Quinn tho? Top 100 Masters

I’m taking a look at the deck I played at the ECQ to a very unimpressive 14-14 finish. At the time my biggest issues were:
1) Levitate was too slow and cute,
2) Aniyah was too fragile,
3) deck had a hard time against Avigraft.

With the recent batch of balances all 3 of these issues have been addressed. With all of this in mind I took the mediocre deck and tweaked it. We’re currently climbing at a decent rate through masters (low 200s as we speak). But I wanted to go over the deck a bit.

Why Quinn? Well, a 6 cost 7/7 draw a card is almost playable enough, but HOTV laughs at our measly card. To really utilize Quinn, you need to be able to get her back when killed. Once your huge threat turns into a value engine at the same time you’re looking at a really good card. There are just 2 things we need. Good renown units and good ways to trigger them.

Renown Units:

4 Hojan: You know this guy, you see him in every aggressive Justice strategy. Well in addition to being just a ridiculous card, Hojan is one of the best Renown units. He’s cheap to play in conjunction with a trigger late game, he buys a ton of time, he can ramp, he’s the workhorse of the deck. Can’t say enough about him.

Skycrag Scalebreaker: If you haven’t had to play against this guy in limited you’re lucky, but can it translate to ranked? It’s a fate card which already plays well into market fodder, but it’s also a renown unit that comes with its very own trigger for renown. The body coming down on 3 can threaten to attack for 5 the following turn. It’s certainly weaker than Hojan, but it brings a lot of value to the table.

Aniyah: Card was pretty sad at 4/3 but if Jotun Feastcaller has taught us anything, 1 health makes a world of difference. Suddenly out of torch range, this card does a lot. It triggers our Quinns, it Ice sprites down a unit, and it threatens to become a 6/6 aegis unit all while having the option to pledge for Justice or Primal. The buff helped it out a lot and it went from a liability to an asset.

No other renown units? Well, the rest of them need either large cost cards to trigger them, or are simply draft cards. These are the ones that give us card advantage at a good rate with a fine body. Don’t dilute your power for more synergy.

Renown Triggers:

Levitate: Going from 2 to 1 is fantastic for us. Triggering renown on your hojans, scalebreakers, and Aniyahs while replacing itself, pushing a Quinn or other unit through in the air, ambushing their flying units, all great. 10/10 card.

Display of Honor: We don’t use the weapons mode on this but triggering renown, huge life swings, finishing off the opponent, or goating their big guy all make this great.

Mirror Image: Howling Peaks is a great card, getting renown off of the mirror images is just icing on the cake.

Snowball: This isn’t a joke. Jotun Hurler getting our renown triggers with no real downside, unlike torch snowball won’t kill your Hojan or Scalebreaker.

Goad: Scalebreaker’s weapon does a good amount for essentially “free”. 4 cost is very expensive but when a Quinn or two are in the yard or you want to make your guys fly, Goad does the job.

Torch: Sometimes you’ve gotta torch your own guys. Best on Aniyah in the face of a kill spell, but when in doubt, right?

You’ll notice a theme of our triggers being free, replace themselves, or act as removal. The renown cards and triggers shouldn’t feel forced.

The rest:

4/2 Howling Peak/Red Canyon smuggler: Originally I went with a regular market, but found that outside of Howling Peak, smuggler did just as well. It also helps that smuggler->downpour kills a lot of early aggression and sites. It also makes our torch kill Vara on trigger, Gun Down kill SST, HotV, Xo, and Vara, snowball deal 2 damage. If our market goes back to mono-primal I’ll change red canyon for jennev merchant. Honestly if I could find room I’d run 8 merchants.

4/2/3 Torch/Permafrost/Vanquish: Our removal suite, Torch is the best card in the game, run 4 of it. Every deck either runs small guys or merchants, torch is never dead, especially when it can deal 4+ with smugglers. 2 permafrost because there are a decent amount of endurance sentinels that can’t get hit by permafrost, we also have 3 Aniyah so we want to diversify our removal. 3 Vanquish, there is some overlap with Display of Honor, but when you want big things dead Vanquish does it.

2/3 Hurler/Xo: Our market fodder. It’s nice that we can play them both and get value out of the full cards. I’ve explained snowball, and Xo needs little explanation.

4 Seek Power: Seek over Cargo is a no brainer to me. We need to hit our power, it’s not uncommon to need 10,11,12 power in the late game so we need to make sure they’re available.

Market:

Skycrag Banner: Despite 4 seek and 4 Hojan, we sometimes need to get power out of our merchants. Skycrag banner because our Primal and Fire requirements are larger.

Torrential Downpour: We have a good amount of small units, we don’t want hailstorm. Downpour is a 1-sided lightning storm, that also hits sites, player, and scouts. It does a lot to stop aggro. It’s a great grab in times of need.

Kaleb’s Choice: I’ve been going back and forth between Bore and this. But with the rise of Vara reanimator I want to be able to counter it while still hitting things like Chains, Avigraft, Combustion Cell, etc.

Rizahn: I wanted a mid game threat in the market to grab, and Rizahn does it best. We have enough spells to get lifesteal on him as well.

Molot and Nakova: Card is great at breaking up big boards. It works well with Kaleb’s Favor off of Howling Peak. It’s also a big Aegis threat that closes games out quickly. Perfect market target as you’ve seen in any Fire or Primal market that runs skycrag factions.