Stormguard and TheBoxer’s Weather Report – Eternal Open: Stormbreak (Throne) Deck Tech – Even Feln

Hi everyone! It’s stormguard798, and I’m back with another deck tech following Eternal Open: Stormbreak – Throne, the first Organized Play event of the season. With a Worlds invitation on the line, Team Eternal Journey (TEJ), much like everyone else, had prepared extremely diligently to storm this tournament – pun intended. Joining me today is Worlds 2020 Top 8 competitor, an amazing technical player, and all-around awesome person: TheBoxer.

Hey folks, I’m TheBoxer. This is my first article in a long, long time. When Stormguard asked me to contribute I was very excited. If you don’t know me, I’m a sacrifice deck aficionado, a math major, and a swimmer.

(Yes, we do follow Eternal news and realise this article is being released the day after the balance patch completely destroyed Even Feln as a deck. Having said that, we both believe that examining the deckbuilding processes and individual card choices from both teams would be beneficial beyond solely the Even Feln archetype. We hope you still enjoy it. :}) 

Tournament Prep:

SG: 

So before we talk about the deck itself, I just wanted to briefly go over what it was like preparing for the Open. We first stumbled upon the Even Feln deck when we saw various members of TBC and TRS play in on ladder (thanks guys!), attempted to reverse-engineer it, and found the strategy to be quite potent – as did many other people, evidently, when it rocketed up in popularity on ladder. Once the mini-set Stormbreak was released, a couple of us branched out to try other strategies, but ultimately couldn’t piece anything together that felt consistently as strong.

The group testing was concentrated in the time following Stormbreak’s release, and although we tried to mostly get together for at least some period of time each time, this was rather difficult as a result of our team being scattered across the world. Most of the testing ended up being done in pairs or groups of 3, with our findings being posted in the text channels for the next group to work with. In those group sessions, we were all spectating 1 person piloting the deck that we wanted to try against a teammate on a designated archetype, with everyone else spectating and chiming in. Since there normally weren’t very many of us and it was more focused on the various lines the deck we were testing could take as opposed to the technical play from both players, everyone watched from the brewer’s side of the game. In between tournament prep, however, divvying yourselves up and watching both sides of the match is fantastic fun and great for improving your game. 

TB: 

TRS was one of the two teams that started out with the original list from LightsOutAce and Isomorphic before Stormbreak was fully spoiled. After a handful of games I loved the deck – and I wasn’t alone. We played it on ladder for a few days but once we realized many of us likely would play it in the Open, we took it off ladder (except for players who felt they couldn’t get enough practice in otherwise). We did a fair amount of tuning before Stormbreak was released in the hope that the meta wouldn’t significantly change. However, the addition of Grenahen just secured our decision to play Feln. 

Most of our testing was done in a group with some people watching each side of the matchup. We sometimes split into separate voice channels if there were enough of us in a given session. The matchups we tested most were the mirror and Feln v Kira. There were also times we just talked for a while while staring at the deckbuilder interface talking over specific card choices.

First Draft Decklists: 

TEJ: 

https://eternalwarcry.com/decks/d/ODT1esAZ7IY/tejs-even-feln-first-draft

This is the first draft decklist that my teammates, iplongno and johnholio, put together. As you can see, nothing really changed in the maindeck whatsoever: it was performing well for us, and all that was left was tuning the markets. 

TRS:

https://eternalwarcry.com/decks/d/DQwlMC0RjcQ/first-draft-trs-even-feln

This is the first draft LOA posted in our team chat. (Notice the very depleted power base.)

Card and deck discussion (Main deck):

The 2 drop-debate – Acantha Ascending VS Damara, Deft Saboteur

SG: 

In our team’s build with 4 Forbidden Research and 4 Shadow Symbol, it is quite straightforward to power out 6S or even 8S very quickly. It’s been a very strong card in general for us, taking advantage of opposing removal-light draws and dominating the game in a hurry. Although it’s weak to silence effects such as Valkyrie Enforcer out of Hooru Kira as well as the general cadre of fliers out of the deck, but it’s a strong way to close out the game against opposing Even Feln decks or the version of Menace Sacrifice not packing any Mother of Skies.

