Disclaimer: This piece of content is rated M, for mature audiences, and is DSFWP. (Dubiously safe for work, probably.) Do not proceed if you’re uncomfortable with such content.
Hi all, it’s AlexFiero here, and welcome to the latest Weather Report. (sorry Storm, I’m stealing your intro. :P) You might know me for being the second most handsome member of Team Eternal Journey (“TEJ”), after Jedi of course. Others may know me from my runs in the Tuesday Night Eternal tournaments, or a few good performances in the early Eternal Opens (“Open”) of the year. Others of you may have no idea who I am, so just know that I’m Stormguard’s teammate and play far too many bad control decks. [SG: ‘Bad’ control decks might be a little critical. Shall we say…of dubious origin? :PPP]
First of all, you’re the 3rd most handsome member of TEJ – at best. Everyone simps for Johnholio. Secondly, you could never steal my thunder – I am literally the Storm. In any case, we’re back! After the biggest set of balance changes that I’ve encountered in Eternal, the format has been well and truly shaken up. I’m sure I speak for all of us when I say that we were all eagerly anticipating what would shake out of this Open. After a week of relentless testing, TEJ had, well, an answer.
STORMGUARD’S DECK:
Decklist:
https://eternalwarcry.com/decks/d/g9WY143JX08/storms-unhealthy-obsession-with-furries-and-balls
As 1 of the few Tier 1 decks from the previous patch that didn’t get touched, Elysian Jarrall (“Ely”) seemed like an obvious starting point. Prior to the patch, I had spent about a month practicing it on ladder, learning the lines, the ins and outs of the deck in case I ever wanted to play it for a tournament. When the patch came around, I tried out a deluge of different options before deciding that nothing felt quite as good in my hands as Ely, so that’s what I went with. Granted, from the rest of my team alone, I should have suspected Stonescar would be pretty popular. (We’ll get to that in a hot 2nd) Though that’s a rough matchup for Ely, especially without market Permafrost, I didn’t want to overpredict anything, and felt Ely would be good in a still volatile metagame.
AF: I would have considered Elysian a good choice going into the ECQ. With no cards impacted by the patch, it seemed like the ideal starting point to attack the format and is likely what I would have taken if I had more practice with the deck. A strong tempo gameplan backed up by cheap but powerful threats in Master Conjurer, Jarral and Wump is very effective into a slow, value-focused metagame. Unfortunately, that is not what we ended up with at the ECQ, so I think I made the right choice not bringing Elysian (even if I didn’t do any better with what I did end up taking).
The list itself is incredibly stock, so I’ll just be briefly going over where the list may differ:
- 4 Obstructive Flicker – Going into this, I expected to see a fair number of Argenport Midrange and Even Xenan decks. These decks will be packing Eremot’s Designs and Know Thy Enemy, which are pretty good against my Party Pairs. Besides these cheaper, more conditional sweepers, Flicker is also very effective against any unconditional sweepers out of Combrei Relics or Garden Control. Being 1 cost, it’s very cheap and easy to hold up, so I felt the deck certainly warranted the full playset.
- The Derry Cathain/Twilight Hunt package – I unfortunately don’t remember who I blatantly stole the idea from on ladder, but it was interesting as a cheap spell for a little more interaction in the deck. Wump is also a Dinosaur, so it, like Derry, benefits from the Hunt buff. However, apart from Wump, the deck doesn’t have a lot of well-statted units. While trying the card out, it just kept underperforming for me. Derry also provides a wee bit of disruption, but I don’t want to pay power for my units to be good. Gross. How gauche is that?
- Kehanya, Skilled Caster – A recent addition from the latest campaign, I think Kehanya could be quite powerful in the ‘right’ metagame of Skycrag Aggro and Hooru Kira. Silence your Houndmasters or Kiras, bop your Tower, and so forth. That being said, it really doesn’t do too much in any other matchup – it pops Face Aegis (“Faegis”) at most. Hence I was comfortable leaving it on the sidelines this tournament.
