Praxis Aggro: A Journey

For those of you who aren’t really interested in anything besides the decklist and the results, I will say that I managed to clear 10 full runs (70 games) in a row with this list, and went 10-2 in runs with a very similar, but less tuned, list before that.

Edit: Winstreak died on the 16th run when the opponent played Suffocate, into Desert Marshal, into Steward of the Past, into double Reality Warden. I can't really say that I'm surprised by this loss.

Praxis aggro is probably pretty well-known at this point, and it saw a real push with the release of cards like Grove Supplier, Kid, Grove’s Heart, and Calm Instructor. Historically though, I have NOT been a proponent of playing red aggro in gauntlet. In gauntlet, my primary focus is reliability and fire aggro always fell short for me. This is because fire aggro has some glaring weaknesses which can cause it to drop games pretty easily. Fire often struggles against large, problematic units because its removal is damage-based. It can also stall pretty hard in the face of cheap removal, board wipes, or bad draws. As if that wasn’t enough, some of the boss conditions are really, really unfavorable for a deck filled with cheap 1 and 2-health units. For these reasons, it has been difficult to build a fire-focused aggro deck that I considered reliable.

While I certainly have tested aggro decks in gauntlet, neither my results nor theorycrafting led me to believe that it was a particularly fruitful endeavor. This isn’t to say that fire aggro can’t earn gold quickly, its aggressive nature does result in fast games, but its win-rate wasn’t high enough for my liking. When it comes to speed, midrange decks don’t necessarily lag all that far behind aggro. At the same time, they are also capable of winning more and encounter fewer of the issues that aggro faces. Owing to this, the time that I have invested in tuning fire aggro decks for gauntlet has been considerably less compared to other midrange decks.

Having said all of that, I LOVE fire-based aggro decks in PVP and have always viewed them as a check on extreme greed piles. PVP modes also sidestep two of my major complaints about playing red decks in gauntlet. The most obvious is that In PVP you will never encounter an unfavorable boss condition… because there are none. The second is that in PVP the definition of “reliable” is skewed away from winning ALL of the games to simply winning MOST of its games. Owing to these factors, I had previously found success and enjoyment playing red aggro in PVP, where in gauntlet, I had not.

Now if you have been following me along on the journey so far, you might be wondering how our final destination is a gauntlet deck. Well, this deck did not originally begin as one. This journey actually began when a friend asked me to look at a Praxis aggro list that he’d found here and inquired as to how I might improve it for throne. Having had a fair amount of success with fire-based aggro in the past (albeit primarily Stonescar), while (arguably) more importantly also enjoying the archetype, I did not respond by sending a “?” and then pretending that I only spoke gauntlet. After receiving this request I earnestly put some effort into updating cards, made the list more like my past Stonescar builds, and also tailored the power base to better support my changes.

In PVP, you obviously want to win as much as possible, but it is generally accepted that you won’t win every game. The upside to this is that, when you’re okay with not winning every game, you can take more risks with your deckbuilding. Sometimes medium-risk, high-reward cards can sink you while you are playing gauntlet.

This also segues into another bit of my personal deckbuilding philosophy:

DON’T BUILD FAIR DECKS.

I mean, this doesn’t rise to the level of unsporting conduct, but good cards exist and it is ok to play with them. If anyone says something to you about it, you can tell them that I said it was okay. There are cards that exist which, by their very nature, are cheaty. A single copy might not win you the game on its own, but if you can accumulate incremental advantage from enough of them it can very easily snowball into a win. Also, sometimes a single copy WILL win you the game on its own and that is even better! Cards like Torch, Oni Ronin, Kid, Grove’s Heart, and League Explorer are GOOD, but cards like, Battlefront Dasher, D’Angolo Houndmaster, Powercell, Searing Strike, Calm Instructor, and East Annex Smuggler grabbing Roaming Cache are basically cheating. As an aggro deck, the idea is to win the game before the opponent’s deck gets the chance to be better than yours. History is written by the victor.

I designed this deck to do some really unfair things, largely on the back of really efficient cards, as well as cards that are so efficient that they’re basically cheating. A hyper-efficient curve paired with cards capable of jumping over the curve entirely is a recipe that, while it might not win you every game, has a very high probability of setting you up for success and puts the onus of stopping you on your opponent.

At this point in the journey, I had an updated decklist and sent it back to the friend from earlier. However, there still wasn’t really any testing behind the list itself and I was confronted with quite the dilemma. You see, I did not actually want to play throne. I felt that, since I had put in the time and effort of thinking about throne that I was basically off the hook. My obligation to interact in a thronely fashion (which was always zero), had already been met. That could have been the end of this story, but it wasn’t.

