(Budget) Elysian Echo-xpedition for Newbies.

This is a deck that I think most brewers have made a version of when they first start Eternal. This is my take on it.

This is a budget deck for the expedition format, consisting of all commons and uncommons, excluding the sole Rare Thunderstrike Dragon, of which you will receive 1 copy for free for completing the tutorial. Two copies is sufficient as the decks finisher, but three copies will get you more consistency.

The deck has the potential to win games, as putting big things in the sky is a simple strategy that works, but there are more powerful versions of Elysian flyers for similar Shiftstone costs. I like to think of this as more of a tutorial for deckbuilding and building a combo in general. The Echo and Inspire mechanics are obvious best friends, and the deck's combo pieces are all about Synergy between board, hand, and setting up future turns.

This deck and description is targeted at newer players and deckbuilders, and the description will more conceptual and fundamental in focus. More experienced players/brewers may find something of value, but a quick glance at the card list for these players will be sufficient to understand what the deck is doing.

Actual vs Effective
A card with Echo draws a copy of itself when we draw it. If the card is something your deck only has one or two copies of, then this means you get a copy of it for free. This however, is not the same as having more ACTUAL copies, only more EFFECTIVE copies.

Having Actual copies of a card increases the amount of times you can play said card, and increases your chance of actually drawing it. Effective Copies are increasing your chances of executing one of your combo pieces. The simplest example of this is a Fetch card, something that lets you reach into your deck and draw something specific, like Majestic Skies' ultimate, or Deck Thinners/Card advantage generators like Second Sight or Wisdom of the Elders.

Eternal has a minimum(which is also the maximum when you think about it) deck size of 75 cards, 25 of which must be power. Card advantage works in one of two ways, it lets you have more answers to your opponent, or it makes your deck effectively smaller. Wisdom of the Elders is a filler card, it helps me get the cards I want to play, either creatures to hit the opponent with, or cards which stop them from hitting me.

By adding more chances to draw cards, we increase the chances of our plan going off, and make our deck effectively smaller than the 75 card limit. Second Sight thins our deck, but doesn't give Card Advantage because we have to give the deck back a card. Echo units let us turn this into Effective Card advantage, because we draw an extra copy of the unit we want.

These basics lain, let us turn toward the combos.

Primary Combo and Win Condition
Echo Unit + Second Sight or Twinning Ritual + Inspire Units, making a lot of big cheap units to hit our opponent with.

In the intro, I mentioned Echo and Inspire are natural best friends. It buffs the units we draw, and lets us buff units in our hand(a relatively safe place to be) with our other mechanics. It also lets us snowball our units by playing one copy on the field, and keeping one copy to buff by putting it back on our deck to draw a second time, or twinning ritual, which then gives us more copies and buffs them.

For example, lets say I have Journey's Guide and Living Example on the field, a copy of Pteriax Hatchling and a copy of Second Sight in my hand.

I play Second Sight, drawing two card and putting the Hatchling on top of my deck. My next draw, said Hatchling gets the Inspire effects, making it a 2 cost 3/2 Flying, and Echo means I now have two of them.

Lets say one of the two cards I drew off Second Sight was a Twinning Ritual, and the other was something like a power. I play one copy of the Hatchling onto the field, and use Twinning Ritual on the Hatchling in my hand. Twinning ritual draws a copy and gives the copy +1/+1, and because we're drawing the copy(important language), our Inspire effects go off again, meaning we now have Two(Echo) 1 cost 5/4 Flying units. We can snowball this as many times as we like.

Here is a trimmed version of the sequence of events.
Cards in play: Living Example and Journey Guide.
Card in hand: Pteriax Hatchling, Second Sight.

Play Second Sight, draw two cards: Twinning Ritual and X, put Hatchling on top of deck.

Next Turn
Cards in Hand: Twinning Ritual
Draw Pteriax Hatchling, Inspire triggers, making Hatchling 2 cost 3/2 flying. Hatchling Echo triggers, giving 2 copies.
Play one copy of Pteriax Hatchling to board, keep one in hand.

Next Turn
Cards in Play:
Cards in hand: Twinning Ritual, Pteriax Hatchling(2 cost 3/2 Flying)

Play Twinning Ritual, targeting Hatchling. Twinning Ritual gives +1/+1, (2 cost 4/3 flying), Inspire triggers(1 cost 5/4), Echo triggers.

Current cards in hand: Three total.
1x Pteriax Hatchling(2 cost 4/3 flying)
2x Pteriax Hatchling(1 cost 5/4 flying).

As you can see, this can snowball quickly, allowing us to flood the board with increasing cheap, high stat units, get our bigger units out faster, and take "bad" trades to protect our health by having reserves.

Synergies and Secondary Combos
Wild Cloudsnake: Our two echo units also have flying, meaning playing our units makes Cloudsnake a bigger threat. Our interaction units like Ice Sprite and Scorpion Wasp also have flying, which helps keep us safe and have a continually growing threat on the board.

Seasoned Spelunker + Majestic Skies.
Majestic Skies buffs our Flyers, Seasoned Spelunker gets a buff if we have a relic, and means we can have a 5/5 on the board as early as turn 3, or just have another 5/5 unit to deploy later in the game. It also comes with the ability to buff itself and ramp our Power.

Wurmstone + any Spell.
The highest costing spell in our deck is 3, meaning at worst Wurmstone is a 7 cost 7/7, not the worst. At best, its a 5 cost 7/7 which is very cost efficient. It's a cheap way of getting a strong unit on the board while we duplicate and buff units in our hand.

Precision Plunge
Turns our unbuffed fliers into removal that also gets around Aegis/endurance and makes them even harder to block.

Scorpion Wasp, Ice Sprite, and Permafrost.
You could, in theory, just use 4 copies of one of these cards and call it a day, but by having a diversity of answers, we can deal with a diversity of threats. The point of these cards is simple, deal with a board threat. Permafrost is cheap and can permanently lock something down. Ice Sprite is the same, but gives us a flying body that locks something down. Scorpion Wasp gives us removal vs Aegis/Endurance units, but typically dies with whatever it trades with because of its low stats. Treat Scorpion Wasp like Fast Speed removal.

Conclusion
This deck, even if the power level is low, does things a deck featuring stronger cards should do. Keep building value, synergize with the rest of the deck, and make sure we can actually execute our plan. These are the things you should keep in mind when building a deck. A Core win condition (hit the guy with dragons), support (buy us time until we can get our dragons, or buff our dragons, and buff the things that buy us time), and a diversity of threats and answers(if our dragons don't want to play we got other stuff)

If you've gotten this far, thank you for reading, I hope you've learned something, and GLHF.