- Accelerated Evolution (“AE”) – Look, Storm likes flying bears. He just does. In any case, this is probably 1 of my favourite finishers, and I do like having access to it somewhere in the deck. It is unfortunately mediocre in the early-game, and with 8 market access, it might not quite do enough to warrant a market slot. The card nevertheless closes the game out in short order in many spots. Flying Party Pairs!
- Only 2 Learned Imitators/main deck Mirror Image – I expect a LOT of people to contest me on this point. I think Imitator is a fine card, particularly in Keelo decks with Triumphant Stranger. I think using the card in a fairer way is rather mediocre. It’s really a card that you want when you’re already ahead in the late-game. For instance, when there are already 4 Snowballs, or if you already have 6P influence. Consequently, it feels like a win-more card. If I’m looking for a win-more card, then I think Mirror Image makes more sense – yes, you need to have something on board to copy, but if you’re unable to protect your on-board threat through your assortment of cheap spells, then you’re already in a terrible spot. 4 Learned Imitators was a bit too much. Drawing multiple copies in the early game is tragically awkward, but 2 felt like a good middle ground.
- No Sling, yes Olzial – Olzial was a staple of the Elysian market back when Sling or Shrine was a concern, just to very quickly knock out the troublesome relic before cleaning up the Soldier with a Snowball or Flicker. Nowadays, aforementioned relics are less of a concern, but it still stands alone pretty well as an individual threat. Not to say that knocking out a relic or site with this doesn’t happen anymore – bye, Speaking Circle – but Olzial being a 5/3 Regen Flier is still quite a pain to deal with.
I ended up going 13-15 with the deck in the Open, which is pretty tragic considering I had 2 byes. Despite that, having played it on ladder since the Open, the deck still continues to perform very well for me despite the aberrant Open performance across quite a few players that I respect a lot. (Including myself, of course. I respect me a great deal.) I have since swapped out the market AE for Permafrost, shoved a single copy of AE in the maindeck, and dropped a Mandatory Retirement. Granted, some hands will just fold to disruption, but what else is Exploit for but to punish greedy keeps and keep us honest? 😛
My personal theory is this – as decks keep trying to get more and more midrangey to go over the top of Base-Shadow Stonescar with the likes of Xenan Mid or Combrei Relics, it opens up an opportunity for tempo-oriented decks to snag a win from underneath them. As we saw in the Summer Invitational, JNL’s Skycraggro deck was able to accomplish just that.
Despite that, I don’t think that Skycraggro is necessarily unbeatable or overpowered – indeed, there are many ways to clear out a legion of X/1s in Throne. I believe JNL simply made a very potent meta call for that particular tournament. But with these balances and checks that every deck has for each other coupled with the recent debatably necessary nerfs, I think that Throne looks to be in a very good place moving forward.
ALEXFIERO’S DECK:
https://eternalwarcry.com/decks/d/S_c5wmwshlk/4-faction-control
When the balance patch happened, all my dreams of memeing my opponents with Turbofog went out the window. [SG: And we thank the DWD Overlords for preserving AlexFiero’s – and people in Day 1’s – sanity.] However, when I took a closer look at the patch notes, I realised that Garden of Omens had not received a nerf, but rather a change – and it so happened to make Kira and Elysian, two matchups that had traditionally been difficult for control decks, significantly better. No longer would you have to live in fear of Bubble Shields, or Dazzles, or Obstructive Flickers ruining your plans. And so, while the rest of my team decided to work on Stonescar Aggro, I set about trying to find the best Garden deck I could (along with help from SG himself).
The first version we went to was a traditional Honor list, but we found that with Transpose being nuked from orbit, we didn’t have a reliable way to get Face Aegis when we needed it – particularly with so many decks running Silverblade Menace. Of course, we could have run Just Desserts as an answer to the dreaded control-killer, but we weren’t convinced at the time that it was enough. Looking back, it would have been just as clean at answering Menace as what I ended up on, but we moved on to looking at other control lists first.
