-
mefisto00.
User deleted
Blood/Diamond
First, the normal boogeyman BD Control is likely going to be hard to port over naturally. Even versions without Angels and Vampires are still essentially trying to work as Extinction control decks that are splashing Diamond for its high-powered rares in Living Totem and Soul Marble. To build the deck, you are likely going to end up trying to build it in one of two ways. First, you can go with the Extinctions and the plethora of Blood and Diamond removal, but this will leave you really reaching for ways to finish the game as neither shard is great at doing so with any of their commons or uncommons. The other option is to try and take something like Barkam’s build from the September VIP tournament with its more midrange elements and push that even farther towards being the aggressor. This lets you play the value troops like Darkspire Priestess and Giant Corpse Fly while likely also being able to pack either Soul Marbles or Living Totems, with the only real cost being that Extinctions have to be downgraded into something like Inner Conflicts (certainly a real cost, but potentially an acceptable one if you are trying to fill the board yourself).
Champion: Zared Venomscorn
4x Darkspire Priestess – $0.12
4x Giant Corpse Fly - $0.12
3x Living Totem – $6.00
1x Protectorate Defender (Return Troop from Graveyard to Hand) – $1.00
4x Brood Creeper - $0.36
3x Xarlox, the Brood Lord - $1.05
2x Mystic Spiritwalker - $0.50
2x Rot Caster - $0.18
4x Murder – $0.12
3x Inner Conflict - $0.12
1x Solitary Exile - $0.19
1x Call to the Grave - $.03
3x Inquisition - $0.09
4x Shards of Fate - $0.12
13x Blood Shard
8x Diamond Shard
Total Cost – $9.97
Living Totem is such an amazing card that it is pretty hard to not try and shoehorn it into the deck. As for the rest of the troop selection, the Vennen cards are all relatively cheap but high in power level, making them excellent contributors when we already have a solid removal based shell to build around. Mystic Spiritwalker is a constantly underutilized tool, and it especially is valuable alongside Brood Creeper and Xarlox to help ensure that they can force the opponent into awkward combat phases that either result in you getting some free Spiderspawns or them essentially chumpblocking.
I would have loved to have fit Soul Marble in here, but in multiples the $0.40 difference between it and Living Totem quickly gets exaggerated.
Mono Sapphire
With Menacing Gralk being the only “must-have” rare in the Mono Sapphire deck, it certainly should be possible to port over the deck to the ten dollar format. The question really will end up being less “Is this deck still good with these pieces?” and more “Is this deck still good against what everyone else is play?”. Fewer opposing control decks to prey upon is likely a strike against playing it, but at the same time not having to worry about lightning fast Gore Feast kills or opponents going over the top with Relentless Corruptions is a plus. Looping Gralks can always steal a lot of victories no matter the format though, so I would expect the same to be true here.
Champion: Wyatt the Sapper
4x Buccaneer - $0.12
4x Menacing Gralk – $6.00
2x Heavy Welding Bot - $0.06
2x Prophet of Lodegan - $0.50
4x Peek – $0.12
4x Time Ripple - $0.12
4x Countermagic – $0.12
4x Oracle Song - $0.12
3x Yesterday – $2.40
1x Sapper’s Charge - $0.03
3x Bottled Vitae - $0.27
25x Sapphire Shard
Total Cost – $9.86
The path you want to tailor Mono Sapphire towards has always been rather dependent upon what you want to do with your 4-drop. While previously that meant debating Dreamers versus Wrenlocke, now it means do you want to go a bit more Troop heavy with Devoted Emissary or try to smash people with Incantation. With no ability to have the one-drop Chosens, Emissary’s aren’t perfect – but then again with the budget constraints it is hard to fit in a playset of Incantations too. That being said, I lean a slightly different way…
The Heavy Welding Bot package is a decent slot-in to many controlling decks in the format. Welding Bot is one of the few common ways to both generate card advantage and act as a potential finisher, and being without any shard restrictions means that is can slot right into many different decks. Normally Bottled Vitae isn’t exactly a barn-burner, but with no turn 4 Gore Feasts to worry about and a reduced impact of Relentless Corruptions and Pact of Pains to go way over the top of 2-for-1s, it makes for a solid addition. Also by going with Welding Bots you save your budget for adding in even more Yesterdays to the 4x Gralk package.
Also of note is how insane Prophet of Lodegan can be in this format. With few Extinctions likely to be around, your 12 attack worth of troops is likely to all stick around and cause a lot of havoc for the opponent.
