Deckbuilding

• Deck Building Packages: A Beginners Guide To Common Card Combinations
• Unusual First Five Considerations: Different Ways of Counting to Ten.
• Ashes Normal Coaching

Deck Building Packages: A Beginners Guide To Common Card Combinations

By Timothy Cathcart

When deckbuilding for Ashes Reborn you may find yourself putting together a deck with an awesome new idea, with card combos that work really nicely together. Then when you play the deck it simply underperforms, unable to pull out ahead.

Don’t despair! This doesn’t actually mean that your idea for a deck necessary sucks or your card interaction inclusion is a bad one. However it is incredibly difficult for your deck to be an entirely new mix of cards and also be competitively viable.

Sometimes an entirely new archetype of deck is created by a player, but more often new successful decks are remixes, a bit of a new idea along with a bit of an old idea. 

This article aims to give you an overview of several tried and tested deck building packages, combinations of cards that often are added to a deck to give it an edge or bring it close to a win condition. Combine these old ideas with your new ideas to help your cool deck ideas shine!

Not everything in a package is necessary, mix and match different parts depending on how much you want to lean into the archetype. For every package there is a variation that only uses some of the mentioned cards. Ashes is a game of spending dice, so most packages focus on the exploitation of a particular card that is particularly high value for dice.

Time Value Spellboard

     

   

This spellboard package is all about efficient single dice allies with tokens and card draw.

The key card is Summon Wishing Wing which gets more efficient the more you can summon those pesky birds and add tokens to them. Use Summon Time Hopper to give status tokens to the Wishing Wings. Having problems with all these units clogging up your battlefield? Use Summon Seafoam Snapper to eat your own Wishing Wing after it's exhausted and guarantee that card draw. All the card draw of the Wishing Wings should enable you to play extra books from your deck and unlock the focus abilities of the Wishing Wings themselves as well as the Time Hoppers.

All these 1 health units can be exposed to ping damage, what is your actual win condition here? Use Fighting Spirit to load up for an attack boost. With enough tokens only a couple of massive attacks from a boosted unit might be what is needed to clinch victory. 

This package has a large number of possible cards, so many variations of combinations of these cards exist. You can even run Time Hopper and Seafoam Snapper without Wishing Wing. Another card often paired is Summon Tidal Crab, to add even more tokens to your units. Stand Still can help you land your big attacks and Accelerate can enable you to string together Time Hopper and Fighting Spirit side actions.

If you do run a spellboard like this with many cheap unit summons, consider including Gates Thrown Open in your first five to summon everything twice in round 1. Otherwise you may find your first five is too cheap and you'll have unspent leftover dice in round 1 which is never a good idea!

PACT

     

PACT is so called because of the interaction between Phoenix Attendant and Chant of Transfusion but the key card is the chant, exploiting the value of Chant of Transfusion is a powerful package.

Start round 1 with either a single copy of Transfusion or by playing Ritualist to pull an extra chant from your deck you can even start with 2. With an ally heavy deck triggering the chants with an ally death shouldn't be too difficult (Though you may wish to include some ways to ensure your allies die like Blood Chains.) Use the Phoenix Attendant side action to heal damage and the Chant of Transfusion main action to immediately move that damage onto an enemy. The amount of healing and damage here can be extremely efficient. For a more aggressive play, play Old Salt to deal 1 damage to an enemy unit before immediately using the side action of the Chant of Transfusion to move the default damage Old Salt enters play with onto the same enemy.  Taking out a 2 health enemy has never been more dice efficient!

There are a lots of combinations of ceremonial allies that can help fuel the chant machine. One to keep an eye on is Blood Archer, who's side action damage can also combo with Transfusion. Since you're flinging wounds around and even ignore armour while you're at it, Fester is also a lovely removal option.

Bear Bypass

     

   

Summon Frostback Bear on its own it is a value machine. On round 1 three dice for a fairly large body is slightly underpowered compared to a three cost ally, but on round 2 and onwards two dice for the mighty Frostback Bear is such great value. The Bear also comes with an built-in win condition, Terrifying 1 which can be consistantly used to deal damage over the heads of smaller enemy blockers. With 2 starting attack the bear is a prime candidate for Massive Growth to deal a whopping 6 damage to the enemy Phoneixborn should you successfully bypass their defences. Want even more value? Use the cheapest option Call to Action or another similar unexhaustion card to attack twice with the massive bear. All this investment in a single unit can be dangerous however so you may want to run Golden Veil to prevent your costly conjuration combo from getting hit by a removal spell. Want to spread your bypass damage between two units? Use Summon Mind Fog Owl and attack in tandem with your bear. If the Frostback Bear cannot be blocked then neither can the  Mind Fog Owl!