Goaychanhong (GCH) built an Instinct list with Cirso’s Choice as a way to get Aegis at fast speed and that was what we tested next, but it lacked ways to close the game. Without Stormhalt Knife like the Honor variant, it was much harder to turn the corner, even if surviving was easier with cards like Saber-Tooth Prideleader.
I took one look at the deck (okay, that’s a lie, I took about 5 minutes thinking about it) and asked, as a joke, “what if we put Xulta Arcanum in there?”. Cut to about 15 minutes later when I’ve built this monstrous four faction pile with both Garden of Omens and Xulta Arcanum. This change did fix the previous issue of closing the game in time, however it led to a new and more thorny problem – how on earth were we supposed to build the powerbase? Obviously you have to play 4 Petition, but then what about the influence requirements? We needed double Primal on 3 for Hailstorm, Justice on 1 for Defiance, along with double Fire on 5 for Garden of Omens or double Justice for Harsh Rule. And that’s just three of the factions – we also needed Time on 3 for Cirso’s Choice. I spent a long time on this powerbase and I like to think I got it as close to perfect as I could. 26 power was necessary to just make sure that we had the influence we needed – and being a control deck that wanted to hit power every turn meant that we were happy to play the extra. The one mistake I think I made when building it was not considering the fact that we could never have 3 undepleted power on turn 3 – if I had thought about that I would likely have cut one Primal source for something else.
I know this is a lot of talk about how I arrived at my deck choice, but I think it’s worth analysing given how off the wall the list I settled on was. There were a lot of layers to the process, without even going into the choice to play/leave out Jotun Hurlers and Saber-Tooth Prideleaders in the final build. While the deck itself looks ridiculous, when I first took it to ladder, I had a frankly absurd winrate with it – I think I went 9-2 in my first 11 games, with seven wins being against Sylscar, the bogeyman of the format. Unfortunately it didn’t work out that well in the ECQ, but I’ll get to that later.
SG: Couple of reasons why I didn’t end up playing the deck. 1. The lines were very difficult for me. It’s a deck all about accruing incredibly small advantages, advancing ahead inch by inch. As a player with an unsurprising lack of foresight, I find it very difficult to anticipate moves far into the future. It’s why I’ve never won a game of chess. 2. I have to play 26 games with this deck, and I’d like to get my games done within a reasonable time-frame. I’m clearly not a masochist like AF is.
[AF: Come on, Storm, I’m clearly a sadist – they’re trapped in there with me, not the other way round.]
Card Choices:
Obviously this is a deck too full of card choices to go in depth on all of them, so I’ll pick those I feel are the most important.
- 3 Cirso’s Choice, 0 Just Desserts: When I first built this deck, I started on a 2-2 split of these answers to Silverblade Menace. In testing, however, Just Desserts seriously underperformed, especially with the 8 early interactive spells we were playing. With that being the case, I started going up Cirso’s Choice and never really looked back. Both modes are relevant against aggressive decks (6 life is a lot more than it sounds like) and Faegis is widely relevant especially without any other way of getting it. Honesty, I could see going up to the full set of Choice in the future.
- 2 Turn To Seed, 2 Equivocate: At some point I realised that although Sling had been nerfed, I really had no clean answer to Rost. Given that Garden of Omens can cleanly answer Sling through Faegis now, I felt that transforming the big snowy monster was the best course of action. This ended up not really being relevant, but I think the two copies of Turn to Seed proved their worth. I’m less sold on Equivocate.
- Only 3 Arcanum: Arcanum is a powerful card and you want to see it basically every game. However, it’s very possible to get Arcanum flooded with the full playset in the deck, so I cut back to 3 copies. I think that’s correct.
- Only 3 Wisdom of the Elders: Most of the time I wouldn’t leave home without the full playset of Wisdom of the Elders. However in this deck it is significantly less appealing, for a couple of reasons – firstly, double Primal early can still be difficult; and secondly, with a powerbase full of Cylices, it is very easy to gain card advantage in the late game anyway. Since I’m playing the extra power, I like 3 Wisdom.