You see, this deck looked like it would be a blast to play. It was sleek, beautifully curved, and deadly. If you’ve ever seen someone forge a knife by hand then it was very reminiscent of that. When a bladesmith finishes a knife they don’t just put it on display and say, “This looks pretty cool, right?” They first take that knife and use it to cut a bunch of stuff because that is both cooler, and it also demonstrates that the thing that they have spent their time and energy creating actually functions for its intended purpose. I wanted to do that… but with my deck. However, I wasn’t in the mood to go around (figuratively) cutting people in PVP, (imagine the awkwardness if my metaphorical knife wasn’t up for the job), so I decided to take that list into gauntlet.

Now, normally I am reluctant to do this and I caution others against the fallacies of doing so. In this situation though, I was willing to overlook the pitfalls of testing a deck intended for one format, in another format for two primary reasons. The first was that the deck had a very linear design, which meant that it wasn’t overly worried about things like, what the opponent wants to do, or what cards they play. The second was the fact that I STILL didn’t feel like engaging in the clown fiesta that is throne.

So there I was, playing gauntlet with a fire aggro deck and I kept clearing run after run.

1…
2…
3…
4…

I’ve won four runs in a row at this point and the deck feels as unstoppable as I had hoped it might be. Buoyed to a height of confidence which one can only truly reach by standing on top of 28 slain opponents, I ran it back for a 5th time.

And… promptly lost.

In that moment, I gazed upon my void and board, which prior to the untimely intervention of a pair of Lightning Storms had been, respectively, empty and full, but were now, respectively, full and empty, I was confronted with two harsh realities. The first was that I would not be winning this game, and the second was that some of the previous issues I had while playing red decks in gauntlet were very much still real.

As a card game player I think that a certain level of introspection is important to learning and improving your ability as a player, and that it is good to be able to look back on games and think about what you could have done differently. I reflected on that moment and thought to myself, “They could have not killed all my guys with Lightning Storm... twice.” On a more serious note, Lightning Storm is a card which is particularly well positioned against this style of deck whose intent is to vomit its hand onto the board as quickly as possible. While you can play around sweepers to an extent, this deck still has to field enough pressure to actually win and it’s very hard to do so with only two units. The fact that Lightning Storm is such a cheap board wipe against this deck makes it very difficult to be able to effectively play around. Fortunately, I can only recall a single, mono-primal deck that plays it.

As I lay there, fallen from my precarious perch, I realized that my invincibility was a fragile illusion and that I was no different than the other 28 fallen foes that surrounded me. I gazed lifelessly upward at the turbulent storm that had just unleashed its wrath upon me and remembered an old saying. They say that every cloud has a silver lining and I assume that, much like what I had just experienced, this phrase was coined after someone else had looked up at a sky full of storm clouds that had also just destroyed all of their stuff with lightning. Fortunately, this cloud actually had TWO silver linings. The first was that I no longer needed to worry about my run dying to double Lightning Storm, which admittedly brought me little solace in that moment, but the second, and more pertinent, was remembering that the deck I was playing was not actually tuned for gauntlet!

Oh right, duh. Naturally I lost. This isn’t a gauntlet deck. I built this for PVP and I don’t even think well-tuned red aggro is even that good in gauntlet. Of course it’s going to lose some games! This must have just been one of those games it was supposed to lose.

That got me thinking though; what if I actually DID make it into a gauntlet deck?

The deck had already exceeded my past expectations for similar aggro decks and there were also some very obvious adjustments that I could make to improve it further. Borderlands Lookout is a very good card in PVP because almost no one plays mono-colored decks, but there are a number of mono-colored decks in gauntlet. There are also A LOT more 3-colored decks floating around in PVP. Lookout isn’t necessarily BAD in gauntlet by any means, but it does have a much lower ceiling, and being able to play it turn 1 often means preventing yourself from being able to hit FF by turn 2 or 3. Bore, on the other hand, is a great answer to attachments in throne, but I’ve rarely found that attachment hate is required in gauntlet. I was also only playing two copies of East Annex Smuggler while I was trying to figure out what cards weren’t performing as well as I would have liked.

I didn’t want to get TOO far ahead of myself though and I wanted to collect a bit more data before I made significant changes. I mean, it’s not like just any deck can Lightning Storm you once, much less twice, right? Maybe that game was just a fluke. So I continued playing the deck while only making small tweaks to the market.

1 run…
2…
3…

The count kept rising and I ended up rapidly clearing 6 more runs without a loss. The deck was a respectable 10-1 at this point and performing well. Unfortunately, I ended up losing my 12th run after getting 2-for-1’d twice by a pair of Rotting Sicknesses, and then stomped on by a board of weenies and General Fiera. Not exactly double Lightning Storm, but pretty close.

