Ode to Beacon (Gauntlet Fun Deck)

I. LOVE. Beacon of the Reach. It's such a fun card to play, generating potentially infinite value. I also love playing Gauntlet if only because it gives you freedom to mess around with such value without getting your face smashed in by whatever's popular in the meta right now. So with all that in mind, here's a deck I've been playing pretty much nonstop these past few weeks and I'm hoping that I can actually write a decent deck tech so here we go.

The Goal
First things first. This isn't the most optimal gauntlet grinder, period. There's plenty of more efficient decks if you're just looking for gold value. This is purely about having a ton of fun with some great value engines, while making sure to tune the deck to be as consistent as possible for being a 5 faction deck.

The basic gameplan is this: Stabilize early game, find a Beacon of the Reach at some point, generate a bunch of value, and eventually just win through having infinite card advantage. It's not the only win condition in the deck, mind, since you can probably spy a certain The Creation Project chilling in the market, but it's how you win 90% of the games.

Being a control deck with no 1 cost cards and having a power base that ~70% of the time won't have undepleted power turn 2, the early turns are always the roughest and most crucial. The deck's influence requirement of FTTJJPSS seems nasty, but in reality the main influence we just need to survive is TTJJS. With that, we can play all of our stabilizing cards and prep to use either a Harsh Rule, Shen-Ra Speaks, or Display of Vision to keep the board clean and minimize the damage we're taking while we search for the remaining influence. With loads of cards to either plunder or Petition some power cards into our hand, power screw has been exceptionally rare from all of my testing.

On a note about influence, I find the rough order of priority from high to low is:
JJ for sweepers -> TJS to play the shell of Kerendon cards for the bulk of our main deck -> TTJJ for Shen-Ra Speaks -> FTJ for fetching The Creation Project from market -> FTJPS



Card-by-Card

Desert Alchemist: This card might as well be named "Glue" because it is almost crucial to keep the deck functioning, since it does nearly everything you'd want in one package. Power screwed? Plunder that card you weren't going to play anyways. Power flooded and you don't have your Beacon yet? Turn that stupid tenth power and keep digging. AI trying to stomp face or voltron up an aegis'd ground unit? Whoops, now you have a deadly blocker. Beacon of the Reach whiff and give you an unplayable? Turn it into power, keep the chain going. AI out of gas an board stabilized? You can start chipping in with her 2 attack. There's so much to like about this one simple card, it's one of my favorite "plain" looking cards out there.

Exploit: Always the excellent card for disrupting combos (yes, the AI still has those) and the plunder effect pulls double time, granting you protection from power screw and also managing to keep your Beacon going on those times it whiffs.

Feed the Hecaton: Probably worth noting that the exhaust ability is effectively trinket text in this deck, since none of the active unit plays are big enough to trigger it, even with The Creation Project out. That being said, you'll always take a simple edict effect for 2 and there's an annoying amount of Aegis units that Gauntlet decks run that I can't find myself cutting this, ever.

Petition: It's a 5 color deck with intense influence requirements. You need this if you want any shot of consistently being able to play your cards out.

Send an Agent: I'll admit this card can be on the weaker side in Gauntlet since there's an annoying amount of multifaction units this whiffs on, but it's still a 2 cost fast removal spell, so we can't be too picky.

Vine Grafter: This is a relatively recent addition to the deck, and it's annoying that it can't hit The Creation Project in market, but the AI absolutely hates the Regen effect it has and refuses to make profitable attacks past it most of the time.

Beacon of the Reach: The all-star of the deck. So fun! I'd also prioritize playing any cards it creates over any warp cards made by The Creation Project if it comes to it.

Display of Vision: Being copies 5-8 of Petition as well as having a token sweeping effect and a very fringe Ruin makes this card hit on enough axes to be worth it to me.

Ebon Dune Smuggler: Don't underestimate the ambush 2/2 blocker as well as having fast Market access! Both smugglers in the deck can hit everything in the market, thankfully.

Hidden Road Smuggler: Maybe it's the Lifesteal effect, but the AI loves to spend its more premium removal on this card for some bizarre reason.

Scorpion Wasp: I have lost one too many games to a souped-up Silverwing Familiar; this card is more a necessity to hate on out-of-reach fliers than a particularly strong ambush deadly blocker on its own.

Harsh Rule and Shen-Ra Speaks: 8 maindeck hard sweepers is a sweet spot for this deck in my experience. You can be liberal to use it on non-full boards, but I find being a little greedier with these pays dividends more often. YMMV, though.



Market

Banish: Most markets should have a spot removal slot, and this is the best one we have access to in the Kerendon shell. Just don't forget to check the power costs of the things you're trying to hit so that you don't try to, say, hit a normally-5-cost-but-got-hit-with-a-tax-so-now-it's-6-cost unit and throw a won game with it...

Nothing Remains: A good market sweeper that also can incidentally hate on some of the recursive decks in Gauntlet. Just make sure you have the JJSS before pulling this one out of market first!

The Creation Project: Look, this card is amazing, there's no getting away from it. Effectively drawing two cards a turn, with an anthem effect, in a deck that really doesn't need to stretch its powerbase to support it, makes for a fine market inclusion and my go-to first choice for stable games. Yes, there is some anti-synergy with the removal packages we run, but it's sort of a good thing to be having a problem with, since it generally means you're stable enough that you don't mind having to wait. This is in the market rather than the main deck because you really don't want to be drawing this in games where you're behind.

The Great Rift: It's not really a card that gets card advantage so much as board advantage. It turns out having access to Shrivel, Savagery, and Ruin all at once is just a great thing to have. Also worth noting that I have now on numerous occasions used the Protect to pop an opposing Aegis, since that's just the way Aegis works.

Token of Vision: For those infrequent games where you just can't get to TT, JJ, or SS to enable your sweepers, it's always nice to have a power that generates those as a backup just in case. This used to be a Token of Menace until I had more than one game where I was stuck on single J.



Honorable Mentions

Defiance: Used to run these but the timing of them is just too awkward and the especially bad anti-synergy between these and The Creation Project just got annoying.

Rift Disaster: Compared to Harsh Rule, is the smaller J requirement worth giving up a card to your opponent post-sweeper? In my view, not necessarily, but it's not the worst...



Bonus Tips

-Don't be afraid to shock yourself with Xultan Conclave. With the heavy influence requirements the 2 life is more than worth it.
-As alluded to multiple times, Beacon of the Reach only checks to see that you played the card it generated, not necessarily what the card you played was. It can be transformed, plundered, etc. Just don't discard and/or market the card away.
-In general, I've found that you don't really want to make "tempo plays" of your units. The only exceptions I see are if you have a The Great Rift or The Creation Project out and the opponent is out of gas.


Thanks for reading my write-up! If you try it out, enjoy the deck, and tell me how it fared for you!