Damara wasn’t on our radar at all as a consideration, but it seems like a very potent card particularly in the mirror – Champion of Cunning is such a powerful card, particularly in the mirror, and being able to snipe other powerful market cards such as Korovyat Palace out of Hooru Kira or Shrine to Karvet out of the Menace decks. I quite like your choice of running only 2, since it does fall off quite quickly in multiples. It also makes much more sense with your choice of Varas to pop Face Aegis so that you aren’t just spending a hefty 5 power to do so. 

TB:

Acantha may not be on the same power level as Jarrall and Kira but she’s no slouch. In the first few builds with 4 Symbol and 4 Research Acantha overperformed. After 1 attack she’s a two-for-one. And even if your opponent does have removal, she only cost you 2 power to play. However, when we cut down on ways to accelerate Shadow influence she becomes less exciting. In our final list we only had 0 Research and 1 Symbol! This was not enough Shadow influence to get to 8S reliably, so we ended upshaving a few copies of Acantha.

Damara is one of my favorite cards in Eternal. Against aggro she can be used to kill many units that cost 3 or less when they attack; against midrange or control she can kill sites and give you a two-for-one that hurts the effectiveness of their merchants. However, she does experience diminishing returns (5 is a lot even in slow matchups), so I don’t like playing more than 2. She was specifically added when wanting to improve the mirror (which revolves around market Champion of Cunning).

The interaction suite – Dazzle/Exploit/Annihilate/Defile/Stealth Strike

SG: 

Dazzle is admittedly extremely awkward against Hooru Kira decks, but blocking an Honor of Claws out of Even Feln or a Display of Menace out of the various Menace decks is a crucial tempo swing . You don’t end up using the ‘Stun’ mode on Dazzle as often, but taking a Shadow Icaria out of combat for a turn is very helpful in winning a tight race. Ultimately, I was getting enough mileage out of both modes to warrant the 4-of. Going card-negative, as TheBoxer pointed out, is a surefire way to fall behind if you use too many of them, but in a deck that has so many ways to get 2 or 3-for-1s, I think you can afford to go down a couple of cards. 

I got completely destroyed by Yetis twice in Day 1, hence I understand the reluctance to play 4 of Exploits. However, as has been already pointed out by plenty of people, the rest of the metagame is tending towards being slower and more grindy, hence I think 4 of Exploit right now is a shoo-in. There are so many key hay-maker cards from Rost, the Walking Glacier and Sling of the Chi to Praxis Trove for the Menace decks to Lord Steyer’s Tower in Hooru Kira. As a result, there are plenty of juicy, powerful cards for you to nab with Exploit. And of course, nothing feels better than taking the Regen-buffed Champion of Cunning out of their hand in the mirror. 

There has been a large influx of multifaction units into the format with Grenahen and Crafty Occultist, but I feel like not running any copies of Annihilate is just asking to be destroyed by ridiculously large threats. Exhibit A: Icaria, First Reaper. Exhibit B: Rota, Steyer’s Adjutant. (In testing, we felt that Xenan variants had a particularly poor matchup into an assortment of Even Feln builds, so we weren’t terribly worried about big Time fatties.) That being said, Defile has proven itself to be a very versatile card, snatching away units to prevent them from being Know/Krull’ed back. In order to strike the balance between the 2, my team elected to go with a 3/3 split – in a deck such as Even Feln that tends to see a lot of cards, you can get away with not having 4 of a possibly clunky removal spell. 

We included 2 copies of Stealth Strike as some direct-damage for sites and as catch-all removal for any big threats. 6S is fairly straightforward for the deck to get, which means Stealth Strike is almost always powered-up. However, 4 cost, even with Revenge, felt clunky and underpowered at times since in this meta-game you were rarely trading up in power when dealing with threats. It was also rather tricky to leave up if you didn’t have exactly Forbidden Research. Therefore, I would probably drop the Stealth Strikes for something different moving forward. 

