Uncommon Applications: Secret Recruitment

This deck is part of my Uncommon Applications series, where I explore different low-rarity Battle Lines cards for Throne.

This deck is built around the combination of Secret Weapon and Kaleb's Cloak to get giant chargers onto the field. It can also use said chargers to close out the game if you survive the early game.

Problems:

This deck is EXTREMELY inconsistent, because not only do you need to play Kaleb's Cloak turn 2 into Secret Weapon turn 3 in order to have a chance of winning against anything that's not control, but there's also the possibility of not recruiting a unit at all when you do pull off that synergy. Furthermore, the top-end used here is severely lacking when they are designed around giving you lots of power that you cannot use in this strategy.

The powerbase also isn't great, as it requires FFFTTJ influence in a deck where the majority of the power centers around time (all the marks and paintings are centered around that color). There's ways to fix it, but I'm probably not going to when the rest of the deck is so questionable.

Improvements:

If you build a deck around this strategy, run 4 Xulta Loyalists if you have them. They are likely necessary inclusions to make the strategy consistent in hands where you have an early Kaleb's Cloak.

Past that, the whole top end needs a rework, of which I see 2 solutions.

The first is to replace the fire-centered top end with a justice-centered top end with Nikos, the Unifier and Svetya, Lightbringer, while keeping Boar Riders. The former gets you immediate value from your shift units while the latter gets you a massive tempo gain and sets up massive value gains later on. I have 3 copies between those two and Loyalist, and I think you'd need full playsets of each to make this deck work.

The second possible solution is to run a more midrange-oriented deck with cards that like having an uninteractible unit on the field, with Cloak being a potentially unfair think you can do that's no longer necessary to win. Cards like this include Blurred Stygimoloch and Trailtorch Cinderpaw. You still need Xulta Loyalist for redundancy in Cloak targets, but now you have options that don't require Cloak, which makes for a more consistent deck overall.

Rating: 2/10

This deck can pop off hard when things go right, but the deck is always veering towards the left when it doesn't have the right opening hand.