Mono Blood Control
Mono Blood is another deck that likely shouldn’t be able to be taken down to a $10 level, but thanks to stretching the definition of what exactly a Mono Blood Control deck is we can likely get away with it. Like BD, we can go multiple ways – Extinction heavy, Pacts/Siphons, removal/Relentless Corruption, or just try to jam some Inquisitors. Taking queues from the success of some Mono Blood decks in the Rock League, we likely want to exploit the somewhat slower nature of the format by maxing out on Terrible Transfers, which in turn likely makes us lean slightly towards running some number of Pacts/Siphons and trying to win along those lines.
Champion: Kranok
4x Giant Corpse Fly - $0.06
1x Corrupt Harvester - $0.15
3x Heavy Welding Bot - $0.09
4x Murder – $0.12
4x Terrible Transfer - $0.12
4x Inquisition – $0.12
1x Call to the Grave - $0.03
3x Sapper’s Charge - $0.09
4x Bottled Vitae - $0.36
2x Surge Mechanism - $1.20
3x Life Siphon - $5.40
2x Pact of Pain - $3.20
25x Blood Shard
Total Cost – $9.94
With less emphasis on killing Falconers and no need to use Zared to push through your own troops, Kranok is likely the way to take a more controlling Blood strategy. It stinks not being able to fit Extinction in here, but you will likely get more out of two Pact of Pains or two Life Siphons than stretching to fit in a single Extinction at $3.20. Once again, your Welding Bots will be doing the heavy lifting to act as board stablizers as well as card advantage engines.
As for playing the deck, be even more cautious than normal with your Inquisitions. With no Extinctions, there are certain cards that you are weak against (notably – multiple troop generating cards and spellshielf cards), so you need to try and be specific with your Inquisitions to maximize the chance of hitting those cards if you suspect the opponent has them.
Omissions
We are missing a few of the best decks here, for probably fairly obvious reasons as the prices on the cards people want to play with competitively are naturally going to be higher than your average rare.
GoreStorm is actually hurt less by the banning of its signature card and more from the inability to pack full playsets of both Mirror Knight and Royal Falconers. Make this even a $20 challenge and we might have the incentive to pack full Mirror Knights and go to town with other aggressive Ruby options thanks to the Poca synergy, but it is hard to imagine going down this path just for Mirror Knights given how hard it will be for opponents to even have opposing Extinctions in the first place.
Tu-Pact actually might be the cheapest “Tier 1” deck out there in its natural form. However, the problem is that it is chock-full of decent rares that all Voltron together into something much greater than its parts. As a deck that operates on a very unique strategic level, it is hard to have direct one-to-one substitutions of its parts and still come out okay. With the need for full sets of Pacts, Extinctions, and resilient finishers in Inquisitor and Colossus it makes the deck nigh impossible to build in this budget format.
Chimes Control as it has grown to exist in its current dominating form is another deck that just doesn’t have enough direct substitutions to make it exist in this format. In particular, Mastery of Time is vital to the deck to take advantage of the many card-draw enhancements that the deck runs (namely Chimes, Wrenlock, and Fulmination). Cutting down the primary engine that fuels the deck nullifies it in this form, but as we will explore later that doesn’t mean that Chimes and Ragefires are totally invalid for this tournament…
Build Up
Diametrically opposed to taking our $100.00 decks and making $10.00 decks out of them, instead we look at taking our $1.00 decks and building them up to the $10.00 budget format. This is the most natural pathway for many TCG players to brew, as your initial card pool will be quite limited (as you don’t own much) and you will be looking for ways to expand upon your first deck without spending too much. It might not always be the most efficient method in the long run (as your $10.00 outlay on budget rares might not help you build towards actual competitive constructed decks), but to brew for a single tournament it can still be an effective and enjoyable method.
Spellshield
If there were any takeaways from the early Rock league results, it was that Spellshield was pretty close to unstoppable. It turns out that when you remove Extinction, Gralk and Mirror Knight from the format (AKA – Blow Up, Exhaust Down, and Chump-All-Day) it turns Spellshield troops into monsters. For at least two of those key cards, it is going to be difficult still for them to exist en masse in this budget format as well, so it makes sense that Spellshield troops might get a path to shine.
Champion: Feather Drifting Downriver
4x Howling Brave - $0.12
4x Moon’airu Sensei - $0.12
4x Dandelion Sprite - $0.36
4x Buccaneer – $0.12
4x Wild Root Dancer - $6.40
3x Devoted Emissary - $0.09
4x Boulder Brute (Spellshield) – $0.12
2x Storm Colossus - $0.70
1x Countermagic - $0.03
2x Time Ripple - $0.06
4x Incantation of Savagery - $1.60
4x Shards of Fate - $0.12
14x Wild Shard
6x Sapphire Shard
Total Cost – $9.84
With no Angels or Vampires around, flying Boulder Brutes or Feral Beasts should have free reign on decimating your opponents health total. Basically, this deck is just taking multiple paths to try and build your own Storm Colossus – whether that means Sprite + WRD, Brute + Feath, Incantation + troops, or just hard casting the bad mutha himself.
