Hi ya'll! I'm a total scrub trying to figure out a properly consistent Gauntlet deck and this is the closest thing I've managed to put together so far. Any feedback or guidance will be greatly appreciated.
The plan is to access the market for one or both relics so I can draw 2-4 cards per turn while navigating the board as efficiently as I can.
Main Deck:
-
Auric Interrogator, who I enable through
Dark Return,
Surgeon's Saw,
Threaten from
Ominous Rift,
Spiteful Strike,
Vine Grafter and
Makkar's Quiver.
-
Spiritweaver, as she supports my main man while fixing my hand and blocking a good deal of aggro. She also tends to act as a lightning rod for most of the removal that could also kill the
Auric Interrogator. A neat upside is that any
Treasure Trove she makes will eventually feed
Petra, Auric Launderer. Only three copies because she can clog my hand and she's not that good of a draw later if I don't have a power in hand for her to plunder.
-
Xenan Lifespeaker, because I don't own
Dizo's Office. The fact that she can enable
Feed the Hecaton once upgraded is just too sweet. Makes
Moldermuck amazing and attracts some serious hatred. Only three copies for the same reason as
Spiritweaver.
-
Shadow Etchings,
Vine Grafter and
Kerendon Merchant. 12 market swaps... My whole market are cards I really want to play but of which I only own a single copy or two, so it didn't make sense to put them in the main deck.
Vine Grafter means I can enable
Auric Interrogator without giving up the opportunity to pull something other than
Makkar's Quiver plus I get to abuse
Moldermuck just a tiny bit.
-
Bloodsucking Skeeter. Sort of a questionable choice, since it's a nombo with
Shadow Etchings,
Spiteful Strike and
Feed the Hecaton, but those are cards whose count I'd tweak without much complaint. This guy can bring certain decks to a screeching halt, essentially only getting removed by
Permafrost, relic weapons and unit abilities (like all those damned silence effects Time and Justice carry). Big potential when buffed with
Vine Grafter and/or
Makkar's Quiver.
-
Moldermuck. Not much to say about this guy. Couldn't bring myself to not play it with 4x
Vine Grafter in the deck. Decent with
Makkar's Quiver as it keeps the ATK stat fixed, which makes it better with a
Spiritweaver on the board.
-
Vara, Vengeance-Seeker. No reason not to play her in a removal-heavy deck with no Aegis of my own, so she stays. Non-negotiable slot.
-Removal package. Almost entirely up for discussion. I love the fact that
Feed the Hecaton can be very easily enabled and
Spiteful Strike's lifesteal has saved me plenty of times. Probably the clunkiest card here would be
Desecrate, but I like it a bit more than
Dangerous Gambit or
Deathstrike.
Market:
-
Makkar's Quiver.
Auric Interrogator enabler and the win condition for way too many games. The Spellcraft ability comes in so handy that I often pull this specifically because I plan on using the
Warlock's Brew, which also happens to feed
Petra, Auric Launderer.
Bloodsucking Skeeter makes a proper mess out of any deck that can't respond to it getting buffed into orbit. The only way I wouldn't play this would be after some serious changes to the main deck that end up putting
Auric Interrogator in the market.
-
Saloon Massacre. I mean, do I need to explain this one? The main deck doesn't want to draw this on accident, so it stays in the market, for which I have 12 sources of access. This is a no-brainer.
-
Display of Will. You've got to eat your veggies, right? Couldn't leave my market empty of some sort of spot removal, plus the anti-relic tech and the potential for a desperate selective draw have come in clutch plenty of times. Used to be a Sigil (read further below).
-
The Big Wheel. The other source of draw in the deck. I tend to play this later than sooner, but it mostly depends on a need vs cost of opportunity sort of situation. Still love the thing and I want to keep it.
-
Petra, Auric Launderer. The most recent addition to the deck. It's an Inscribe in the market, which frees up a slot that would have otherwise been taken by a Power card and she always gets pretty big thanks to the Spellcraft and Plunder effects. Her slot used to be taken up by
Vara, Limitless, but I've barely felt the loss of reach since I swapped her.
What do you think? Does it look good, bad, cringy or just dumb? I registered on this site specifically to ask for feedback and guidance on this, so PLEASE speak your mind. I will update the space below with my general thoughts on what works, what doesn't and which ways I'd like the deck to be improved.