- Full sets of Torch and Defiance: This deck is greedy enough to go over almost anything. I won games where my opponent played two Speaking Circles before I hit my 5th power. However, it is susceptible to aggro, so the full 8 pieces of cheap interaction is necessary – especially since it’s impossible to play a sweeper on turn 3.
- 0 copies of Dazzle: Dazzle is a good card, definitely. But with access to Display of Instinct, it starts to look a little flat. Not being able to negate Etchings or Dark Returns feels pretty bad, and you just can’t negate a turn 2 Exploit in the list. In the end I decided that Display provided flexibility in the ways I valued more.
Now let’s get on to the ECQ. I had a fantastic record with the deck leading up to it, so where did it all go wrong?
There are certain benefits to being in a team. You can take a deck off ladder and be fairly confident that those you work with will be able to put it through the wringer; and if it comes out the other side you’re doing pretty well. However, this comes with one major downside if you’re truly trying to keep the list secret: you miss innovations in other decks on ladder.
I took the list off ladder after the first day of testing, and in doing so missed a very important development in the SylScar deck that took the tournament by storm [SG: You mean in overwhelming fashion. Otherwise it gets too confusing. Also, I take full responsibility for this bit.] – market Krull over previous ‘Dark Return’ effects. Krull is much harder for this deck to interact with, while being able to be used multiple times. This took the matchup from heavily favourable (I lost to it once in testing) to unfavoured in the tournament (I beat it once in the ECQ). This is a lesson in why it is important to not get complacent in testing – it would have been very easy for me to either select a different deck or spend more time preparing to beat this new threat, however I prepared as though the meta was going to be the same in the ECQ as it was almost a week earlier.
Learn from my mistakes and don’t prepare against a static metagame.
SG: Yerp, as AF mentioned, Krull being a unit as opposed to reanimation through a spell makes it very difficult for this to interact with since Display isn’t an option, and you don’t have void hate in this deck. Since we’re not pressuring their life total in any meaningful way, a competent player will easily see the line of simply ‘Krull-juggling’ to knock us out while we’re helplessly floundering.
OTHER DECKS:
Stonescar Aggro:
https://eternalwarcry.com/decks/d/S7JoMj4yqpU/goaychanhongs-decklist-top-32
AF: Aggressive Stonescar is a list that many of our teammates ended up on, and it served them well over the course of the tournament. It was probably my second choice going in. The buff to Vicious Highwayman really breathed new life into the deck, although in the end it may have been overshadowed by other Stonescar lists. Everyone tells me that Blackhall Warleader is the best two-drop in the deck, but I think I would have maxed out on Fenris Nightshade first, as it gives us a way to generate additional cards in slower, slightly grindier games.
Having said that, I did tend to play the deck a little slower than most people on my team (probably the control player in me talking). I found that going a little bigger (with extra four-drops) already gave me an advantage in the mirror, and because of that I wanted two-drops which were better suited to winning me the control matchups. In a more aggressive leaning version of the list, like what the rest of my team brought, I can see Warleader being a more consistent two-drop.
SG: Choo choo! I mean, we have 3 people on the team notorious (pun intended) for playing SS Aggro; I’d be very surprised if no one ended up packing it. We ended up packing the full playset of Highwaymen main deck and only 3 Jekk, which I’m not convinced is necessarily correct. Highwayman is obviously great against aggro, and can pick off Kira/Syl. However, in other matchups, Highwayman needs to do more than just break Faegis to be worthwhile. Although Jekk varied very greatly in terms of impact, it’s still an incredibly powerful card, and we probably should have played the full playset.