Incantation especially should be interesting to watch in this format – it historically has had a big problem in that it either gets chumped into Extinction or Xentoth Inquisitor’s block it and the Blood opponent gets to go up on card advantage. With neither of those cards able to be played in large numbers, the 6/3 could really shine in this format.
Likewise, Wild Root Dancer is a card with a natural Extinction problem. In order to do anything with WRD, you have to have at least one other troop out, opening your doors wide to get two-for-one’d or worse. With fewer chances to get blown out by mass removal, Wild Root Dancer can act like the Limited bomb it normally is and either be an incremental advantage if they deal with it fast or a soul-crushing blowout if they don’t.
Dwarves
Dwarves were banned in the first Season of Rock League due to concerns about how powerful Bertram Cragraven’s ability could be at turning them into an unstoppable machine (if you’ve ever played against them in draft, you probably can understand this concern fully). While the Bertram ban was lifted for Season 2, that doesn’t mean the concern is totally gone because as of this writing Bertram is already the most-played champion in the early parts of Season 2.
Champion: Bertram Cragraven
4x Gearsmith – $0.12
2x Research Librarian - $0.18
4x Malfunctioning War Bot - $0.36
4x Elimination Specialist - $0.36
3x Eurig the Robomancer - $1.80
4x Pterobot - $0.12
2x Argus, Herald of Doom - $4.80
2x Sapper’s Charge - $0.06
2x Construction Plans: War Hulk - $0.06
2x Chaos Key – $1.60
4x Oracle Song – $0.12
3x Volcannon – $0.27
3x Shards of Fate – $0.09
13x Sapphire Shard
8x Ruby Shard
Total Cost – $9.94
There are a lot of ways to take Dwarves, given the plethora of options they have at common and uncommon. Likely the two most successful will be to either try and push their aggressive stance with War Machinists, Rocket Rangers, and Slaughtergears or to be a bit more controlling with trying to maximize the power of Elimination Specialists and card draw. I’ve leaned towards the latter here, as the former can be a bit draw dependant due to the need to play things like Charge Bot to ensure you can turn on Rangers quickly. Specialist is the cheapest (dollar wise) form of potential mass removal in the format, so bringing that ability to the table can be game changing. It is a difficult balance to fit in card draw alongside having enough artifacts to make Gearsmith viable, but it certainly should be doable given the restraints of the format.
Also, it should be noted that Argus is a beast in this format. Many of its natural predators will be downplayed – Extinctions are hard to have en masse, Chaos Key’s should be limited in number, and Solitary Exile has trouble fitting in primarily due to Diamond’s diminished role in the format with the price on Living Totems and Soul Marbles being just enough to discourage running Diamond just for its power rares. The fact that you can tutor one with a Gearsmith makes Dwarves the most powerful Argus deck, and that isn’t something to ignore…
BR Orcs
While maybe not even a top-tier challenger in the Rock League, Blood/Ruby Orcs status as a 4-0 winner in both publicized sets of 128 person tournaments means that it shouldn’t be discounted away as an anomoly just yet. While the Gore Feast banning will likely hurt anyone who is trying to come with the deck straight from the Starter to this tournament, the core largely remains the same Smash-Face group of ragtags that it always is.
Champion: Poca, the Conflagrater
4x Fang of the Mountain God – $0.36
4x Furious Taskmaster – $0.36
4x Shamed Gladiator (Speed) – $0.36
2x Throat Cutter – $0.18
4x Veteran Gladiator – $0.36
3x Claw of the Mountain God – $1.05
2x Zoltog – $4.80
1x Te’talca, Orc Gladiator – $0.25
3x Burn – $0.09
3x Murder – $0.09
1x Crushing Blow – $0.03
1x Burn to the Ground – $0.09
1x Life Siphon – $1.80
1x Blood Aura - $0.03
4x Shards of Fate - $0.12
11x Blood Shard
9x Ruby Shard
Total Cost – $9.97
Arguably you could skip the Zoltogs and Life Siphon entirely and bring the deck down to under $5.00 if you really are on a budget, but the deck especially likes drawing those Zoltogs as without the prominence of Extinction those Savage Raiders can add up extremely quickly. Outside of that, it is a fairly straightforward deck that is easily tailorable if you prefer other commons/uncommons over the ones I like here (that are chosen in part to avoid having any good Zared/Bertram 1-defense targets).