TB:

Dazzle is your best card in many of your worst matchups (e.g. Clear the Way or Reanimator). It can stun stuff in other matchups but I’m a loyal adherent of card game theory. I don’t like going down a card unless situations are very dire. I want my cards to trade one-for-one or better in almost every game. The first Dazzle in a bad matchup can be plundered by Huntress or Exploit, but the second one can be easily stranded. This is how I arrived on 2 copies.

Exploit is another card that helps in your bad matchups but unlike Dazzle it’s easier to play (2S vs 2PP). It combines well with Felrauk and Rindra to strip your opponent of resources. I don’t love spending 2 to make someone discard a card in an even deck but this deck uses Exploit better than most other decks I’ve seen it played in.

Defile is great if you’re worried about Dovid and Wump&Mizo but relatively bad in the mirror. Annihilate conversely is better in the mirror but worse against Kira and Elysian. Annihilate is also good against many of the units in Xenan. We went with a 3-3 split but if we were forced to add a seventh removal spell it would be the fourth Defile as bigger units it misses can be blocked or killed with Icara.

Stealth Strike was briefly mentioned by Noverb but we dismissed it when we realized we couldn’t market it. We never considered it in the maindeck. It’s a powerful card that works well with Grenahen but 4 up front just feels like too much when many of the scary threats cost 2. 

The 4-drop debacle – Rindra, Infiltrator V Vara, Vengeance Seeker 

SG: 

Going into the tournament, we did not feel that 4 cost-Vara was a particularly good card – there is just so much fast-speed removal that catches it off-guard, which means it often doesn’t end up doing anything. The knocking off of Aegis is nice against Sling and Kira as well as clearing the way for the rest of your discard to go through, but I don’t think the effect is powerful enough to warrant inclusion on that alone. I do think from the Damara to the Reappropriator, the selection of Vara in order to support the rest of those cards in TRS’ build does make sense. 

On the other hand, Rindra is a multifaction 4 cost unit, which is surprisingly hard to kill given that Yetis is the only ‘popular’ deck that happens to be running Torch at present. At worst, you’ve at least gotten a card out of their hand, and at best, the lifesteal can stabilise you in a jiffy. My personal opinion is that you can’t lean so far into trying to beat a specific deck that you bring an objectively worse 4 drop: yes, it sucks when they kick off the Felrauk chain by discarding it, but I somehow ended up facing more Yetis than Even Feln on Day 1. You can have an expected metagame, but at least in terms of trying to get to Day 2, I don’t believe it advisable to lean too far over into predicting a certain archetype. 

TB: 

Vara is not a powerful card. I was close to registering 4 Rindra but ultimately went with the variant Jez2718 and NotoriousGHP came up with 4 Varas. They were confident that Vara was good against Kira and Sling. Although I didn’t agree from experience, I trusted them. (they were also both halfway to day 2 at the time and claimed to like it in the Open meta) Knocking off aegis is powerful when Kira, Elysian, and Sling all have ways to gain aegis. In a meta with less Primal, I think Vara wouldn’t have been right but she felt like she had a pseudo-summon effect that saved me a card by popping aegis.

Rindra is a two-for-one that stabilizes, what’s not to love? With so many duals available playing Rindra on curve wasn’t difficult. I ended up with 2 copies of Rindra in my deck. Enough that I had access to it, but not so many that I was forced to play it on 4 in the mirror because of a lack of better options. Because of Golem you see 2 ofs a lot more often.

The draw spells – Honor of Claws, Forbidden Research and how many of them do you even need? 