1.- Power smoothing. One of my main concerns is not missing power drops. Fetching power with cards like
Vara's Favor,
Petition or
Seek Answers is an option, but so far I've had better results with the Inscribe and Plunder mechanics. More direct draw with
Furious Accusation or even selective draw with cards like
Cull the Deck are the other way I've gotten good results.
2.- Redundancy/backup. (coming soon)
PS: I feel awful about not giving credit to the authors of the decks from which I took inspiration, but it'd literally be too many to mention and I'd feel even worse about mentioning some but not all of them, so you guys can just go ahead and assume I copied EVERYONE's homework and tried to make a budget version that's kind of an unholy amalgam of every single Mono Shadow deck that wants to pay life in order to draw cards.
Dark Return
x2
1
Shadow Etchings
x4
1
Spiteful Strike
x2
1
Xenan Lifespeaker
x3
2
Annihilate
x2
2
Exploit
x2
2
Spiritweaver
x3
2
Victimless Crime
x2
2
Vine Grafter
x4
3
Auric Interrogator
x4
3
Bloodsucking Skeeter
x4
3
Desecrate
x3
3
Feed the Hecaton
x2
3
Kerendon Merchant
x4
3
Moldermuck
x3
3
Surgeon's Saw
x2
4
Vara, Vengeance-Seeker
x4
Shadow Sigil
x13
Amethyst Waystone
x4
Midnight Reprieve
x2
Ominous Rift
x4
Signing Bonus
x2
View Deck on Shiftstoned
another very important factor for successful gauntlet grinding decks is that they are proactive vs reactive and your deck is highly reactive. another way to look at it is that your main deck should be executing the game plan (proact) while your market is used to help with road blocks (react).
and i might have a tinfoil hat on but i think the ai cheat so we need to "cheat" back. that means playing as many broken op high impact cards as possible (Vara, Vengeance-Seeker is a great example) and abusing mechanics the ai don't understand (unit stealing, decay damage, deadly units, stealth, predictable blocks with combat tricks, etc.).
as for your specific list i think you have one too many market access cards. generally 8x market access is plenty so i'd cut grafter or merchant. i also think you have too much removal or at least too much variety. i think you need to work your way towards having 4x copies of 1 or 2 removal spells along with 4x spiteful strike because that works as both removal and proactive damage. i also think Auric Interrogator is too needy of a card. it requires 5 strength to do anything and even then it has no keywords with low health. however, i get that you're on a budget and it sounds like a pet card for you so i'd suggest putting back in Ripknife Assassin. the warcry is perfect for interrogator and works well with Moldermuck (which should also be a 4x, moldermuck is INSANE).
i would do something like this:
-2 Dark Return > +2 Spiteful Strike (i don't like recursion in the main board, it's far too reactive)
-2 Feed the Hecaton > +2 Exploit (works as a proactive way to pick apart the opponent's hand and fixes power. it's not super good late game but the more copies you play the more likely you draw them early. even if their hand is empty you can plunder a land)
-3 Desecrate > +2 Annihilate, +1 Moldermuck
-4 Kerendon Merchant > +4 Ripknife Assassin
-2 Surgeon's Saw, -2 Victimless Crime > +4 Impending Doom (absolute classic powerhouse that ends the game insanely fast and has great synergy with Spiritweaver)
i also read in your other comment you put furious accusation back into the deck which is a great choice, so if you want to try my suggestions but already cut some for accusation i'd work around keeping that in the deck.
also, a card you might like is Nectar of Unlife. it's really really strong, being removal early and recursion late. there's also Midnight Hunt which is as a personal favorite of mine to put in the market to help close out the game. if you do end up cutting dark return another card i like to run in the market is Last Chance. it's rare you need to recur something more than once so voidbound is a fairly negligible downside for getting a unit back for 0! you could also just run dark return in the market for the synergy with interrogator.
well, that's all i got for you... lol hope i helped!
For the removal package, have you heard of Victimless Crime? It doesn't hit a lot of important units against some decks, but it's great against others. In synergy with Annihilate your coverage gets pretty good. edit: Oh, there's also Shrivel as an amazing removal.
