The Proving Ground – Even Vox

Hi! It’s stormguard798. I, unfortunately, didn’t realise I could have played in this week’s Tuesday Night Eternal Tournament on Friday (look, time zones are hard), and I also didn’t end up playing in my own team’s Peasant Tournament. So, instead of the usual spiel where I spill all of the secrets from testing (sorry readers), I’ve decided to take a different tact with this article/post. In this new Proving Ground series (hopefully? We’ll see how this pans out), I’ll be taking a look at decks of yonder year, kick out some of the old dust bunnies, and see if they’re still up to snuff in the current meta.

(I’m going to get this in here because all the parentheses weren’t confusing enough: the Proving Ground is the name of the Elimination Arena from The Challenge: War of the Worlds, and I felt it would be a fun name for this series. Look, I like watching a lot of reality television; fight me.)

 So, for my first instalment I wanted to stick with a deck I enjoyed playing in the past: Even Vox. For those unfamiliar with the deck, it’s a TheBoxer mind-child and had a primary gameplan revolving around the vast number of Corrupted Units at an Even Power Cost. It keeps card parity with draw spells such as Distillation and Strange Burglar, and eventually overwhelming the ground with massive Shades that have been pumped by Vox.

Now, of course, there’s a lot of cards that are no longer legal in the deck as they have been nerfed to a non-Even power cost, so in the interest of keeping the deck Even, I have decided to omit them from the discussion entirely. (Yes, I realise it may not be correct to keep the deck Even, but I’m rolling with it. So there.) A lot of the remaining cards that are still in the deck have also been horribly nerfed – in fact, the archetype might be one of the most nerfed decks in Eternal’s history – Kato, Blightmoth, Gentle Grazer, Worthy Cause, Two-Face, Even-Handed Golem, Nahid’s Distillation, and Unfamiliar Interloper have all been hit. So…how would I build it now?

Decklist:

https://eternalwarcry.com/decks/d/s1s7iuQgZdM/the-proving-ground-even-vox

Inclusions:

• Devour: After all the power creep that has happened since it arrived in Set 1, Devour  remains one of the best fast-speed ways to sacrifice a Shade, a unit targeted by removal, or simply a stray Totemite. Being an Even deck, we do have some inherent card draw from Golem, but since this deck doesn’t win particularly quickly, I think it’s still important to have Devour aa a ‘glue’ card to just keep those cards flowing.

• Two-Face, Unfamiliar Interloper and Kato, Arena Herald: I’m lumping all of these cards into 1 entry because they all sort of serve a similar purpose – a 2 cost corrupted unit that makes a shade. Granted, Kato is by far the best of the bunch after the nerfs to all 3 of them since they provide an additional unit that could either be Sacrifice fodder or a giant beater, but they still serve the same similar role of getting a high enough Nightmare density for Vox to really tick.

• Endless Nightmare: Speaking of, I think this is a super interesting card that I consider quite meta-dependent; for instance, back when Rakano and Hooru Kira were completely dominating the meta and Valkyrie Enforcers were everywhere, this card would have been terrible cause although it could block, we’re not really in the market for a vanilla 3/1 most of the time. However, now that silence is not as common as before (but let’s be honest, Enforcer is great and people should still play it a lot), I think it’s much more viable to run this card. Particularly against a Unitless Control opponent, having this be a recursive threat that can be buffed by Vox for some massive damage is game-deciding, and just being able to get it back for free before snacking on it with Devour or Worthy Cause is also incidentally helpful.

• Vox, Nurturing Sadist: In other news, this what brings this deck from a mediocre sacrifice deck to something that could threaten a pretty devastating win condition. Of course, the main focus is the pseudo-anthem effect, buffing up all our shades to completely clog up the ground, but that sacrifice effect can come in handy in breaking Face Aegis if you need to, gain a pinch of life against aggro, or on the off-chance that your opponent plays a huge threat on their otherwise empty board. This also gets around Unit Aegis if you need something of theirs gone, particularly since we don’t have a lot of removal compared some of the other Even decks.

• Strange Burglar: I’ve tried several different 4 drops in this slot from Tattoo Dragon to Saber-Tooth Prideleader, but I feel like ultimately the card draw that Strange Burglar is just an unbelievably swingy effect that at present doesn’t have a replacement now that Distillation isn’t an option – particularly against decks that may have a harder time pressuring you, the Torch you direct at your face isn’t too consequential, and even against aggressive decks, a 5/4 body isn’t the worst. In the right spots, being able to activate this 2 or more times lets you completely run away with this game. The 1 attack anthem effect could also come in handy in allowing usually 0 power shades to attack.