If you have charm dice to spare, don't forget you can slip a sneaky Charm Dice Power into the mix and debuff an enemy blocker's attack which would otherwise be high enough to block the bear. There are also more additional options than ever to boost the attacks of your units. Use Wallop to unexpectedly hit harder than your opponent was expecting and Clashing Tempers to combo your attack with removal options.

Burn

   

The most common commination of cards referred to as a card package is the "Burn Package", cards that define burn in Ashes Reborn.

Nature, Ceremonial, Charm and Sympathy, these are the dice types each with access to a high efficiency burn card. Final Cry offers 2 damage for 1 dice and requires a unit death to trigger. Sympathy Pain requires an opponent to deal you damage and offers the same ratio, 2 damage for 1 dice. Both of these requirements are usually easy to trigger, though for Final Cry you may wish to pack effects that will destroy your own units like Reclaim Soul, and for Sympathy Pain you may wish to ensure your opponent attacks you with Summon Light Bringer, an attack you can immediately Phoenixborn Guard to trigger the pain. Molten Gold offers even more damage, technically less dice efficient at 3 damage for 2 dice, yet it more than makes up for it by being more action and card efficient.

You can include just Molten Gold in your deck for closing out games or go all in and stack your deck with 3 of each card for the full burn package. Just remember, this powerful burn can be high variance simply because unlike other games there aren't enough powerful burn cards like these three to fill out an entire deck. You'll have a different round 2 plan for when you don't draw many of your burn cards. I also recommend caution when including burn cards in your first five. You may find that spending dice early on burn will just put you too far behind on the fight for the battlefield.

   

Less powerful but more consistent, slower burn makes up a parallel collection of cards. Fire Archer offers both a unit and 1 burn for 1 dice. Once in the discard, it can be recurred and played, any time you can use a Ceremonial Dice Power side action. This is an even worse ratio of 1 burn for 2 total dice, but it could be just the 1 extra damage you need to win the game. Chant of Revenge promises to offer a base value proposition of 1 dice for 1 burn, with each round you can trigger it afterwards making it even better. Spending dice however on the chant in round 1 won't help you with control of the battlefield so the efficiency proposition can be a double edged sword. Frost Bite offers 1 dice for 1 burn and with the focus effect you can spend whatever dice you want on it. Most decks that use Frost Bite run three copies of it in the deck and leave a spellboard slot open for drawing and playing it in later rounds.

With slower, less dice efficient burn cards it will take longer to kill your opponent with burn, but this is offset by the fact that both spellboard cards with stick around from round to round, and the Fire Archer can be recurred. Feel free to try any combinations of these burn cards to supplement your unique deck strategy. 

Aggressive Light Bringer Opener

     

Some decks just want to get in early with a lot of damage before their opponent has time to react. There are many variations of the early ally aggressive opener but they all follow the same logic. In Ashes it takes time to first play a summon spell and then use it to summon a conjuration. Can you race your opponent and get in a massive attack before they have time to set up?

Choose to go first if you can and play the key card to this strategy, Summon Light Bringer. Hopefully your opponent won't quite know what's afoot yet and will play something slow like a conjuration summoning spellboard card of their own. Then play an high attacking ally, like Hunt Master or Grave Knight. Your opponent will want to block your big attacker with something, but whether they play an ally or summon a conjuration, on your turn you can activate Summon Light Bringer and force them to attack with their new blocker. Use your Phoneixborn Guard on whatever they attack with and then swing back at them with all your attackers, a total of 5 attack usually with the Light Bringer included.

There are many variations on this early Light Bringer strategy including those with more swarming attackers like Raptor Herder and Summon Vampire Bat. You can commit these four dice to the opening attack of 5 damage and it still leaves you with six more dice for whatever else you want to do with your first five.

Realm of the Absurd

    

This early damage combo is even more all in on attacking your opponent's Phoenixborn directly and many players have tried a variation of this first five. The key card here is Realm Walker which exhausts whatever unit your opponent tries to block you with, If your opponent manages to play 2 blockers then fear not, attach Hunting Weapons to your Realm Walker just before attacking to both take out a 1 health blocker and force your opponent to instead exhaust the higher health blocker, as well as deal an extra point of damage when your attack hits. Throw in an Unexhaust card like Flute Mage to get double the value out of your Realm Walker, and Golden Veil to protect your investment into a single unit.

