Much credit goes to
JankAlchemy who deserves your love and admiration.
You drop a spire turn 4, then play and protect remove-or-die threats for the rest of the game.
Mulligan and crest scout to avoid drawing your big units before they've become
inspired.
You should be playing a merchant turn 3 and spire turn 4 most of the time. After that you can catch up with whatever they've played, fetching win conditions from your toybox of broken jank.
Influence
The deck isn't as influence reliant as it looks.
-TS early for spire and merchants.
-J for
Crownwatch Press-Gang and reweave, which are important.
-P for card draw, permafrost and ozio.
Everything that requires more influence than that is a 1-of that you can just not fetch when you can't afford it.
-PP if you plan on fetching
Shadowlands Borderscout with
Crownwatch Press-Gang.
-TTJJ for
Shen-Ra Speaks in your market.
-TTSS for
Eremot's Machinations in your market.
-F for
Triumphant Stranger and nothing else (usually you reweave him).
Utility Cards
-
Crownwatch Press-Gang fetches whatever nightmare you feel like playing. Always great to draw.
-
Reweave is another flavor of fetching, with a focus on bodies you want to protect rather than fight with. Turn 3 merchant, turn 4 spire + reweave merchant into
Triumphant Stranger is the dream. Oizio, removal units, and press gang are other good targets to reweave into. All those merchants and press-gangs are who you reweave from.
-
Pause for Reflection is mostly to dodge removal on your riskier payoffs. You can also replay your removal units or spired-
Crownwatch Press-Gang or lumen defender to heal and ready it for blocking. A fast aegis would work better in a lot of cases, like protecting recurring nightmare, but pause fits the influence better and lets us reuse removal units and press-gang.
-4x
Honor of Claws, since post-spire all of your cards are dirt cheap.
-For removal you have 3x
Annihilate, 4x
Permafrost, a market
Banish and a market
Shen-Ra Speaks. You can also press-gang
Archive Curator or
Qirin Ascendant. I usually stall, board clear, and machinations to take control again.
-
Oizio, Adaptive Spy hell yes. FREE. FREE. After spire its 0 cost and warp. Swing in with Mr. Triumphant and then oizio him back.
Shen-Ra Speaks their board and then copy the best unit killed for FREE. V a l u e .
Beefy Rainbow Payoff Cards
-
Lumen Defender is 3-of, which is a lot considering most payoff cards are 1-ofs for you to fetch. It's there to stabilize you with a big fat blocker and some health.
Everything below is a fetchable 1-of
-
Triumphant Stranger is just silly coming out of reweave turn 4. A great value engine to fetch if you're not anticipating board clears.
-
Unraveling Fanatic is also there for reweave. So long as there isn't a board clear, it will keep him safe till he gets big. Feel free to cut this one, though that will leave fewer reweave targets.
-
Shadowlands Borderscout is just stupid value if they don't have a flier to block with or removal. Best with protection in hand.
-
Recurring Nightmare dodges slow removal and ramps up fast (total damage 3, 9, 21 ...) to win if they don't have a flying blocker. This is a good choice if you're expecting slow removal and need to end the game more than you need borderscout's card draw.
-
Highwind Glider is like a fat, slow version of borderscout. If they're playing fliers, borderscout would just die. Glider will block for you while drawing a card every turn.
-
Archive Curator and
Qirin Ascendant are nice pseudo-removal you can fetch when you need them. If you have extra
Pause for Reflections in hand you can get a lot of work done.
Market
-
Stand Together to stay up when you're up. Due to your low costs you can hold things in hand, then flood while keeping this in hand to win next turn.
-
Eremot's Machinations to come back when you're down. All your best units cost 1, and 2-3 can catch merchant and destiny press-gang. Really funny against mill. Best to
Stand Together shortly after.
-
Shen-Ra Speaks when you've totally lost control of the situation. The silence will ruin your press-gangs and machinations.
Strengths
-Makes control decks wonder what they're doing with their lives.
-Watch your opponent invest heavily in killing a critical unit, then oizio it back, then machinations back the first one.
-Win primarily through "...concede" moments.
Weaknesses
-Makes aggro decks feel good about themselves.
-Fliers shut down borderscout and nightmare, which are some of the best win-cons.
-Eremot's designs -_-
Do you think we can find a spot for one copy of Frontier Jito? A massive sneak attack with all those 1 mana heavy hitters feels great.
Also, the power base needs serious work. I am not very good at it myself either but this list uses too much crests and you are almost always playing cards off the curve.
Overall, good idea and concept. Thanks for sharing with us!
Edit: Not in this deck, but grazer with spire could potentially be really good. It's a bit difficult to ensure that the random drop will be worth the trouble though.
Jito is pretty great. He's not in main deck because I think he's too situational to earn a slot, not even off of press-gang imo, and he's not in market because he's out of market colors.
Try slay the spire by the beloved JankAlchemy for a jito focused spire deck. I think bait goes pretty well with it.
Could you post an improved powerbase? That's not my strong area. I find maybe ~3/4s of games I had an undepleted power turn 3 to get my merchant in, which is all I really care about. Having those scouts is really important for not your big units pre-spire. Keep in mind there's seek power and trailmaker. I'd be happy to try your implementation.
I'm also considering cutting fire and Dr.Triumphant and pushing attention towards JJ for pristine light maindecks.
Thanks for your thoughts, I'm happy to receive any suggestions.
Edit: reweave merchant into shifted triumphant?
EditEdit: Reweave is great for on demand fetching like press-gang. You can get an oizio or a removal unit or a triumphant or an unblockable borderscout. You don't really need 4 copies of triumphant.
You should definitely check that out.
The biggest con with that version is the inclusion of Shimmerpack, among many many others that's hard to list them all. You can tutor that with Keelo sacing your Grazer shade, pre Shadow of Spire merchant, post shadow of Spire Press-Gang, etc. Once you have a slightly bigger board than your opponent, each additional units goes face for 8. If you ever find 2-3 spaces for Keelo in your deck, I would suggest finding another space for Shimmerpack.
BTW, I like your new idea with reweave. None interactive triumphant stranger feels stupid.
About the powerbase, playing second against aggro with two depleted powers on your first turns doing nothing is GG. One way that may help if you still play this much crests is focus more on Justice/Shadow colors and play 4x defiance. But janky decks always have hard time dealing with decks that curve out any way.
Hard aggro is definitely a bad matchup. If you get a good merchant and manage to tutor a defender you might be okay, but its definitely not where this deck wants to be. Sometimes you can pause for reflection to stall. Defiance might be a good choice alongside the annihilates, though I don't know what I'd cut. The deck badly needs most of its slots, and removing 4 1-ofs, or 4 draw, or 4 merchants, or the reweaves, ect, would all really hurt the deck.
Idk if you saw the changes. The powerbase is a little friendlier now. Triumphant is the only F card and is assumed to be a reweave target nearly all the time.
The deck does really well against midrange and control though. I love when they boardclear and I play a free oizio off the top of my deck to turn into borderscout and attack their empty field. So many silly plays.