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 dispair! This doesn’t actually mean that your idea for a deck necessary sucks or your card interaction inclusion is a bad one. However its 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 deck ideas shine!

Not everything in a package is necessary, mix and mach 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. Most packages focus on the exploitation of particular cards that are 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.

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.) 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.