Just like with any of these strategies you don't have to use all the cards of the combo to get good value. Just be careful with the Realm Walker's 3 life total which put them in unfortunate range of 3 damage removal like Molten Gold.

Creeper

     

         

The potential value of Summon Indiglow Creeper is pretty insane. What starts off as a fairly humble small unit can turn into 2 massive units, all for the price of 2 dice. If you can consistantly blossom your Luminous Seedlings into Brilliant Thorns then you'll most likely command the battlefield, so its no surprise that many decks make this value proposition a goal of their deck. Use Summon Gilder to provide both unit guard against attacks to your otherwise defenceless Luminous Seedlings and fuel to grow them when your Gilder dies and bestows its status token inheritance. If your opponent refuses to kill your Indiglow Creeper conjuration for fear of the Brilliant Thorns, use Summon Seafoam Snapper to do it yourself.

Snapper isn't the only way to kill your own creeper of course! Guilt Link is another favourite for the job. So long as you can get a token on it you'll also force your opponent to destroy a unit while you're more than happy to destroy your Creeper and get a Seedling. Check out Redirect and Seeds of Aggression for other options of gaining some kind of benefit while killing your own creeper.

There are lots of different ways of getting status tokens onto your Luminous Seedlings. Grabbing more copies of your Summon Indiglow Creeper to unlock its focus effect it one. Using Summon Tidal Crab to offload tokens directly is another. Try out a variation of the creeper deck and see how you can incorporate its powerful value into your plan.

Fallen

     

The bane of many a despairing player, Summon Fallen has the potential to reward its owner with an overwhelming large number of zombie units. At first glance, Summon Fallen operates like a chant, triggering with a status token whenever an ally dies and allowing you to spend that token for a benefit, in this case summoning a Fallen unit. However its unbelievable power ceiling is revealed upon closer inspection. Unlike a chant, you do not have to exhaust the card to spend the token, and the number of Fallen you get scales with the number of copies you have in play. That means with all 3 copies of Summon Fallen in play, each time an ally dies you can summon 3 units for just 1 dice. It's easy to see why this incredible value engine can be a go-to when designing a deck. Use Open Memories to get your second copy of the ready spell in play as quickly as possible in round 1. Then start pumping out allies, and each time one dies you get the ability to summon 2 zombies.  If your opponent thinks they are clever and avoids killing your allies, include cards like Reclaim Soul to kill your own allies and trigger your fallen books.

Many players have given their own unique twist to a fallen deck. How will you get you hands on the second copy from your deck, or even better still, the third? Be careful though, you may run out of allies to sacrifice to the machinations of war and you might simply get destroyed by your opponent before you have time to setup your value engine. 

Raptor Herder Spam

     

Which unit is the best unit? For the cheap cost of only a single dice, Raptor Herder might offer the best value for money. 3 attack spread between 2 units won't suit every deck, but there is no denying the aggressive power of playing Raptor Herder over and over again. Opponent killed your Raptor Herder? Use Ceremonial Dice Power Recursion or play Shepherd of Lost Souls and get it back into hand to play again. Opponent doesn't want to kill your Raptor Herder? Use one of the mount cards, like Summon Cerasaurus Mount to create a powerful unit and put the Raptor Herder underneath it. When your opponent inevitably kills your mount, you get to play Raptor Herder again! There are lots of other creative ways to replay this extremely efficient ally, a useful tool to have in your deckbuilding arsenal.

Conclusion

There are of course many more combinations of cards that are often seen together in great Ashes Reborn decks. In particular, yet unmentioned are spindown and mill archetypes, with fun powerful combinations, like mill spellboards of Abundance, Summon Three-Eyed Owl and Summon Orchid Dove as well as spindown combos with cards like Dreamlock Mage, Dream Fracture and Hollow. However I'm a little less confident on exactly how to make these packages work best in the current meta. 

   

Some Phoenixborn also have specific packages like Maeoni who is often paired with some combination of Summon Gilder, Explosive Growth, Hypnotize, Root Armor and of course Golden Veil.

      

Hopefully this has been a helpful introduction to some of the common powerful combinations and packages of cards in Ashes Reborn. What combination of cards do you think works well together across a range of different decks? Is there a card I haven't mentioned with amazing dice efficiency, ready to be exploited? Let me know on the Ashes Discord!

Unusual First Five Considerations: Different Ways of Counting to Ten.

Unusual First Five Considerations: Different Ways of Counting to Ten.