SG: 

In our testing, we found Forbidden Research to be a more versatile card selection spell: whilst you do have to discard 1 more card, you can do so at fast speed, which means you can hold up removal and negation spells, and you also get some bonus Shadow influence, which helps for getting the influence on Acanthas mid-combat. Plus, it’s always nice to ambush your opponent with 2 Felrauks mid-combat, even if they aren’t fantastic blockers. However, the card doesn’t actually provide any card advantage, only card selection, which means that we are still supplementing the 4 cost spell suite with 2 Honor of Claws so in the case we don’t get terribly lucky with Felrauk draws, we don’t fall too far behind in raw cards and inevitability. 

TB: 

I loved the late-game inevitability of having eight draw spells, but it simply was too bad into fast decks and being forced to walk into Dazzle wasn’t great. For a while we had 4 Honor and 2 Research but Research was cut to make room for Grenahen. Because of how last-minute this change was, it’s one of the parts of the deck I’m least confident on. I think having less than 6 draw spells hurt the long game power of the deck. My topdecks felt worse in the version I played in the Open.

Extra Shadow influence can be powerful but I can’t pass up extra cards. Improving the power level of some of the cards in my deck is not worth giving up that card for. I like that Research is fast but after cutting down on Dazzles, that mattered less. Once we cut down on Acanthas and cut the At Any Cost in the market, there was really no debate as to which draw spell was better.

Grenahen – Yay or nay? 

SG: 

I am frankly not a fan of Grenahen as an inclusion in either list. You don’t have damage dealing spells maindeck (barring the 2 Stealth Strikes in the TEJ version) and you don’t have any way of recurring cards from your void. Granted, with 34 hits, the odds that you miss are only around 12% (the parameters I used was a Turn 2 Grenahen on the play with no units in hand) but when you miss, a 1/3 lifesteal is very underpowered. You can hope to get a little lucky with Felrauks and pick up additional value that way, but you have plenty of other ways to discard the Felrauks if need be. 

All in all, we’ve found Grenahen to be extremely underwhelming in the Even Feln deck, and as a result elected not to include it in our deck. It is possible that our judgment was clouded by how it overperformed in other lists such as the various iterations of Menace Shrine, but I don’t think that Even Feln is the best shell, nor a good shell, for Grenahen. 

TB: 

Grenahen is Golems five through eight. On aggregate it’s the card I’m second most happy to have in an opening hand. It establishes a presence on the board to block or imbue while digging for Golems and other units. I don’t love the failcase but in many matchups the body does matter. We did the math on how often you hit a free Felrauk and it’s shockingly high, around one in nine Hens! Not that this would sell me on the card alone, but  it’s certainly an added bonus

One piece of tech I appreciated (but did not think of) is running Vara’s Favor to allow Hen to find power. This deck is semi-greedy on power count because of how much plunder and card draw it has, so even adding a single Favor would up your odds of power significantly.

The power base – do you need 4 Shadow Symbols? 

SG: 

I entirely understand wanting to play 20 duals in order to get both sides of the influence buff for Champion of Cunning as expeditiously as possible, and honestly that’s probably a better idea. Granted, we liked being able to rush influence for both Acantha and At Any Cost, but that’s mostly gravy, and not devastatingly crucial. On the other hand, making sure you have the Flying and Aegis on the Champion is so important for racing decks like Sling. I do think TRS’ call was better for this tournament given the expected meta and Champion being so crucial in the mirror.

TB: 

If you’re running 4 Acantha and market At Any Cost, 4 Symbol becomes a lot more appealing. But if you cut down on those, cutting down on Symbol is easy. I still like the one of Symbol because you’ll never experience diminishing returns while also seeing it fairly often with so much card draw. We played 20 duals primarily to facilitate Felrauk (although Champion was another factor). We did the math on how many undepleted sources were needed for turn 2 and looked at where the curve flattened out (at what point adding more gave us less in return). This happened around 11-13. Ultimately we played a deck 12 undepleted sources of power for turn 2 which explains the 4 Shadow Sigil and the 1 Primal Sigil.

