Ranked up to 1200ish masters at the end of last season. I took a concept from Twitch streamer LocoPojo and adapted it to suit my collection and personal play style. This deck utilizes the new pledge tools to cheat out minions and spells that lead to a lot of card draw, power, and damage. It’s a high roll deck where you live and die by activating your pledge cards. Always mulligan with the intent to pledge, even if you have to go down to 6.
Questions, thoughts, concerns, let me know!
Updates: As someone pointed out familiar was kind of a weird pick (which I knew would probably be the case), and after play testing it, i agree it felt underwhelming in this list. I elected to focus on the ramping aspect of this deck and due to some of the high influence costs (Darya and Tempest), trail maker made sense and is some nice fixing. I also swapped out strategize for honor of claws. It feels a lot better to destiny into, and it’s just generally a good card. If you’re running primal I’d encourage you to put HoC in almost any list.
Edit: Ok, while I did (and still do) love your deck, the inconsistency was just too much for me. High-rolling a destiny channel is great, but I do also like winning. In that line, I made some changes that have really evened out the deck:
- 4 seek power
- 4 trail maker
- 4 Diogo
- 1 Eilyn
- 4 Channel
- 1 Winter Crown (Market)
+ 4 Initiate of the Sands
+ 4 Jennev Cargo
+ 4 Jennev Merchant
+ 2 Shadowlands Borderscout
+ 3 Gunrunner
+ 1 Rimescale Draconus (Market)
The initiates for the trail makers was the first swap I made. I found that I usually didn't have two undepleted power on turn 2, because I was playing crests or a depleted seat. However, I usually DO have one undepleted power turn one, because of pledge. So turn 1 time pledge and initiate means you'll have two undepleted power turn two. Additionally, playing initiate turn one means you have a unit for bayonet turn two. I just played a game a moment ago that went - pledge vanguard play initiate, turn two bayonet plus glasshopper, turn 3 vanguard.
The next change I made was swapping the seeks for cargo. Does the same thing, but later in the game Diogo hitting a transmuted cargo stings a lot less than him hitting a seek. At least you have a shot at getting something good out of the contraband.
I found however that I was still really struggling in the early game and there's a lot of aggro and midrange running around, so I threw in the jennev merchant as another three drop. Not only does it increase my access to my market, but it's a great target for bayonet because of the aegis. I'm finding opponents are targeting any unit early in the game so as to prevent you putting bayonet on something, and this helped a lot. Plus, with 8 merchants, I can throw away an Eilyn early in the game and go get it later. This is also when I dropped the channels and threw in gunrunners and scouts. I think i'm probably going to drop the scouts altogether and go up to 4 gunrunners. They're really that good. Unless your opponent is running wide aggro or baby vara, he and his weapon become very difficult for your opponent.
Once I got to this point, I realized that Diogo was just too big and slow and I'd dropped the channels so there wasn't even the high-roll opportunity. I realize your deck is focused on him, and I support that. But I just wanted to win a bit more, and cutting him was the right choice for that in my opinion. The rimescale in the side is to help against aggro and xenan. They want you to trade with their vara so they can bring it back. How about instead you drop a rimescale and get a body plus permafrost the vara?
Overall, I would STRONGLY suggest you swap the trail makers for initiates and the seeks for cargo. It really made a difference in my games, particularly my starts which became much more explosive. I would also advise you play around with gunrunner, because he and Darya are a nasty combo. Thanks for posting this deck!!!
Edit: just realized this deck is not up to date. I will add in my latest changes. Stay tuned.