By Timothy Cathcart.

In this article I will be writing about Ashes Reborn and deckbuilding. These are perhaps quite basic concepts and ideas so this article is for beginner players and if you're experienced you may find this stuff obvious. However, I'm writing this for myself a year ago when I started to make decks and what I would have liked to know.

When I was first starting with deck building for Ashes I was excited by the world of possibilities the game offers. Then I started to get more serious about making more competitive decks and developing a good first five.

The first thing you may realize when making decks for Ashes is that you must plan a first five (or several first five variations once you start getting fancy). The next thing you'll consider is that with ten dice to spend in round one, you'll be at a disadvantage if you can't spend all ten of your dice and your opponent can.

At this point there is an efficiency based model that you can employ. Simply pick a combination of five cards that cost in total the ten dice you have chosen. This includes not only their play cost but also the cost to summon books ect. Add in the cost of your PB's ability and for a lot of decks this super card and dice efficient first five will work well.

However the more I play the game the more I've come to realize there are more first five options that are also competitively viable. Essentially more ways of counting to ten dice spent.

"This one goes to eleven" Flexible Overcosted First Fives.

The first option you may wish to consider is having "too many" cards and abilities in your first five than you will be able to play/summon with ten dice.

This strategy has many benefits:

By having multiple options you can react to your opponent's strategy even after you choose your first five.

By having extra cards in hand you can bluff many more options late into round one. It's much harder for your opponents to predict what you have, if you hold onto two cards in hand vs one. With only one card they can count to ten while examining your spellboard and leftover dice, and work out the likely card you have. Much more difficult for them to guess, if you keep those two cards in hand, late into round one.

By not playing all of your cards in round one you will also be able to guarantee a particular card in hand for round two instead. Normally in round two your hand is completely random so this can be useful.

Here are some examples of having flexible first fives:

Golden Veil. Protective reaction spells like Golden Veil and Fate Reflection are great cards to have in flexible first fives. If your opponent tries to use removal, they are extremely powerful. However, what if your opponent doesn’t play removal? We'll no need to just waste that charm dice, have a backup plan for spending it instead! A good idea here can be to play slightly slower then your opponent. Wait for them to spend their dice/cards before you can safely spend the charm dice on something else, knowing now that they don't have removal after all.

The great thing about these cards is that if you don't spend them round one you are usually very happy to keep them for round two, continuing to protect your key unit.

Ice Trap. Ice trap is particularly amazing against two dice summons or units with two health like Winged Lioness ect. But depending on what they play, you may wish to spend the dice on something else instead.

Nature's Wrath. Nature's wrath is great in the first five against swarm openers, especially useful to include this in a first five with a PB that can struggle against lots of units all attacking at once, or if you suspect your opponent to play raptor herder or prismatic fish.

Adept Duellist. This one is even more of a specific counter, but if you suspect an alteration like root armour giving you a hard time, then including a duellist might be a good inclusion for your flexible first five.

Fester. Having removal like fester, excavate or even molten gold In your first five can be super useful if your opponent plays a knight or even a key two cost unit. However it can often feel like a waste of a dice if no good targets show up for removal, or you can't get a wound to stick.

   

Summons. Playing a summon spell but not summoning it round one is a particularly efficient use of first five flexibility. Not only do you have the flexibility of choosing to either summon or not, you will also draw a full five cards in round two since your "extra" card is sitting in the spellboard and not in your hand. You can even go all in on this concept and have an expensive summon that you don't plan to ever summon round one, but this loses the value of first five flexibility.

Summons with book tax are inversely efficient to not summon round one so avoid using these books without committing to using them.

Body Inversion. Just like a removal spell from hand, this spellboard card can be situationally very powerful, but as in real life, often the right opportunity to invert someone’s body doesn't come up. Reduce the sting of this situation by having a plan to spend that illusion dice elsewhere.

 

Mounts. Mount summons can be great but often pose a problem, what if your opponent can kill your ally before you get to mount it? A good answer to this is to have something else in your first five you can spend dice on in case you are unable to summon your mount.

There are endless more examples but hopefully the idea here is clear: Include a situational but powerful card in your first five in addition to a back up dice spend plan. With an over budgeted first five you can decide for example whether to play fester or summon a bone crow. If the opportunity comes up, play fester for a nasty removal option. No good targets for fester showing up? Then try to summon the bone crow.

So how do you accommodate so many variable costs for this flexible first five?