• Quarry: I’m sort of on the fence about this card because it doesn’t provide any actual card advantage, just card selection and I think you have a large enough redundancy across the deck that you don’t need to dig for any card in particular, but ultimately, I decided to include this for consistency. From my experience, it’s super important for this deck to keep hitting power drops, at least up to about 6 power (so that you can play and activate Burglar in the same turn.) There is also the upside of dumping cards like extra units like a late-game Interloper or an Endless Nightmare to recur later or to up the unit count for Kato.

• Exploit: The other card that people are going to yell at me about. Yes, I get this card doesn’t fit with the rest of the deck synergistically. However, as anyone who has ever played this card would know, or anyone who has read my previous articles, I love this card, and it slaps. So hard. Discarding a Machinations from Pyrotech Combo, an Hourglass from Xenan Reanimator, or fixing from Kerendon (hehe. Seriously though, the influence in that deck is a house of cards) can set them back a lot. On top of that, that Plunder is super key because as with any deck running Even-Handed Golem (EHG), sometimes you just have a lot of cards in hand, and you want to make sure that you have the power to cast them. I think any deck has to have a lot of synergistic moving pieces to not include Exploit; that’s why I can see a case for not including it in something like Reanimator where you need a certain density of self-discard, but otherwise, I think this card is pretty much a shoo-in in pretty much every Shadow deck.

• Worthy Cause: Honestly a toss-up between this and Send an Agent (SAA), but ultimately I decided that the silence effect on problematic recursive units was just too good to pass up. On top of that, you could use this to save an Endless Nightmare that might potentially be silenced, or just to decimate and swing in for a huge attack – one huge problem with this deck is that it’s super susceptible to incidental pokes of damage such as that from fliers, and just having a massive lifesteal swing once you’ve managed to build out your board can be crucial and put the game out of reach for your opponent, or keep you out of lethal poke range.

Exclusions:

• Karvet, Solar Dragon – Originally, you used to run a couple of copies of this card to break the ground board stall that you would often encounter in the Even Vox mirror. However, I think as power creep has revved up over the past few sets, Karvet has really paled in comparison to more efficient and powerful options at 6 power. (Exhibit 1A: Shadow Icaria) And with SAA being immensely popular right now, leaving behind a 1/1 cultist isn’t exactly what I’m looking for when Karvet gets plucked off straight away. And without any additional dragons or ways to speed up the time frame in which mastery can be achieved (very rarely with Strange Burglar buffs, but that’s a corner case situation), the card just costs too much for too little.

• Kairos’ Choice – A decent removal option particularly against aggro, but I just feel that SAA and Worthy Cause are just much more efficient and powerful removal spells; I don’t think the ‘Rescue’ mode of Choice is really that potent now that your only good target for it is the Golem itself. Having said that, the versatility of this card alongside the fact that it is good early-game removal might warrant the slot over Worthy Cause, but I’m not positive.

• Lumen Reclaimer – A tech card that the Even Vox decks brought in for the mirror for when the game dragged out, and that could be quite interesting against the Reanimator decks that are populating the ladder nowadays. However, those decks have numerous ways of stocking the void and the effect isn’t exactly super reliable without the full 4 copies. (I mean, you could technically run 4, but it’s very unlikely that you’d want what is essentially a vanilla 4/4 against a lot of decks – however, I think it could warrant a market slot in a Time-based market). Hence, I wouldn’t want to include it main.

The Power Base:

          I think the power base for this deck is strange enough as a whole that I think it’s worth dedicating an entire section to this. For starters, we are running 27 power, and the only reason I’m comfortable running only 27 power is that we have the 4 main deck Exploits with which to Plunder away cards in the case we need to. It’s so, so important for any kind of Even deck to play more than the base 25 power especially if you’re not packing a card like Petition because the way that you fall behind despite the card advantage from Even decks is simply not having the power to play them.

          I have also decided to run 4 Diplomatic Seals, which might not seem like an obvious choice considering that this is a deck that  plays to the long game, and here is my reasoning: you don’t have terribly steep influence requirements in the deck: really, the toughest thing to cast influence-wise is probably the Tasbu out of the market – and you have plenty of time to get to that. On the other hand, it’s super important that you have undepleted power on turn 2 and 4 because surprise, surprise, the majority of your deck is 2 drops. Therefore, although something like Diplomatic Seal won’t be getting you any influence later on, honestly, it’s really not a big deal. This is a pretty drastic change from the previous iterations of Even Vox where you needed triple Time for Grazer and double Shadow for Blightmoth. This is also why I’ve elected to run the Stonescar Painting so that we’re able to more reliably undepleted power on Turn 2.

