Masters Dramatist's Mask

Master's (Nov 18) Dramatist's Mask

After making masters with a normal deck last month, I was playing around with Dramatist's Mask (my favorite meme deck) inside masters and actually winning most of my games. Since it's always hard to judge success inside masters (since you're playing against other people's memes) I decided to spend this month refining the deck and trying to make masters with it.

The core difference between this deck and the "Fall of Argenport released ten minutes ago and I blew all my shiftstone on this" version is that it's been backed off the "no units allowed" concept--everybody I've seen run the meme deck refuses to use ANY other units (particularly Merchants) to ensure the combo always hits a First Flame.

However, this means you'll lose the vast majority of your games to simply never drawing the combo--the only reliable (read: Aegis) carrier is the Xulta Convoy bodies, and the only combo fixing you'd have access to is using Rise to draw Masks. You'd likely end up playing Assembly Line or Sheep as a secondary carrier, but those will almost always get wiped by removal and frequently force you to wait until 6 power (and an Unseal in hand) to hope you can protect them, but by waiting to 6 power you've also increased the odds of the enemy having 2 playable removals in hand.

Opening up the deck to Merchants vastly increases the reliability of the combo--you now can rely solely on Xulta as a carrier in the maindeck, with Merchant able to pull both the Mask or Vadius as a secondary carrier. This means you effectively have 8 copies of carriers, and 7 copies of Mask as combo fixing.

One of the last changes that really made the deck work reliably was the addition of the single Snowcrust Yeti--yes, it's another body your combo can potentially hit as a dud, but vastly more importantly it allows Rise to the Challenge to pull the Mask or an Aegis body as necessary, essentially acting as a Merchant itself. That puts you at 13 potential bodies (4 Merchant, 4 Xulta, 4 Rise, 1 Yeti) and 11 potential Masks (4 Merchant, 3 Mask, 4 Rise). The Yeti also allows you to rush-drop the combo on 5 power directly from hand, which is very nice in certain situations.

The downside is that your combo can pull a Merchant (or Yeti, but he's got Aegis so it's less likely to break the chain)--however, it's far easier to protect the Merchant on a bad pull from Mask than it is to get the combo going without her. Kaleb's Choice in the market (which you'd grab if Mask pulls Merchant and no Unseal in hand) protects her from virtually everything except Slay, Equivocate, and Feeding Time in terms of removal you're likely to see frequently.

The fourth Market slot is Honor the Ancestors, which synergizes amazingly well with Xulta, as you may have a second Aegis body standing there doing nothing on the turn your combo triggers. If it hits a Merchant, you can immediately play a second Mask off Tribute onto the second Xulta body, and as you'll almost always have 5 power by this point you'll also have 2+ power remaining for Unseal.

The flex spots were the two Second Sight and the 4 Eilyn's Choice. In most versions of the deck, these were 2 Mirror Images and 4 Lightning Storm/Hailstorm.

Hailstorm ended up being too unreliable since blue is just a splash in this deck--it seemed I'd never hit PP when I actually needed it, and 3 damage was also enough to wipe a Mask-holding Xulta, Yeti or Vadius so I couldn't play it underneath my own combo.

Lightning Storm was more reliably cast and could be played under Xulta and Vadius on combo, which was nice, but I was still losing to heavy hitters more often than aggro--particularly Little Vara, who is an absolute nightmare for this deck for obvious reasons.

Moving to Eilyn's Choice was a very recent change but has so far been very good--it's essentially a reactive Vanquish for our purposes, but there are some other niche upsides with the Counterspell (against Feeding Time or Harsh Rule in particular), and relatively large upside in being able to block Killer attacks (one of the more common ways I'd lose the combo, given Aegis and Counterspells). I honestly hadn't even taken it into account when first putting the card in, but being able to remove large-body Killers reactively is very nice for keeping the combo going--even a Xenan Initiation will get most things to 4 damage, and that's enough to respond with Eilyn's.

The Second Sights I'm less certain on, I switched to be more Crest-heavy in response and essentially just use them as a ghetto Strategize. I'm not willing to go to Wisdom of the Elders, as hitting PP would still be a problem just like with Hailstorm.

Mirror Image was great, particularly to copy out a Scourge so it'd remain on board while the original gets Masked, or to guarantee a OTKO by duplicating a First Flame. It also had combo-building synergy, as Mirror Image + Merchant essentially held the entire combo by just copying the Merchant, but ended up feeling like a win-more card in practice. I'm still not 100% on Second Sight though, and would likely go back to Mirror Image as a first option.

Speaking of the Scourge, his entire purpose is mathematics--with 4 Merchants and a Yeti, it was actually more likely that the combo hits a dud than a First Flame. Putting in the 2 Scourges gets the odds back in your favor, and his primary job is really just to hold the combo for a turn with very little chance of losing it (Deadly+Killer and unit-based Silence are the only things I ever lost Scourge combo to). I looked pretty deep for anything else to put in that slot, but ended up deciding that something reliably holding the combo until you get a Flame was better than any other secondary finisher cards I could come up with. He did lose some of his purpose with Mirror Image being removed, but he still felt better than the other options, but maybe Set 5 will give us some crazy 15-cost finishers I can dump in there.

(PSA: Spirit of Resistance was tested in this slot, but sadly, his Summon breaks his own Mask--I'm not sure this is intended, as the Mask text indicates you play the unit and then play a Mask on it, so I'd think the Summon would trigger before the Mask exists, but nonetheless that's why he's not in this spot instead)

So effectively, the deck is all about getting the combo up with reliability--keeping it running once it's up is far easier in practice, and that's assuming you don't just auto-win with a Flame hit on the first pop. Considering you'll always keep Merchants in hand (never Crest them to the bottom, even if you don't need them) and pull Yeti with Rise as necessary, the odds almost always end up better than they seem--Flames get sent back to the deck with Strategize (or fed to the Market, if necessary) to keep the odds up, but you'll almost never be triggering a combo with all 4 Merchants and the Yeti still in deck. Even then, I won far more games than I lost where I hit 3-4 Merchants on Mask triggers, because once the Mask is rolling your entire turns are spent just stopping the opponent from doing anything with your counterspells and removal.