 

Match costs. If you plan your first five around either summoning a steadfast guardian or playing molten gold, the mismatch in dice type will give you a massive headache. Instead, think about including both a Steadfast Guardian and Kneel in your first five. They both represent the same two dice spend with no conflicts, so you won't have a problem being able to pay either of them, even once you are down to only two dice.

The basic costs on most PB unique card are great for this since they dice match with anything.

Include ten dice worth of first five cards in addition to a Sword of Virtue and you have a lot of options.

How do you get above ten dice? Knights can be useful here but vulnerable to removal. A book tax two cost summon like Tidal Crab costs three without the same loss of investment (since you still payed the tax for later summons). PB abilities with a dice cost are really great for putting your first five cost above ten without having to include too many expensive cards.

Additionally you can plan to spend dice on dice powers (a subject I'll get into more in the next section).

.......???

"This one goes to…  nine?" 

The inverse option from overcosted, flexible first fives is also equally valid. Having a hand of cards which adds up to less then ten can be supplemented by planned usage of dice powers.

Dice powers are generally not as good as spending a dice on cards. I mean otherwise the game wouldn't really function since cards would have little value!

However the cost of losing efficient dice spending is sometimes worth it for the inclusion of specific summons and cards in your first five.

 

One of my competitive decks has been improved by removing Winged Lioness and replacing it with Light Bringer.

Additionally I swapped out Frost Fang and replaced it with Root Armour. (Admittedly Frost Fang is also not a commonly played card but the point is I went from spending two of my first five dice to only spending one.)

By focusing on exactly what five cards you need in round one to really make your deck sing, you can supplement that choice with good dice power usage rather then give up on a powerful opener idea in favor of more expensive cards to fill out the ten dice.

Often the key to using these dice powers is to remember that you will be spending the dice for its power side, and meditating them up at the start of the round.

But not all dice powers were made equal, and that is especially true for a first five!

Nature.  A nature dice power is possibly the most generically useful, sometimes trading into a one health summon with no efficiency loss at all. But even without that best case scenario, one damage is almost always useful at some point during round one, so it is the dice power I recommend the most incorporating into a first five.

Ceremonial.  A ceremonial dice can fit great into a first five. You can play aggressively with an ally like raptor herder and try to force your opponent to block and kill them. Then, pull them out of the discard and do it again! Or you can simply meditate with an ally heavy deck and see what comes up in the discard to pull back out.

Divine. Boosting attack seems like an aggressive move, and it can be, but I've generally found that one dice for one damage to your opponent's PB isn't that great use of dice, especially in round one, so potentially avoid attacking a PB with a divine boosted unit. Instead think about how you can force an early guard and then use the divine power to kill a unit you wouldn't have be able to otherwise. A divine power on an alert unit like Beast Tamer can also be really annoying for your opponent to deal with. With the same logic, using refresh effects on an aggressive divine dice unit can work wonders. Often your opponent doesn't expect the divine dice and attack combo!

Charm. Charm is especially useful if you are playing with terrifying units like Frostback Bear to downgrade would be defenders, but it can also be useful if you are playing defensively and a nasty unit shows up with enough attack to mess up your wall plan. Still, I've found charm more difficult to incorporate well into a first five plan than others.

Illusion. Spin down is a tricky proposition. Generically pretty useless since your opponent can just med the dice back up, or maybe they didn't even need those dice at that level you reduced them from. However, paired with a first five removal card, spin down can be a potentially very powerful round 1 play to prevent a Golden Veil or Fate Reflection from your opponent. Additionally if your deck hopes to win by end game fatigue damage, incorporating an illusion dice power can provide good value, potentially 2 mill from forcing meditation, which is pretty good value. Just make sure to try and predict which dice they actually need at a particular level or its a waste of a dice.

Time. Time is great if your opponent has a token to remove (a personal favourite is to remove a token from chant of transfusion), but this can be matchup dependent. Even without the second part of the ability, a time dice can provide very consistent if a little inefficient value. I'd recommend not planning to use it in a first five.

Sympathy. Sympathy dice power is rubbish and if you ever use it it probably means you've lost the game. I'm only somewhat joking! Sometime near the end of the game, using a sympathy dice can draw you that last burn card you need. Perhaps there is a strategy for sympathy dice powers that I'm unaware of, but for planning a first five it's seems a very unwise value proposition.

Of course, I'm sure there are plenty of way to use dice powers in ways that I'm missing from these examples.

The point however remains: Obvious dice efficiency isn't everything in Ashes Reborn, sometimes its worth losing a little efficiency to play a very specific combo of cards in your first five. 