          Similarly, that’s why we have 2 copies of Broken Contract – whilst I don’t want to play the full 4 of because having multiple copies in one’s opening hand would be extremely detrimental to your early game – after all, this is still a 3 faction deck – getting a free unit to attack with, to sacrifice, is just some nice bonus value in the late game.

          Now, if I’m complaining about being unable to hit power, then why am I not including Petition? Honestly, I feel that we have so many 2 drops that we’ll always have something to do with our power. Coupled with the fact that we don’t run any sweepers because they’re pretty much all more detrimental to us than our opponent, alongside the fact we only have 4 Cylices means it’s usually not worthwhile to spend that 2 power looking for another one, we’d rather just spend our power developing out our board instead of Petitioning.

The Market:

• Vine Grafter – If you’ve watched the recent Eternal Journey Peasant tournament, then you’ll know how much this card performs. I don’t consider Broker to be a good card in general, even with the draw power of this deck, because so often you need a card to bail you out right there and then, and you don’t have the time to dig for it, so I’d rather be able to access it immediately. This aspect of market access is super crucial against opposing value-engine cards like Rolant, where our attempts to dig for said market cards just end up putting them ahead on board a lot. Ultimately, it’s a question of which Grafter to use, and though I felt that there’s some contest with the possibility of a Time market, Vine Grafter is such a powerful card (and just a better base unit, by far) especially against aggro that I felt it was the better market choice.

• Edict of Makkar – To stop a Rolant from getting out of control, and occasionally a Katra or a Wump&Mizo. Might be dropped following the Rolant nerf, but we’ll need to see how the meta shifts before deciding on that.

• Send An Agent – In my mind, it was either this main and Worthy Cause market or the other way round. One could consider Banish in this slot because it does address multifaction units such as Rolant, Diana, Katra and so forth, but being 1 power less and being able to deal with ridiculous threats at fast speed like Vara, Fate-Touched, the Queen of Glass, or Rota is just too good to pass up.

• Shrine to Karvet – Look, sometimes you just need a finisher, and considering how many units you can put out on the board and the myriad of ways you have to sacrifice cards for cheap, this seems like a fairly straightforward shoo-in. Particularly fun with massive Vox shades and Kato giants.

• Silverblade Menace – Sometimes you just need that Silver Bullet against control; that’s it. Moving on.

• Tasbu the Forbidden – Whilst it does tend get removed with astonishing speed, the games where this card sticks around for even a turn just let you absolutely run away with the game like an out-of-control freight train – you have a bunch of Shades that just die on their own, you’ve got plenty of sacrifice outlets, and just a whole host of ways of just keeping the Tasbu engine going. Ideally, you’d play it with some way to get additional value out of it in response should it get removed, but honestly not the worst-case scenario to force the answer out of your opponent. The other consideration I had in this slot was Azindel, but having a distinct lack of evasion on the majority of our units meant that it didn’t perform quite as I hoped for a card that cost 8 power.

• The Speaking Circle – The Absolute boogeyman of both formats right now, and running it is not out of the question in a Grafter market, especially considering that this deck isn’t exactly adept at dealing with opposing sites. My biggest problem with the Circle is that right now it does feel like a question of who can drop theirs first, and I don’t think we can compete with the TJS decks right now in ramping theirs out (not that we could compete with TJS decks to being with, but you catch my drift.) And with a completely random agenda, I think it has more opportunity to fall short than it does of actually furthering out strategy. I haven’t tried it out, however, so feel free to @ me if I’m wrong. I guess you could also consider Temple in this slot, but with Speaking Circle running around as much as it is, I would be wary.

• Gnash, Desert Prince – Now this is the card I most regret not being able to play in a Shadow market: we have no fliers in our deck, so this doesn’t affect us at all, and it’s so potent to be able to sweep away all those fliers out of TJS or Kira decks, and start spitting out those Aranhas to sacrifice, to eat up Intrusions from the opposing side, and just provide an absolute freight train of value. Granted, due to the prevalence of SAA, I wouldn’t run this main deck for fear of not being able to properly utilise its summon effect, but it’s an incredibly potent card and basically a shoo-in if you run a Speed Grafter market.

Tips for any newbies piloting the deck/archetype:

(aka Look, I’m not actually a good player I just try and practice the decks I do play a lot, okay?)

