My Heart Burns (27-13, league, peak #40)

Well, this was an interesting league. Week 1, I had an extremely weak pool. Went 1-4 and decided to hold off for a bit. Week 2, I was busy and skipped out on. Week 3, I opened some more stuff and tried a different faction composition... only to go 0-2.

Then I said 'screw it!', switched to Stonescar to run Burning Cruelty, and went 18-5. It's like a wise man once said: give a man a fire, he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire, and he'll be warm for life. And this deck definitely made me feel warm and fuzzy inside.

Wrapped up week 4 with an 8-2 record, putting me into top 50. Good stuff.

Anyway, this is a pretty standard aggro deck - lots of aggressive 2 and 3 cost units, backed up by some efficient removal to clear the way. That said, it does have some nice card advantage / filtering in the form of stuff like Oni Quartermaster and Oni Gunwright + weapons and a few plunder effects. More significantly, Burning Cruelty is absurd and responsible for a huge percentage of my lategame wins. By the time games got to lategame, opponents were usually out of removal (having been forced to use it on my other units), which let it take over. A relentless flood of charging, deadly units is just not a thing many decks are capable of dealing with in sealed... and pumping them up is just the icing on the cake. Giving Outlands Sniper deadly also came up a few times, which was a fun interaction.

I suspect I could have squeezed out one or two more wins with some tighter play - plunder decisions can be hard, especially when balancing 'curve stops at 3' vs 'I need FFFSSS influence'. Still, I'm pretty happy with the performance overall, especially given how bad my starting record was.

MVP: Burning Cruelty, obviously. Burn, baby, burn.