Conclusion.

In my experience there are lots of legitimately powerful and competitive first fives that either involve a hand of cards with total costs that exceed ten or are less than ten.

When deck building, consider whether your deck would benefit more from the inclusion of a highly synergistic card, even if that brings your total below ten.

Conversely, also consider if your first five would benefit from the flexibility of including a counter card to shore up a particular weakness, even if that card brings your total first five costs to exceed ten.

If you're completely new to deckbuilding, you may be best to stick with matching all five card to your ten dice, but just know that the world of more unusual first fives awaits you.

Ashes Normal Coaching

Ashes Normal Coaching, Part 1 by creevedog and mbauers

 

Ashes Normal Coaching has been going on for a while now behind-the-scenes, and Charlotte has been an amazing student. [citation needed]  I’ve learned a lot about this coaching process and how to make it more easily observable in the future when we add more students.  We would like to talk a bit about the deckbuilding process and some of the conversations that we’ve had.  We will demonstrate it with a new deck step-by-step, and hopefully show some insight into how competitive decks can be created!

The process (some steps don’t necessarily apply for each deck):

Steps:

1. Choose PB/archetype dice type (example, Echo = sympathy or divine) - if dice agnostic, pick a dice type from the non-unique cards you most want to include.

2. Pick 10-15 cards in that dice type, plus PB special.

3. Identify other dice types and cut some cards if too many dice types (example, we cut Battle Seer since it was the only card pulling in Illusion).

4. Round out the remaining 30 cards.

5. Look for Adds - cards to swap now or just note for later.

6. Create sample FFs.

7. Take most likely FF and remove those cards.

8. Total the dice counts of the remaining 25 cards - count parallel costs as one or the other (can be split; 3x SP can be 1 sympathy, 2 charm)

9. Reduce totals to ratios and use ratios to determine dice counts.

10. Adjust ratio to include summon cost for any books in FF (example, LB in FF bumped divine from 1.5 to 2.5) ignoring book taxes.

11. Check all FFs against the dice spread and adjust if needed.

12. Take the play cost (or summon cost + book tax of the books you are drawing into) of the 25 non FFs and divide by 25 (to get cost per card). 

13. Multiply cost per card by 5, then add any FF summon costs. This tells you approximately how many dice you will need to play your cards each round. You want the number close to 10. (Exceptions: Coal - number can be high because you can play cards for free; 4-book decks - per-card number needs to be lower because of the dice spent on the spellboard each round). Small differences can accommodate dice powers. If you go over, look for cards with a discard cost (Crescendo, Backtrack).

14. Spice 

15. Deck name

We used this process to collaboratively create Charlotte’s Winter Open list.  Here is a sample prompt for us to build another deck:  Aradel with Gilder and Water Blast for Monks and Snappers, and our own Monk for value, but let’s stick with just those 3 dice types, Nature, Charm, and Sympathy.

1. Done above

2. Screenshot:

3. When I look at this list, I would lean towards a 4 book start with an essence druid to get a second cobra or salamander.  With the 4 books, water blast, and druid, it costs 2 nature, 3 charm, 3 sympathy, and one basic.  This likely puts us at 4 Sym 4 Charm 2 Nature, or 4/3/3.  The latter makes things like molten gold or extra pings more viable, the former allows a flexible start with the druid of either a second monk or cobra in round 1.  I value flexibility, so I lean towards that.  

4. Keeping in mind my above thoughts, I like all of the above cards.  I would add something like 2 Sympathy Pains (reach, dual cost), an anchornaut or 2 (basic cost, works well with WB when we need our nature elsewhere and can’t get the gilder), amplify x2 (lots of good targets), EV x2 (more pings), and probably 2 more raptor herders.  Maybe another crescendo, then CUTR X2, then 2 other cards that may or may not be replaced in the spice step depending on our dice spread.  Strange Copy and Return to Soil?  Redirect?   I made all of your suggested adds. I do like Redirect and I don’t play it enough, so I added that. I’m not the biggest fan of Strange Copy (I can never find an opportunity to play it) so I’m nixing that one and I think Return to Soil might be good, but looking over C/N/S cards, I think Generosity might be a better addition? The untap is flexible and healing is never a bad idea in Aradel. I’m keeping Return to Soil on the list of possible adds, along with Ice Trap and Call to Action, two other cards I wanted to add but don’t currently have a slot for. (I wasn’t sold on the String Mage to begin with - I just added her for token manipulation - so that’s a spot that might free up at some point?) This is the list as of now:

5. Included above in number 4

6. 4 books plus Druid is pretty much going to be our FF.  We can get a second cobra or salamander with it.  Another potential FF would be something like Monk, Tamer, Huntmaster, Anchornaut, String Mage, both of these work with our current dice spread.