Card discussion (Market): 

Eremot’s Designs/Malediction/Blightmoth 

SG: 

I do think that some form of sweeper should be present in the market – a deck that’s all about grinding out value from your cards can really pull far ahead with a solid 3 for 1. Whilst they are most helpful against aggressive decks, a well-timed sweeper against a deck like Hooru Kira in the mid/late game will still completely destroy them. The question, of course, became which sweeper to pack. We immediately eliminated Blightmoth as an option – if you’re able to cleanly drop a Grafter and spend your Turn 3 accessing the market against the Yetis deck, then you’re probably already in great shape that game. 

We initially had Eremot’s Designs in the market, but eventually shaved it for the Malediction, which I do regret. We thought the Malediction would be more versatile against the Menace Trove match-ups with all its 3 drops as well as the Even Feln mirror since it can snag poorly played Rindras or an unbuffed Vara. However, as anyone who’s played the Trove/Shrine matchup knows, you can oftentimes clear their board and still have them kill you the next turn without breaking a sweat. I also ended up running into a shocking number of Mother of Skies decks, which Malediction unfortunately doesn’t quite deal with. In addition, Designs being half the cost of Malediction is quite important when you’re being rushed down in certain matchups. 

TB: 

I believe it’s important to think about what circumstances will lead to grabbing a certain card from the market and evaluating options conditioned on that. A conclusion TRS came to was that most of the time Grafter for a sweeper was too slow against the best aggro draws. And against the slower draws killing your own Grafter was bad because you wanted it, your Golems, and your Hens as blockers. This led us to Blightmoth, which also has value against Menace Trove decks. Some members of TRS argued against including a sweeper altogether. Before the tournament I was on the side of Blightmoth, but looking back I didn’t get it very often and believe it’s not an efficient use of market space. Against aggro the grafter body does enough and against Trove you just want to get Champion to kill them.

At Any Cost/Silverblade Menace

SG: 

Of course, the upside of At Any Cost is that it’s able to direct damage to things other than your opponent’s face – a problematic Lord Steyer’s Tower, perhaps, or a recurring unit. However, the berth between the modes of AAC is incredibly wide. On the other hand, with all the spells that most meta decks are running nowadays, both the floor and ceiling of Silverblade Menace tends to be higher, even if it can only be used as a finisher. Our team selected AAC for its versatility, but I do think it’s questionable as to whether the set-up cost for the card was worthwhile since it’s not the deck’s primary gameplan. 

TB: 

At Any Cost is a far more powerful card than Silverblade Menace. But with only 1 Shadow Symbol we felt we couldn’t support it, although I was somewhat tempted to include it as an expensive Sear to help kill sites (which can be a problem when you don’t draw Icaria). Menace rarely drains for double digits but in some matchups 7 is not an unreasonable expectation. Since Grafter gives Regen, it can sometimes help stabilize against aggro decks by gaining three or four life and blocking in the air.

Reappropriator 

SG: 

Not including this card is probably my biggest regret of the tournament Particularly potent in conjunction with the Aegis-nullifying clause of Vara, this delightful piece of Shadow relic interaction snatches Shrine, Trove and Sling out of their decks, and tacking Regen onto this unit makes it particularly sticky for those opposing archetypes to deal with. Never skimp on the relic interaction. Granted, they often play Shrine on the turn they want to kill you so this doesn’t help there, and there’s always the chance of them immediately removing the Valkyrie, but the tempo loss when they don’t gives you a fighting chance to just kill them by then. 

TB: 

This card looks better on paper than it actually is. I think I grabbed it a grand total of zero times in the top 64. Trove has market Combust with many Smugglers to get back their Shrine and Sling has a smörgåsbord of damage-based removal spells to get back their Sling.

Nullblade

SG: 

I think this is certainly worth some consideration: despite the Krull nerf, Krull/Know is still being played, and Nullblade does a great job at blocking off any recursive units. Whilst Decimating Waylay makes for stronger void hate, Nullblade has another use of simply being removal in the form of a relic weapon. However, there are a number of Menace Shrine variants that do not rely on Trove, and therefore Know/Krull, at all, which means this isn’t as effective at hampering their strategy. That being said, you can never go too wrong with a pinch of void hate in the market. 