At this point I felt much less enthused about my 10-2 record than I had previously felt about my 10-1. I had also played A LOT of games with the deck in a very SHORT period of time, so while I had some changes in mind, I shelved the deck in favor of playing my Mono J and Stonescar Big Wheel lists. After a 31 and 23 run win streak with the respective decks both,ended on the same day, I lost a lot of my motivation to play Eternal and shelved that too for a few weeks. I’d log in before the end of the month to finish the chapter fights, but wouldn’t stick around beyond that.

This brings us to present day.

I was hanging out in the Eternal Discord and had responded to a comment that I had seen. I imagine that this had the effect of reminding people that I exist. In light of this reminder, one such person asked me if I had any interesting new gauntlet decks to share and I immediately started combing through my saved decks for those I considered the most optimized/the least embarrassing. That was when I finally remembered this deck, which was still PVP oriented, as well as the changes I had wanted to make. After posting the list I received the suggestion to include Roaming Cache in the market. After looking at some other lists, I also remembered that Phase Out is a card that exists. I also finally got around to swapping out the Borderlands Lookouts and getting the last two East Annex Smugglers into the deck. With those upgrades and a fresh coat of paint, I was ready to take this deck back out for another spin.

Let me just say that those changes were GREAT. I quickly managed to clear 10 runs VERY quickly. These results were far beyond what I had initially hoped for and these runs were also FAST! I didn’t keep track of all of the games, but for the 40 games I did track, the average length was 5.2 turns. This is something that I consider to be close to the upper limit for speed. This deck also had other qualities which really made me enjoy playing it.

Granted, a lot of people are not fans of playing aggro decks in any context. If you are a part of this group, then you will likely not enjoy this deck either. I won’t try to convince you otherwise. However, for those of you who are open to more aggressive playstyles, there are a few reasons that I personally find this deck very compelling to play.

1. It wins a lot. This should probably be a large priority when you are trying to grind gold in gauntlet.

2. It wins quickly. This should also be a priority if you want to accumulate gold more quickly.

3. This deck plays games which strike a nice balance between complete curb stompings, and highly interactive games where you are required to make important decisions and milk as much value from each of your cards as possible.

I find these factors to be really important when it comes to the longevity of my enjoyment while playing a deck for extended durations. You can have a nice level of stomping/engagement, but if you are losing a lot then it doesn’t feel productive. On the other end of the spectrum, you can have a deck that basically wins every game, but if it doesn’t do it quickly then games can be extremely tedious and dull. If a deck wins all its games while requiring minimal thought, sure, that’s a good grinder, but how long can you play it before you get bored? On the other hand, if every game requires your full focus and feels like you are balancing on a razor’s edge, it can be quite mentally draining. I feel as though this deck has managed to do a really good job of finding the sweet spot of these various factors for me.

I will wrap up this rather lengthy write-up with a few tips for playing the deck:

1. Don’t be afraid to play Battlefront Dasher without contracting it, especially on the first turn if you don’t have other units to play.

2. Try to be smart with your D’Angolo Houndmaster triggers. Houndmaster and Kid do not play well together and sometimes you will get more damage by attacking with more than two units. In grindier games you might need to be trading 4/1’s for their units. It can often be correct to make a 4/1 one turn and attack with all of your units the following turn.

3. If you plan to play Calm instructor and have power to play other things, consider playing the other things first so that you are able to play them before potentially Contracting yourself out the necessary power if you Recruit a Battlefront Dasher.

4. Roaming Cache should probably be your most commonly grabbed market card. That being said, Sometimes you will want to wait to grab it on a turn where it allows your 2-attack units to trade up into 3-health enemies.

5. Don’t be afraid to discard Searing Strike or Torch to activate Autotread if you were going to use them to kill something with one health anyway.

6. The AI is really bad at defending itself against Phoenix Stone because it doesn’t recognize it as a potential 4/4 flyer. Soulfire Drake costs more upfront, but only requires you to pay for it once. This deck does not have a ton of flying units and Drake’s Entomb can grant all of your charge units flying if the ground gets stalled.

7. The only real pumps that this deck has for Passionate Stonehammer are Cache and Dasher. That usually means that unless you plan to grab Cache in the next turn or two that you are better off Berserking it immediately if the coast is clear.

I think that’s it. Thank you for joining me on this journey and if you give this deck a try then I hope that you enjoy it as much as I have. At this point, it’s not really optimized for PVP, but I really wouldn’t be surprised if it still performed well in that setting. Best of luck and good grinding!