This is by far the most fun deck I'm playing in gauntlet now, even though it doesn't have the highest win rate. I've been trying to build a decent deck around
Kaleb's Sanctum, and Empire of Glass brought some new additions that finally make this viable. The deck is all about abusing synergies around playing weapons, without having to waste any card slots on actual weapon cards.
Playing weapons for free
Ijin, Walking Armory - once you reach 6 justice influence, you get a free 4 cost 4/4 weapon each turn per Ijin (given you have another unit to play).
Kodosh Evangel and
Icaria, Valkyrie Captain are here to help ramp into that influence threshold sooner.
Jishu, the Burning Brush - plays free 1/0 overwhelm weapons on every Oni you play, and there are a total of 18 Onis in the deck (and 1 in market). While the weapon isn't big and shiny like Ijin's, the goal is to fill the board with weaponed up units for
Kaleb's Sanctum.
Rewards for playing free weapons
Watchwing Support - buffs the next unit we draw each time we play an attachment (includes itself). This is often my preferred first 2 drop. The random cards you get in your market from warping this isn't important.
Lynax, Moltenwing - another fantastic addition from Empire of Glass, this unit deals damage equal to a weapon's cost whenever we play one. That's 4 damage per Ijin trigger, 1 damage per Jishu, and however much you manage to get with Sanctum. Also keep in mind that you can buff her with
Rust Grafter so that her triggered damage gets decay.
Oni Quartermaster - the classic. Be careful about playing out multiple though, as you can quickly deck yourself with Sanctum in play.
Going to market
Kaleb's Sanctum - this is the real card the deck is built around. I first started the deck with 4 copies main deck, but found that drawing multiple copies is bad, and there were definitely times when it just sits in hand or on board not doing anything. In this latest iteration, Sanctum is moved to the market, and we have 8 cards that can fetch it when appropriate. Appropriate basically means you've managed to get a board with at least a couple of units with weapons, and hopefully at least one way to capitalize on playing additional weapons. One of the funnest aspects to playing Sanctum is you can get multiple spellcrafts at once when you reroll your weapons at the start of the turn, so slow down and take a look at all the new weapons that got played and plan out the spellcrafts.
Rujin, Conflict Within - a big Oni, can kill an enemy unit on summon, and can produce an exalted weapon on death. Replace with another large Oni to reduce shiftstone cost if needed.
Hammer of Glory - for when you really need to play a weapon to remove/silence something troublesome and don't have a better option.
Pristine Light - this deck's units are small early on, and very large later on once your weapons are active. Hence removal options are focused on dealing with large early threats. Replace with
Harsh Rule to reduce shiftstone cost if needed.
Problems with non-relic weapon cards include - they’re useless without units, give opponent easy 1 for 2 targets, and once Sanctum is played you only get one new weapon per unit.
Changed out the 1-cost Onis for Markmakers and Granite Acolytes because I sometimes struggled to get weapons in play.
At least with the way I’ve been playing this, I find it more useful to have the 1 drops to have more potential chump blockers early on. Maybe going down to 3 or 4 1 drops is better?
Another idea for if you’re having trouble weaponing up, use one copy of Markmaker or Malaga Munitions in market to replace Bore could be good.