TB:

I love a lot of what this card does against the mirror and Reanimator but 4 is too much and I’m never getting it before Champion. We’re past the days of Jawbone Greatsword being a passable market option in fair matchups (as much as this fact saddens me). Against Trove they can just Display of Menace you (which they can find with Grenahen) and make you feel like an idiot for paying 7 while they paid 3.

From Below 

SG: 

I had included this card on the day of the tournament itself as a way of disrupting Hooru Kira and Menace Trove – they might get 1 copy of the spell they wanted, but they won’t be able to dig into any more copies. As additional upside, the Globules it makes will mow down opposing boards in a hurry. However, it is extremely underwhelming when it gets plucked off immediately by a Bring to Justice or Combust. The few games I played with the card it over-performed since it stuck around, but the floor on this card is too low to warrant inclusion. 

TB: 

I see this card in a different way. I mostly ignore the discard effect and focus on the killer oozes it gives you. I think this is a powerful card in unit-based midrange mirrors in Expedition but doesn’t make the cut in Throne. This walks into Icaria in the Feln mirror.

The Speaking Circle/Dizo’s Office 

SG: 

A couple of people like the Speaking Circle in Throne; I am not one of those people. With the entire Throne card pool, your hits off the Speaking Circle are completely atrocious, and it’s too fragile to reliably stick around. As with Dizo’s Office, it’s certainly a powerful haymaker, but it ended up getting too easily plucked off in the mirror by Shadow Icaria, and as a result, didn’t feel it was worth the inclusion – 7 power is a lot. 

TB: 

Basically the exact same reasoning from me. Expensive sites are bad in a meta full of Icaria. If I wanted another big threat in the market I’d play 8 cost Vara or Last Chance (to get back my Champion).

Shrine/Trove discussion: 

SG: 

Storm’s Menace Discard Shrine:

https://eternalwarcry.com/decks/d/IoKXJ9lJLYw/storms-menace-discard-shrine

Back in February, I wrote my Misplay tournament report talking about a Feln Purveyor deck that I had nicked, I mean, put together, and when I saw both Grenahen and Crafty Occultist in the new set, I knew that it was sweet, sweet destiny. How I love my value units. 

With the addition of Fire to the deck came some delightful additions – on top of the Occultist, we snagged Kato as another amazing payoff for having a bunch of units in one’s void. If we’re running Kato, then we should most certainly run Carver, sacrificing all the piddly 1/1 units for some additional reach only to recur all of them again later. With the Fire influence came Combust in the market for more versatile removal, Shrine for some ridiculous turns, and Strangle Burglar for a little bit more reach for the deck. With the addition of Shrine, I also felt comfortable including the Know/Krull package for a little extra recursion since we can recoup the life loss. 

I felt comfortable making the simple exchange of Grenahen for Sporefolk and Occultist for Lightning Sprite as a discard enabler and a controlled Discard outlet respectively. Whilst Felrauk has proven themselves to be a very potent card this weekend especially when played for free, it has proven far too difficult to be able to get the requisite influence to play it for free, which is why it got booted out very quickly. In fact, after some testing, I found the same to be true of Maveloft Huntress, even if it is a ridiculously powerful card: double Primal early is just too difficult for this deck, and a huge part of the flexibility and power of Huntress is being able to smooth out your early draws. I do think the strategy certainly has some legs, but there is just so much efficient removal and value-based defensive units right now that leaning towards a more aggressive strategy didn’t quite pan out. 

In fact, that’s also part of the reason why I didn’t try pivot to a Mother of Skies based strategy – whilst I think the card is very powerful and really amplifies the potency of Shrine, being able to rebuild your board so quickly, not being able to go T2 Mother into a T3 multifaction unit consistently really hurt the power of the deck. I also didn’t go down the route of Rat Cage/Reactor Forge and the relics sub-theme, because frankly, after some playtesting, more often than not I ended up killing myself with my own Forge. Besides, with Know/Krull, I felt that there were enough other ways to cheat power that I didn’t also need Forge. 