For the rest I agree entirely with alamat. One of the best upgrades for the deck would be Blackhall Warleader, but that's a steep cost for a not-too-useful-in-pvp card.
First of all, I should have specified Dizo's Office would have gone in the Market, not the main deck. Also, 2x Annihilate + 2x Victimless Crime are the one bit in the removal package that I wouldn't change (the latter was in the deck, you just didn't notice).
Regarding Shrivel, I experimented with that card in early iterations of this deck and ended up concluding I prefer the lifesteal from Spiteful Strike + the synergy with Auric Interrogator and the fact that it can help me kill units with Aegis if Vara, Vengeance-Seeker isn't around. I'll try swapping it in for the 2x Feed the Hecaton, though, which is something I haven't done yet.
I fully agree with your assesment on the mana curve; this deck was a The Big Wheel deck from the very beginning so it was always meant to have the one 4-drop as its top end.
I personally don't really like the idea of running Blackhall Warleader in a deck without ways of giving it either Overwhelm or Unblockable, much like with Murgo the Bone Guy, which I do own. Plus, I don't have it and it's both expensive and situational in PvP.
Cheers!
The way I see it if I went for a Furious Accusation + Waxing Moon setup would be:
- 3x Moldermuck
+ 4x Furious Accusation
- 1x The Big Wheel, + 1x Waxing Moon (in the Market)
- 2x Feed the Hecaton
+ 1x Desecrate
Would that make sense? It's very close to what the deck looked like back when I didn't know Moldermuck + Vine Grafter was a thing, and back then I saw Waxing Moon as a bit of a waste with all the deadly units I was running at the time (I had Ripknife Assassin instead of Xenan Lifespeaker). What I don't like about this change is that it would lower my unit count, making Spiteful Strike way worse. Also, without The Big Wheel, I'd be able to run a couple of higher cost cards... Thing is I don't have any of the stronger 5-cost units (like Tasbu, the Forbidden), so I'd have to skip all the way to 6/7-cost units such as Vara, Death's Master, Vara, Limitless or Icaria, First Reaper.
Cheers!
1.- Redundancy/backups: I wish I had more than two copies of any piece in the Katra combo (it looks nasty as all hell with Moldermuck), but I see your point; I haven't been able to find much redundancy for this deck aside from Xenan Lifespeaker + Spiritweaver for the lifesteal. Running both Auric Interrogator + The Big Wheel with the two Lifesteal-givers is the baseline redundancy from which I started building.
Regarding Moldermuck, you might see why I'm only running three copies; it's not really that good on it's own.
2.- Power fixing. I used to run 2x Call The Hit in the main deck with Desecrate in the market before I got my hands on Makkar's Quiver. At that point, market slots felt too big for just a spot removal card so I went for the "more removal in the main deck" approach. Still, this is the one issue I'm the most concerned about. Would you say I'm carrying too much spot removal in the main deck? If so, then I'd gladly swap Call The Hit back in with either Desecrate or Dangerous Gambit in the market instead of Display of Will. I think that'd make sense.
Would you mind elaborating on other ways of fixing or fetching power? I tried running Vara's Favor, but I mostly ended up using it to pop an Aegis for my removal and I don't see Pledge really being a thing without a proper critical mass of it. Maybe adding the 4th copy of Spiritweaver back in? Aside from her and Exploit, I don't really see other sources of Plunder working out since Auric Interrogator would kill my own Razor Lash, Shadow Walk Cloak doesn't enable him and Towering Arachnid just doesn't fit in the deck due to a lack of Entomb/Revenge units and sacrifice fodder (aside from the 1/1s Moldermuck leaves behind). Also, you just made me find out what Fatal Misstep is (lmao); my hatred of Aegis says "go Battle at the Gates" and my thirst for card draw pulls me towards Poison the Well, but your point about graveyard recursion is very good. I'll mess around with it, see what happens.
PS: I did the change I told you about in the previous message and so far I've enjoyed having Furious Accusation back in the deck. That card's just too damn sweet to pass on, but ditching Moldermuck in order to accomodate Waxing Moon isn't really working out since the Deadly effect is almost always wasted (except on Vine Grafter, and I was already cool with giving it's buff to Kerendon Merchant and Bloodsucking Skeeter for a comparable result) and it draws half as many cards as The Big Wheel.
Cheers!