7. 4 Books plus Druid removed from card pool for math analysis 

8. (and steps 9-11) Totaling up our remaining costs (and ignoring basic dice), so Beast Tamer (2 charm), EV x2 (2 charm), Amplify x2 (2 charm), Generosity (1 charm), Seeds of Aggression (1 charm), Sympathy pain (1 charm–for now use other two as sympathy), GV (1 charm), Redirect (1 charm) = 11 Charm

Huntmaster (1 sympathy), String mage (2 sympathy), Raptor Herder x2 (2 sympathy, use one for nature), Crescendo x2 (2 sympathy), Sympathy Pain x2 (2 sympathy) = 9 Sympathy

Huntmaster (1 nature), Raptor Herder (1 nature), Molten Gold (2 nature), Nature’s Wrath (1 nature) = 5 Nature

Reducing the ratios (this time dividing by 5) Gives us Charm 2.2, Sympathy 1.8, Nature 1

If we expect to pay all of our Sympathy Pains with Sympathy dice, we can easily change the ratios to 10/10/5, or Charm 2, Sympathy 2, Nature 1.  Now we add in our summons per round, which is one of each die, plus another nature for WB.  This makes Charm 3, Sympathy 3, Nature 3.  Already, it appears as though our 4/4/2 is off.  We need to add a 4th charm or sympathy die for our druid opener.  I think a Round 1 2nd salamander is more impactful than a round 1 cobra, so we lose the versatility and go to a 4 Sympathy, 3 Charm, 3 Nature dice spread to help with the rest of our deck.  Hopefully our anchornaut basic dice sink and multiple parallel costed cards will help with our non-perfect ratios. Dice have been updated to 4/3/3.  Side note, with our 3/3/3 ratios, someone could easily swap out one of our 4 sympathy dice for a time die, ditch the Magic Syphon, and replace it with a Snapper to make this a Valuetown deck.  Side side note, you can do that, but then you become the thing that you hate, which would be lame. I mean the whole goal here was to take down Valuetown, not be Valuetown.  Sometimes Matt really doesn’t understand this game.

12) Adding up the 25 non-FF cards, we get 28 total dice.  Divide that by 25 and you get 1.12 dice per card.

13) 1.12 x 5 = 5.6 dice per 5 cards drawn.  So take that, add 1 for Gilder, 1 for Cobra, 1 for Monk ,1 for Waterblast and we are at approximately 9.6 dice per round spent after round 1 using just our summons, PB ability, and drawn cards.  Maybe every other round we have to spend a dice power.  If we ever draw a hand with too costly of cards, we can hopefully mitigate that with crescendo.

14) Spice–we have some spicy 1xs with Generosity and Redirect.  I don’t really like the 1x Seeds of Aggression.  We don’t have any very strong units to make good usage of it, and our 8 Battlefield is unlikely to be full.  I think instead a Return to Soil or Rile the Meek in its place might be better to catch people off-guard. I don’t love Return to Soil so I added 1X Rile the Meek.

15) Deck Name Valuetown Liquidation Sale

I think this is a solid Version 1 of a deck.  It has unit guard and good swinging potential and decent removal vs swarm decks and midrange decks.  It has some reach, some mill, some healing–a skilled pilot can pivot win cons in this.

However, it doesn’t have great hard removal against a big threat, so maybe needs a guilt link?  Or maybe it can just go wide around such a deck and redirect when needed (plus Voltron decks aren’t very prevalent).  Now to test it to see if any tweaks are needed!  I’m on it. Hype.

Version 1 test results:

I played two test matches, one against a Harold and one against a Tristan.

The Harold match went poorly. I FF’d the four books and Essence Druid (Sally X2). He had a Sonic/Flute Mage combo that just wore me out. I did make short work of two Realm Walkers (one with Water Blast/Gilder ping and one with Molten Gold) but otherwise, I did not deal with his threats very well. I mostly stayed even or ahead on board, but never did any appreciable damage to Tristan and made bad attacks. He was also running Fate Reflection which kind of wrecks much of what this deck wants to do. We had a chess clock and I ran out of time with 2 damage on Harold and 13 on Aradel. Not great. I was pretty down on the deck after that.

