Break the Hourglass

Here's the second version of my Xenan grinder list. I've left the other one up because it's pretty different and a tiny bit more affordable.

The main change is the dropping of Dinosaur Nest. Sure it's a great card, sure it wins the midgame, but I felt it never really helped to win games that weren't already won. The dinos are delayed, pings are everywhere... Plus, dropping those allows us to go into amazing cards that felt a bit bad to use before: Gnash, Desert Prince and End Of An Era. Since the number of prehistoric lizards is way down now, I've also given up on Twilight Hunt.

So, what do we play instead? Well, the deck was a bit lacking in a few things before: reliable removal, even more power generation to take care of those amazing two-power-drawn games, life gain, and unfair things to trick the AI with.

For the first, we go to 6 removal bullets of Send an Agent and Banish. I'm happy with the 3-3 split, drawing multiples of either isn't amazing and they complete each other well: big multi-faction units are not too relevant once we spam bombs.

The three others points are mostly covered by a single card: Spiritweaver. Playing the great Stonescar list from ltsTenz made me realize how clutch it was, and how much the AI hates this card. It's a removal magnet, making the opponents with Torch or silences less likely to hit our ramp. Our big units are also considered more valuable, leading to the AI taking full board blocks which are great to take advantage of with any of our fast removal. And dozens of hp from lifesteal is quite relevant when we don't have Azindel, Mastermind or Moonstone Vanguard.

The other ramp unit is Tocas, Waystone Harvester: it's more costly than Initiate of the Sands, but it's much better at holding the board. 4 hp is an extremely important break point in Gauntlet. That's why I rarely twist him, but sometimes we can get a bit stuck so it's nice to have. The other effect is pretty irrelevant, aside from not getting hit with Finest Hour.

Regarding the market, we drop Sandstorm Scarf for Gnash, Desert Prince since the deck isn't that weak to flyers in the first place with Titan and Riftfeeder Wasp. Speaking of, the only potential target on our side is the wasp. Gnash is now our only source of Killer to combine with Grodov's Burden.

We also get rid of Hive Queen Uther in favor of main deck life gain sources and Gnash as a better big impact unit.

Lastly, the freed market space is filled by End Of An Era. Having both it and Chronostorm allows us to handle both kinds of annoying aggro beat-down and it hits a surprising amount of slower decks extremely hard. Gauntlet is pretty fast overall.

I've yet to loose with this list, low sample size but it's very smooth. As I said the other deck list is great, but sometimes I think it's playing against itself too much.