no longer playing it, with about half my purchased coins and 40,000 gems unspent (in a non-predatory monetization system with a lot of free-to-play benefits where I never felt like I had to spend money) — even though the client looks and feels great, they keep putting out fresh content, the development team is open/active in their communities/responsive to critiques, there are 10k tournaments every two months, there’s an excellent limited format where you rogue-like upgrade your deck between games with elimination being two consecutive loses and an entry consisting of two runs, there’s actual interesting lore-based champions that pull me deeper into the game and the surrounding universe, they pay for survey feedback ($5), and there are desirable cosmetics (another thing I never particularly cared about before Runeterra) — just served to illustrate how much more I enjoy Epic’s gameplay.
Similarly, since Hearthstone came out with battlegrounds I’ve played 302 hours, but I haven’t played a single game of “Hearthstone” since, and I haven’t missed it once (although Duels intrigues me). Tried to get into Magic Arena, one skipped weekend due to a vacation, and I effectively forgot about Arena for a while, and when I remembered, I had no desire to go back. Tried to get into Eternal with Pluck U to chase the 50K world championship, game just wasn’t particularly fun to me.
In general, I’ve just come to the conclusion that I actively dislike the standard resource model for most 2-player dueling card games and their implications (missed resource drops, playing on a curve especially for midrange, exponential power differentials between resource-costs, etc.). Runeterra is far and away the best of these because they address a bunch of these issues, but some of those core issues remain.
I vastly prefer Epic’s resource system where every card costs 1 or 0, each of those is largely balanced against the other cards of that cost (with some outliers), and the only thing determining what cards I want to play is the game state not the game turn. I can manipulate the game state much more easily than the game turn, and I love setting up decks and plays that manipulate the game into a state where this one card is better than all other cards, even though they all cost the same. Games are able to play out with so much more variation because of this. Dark Draft as a heads up draft format is phenomenal as well.
Further, the spoilers for the new kickstarter sets look awesome, and they got me super excited, as well as the fact that Pantheon is going to start to be added on the app on Tuesday Nov 3. Therefore,
Weekly Streamed Saturday Twitch Challenges
Every Saturday at 1pm CST/CDT I want to play at least a best of three against someone in any epic format on the app (excluding on the day of a Monthly which I’ll stream starting at 11am ET). I will also stream it on twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/tomsepicgaming (if you would like to remain anonymous, I will cover your Epic username.)
During the best of three, I can either do my usual talking through all of my plays by myself or we could hop into a discord/skype call that I’d broadcast. I can also actively focus on providing feedback or refrain from it as much as possible while still explaining my plays. (While also interacting with chat of course!)
For formats, the default would be Dark Draft, but I will happily work with the challenger on any format they would want to do including but not limited to: Random 30, Beginner, full Constructed, Constructed using only some sets, singleton Constructed (30, 45, or 60), Burn/Health Gain lessConstructed, other custom ban lists, we each start with the same 33 cards from an alignment and then finish building from there but can’t add any more of that initial alignment, anything we can think of.
First match will be against Atlanta, Dark Draft on November 7, 2020. I will then break out those games into individual videos which I’ll post on my
New YouTube Channel
I wasn’t able to get back into my original Youtube channel after Youtube changed stuff, so I finally gave up and just created a new one: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeqfbtXRAGMdm8e06tvS9-w/videos. I am planning on posting a single-game video every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 7pm CST/CDT. I have preloaded it with the January 2020 Constructed Monthly, and my tutorial campaign run through. I plan on adding all of my highlighted games from Twitch so far. Including the Saturday streams, I will also be putting out content on the blog the rest of the week.
Card Ratings Finally Continued
I recently updated my Constructed Tiered Card Ratings as well as completely overhauled my Dark Draft Card Ratings. Going forward, I will be posting one new card review every Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday at 7pm CST/CDT. To see them you can either subscribe to the blog or check out my most recent posts page: Game Reviews, Strategy Articles, and More. Seeing as how I’ll be flooding out a lot of smaller content, I do not plan on cross-posting to the Epic pages on Facebook (Fan Page, Digital), Reddit, or Board Game Geek as I have in the past, outside of potential major articles. (Feel free to post to any of those if you would like to discuss anything here with that particular community.) Also, I do not plan on actually posting anymore big articles on here for awhile, aside from one which will go up before November 20th, unless a massive wave of motivation hits. I might do some stub articles on stuff I want to put out there but don’t have the energy/full-understanding to do as thoroughly as I’d like though (Aggro-combo human token decks).
Here’s the first rating in the new style (I have a couple more written out going in alphabetical order, but I found this one was particularly interesting):
Images used with permission from White Wizard Games. These are not the final card files and are subject to change.
I actually think this card is quite powerful, and I’ve been consistently impressed by it. It’s a “boring, vanilla,” airborne/ambush champion, but those stats are actually terrifying. Aerial Assassin at minimum trades with all playable airborne champions (except Sky Serpent), and it survives all of the 7 or less attack ones like Draka’s Enforcer, Angel of the Gate, Ice Drake, Strafing Dragon, Little Devil, etc. It also survives all 0-cost removal (barring bounce: Hasty Retreat, Vanishing, Disappearing Act which are all devastating), in addition to 7 damage removal which is getting to be a more important break point (Fires of Rebellion, Whirlwind, Flames of Furios). On the attack, that 9 airborne offense effectively demands a 1-cost answer as there are not many 0’s that can effectively mitigate it, since there aren’t airborne tokens to chump block (thankfully).
Further, in Dark Draft, I’ll frequently attempt to plop this down in front of a turn 1 Little Devil, Guilt Demon, or blitzing 1-cost airborne champion with 7/8 stats or lower to go for the block. This is especially true because on-turn fast targeted-removal is not valued particularly highly right now, so while they may have a slow reestablishing follow up, which isn’t ideal for me, the odds that they can remove my blocker before I eat their 0-cost champion is fairly low. Even if they do, it will frequently force them down to 3 cards in hand turn 1. If I’m holding a 0-cost buff, to counter a potential buff from my opponent, I’m even more likely to try for this play. (Erase and Banishment are the utter fail cases for this though so be aware.)
In constructed, this was a solid and necessary addition to my Sage, Kark-Hunting list. A lot of the other ambush champions that I could use for off-turn gold-punishers were either just too small and unimpactful or didn’t have reliable, in-built evasion, making them too bad/inconsistent. Against Kark, you have to push big damage early, to prevent the turbo Kark win, and you need to apply constant champion-based persistent pressure to prevent them from stabilizing into card draw. This did both, as an off-turn gold-punisher. However, if you can’t reliably play it as an off-turn gold punisher, you can’t draw enough cards to maintain a reasonable hand-size, or you need either more immediate or long term value to win, this probably isn’t your card. If Alignment doesn’t matter and burn is super prevalent, Angel of the Gate is probably better, but Angel’s 7 health is definitely a liability so if your deck is more aggressive than midrange/control, Aerial Assassin might still be better.
The threat of this card is so-high that I try to do everything I can to avoid spending my gold first on my turn if I know my opponent has it in hand and I don’t have an effective answer, similar to (but not quite as much as) Rift Summoner and Thought Plucker.
Conclusion
I feel pretty good about this schedule, but I’d be happy to hear any comments, concerns, hype, etc. if anything comes to mind. Nothing is set in stone so it can be adjusted if there is a reasonable reason.