The Tristan match went better - we were both running a lot of weenie units and my built in ping kept his battlefield well under control. I dropped Syphon from my FF for a Raptor Herder - I think the extra bodies helped considerably. I kept a fairly stout battlefield throughout. Had a couple of sweet plays with Rile the Meek and Amplify/Anchonaut, and won in R4 with a Water Blast/Crescendo swing for 5 damage, followed up by a Molten Gold. 

The dice spread worked pretty well in both matches. I had one round in the Harold match where I drew Amplify, EV, Redirect, and Sympathy Pain in the same hand - with only 3 charm and a Cobra book, that was a little tight. I think I used sympathy for the SP and just never played Redirect. In the Tristan match, I drew Molten Gold R2 and didn’t have enough Nature dice to play it (it might be better to say I prioritized other things) until R4. That was less a problem though as I didn’t really want to play it until I closed with it, it was just taking up a hand slot.

I think you’re right that the deck needs a better way to deal with big beefers and could use a Guilt Link. Maybe swap the Magic Syphon? (I worry about my ability to time a Guilt Link though - I can never seem to isolate a great target. Other suggestions?) I also noticed that Gilder is dropping status tokens onto my units that I can’t use (minus Huntmaster), so maybe I drop a Crescendo for a Wave Crash? Spice!

And finally, neither the Harold nor the Tristan decks were Valuetown decks. I have not, thus far, put Valuetown out of business. Sad face emoji.

Version 2 (-Magic Syphon, - 1XCrescendo, +Guilt Link, +Wave Crash)

Version 2 test results (with screen shots even!):

Played a mirror, FF’d Guilt Link, 3 Books, Essence Druid (Sally X2). Opponent’s FF was Sally Snapper, Gilder, Hunt Master, Mirror Spirit. (Smells like Valuetown!!)

Crazy fun match! I lost, but it was so close! I stayed ahead on board all game but never did a lot of PB damage. I did manage to Guilt Link his Hunt Master R1 because he misplayed, but got no more use out of GL after that.

R4 was epic. At the end of R3, he had me within 2, I needed to do 8. I was playing around a Sympathy Pain (that he later said he didn’t have) so I just pinged his board away, hoping he wouldn’t roll any power sides top of R4. But he rolled 2 power sympathy and a power charm. (He actually kept the power charm from the previous turn. I think I was so jacked up that I didn’t realize he already had the power side he needed.) I even said GG and all that.

But I drew a Generosity so now I’m out of SP range. I kept building up my board and trying to ping away his guys so I could Amplify a Cobra or a gilder. I ended up Sympathy drawing a Raptor Herder, which was perfect. He was swinging for 4, but I had blockers, then I planned to play RH and swing with Amplify, but he played Stand still on my Cobra and I lost. 

Even so, it  was so fun and so close. I really like this deck. (After being so down on it after my first test match. What do I know?)

I only fired the Guilt Link once, but I took out a Hunt Master, so it did work. It might not be the best answer to big threats, but I think I’m keeping it for now. And the Wave Crash took out a Gilder. It’s also a keeper.

I have my Phoenix League match on Wednesday. I’m planning to play Version 2. Fingers crossed!

Phoenix League match results:

Opponent brought Jessa (gross!) with C/N/D/S. I FF’d 3 books, Essence Druid (Sallyx2), and Raptor Herder over Guilt Link. I think I benefit from more bodies on the board in this match-up (and Jessa always benefits from things dying.)

He FF’d Sally, Light Bringer, Grave Knight, Huntmaster, and Final Cry. I Water Blasted/Gilder pinged the HM and was able to kill GK with Sally and ED. After that I pinged away his board and did 5 to Jessa, but not before taking 7.

I went first top of R2. I had a Gilder, ED, 2 Sally Spirits, Cobra, Raptor Herder and Hatchling still on board. And I drew a Nature’s Wrath and a Redirect. He had a single Sally Spirit. So I swung for 6 unblocked. I redirected a Screams (I could have Redirected a Final Cry but I just forgot because I am me), put out a few other units, swung and pinged some more. Then NW to reset the board.

He did a lot of burn, but by the end of R2 I was able to put out a Cobra, RH, Hatchling, Sally and EV to swing 6 for lethal. I think I was down to 3 health remaining, so I just barely stayed ahead of the burn.

Final verdict: 

This deck is hype. I really enjoy playing it. It puts out a lot of bodies and does a lot of ping damage. I only faced one Valuetown deck in four matches, but I think it does what it was designed to do in that match-up, and is solid in other match-ups as well. Two thumbs way up.