alt-title: replace the cards in your deck with better cards
I wanted to build around
Ashara, Ruthless Assassin after picking up a premium copy, but this deck is unit-light enough that she frequently couldn't hang around on board long enough to be a sac outlet. So I cut her for power and Stingers. Most of the fuzzier numbers are so I could play the full 4 Vara's Favor; we also don't want to load up too hard on Secret Passages.
You've got 6+1 cards that let you steal units, 6 sac outlets (2 of them reusable), and 4+1 bounce spells that work exactly as you expect here: if you steal a card, you are its "owner". We don't really want
Temple Tactic because we routinely want to hit over 5 power for additional flexibility on our turns, but that'd be another bounce effect to consider. Be Gone has also helped grab shadow influence more quickly. (As an aside, I don't think this is a
Star-Reader Severin deck, but Severin and Be Gone in the same deck seems slick.)
Other things you could try:
- maybe 2
Kerendon Merchants for more consistent market access, though the current market is built more like a toolbox than something we
need consistent access to. Could also drop smugglers entirely and go for 7 ways to get Madness, and maybe toss one of the Secret Passages into that market over the Meditation.
- playing another unit over Dark Return, so you can have it in the market instead of Last Chance. 29 power is enough to let you slide up the curve a bit. Is it the deck for
Impending Doom,
Shadowlands Tyrant, or
Mazag, the Waking Terror? Maybe.
- loading up on more copies of Meditation might not be the most awful thing? People playing units with fate effects and revenge, like Xo, Makto and Elias, is really nice for us.
-
In Cold Blood,
Xenan Initiation, or
Banish as removal
-
Blistersting Wasp <-> Ripknife Assassin. I've won games off the warcries, but the deck is otherwise soft to the word "flying", and
Sandstorm Titan/marketing for
Sandstorm Scarf can be too slow.
-
Initiate of the Sands or
Trail Maker
- sites. We don't have the best setup to take advantage of
Xenan Temple's steal effect, so that might take some additional reworking.
Other things I tried, and I don't think you should:
-
Abduct used to be in over Vara's Choice. It wasn't great. Too much of a power investment playing stolen cards that way.
-
Entrancer isn't the most reliable with the current way the power base is built. You'd be playing Entrancer more as a silence / info effect than as a unit, which means this deck wants to be able to play it for tempo a lot of the time (the role that Shakedown is playing right now), and that's just that much less likely to happen on turn 1.
Fun things you can do with this deck (some of which I've just done today)
- Steal your Rakano opponent's Valkyrie Enforcer, devour it for cards and then replay it twice more to silence off their Red Canyon Smugglers. And to think, if I had Temple Standards in, maybe I could've stolen a smuggler
and a plate today.
- Steal your Feln opponent's Champion of Cunning, then bounce him to your hand with Be Gone while fixing for shadow to activate his buff.
- Concede to TJP control. And honestly, that's fine. We're already a deck that tries to out-value aggro and beat up on greedy midrange; the deck would be too silly if every matchup was in our favor.