• Don’t forget the Worthy Cause ends up silencing opposing Shadow Icarias, so there’s no need to aggressively dump your hand out of spells before getting rid of here; also important to keep in mind against cards like Icaria or Kira early game if you don’t have a stocked yard as they are debuffed without their textbox.

• Remember, you have an influence requirement with which to bring back Endless Nightmare in addition to having excess power – a fact I forgot about a lot when I first started playing it. Having said that, leaving up 4 power is a lot, especially since this deck doesn’t have that many ways to play at fast speed; hence, it tends to be that majority of the time you just play out your hand. On top of that, whilst it may be tempting to sacrifice the Nightmare if given the option especially in response to something like a silence effect, if you don’t plan on recurring it, sometimes it might be better to have a vanilla 3/1 just stick around.

• Strange Burglar has a buffing effect, which means although you often want to play a unit post-combat, especially since it has an activated ability, remember this can allow your Shades to push through some damage in certain spots instead of fading away into nothing. Remember to combine with playing/sacrificing Interloper as well.

• Now that people aren’t playing Turn to Seed as frequently, as opposed to the play pattern of always dropping your Golem on Turn 2 previously, it’s at times correct to wait, and instead play out a better blocker, especially Vine Grafter against something like aggro. This is because Milos, Rebel Bomber is less frequently played nowadays with the decline of Stonescar, and Royal Decree tends to hit you later on anyways.

• Vox’s sacrifice effect is a neat way of removing Face Aegis even if your opponent has no units; remember that in case you need to go for a big Menace win, particularly since fewer ladder decks play Transpose nowadays.

• Tasbu is a fantastic card, but being a mono-faction unit it’s quite vulnerable to one of the most popular removal spells in the game, so be sure to drop when it’s going to hurt, and when you’re able to build a turn around it.

Verdict:

MEME. Absolutely a meme.

          For real, 100%, I would not take this deck, or I don’t think any iteration or build of Even Vox to a competitive tournament. Here is why: since this deck got nerfed into complete oblivion, you’ve had the release of such wonderful cards as Svetya, Lightbringer; Rolant, Iron Tyrant; and Know Thy Enemy. If I think about it hard enough it’s just all the cards I love now out to get all the cards I loved before. 😦 But yes, there are just so many cards nowadays that hamper this style of strategy, and since you’re a lot grindier and value-oriented as opposed to being speedy like perhaps a Shrine-focused build of FTS, it’s quite hard to sneak under all these cards before they can set-up over you. I’m not saying it’s impossible, especially with the help of Exploit and market removal, but there’s so many decks using at least 1 of these cards, if not more, that I think it’s rather prohibitive to be able to climb competitively with this deck. (Also, games with this deck take absolutely forever, so it was never conducive to climbing to begin with.)

          In addition, the original version of Even Vox sort of struggled against fast aggro to begin with, and following the nerfs so that most of your 2 drops only have 1 health left, it’s super easy for something like a Snowball or Autotread to just pluck them off and leave you in their dust. The one exception to this is Vine Grafter because a 2/2 regen body that can give another unit of yours regen as well is super crucial for stabilising against aggro; having a draw with them in hand is pretty much your only shot of winning against a deck like Yetis.

          So enough about all the decks you can’t beat, what about the things that you can? Anything you can profitably out-grind, really: I’ve beaten decks like Elysian, Even Xenan and Garden Control just by picking the right moments to press as opposed to draw cards, and be sure to apply enough pressure that you can outvalue them; whilst I do think our strongest matchup is against a deck like Unitless Control because you have recursive threats in the form of Endless Nightmare – particularly now that most iterations don’t run Turn To Seed. However, most Primal control based decks are few and far between on ladder, with most players electing to go the Kerendon Route for Control with Know Thy Enemy and Rolant instead. 😦

          Anyhow, now that I’ve droned on. And on and on about all the reasons that you shouldn’t play this deck and how it’s not really viable in the current meta, why should you? Cause it’s fun. I love snaccrifice decks, I enjoy all the deck-building decisions from making Even Handed decks, and when I get tired of getting completely luck-sacked by Xenan Reanimator on Turn 5 5 times in a row, then I take this out for a spin. For those who previously enjoyed this archetype, I hope this at least provides a decent starting point of where to go next. 🙂

          Should I not run Exploit in this deck? Did I make the wrong choice of removal to main deck? Am I just completely delusional for even writing an article about this meme to even begin with? At me on Twitter @stormguard798, or find me lurking in either the Friends of Eternal or the Eternal Journey Discord. Until next time.