Davia Davia Davia Davia Davia

This deck is basically an updated version of past Trove Combo decks like One Turn Faster Than Scavenger, put together with help from f0x. The new card Abundance speeds up the deck by a full turn, and it goes off consistently on turn 3 or 4 if not disrupted. The end result of the combo is putting 5 copies of Davia in play and passing the turn with Swift Refusal up and faegis, which is good enough to win essentially 100% of the time that early in the game.

This deck is fairly silly and will probably get nerfed soon, but I thought I'd post a canonical list here and answer a few common questions, for posterity if nothing else.

1. How does the combo work?

You want a merchant in play, Trove and any 1-drop in hand (and one additional card to merchant away), and 4 power including PP influence.

Then you play Trove followed by the 1-drop. Trove plays Abundance, which plays a random 2-drop. Trove plays Reweave, which you use to turn your merchant into a new, shifted merchant. Trove plays Display of Destruction, which you use to gain 6 power by sacrificing your 1-drop. With the shifted merchant's summon, you get Ruckus Rouser from your market. You play Ruckus Rouser. Trove plays Evacuation Plan, which you point at Ruckus Rouser. This gains you 8 power (up to 10 at this point), and the sentinel that it plays is a 5-drop. Trove plays Discover Talents, which you use to draw Davia. You play Davia. Trove plays End of Hostilities, which you point at Davia. With your first Davia trigger, you replay Display of Destruction, sacrificing your 2-drop, gaining 6 power (up to 8 now). Two new copies of Davia enter play; with one trigger you replay End of Hostilities (on Davia again), and with the other you replay Discover Talents to draw Swift Refusal. The final two copies of Davia enter play; with one trigger you replay Reweave to turn your sentinel into Snowstorm Druid to get faegis, and you pass on the other trigger. You pass the turn with 5 Davias, faegis, 2 power, and Swift Refusal. You win the game.

2. Why don't you {extend the combo in one of various ways to do lethal damage the turn you go off}?

Yes, you can add a card or two to maindeck or market (moving End of Hostilities to market and playing End of the Barrel maindeck is a good way to get a bunch more power to work with) to keep on going off and end with a big Evacuation Plan followed by Darkfyre (requires FF influence) or by playing Death Pit (requires TT) to give all your Davias charge.

But there's no point. A win is a win, and playing 5 Davias on turn 3 and attacking for lethal on turn 4 is just as good as doing lethal damage on turn 3. Spending more slots extending the combo means fewer slots for 1-drop units maindeck or useful market cards for when your opponent interacts with you. If you somehow find yourself losing games after making 5 Davias, we can talk more then.

3. How do you beat {X form of disruption}?

If the problem is just that they killed your merchant, you need to draw a second one, and then you need to stick either the new merchant or the Trove for a turn before going off on the following turn.

If the problem is that Trove was discarded or killed at fast speed during the combo, well, hopefully you got faegis with Mistveil Drake or Snowstorm Druid first, but otherwise you can hope to get Unearth the Past from the market to redraw Trove.

If the problem is something else (e.g. Combrei Lawmage, Tocas, Sinister Rumors discarding your Evacuation Plans, your opponent holding up a negate spell for Abundance, Open Contract messing with the costs of units in your deck, etc), things might be pretty hard. You have some room in your market for cards to try to answer some of these issues, but regardless it's going to be rough if they land one of those. This market has Autotread (doubles as a 1-drop for comboing) to kill annoying units, Unearth the Past in case Trove got Exploited or removed during the combo, and Great Valley Smuggler to help get Unearth (you can get it with Howling Peak Smuggler, then use it to get Unearth) and to serve as a 3-drop if you need to find one after Open Contract. If you have other ideas for beating disruption, you can certainly play around with these market slots, though I'd recommend having at least one 1-drop in it.

Of course, you can also just hope to combo before they find their disruption. Turn 3 Tocas doesn't help them if you are on the play and went off on turn 3 first.

4. Do you think this deck is busted?

I don't think it is. T3/4 is a very fast (effective) goldfish, but there are enough reasonable cards that happen to be great against the deck (see previous question) that it's pretty easy for metas to become unfriendly to Trove if it gets too good. I tend to think the existence of disruptable combo decks like this is actually pretty good for the health of a format because it encourages other decks to play more diverse interactive cards. That said, I don't think the actual gameplay of games involving this deck is very good or fun - too fast and fragile, too many identical games. I like building decks like this a lot more than I like actually playing them! And DWD has said they don't want T3/4 combo decks to exist, so I assume something will get nerfed soon. But that doesn't mean this deck was necessarily too good, just that it's not the sort of deck DWD wants to have around.