On the 2-drop issue: I was 1 of the people who told AF that Blackhall Warleader was the best 2-drop for 1 simple reason – it has 3 health. Get 1 attack in, and it’s out of Hailstorm range. That’s it. It means it can be effective both on the play and on the draw, particularly against Skycraggro. For the remaining cards, our team was torn between Fenris, Skullbreaker and Midchief Salus. Fenris helps draw cards, and while the damage can add up quickly, we are usually the aggressor in most matchups, and have some life to spare. Back in the old days when noobs like me could win TNE Challenges, you’ll see Fenris put in a lot of work for me there. Skullbreaker was good in that it was a mini-Champion of Chaos that can slog through bigger units, but without many Warcry units/weapons, it was difficult to buff. Salus’ Quickdraw was nice to push damage – though we had no tricks – and provided a late-game power sink. We ultimately ended up on Fenris and Skullbreaker as our supporting 2 drops, though that might have been wrong.
One thing I do want to bring up is our team’s choice of Shakedown as a card, which we felt would be very, very good. It takes Equalise/ramp spells out of Combrei, ChaChas in the mirror, and Kira/Wump/other haymaker units out of the Kira decks and Elysian. Also Golems, but we weren’t too worried about that matchup. Yes, it misses all the 4 cost relics, but people definitely weren’t playing around Shakedown at all, and got appropriately wrecked by it a lot. Don’t sleep on this card.
If the Shadow-based Stonescar decks continue to be popular, Fire-based Stonescar may struggle a little. After all, the deck that goes just a little bigger is usually favoured in the matchup. But if the format ever undergoes massive changes again…slamming people’s faces really hard is never too bad of an idea.
Post-Open decklist:
https://eternalwarcry.com/decks/d/yZjr7tqij8c/stonescar-post-open
*Note: I came up with this BEFORE Cen Wastes Smuggler got hit with a balance change. Feel free to fiddle around with the various market options to see what works best.
Moom:
https://eternalwarcry.com/decks/d/-Ba6JnhdzUo/moom
AF: Stormguard almost convinced me to play this in the Tuesday Night Eternal tournament the morning of the ECQ, but ultimately I felt that the deck was too anaemic when it couldn’t find Waxing Moon – the units you play are relatively bad at actually killing your opponent (excepting Midnight Gale, of course), and you don’t generate enough value to challenge more midrange-y decks if you can’t get the deadly turns. It is an interesting deck concept, however, and probably worth exploring more.
Something that might stand out in the deck is the singleton Tempting Offer in the powerbase of the deck. This was my concept (though I may have been influenced by teammate LeoThePleurodon’s use of it in a Xenan Strangers deck we looked at) and I’m very proud of it. The basic theory is that the first copy is effectively free if you add the Seat over another Sigil, and it gives you a way to mess with your opponent’s Even Handed Golems without spending a card slot on it. It doesn’t always happen, but every now and then it will come up and it almost never hurts you otherwise. It’s not much, but you should try to squeak out every tiny edge that you possibly can when building a deck.
SG: The deck originated from TBC’s Mail, who wanted to make a fun, silly deck. Usually, it’s up to me to ruin said deck by naming it ‘X Midrange’ in TNE tournaments – allegedly. And the palindromic ‘Moom’ seemed like a good idea for a deck name at the time. The deck initially included Jarrall, but that felt like perhaps a few too many conflicting ideas jammed into 1 list. So we cut that down. Unlike the Sling deck which similarly relies on a key relic, the units that the Moom deck plays are unfortunately a little…lackluster. The rise of Xenan at that time packing Send An Agent, Prideleader and Banish also proved to be a giant pain in the butt. So we scrapped that idea during Open testing and pivoted to something different.
Jump-cut to after the Open, where a number of Even Feln Moon decks did…OK, but nothing particularly spectacular. The obvious problem is the fact that it’s an Even deck, and the payoff for being an Even deck just…isn’t there right now. You might high-roll with Golems on occasion and chain them into a deluge of cards, but the times when your curve completely destroys you, I suspect, are going to come up more often. Plus, between Tempting Offer, Open Contract, Royal Decree, etc., the Golem is honestly not that hard to disrupt. Some people like their 1/1s for 2. I don’t.