I definitely underestimated the potency of Trove previously, and having played with it sans Forge, combining it with Know is possibly one of the most ridiculously powerful things that you could do in the format – in fact, a very nice friend passed me a very well-tuned Trove list prior to starting my run should I want to run it. That being said, I didn’t end up playing it because the lines are ridiculously complicated, and I don’t have faith in my own technical ability. A lot of the Discord conversations by players who did end up bringing it revolved around losing games due to misplays rather than deck construction. The deck is ridiculously powerful – just make sure you know how to build and play it. 

TB: 

TRS’ 4F Shrine: 

https://eternalwarcry.com/decks/d/a2QMF6nXmMM/trs-4f-shrine

Grenahen and Crafty Occultist are powerful cards. Trove is the obvious home if you want to play both of them. I knew this deck would be a powerful option but was entirely unsure how to build it. So rather than tell you exactly how to build it (which I still don’t know), I’m going to share some of the questions that made building it hard and deciding not to play it easy.

• Is Mother of Skies worth playing? She works well with Kato, Grenahen, and Occultist but is tough on the influence. 
• Which Smugglers are correct? There are reasons to love all three. Feln is great with a Shrine in play, Stonescar is a good blocker, and Skycrag powers up Snowballs and Display but cannot take Krull out of the market. There’s also how each of them restricts what cards can be in the market. You can only play cards in the intersection and the complement of the union with respect to the intersection (e.g. Feln and Stonescar means you can play Shadow cards and Skycrag cards). 
• Is Whispering Wind worth playing? It’s a powerful threat, but it makes you weaker to removal and means you can’t play Hurler to get with Know When to Hold ‘em. 
• Is Reactor Forge worth playing? Additional relics after Trove have huge diminishing returns because you do need units to sacrifice after all. Playing Forge leads you down the path of Rat Cage to minimize this problem. 
• Is Darkwater Vines worth playing? It enables Krull but is not good fodder. 
• Should you play Torch? If you’re going to play a single removal spell main, then Torch makes some sense because Grenahen can find it. But this makes Trove worse as you don’t know for sure your 1 drop will play Know When to Hold ‘em. 
• Should you play Defile? My kneejerk reaction was no because of how little room you have for removal and the fact that it isn’t damage based. You have Krull to reanimate things you steal, and Trove will only play Defile if your opponent has a legal target (otherwise it will play Defile). 
• Should Burglar be main or market? If you play it main, you slow down some of your opening hands but if you play it market your late game gets worse. 
• What mix of Paintings, Vows, and Banners is correct in the power base? 

If you’re overwhelmed by this paragraph, that was the point. This deck is very complicated and the only thing I knew for sure about it was that I couldn’t find the right build in time, let alone know how to play it at a high level!

Final thoughts: 

TEJ, and by that, I mean iplongno and johnholio, worked really hard preparing for this tournament and testing out a lot of different options for the Even Feln deck whilst I was off in Menace lala-land, which I am extremely thankful for, given how solidly this deck ended up performing for our team. I’m happy that I was able to kick the OP season off with such a strong start, and though I got swiftly destroyed by my previous collaborator, SRFS, in the Top 64, I hope that TEJ as a team can keep this good momentum going. ^-^ Although I must imagine TheBoxer is far, far happier with his result: you’ll be able to continue to laud him with congratulations over at @TheBoxerECG. 

How many of you stan TheBoxer, his reasoned logic and superb gameplay as much as I do? Do you agree with all the nerfs Even Feln got hit with in the latest balance patch? (I know I certainly don’t.) Let me know on Twitter @stormguard798, in the comments section of the Reddit post, or when I’m lurking in the FE, TEJ or The Misplay Discords. Until next time. 😉