[Master] Damage Dragons (artist formerly known as '44 Backlash Damage Dragons')

Obvious clickbait, they were only worth 11 (apiece. loooooooooooooooooool)

Also, sometimes you get at least several (9) snakes.


- Be sure you keep track of how quickly the spell damage is racking up. I missed lethal at least once because I hadn't, for some reason, expected our Kaleb's Favor to be doing 8 damage... but that was our second game and it turned out this was actually not unusual.
- If you are a coward with no use for zero-cost dragons, you can swap out Sindok. Be aware that this will reduce the deck's +morale damage modifier.
- You do not actually need to hard mull for Vestige in this iteration of the deck, although it certainly helps.
- Always swing with Firemaw before you Trove.
- You would typically like Cinderclutch to kill the player via morale damage.

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Y'all know I got ongoing brain damage (neuroimmune disease) and that Eternal is a large part of how I've been able to maintain and improve memory, calculation, and critical thinking. Lateral thinking is my most notable skill as a player, purely because I cannot depend on any given part of my brain to be operational from one moment to the next. (Viewers often watch me set up elaborate plays on stream, verbally explain the reasons for and order of the entire chain, look puzzled because I can't remember the payoff action I just mentioned aloud, and pass the turn. I can't prevent it so there's no use being upset, I can only improve my ability to compensate.) Damage Dragons is honestly one of my top decks of all time for rewarding lateral thinking, up there with Lucia's Yeti, Ace's Kennadin, and my old Reprobates.

It's rare for me to find decks that allow me to progress as a player by providing a very high skill ceiling coupled with a floor that makes the learning feel like fun. (Learning high skill ceiling decks often feels to me like a lot of mindless repetition completely sabotaged by failure to identify or correctly play the few key decision points because I went on autopilot. With a brain as unreliable as mine, I want frequent opportunities for brilliance to provide recovery from "2+2=7.") Damage Dragons keeps me engaged and thinking actively every turn, including my opponent's, so I don't go on autopilot and my brain often gets the opportunity to compensate for one thing it can't do with another thing it does spectacularly.

Skycraggro Yeti is a cheaper way for a new player to get a similar experience, but this deck should provide aggro players with a spell-based deck that makes the following obvious to even a Kaelos:

(a) a miscalculation from the mull onward lost me the game 10+ turns later (and I can see how)
(b) I'm provided enough variables to manipulate that a particularly clever turn will almost always let me redeem myself from having added wrong / missed lethal / etc
(c) not only do I get opportunity to recover from mistakes, I can win in a lot of different ways by engaging different skillsets and being perfect at all of them isn't necessarily better than being great at any one of them; different types of player will succeed differently but all can succeed
(d) I need to pay attention to my opponent's game as much as my own because knowing when to hold a card matters as much or more than which I use or how I use them (e.g. learning to wait for a backlash or sacrificial unit before playing my first Acedonis against a removal-heavy opponent, using a spell to remove a unit before it becomes dangerous vs. holding the spell until it's bigger and removes two problematic units vs. ignoring units in favor of killing the player)
(d1) I need to predict what my opponent can do to ruin my plans based on their influence, power, and the cards they've shown me
(d2) then adapt my strategy so that my plans are more difficult for their particular deck to ruin
(e) I've benefited from learning to keep a mental counter that I did not before (a tally of all the different permutations of damage available to me and where they can be sent + all the different ways my opponent can deprive me of spell damage and how much each will hurt)
(f) I need to pay attention to the order in which I play my own cards during my turn and plan turns in advance (when to equip Visage for spell damage versus cost reduction, Crest before Firemaw before Trove, dropping some units out of usual order to buff a spell to get a free Sindok along with removal, holding Clutch for an Acedonis buff, etc.)
(g) knowing all of the cards still available to me, or not, matters more than usual because so many combinations provide me with an out
(h) even as the defender, sometimes going face is the right answer; even as the aggressor, sometimes I need to hold

Hope some of y'all that have trouble finding a deck with opportunities to improve your play that feel both optional and fun enjoy this as much as I do. I would love to know what kinds of skills it has helped you improve in the comments!