So after taking a short, simple look at the terrible pile of cards, I replaced the underperforming units with more card draw and removal, and what would you know? The deck doesn’t feel terrible. There’s still a couple of kinks to be worked out – what do you want as your 4 drop: Vara or Rindra? Do you want some number of Dazzles, or is Flicker enough? But following the LOA Sling-esque strategy of essentially being Primal Control leaning on Moon as a source of card draw and removal, the deck is quite potent. With many other decks dialing back on relic removal and slowly devolving into greedy midrange piles, it’s the perfect opportunity for Moon decks to sneak in and decimate them. Much like Sling, since the Relic draws you cards, the payoff for being an Even deck really isn’t there. At all. (As an aside, you’re in Primal. You really shouldn’t be lacking card draw.) Although I was a little concerned about the aggro matchup without Mother of Skies, as it turns out, being able to play cards on curve is good. Helps you fall behind a little less. Who’d have thought?
Post-Open decklist:
https://eternalwarcry.com/decks/d/SSjkFv-Rxis/feln-moon-but-with-a-functional-curve
*Note: Stonescar Heavy-Shadow going down in popularity is rather awkward since that was probably 1 of our better match-ups. No matter. I’m sure we’ll still pummel all the greedy midrange decks, especially those that are skimping on relic removal. Our aggro matchup is pretty good too – even without Moon, we’re still pretty effective at clearing out X/1s.
PATCH NOTES (THE QUICK THOUGHTS):
SG:
-I love the Moldermuck and Ambitious Mandevilla nerf. Shadow Midrange has had its time in the sun for quite a while in Expedition. I do expect that less Shadow heavy Midrange will still play a pivotal role in the format, from Sandstorm Titan to Quinn, but hopefully we get something different.
UPDATE: I’m immediately back to hating Expedition in the span of about 10 hours. We’ve gone from greedy midrange with Davia and Might, to greedy midrange with Azindel and Might, to greedy midrange with Heart of the Vault and Howling Peak. I feel a lot of the homogeneity in the format could be solved with Vanquish. While some enjoy ‘Battlecruiser’ Eternal, I do not, and I’ll leave Expedition in the strong, supple hands of AlexFiero to figure out.
-I love the Ankle Cutter buff. Now it doesn’t die to Snowball, which is a key consideration for any Fire 2 drop without Charge.
-The Coveted Gemstone nerf feels like it hits Expedition far harder than it does Throne since there are less market access options in Expedition. That being said, Combrei Relics can still capably win without either card, so I presume the deck will just keep chugging on.
-The Tasbu and Cen Wastes Smuggler nerf probably spell the end of Stonescar Heavy-Shadow unfortunately, at least as a Tier 1 archetype The deck wasn’t oppressive meta-game wise from my experience, but DWD definitely knows better.
AF:
In general, I like these balance changes. The new cards added to Expedition to prepare for the Open seem both impactful and not relevant to existing archetypes. The nerfs to Mandevilla and Moldermuck reflect the power level of Xenan, and the buffs are all worthwhile. However, the nerfs targeted towards Combrei Relics and Sylscar seem… unnecessary to me. None of them appear particularly impactful (except possibly Smuggler) and neither deck was oppressive in the metagame. I suppose Tasbu dies in combat a bit more now? And it’s slightly harder for Combrelics to fill the board with bugs? But I could be wrong. It’s also possible that the relatively minor changes allow other decks to interact more meaningfully without significantly weakening either deck, and that’s what I’m personally hoping for.
AlexFiero has a Twitch channel which he never uses because he forgot a password. On the other hand, you can find me over at Twitter @stormguard798 or lurking in The Misplay, Friends of Eternal or the Team Eternal Journey Discords. I would love to hear all your comments about how my Eternal Warcry deck names are far better than AlexFiero’s. Until next time. 😉
Friends of Eternal:
https://discord.com/invite/MYh7hUs
The Misplay:
https://discord.com/invite/7Qk6HXq
Eternal Journey:
Careful Considerations - Ramblings of an Aspiring Azorius Lawmage 