Ahhh, Kalis.
Bloodrite Kalis, to be exact- the card (and deck) that really brought me into Eternal. It may have been jank at first, but it is *fun*- and while it started out in Set 1 as a very, very jank deck, it actually seems to have gained ground and improved as new cards came in to feed the Kalis.
For the uninitiated, Kalis is a simple concept- you create a board filled with cheap tokens, like
Grenadin Drone,
Assembly Line, and
Torrent of Spiders, and then sacrifice them all as fuel for a giant superweapon, the Kalis itself. And when it dies? Simply recur it, using cards like
Disjunction, then go swinging all over again.
Now, Kalis is a combo deck. And like all combo decks, it wants to get all of its components out and get swinging- it wants units on the ground to sacrifice, it wants a Kalis in your hand, and it wants things to recur that Kalis when it breaks. With this deck, I've added two things to increase the likelihood that everything falls into place- the Vault, and the Market.
Vault of the Praxis's job is simple- it's a card draw engine, that piggybacks off of part of the combo (namely, our token generation). With just one Vault on the board, Drones, Assemblies, and Torrents will all cantrip- and with two or three on the board, your hand will fill up faster than you can say "hand size limit". It also has the side effect of pushing us into three colors- giving us access to cards like
Disjunction (Kalis recursion that can also retrieve broken Vaults and doubles as removal!),
Temple Scribe (He's kinda like Dark Wisp, except that he gives you the card immediately), and
Ephemeral Wisp (Something you can sacrifice
repeatedly- and two Wisps in play at once mean that your power cards activate your vaults!).
Meanwhile, we also have the Market- commandeered by the lovely
Ixtun Merchant. She allows us to trade for some of our combo cards, bearing a Kalis and an
Honor the Ancestors for that sweet, sweet recursion. She also bears a Combust, for situations where we need removal and we need it
now- and this just in, she's now gotten in a shipment of
Praxis Banners for guaranteeing that we actually hit the power we need. The market's mostly for bootstrapping us in the early game, with a guaranteed early Kalis, or perhaps to get us out of a sticky power-screw situation, but Ixtun's got us prepared for any situation.
Even if Kalis is still sweet and saucy jank, with both the Vault and now the Market, it now feels more reliable than it's ever been.
EDIT 12/7/19
The Bloodrites begin in Xulta! The new set's given us a couple of very interesting cards, in the form of
Proselytize and
Voprex's Choice. Proselytize is a new source of tokens, with the Cultists being around as useful as Assembly Line- a little more useful in the endgame, a little less useful in the early game. Voprex's Choice, meanwhile, is Disjunction 2- a Kalis recursion tool that can also double as removal. It's really useful removal, too- sure, it's not directional, but you really only need it to chip away at the board so you can get a clear shot at the opponent's face. If you need *directed* removal... you have a Kalis, and Annihilate still exists in the deck.