Elysian Chalice

Your win condition is to make your opponent concede!

Card Choices:

Permafrost: Premium removal.

Disjunction: You can't win without chalice, so this is here to get chalice back. Also deals with pesky relics like gift, flamestoker, xenan obelisk, and starsteel daisho.

Equivocate: Not the best removal, but in elysian you gotta make do with what you have. Helps that the unit will probably be smallish, like a 4/4 or 3/5 that can be blocked by your chaliced units.

Illumination Wisp: Questionable card, but it is a really nice unit to chalice into a 3/5 endurance flying.

Storm Lynx: Poor man's desert marshal. Nobody plays around it though.

Strategize: Draw cards, win game.

Temple Scribe: See above.

Unseal: You need some way to beat control.

Amber Acolyte: Do I really need to explain this?

Auralian Merchant: Single-handedly made chalice good again. Basically does everything chalice wants. I'll talk about market choices later.

Scorpion Wasp: Just play this to block icaria and spam "well played". Also can be chaliced in a pinch. Try to bait out torches and annihilates before playing it though.

Archive Curator: Not great, but we don't have infinite options. It does answer stuff like makto or statuary maiden, and a 3/6 flier is pretty sturdy.

Crystalline Chalice: If you don't have this or a merchant to get this in your opening hand, you probably want to send it back.

Lumen Defender: Keeps us alive, and stonewalls midrange when chaliced.

Powerbase: Primal waystone is an auto-4-of. We need 5-6 sigils minimum for our amber acolytes and seek power. Clan tactic is the best power card in the game, it helps a ton to mitigate flooding. Also two of them kill icaria. Also also it kills relic weapons. Seriously, the card is insane.

---Market---

Crystalline Chalice: This is what you'll be getting with your merchant 90% of the time. Remember, chalice is basically your only win condition, so if you suspect your opponent of having relic destruction you might want to get a 2nd one. (play the second one before they omen your first one to get around omen of austerity)

Scorpion Wasp: Good removal, amazing answer to icaria.

Disjunction: Gets back chalice, kills annoying relics. You might need to get this to kill an omen of austerity'd chalice.

Amber Ring: You only really want this if you're going to get lumen reclaimer too, or else you'll get decked really fast. However, against control infinite 3/3s is pretty sweet.

Lumen Reclaimer: This deck has very few win conditions, and is liable to getting decked. This card is probably not necessary if you play well, but just in case you might want it to win those VERY long games. Could easily be an equivocate or archive curator if you aren't worried about decking. You could also play something like a xenan obelisk or shimmerpack as alternate finishers.

Chalice has changed a lot with the new set, specifically thanks to auralian merchant. Previously, we needed to play channel the tempest to have a win condition in the games where we didn't draw chalice. Since we had channel and chalice, we needed some way to regain tempo so we added harsh rule. The end result was a schizophrenic deck that was 1/3 units but played 4 harsh rules, and still lost because it was too slow. This all changed with auralian merchant. Suddenly, we have seven copies of crystalline chalice in our deck instead of 4. Now we don't need channel the tempest, since we'll have chalice basically every game. At that point, we can cut the harsh rules for more single-target removal. Chalice doesn't care about random little units like amber acolyte or temple scribe, since the can block those with our own random little units. We care about the big units like sandstorm titan, worldbearer behemoth, tavrod, and icaria. After playing with TJP chalice without harsh rule or channel, I realized that the justice isn't super necessary anymore. Your only justice cards left are desert marshal, combrei healer, vanquish, and eilyn's choice. Desert marshal is a great card, but clan tactic means it's less necessary to combat relic weapons, and scorpion wasp is a better answer to aegis units. Combrei healer is an amazing card, but aurelian merchant does sort of fulfill the same roll and healer was always a bit sketchy since it's one of your only units that doesn't generate value immediately. Also, it becomes a 4-power unit when you chalice it which is just asking for vanquish. Eilyn's choice and vanquish are probably the most painful losses, but equivocate and scorpion wasp do fulfill a similar role and unseal is a really good way of protecting your units from a tempo blowout like permafrost. Don't get me wrong, TJP is still almost certainly the better choice since you just get to play better cards and the manabase can easily support the third colour. But elysian chalice just has a certain appeal to it :D