Fringe to Mainstream
No Angels or Vampires will be played in this format. Extinction, Mirror Knight, Mastery of Time, Xentoth’s Inquisitor, Relentless Corruption and Eye of Creation all can’t be played in 4-of quantities. The power duo of Soul Marble and Living Totem find themselves seperated. All these things relieve a lot of pressure upon other, previously Tier 2 decks that now might have a chance to shine. While the list below certainly isn’t exhaustive, it provides at least a starting point of what direction you should be looking to find decks that can rise above their previous station.
DS Servant
Servant is one of the decks that suffered most from the rise of Blood/Diamond control. 2/2 flyers just don’t cut it against Angel and Vampires on their own, and trying to swarm the opponent with them was just asking to walk into Extinction. While Mono-Sapphire Servant has a place in the normal meta, it runs too many expensive cards to translate over well into the $10 arena. DS suffers from not being able to play the full quantity of Living Totems, but the splash into a second shard helps give it access to some cheaper commons and uncommons to help fill out the deck.
Champion: Wyatt the Sapper
4x Servant of Shathak – $1.80
4x Protectorate Defender - $4.00
2x Thunderbird – $0.06
1x Lord Benjamin, the Wise - $0.45
1x Cerulean Mentalist - $0.19
4x Buccaneer - $0.12
1x Wizard of the Silver Talon - $0.09
1x Shellsafe Sure Shot - $0.09
3x Mystic Spiritwalker - $0.75
1x Menacing Gralk - $1.50
1x Prophet of Lodegan - $0.25
1x Sapper’s Charge - $0.03
1x Bottled Vitae - $0.09
1x Stoneskin – $0.15
1x Time Ripple - $0.03
1x Peek – $0.03
4x Countermagic – $0.12
1x Oracle Song – $0.03
1x Inner Conflict - $0.03
1x Repel – $0.03
4x Shards of Fate - $0.12
13x Sapphire Shard
7x Diamond Shard
Total Cost – $9.96
Once again we see Mystic Spiritwalker and Prophet of Lodegan show up. $0.25 Limited bombs are going to more than pull their own weight in this format, so plugging these powerful options into your budget deck is a good way to overpower opponents that aren’t playing on the same level.
It is certainly sad to not see Living Totem in here, but by not stretching far for an individual card you end up being able to pack the deck with mid-tier rares that can make your deck more powerful in the average game you will play.
Mono Ruby
Look back to the last beta tournament before Angel of Dawn and Vampire King were sprung upon us. Mono Ruby took over half the Top 8 slots, including the eventual winner, and utterly dominated the tournament. So it follows that if you remove the ability of everyone to play Angels and Vampires then Mono Ruby at least needs to be discussed as a legitimate consideration to play in the tournament. It helps that even these top versions of Mono Ruby play no card more expensive than a couple bucks, so it is a very easy port to a $10 shell.
Champion: Poca, the Conflagrater
4x Savage Raider - $0.12
4x Arena Brawler - $0.12
4x Furious Taskmaster - $0.36
4x Ruby Pyromancer - $0.12
3x Emberspire Witch - $1.80
4x Gem Crazed Berserker (Speed) – $0.12
4x Veteran Gladiator - $0.36
4x Burn – $0.12
2x Crushing Blow - $0.06
4x Ragefire – $6.80
23x Ruby Shard
Total Cost – $9.98
Maxing out on Ragefires is the first and biggest priority – you just steal enough games from drawing multiples in a deck like this that it is hard not to include them. After that, it comes down to Unmerciful Tormentor versus Emberspire Witch, with myself giving the nod to Witch as Tormentor is really an “Anti-Angel/Vampire” technology card in the deck that isn’t as necessary without those flying menaces to worry about.
Bird ‘On Fire
For a brief flicker in time, a Mono-Ruby control deck that “splashed” for Bird’o Plenty was fairly en vogue due to the insanity it could create with Chimes and Bird’O paired with tons and tons of burn spells. Like the other tier 2 options here, it had issues with some top tier cards in the format – namely that it had trouble competing with other more consistent card advantage engines like Xentoth’s Inquisitor and Relentless Corruption. This doesn’t mean it immediately becomes an impact player (it is hard to fit Ragefire plus all the cheap rares it wants to play), but it is worth looking in to.
Champion: Farhny
4x Bird O’ Plenty - $2.00
2x Heavy Welding Bot - $0.06
4x Burn – $0.12
4x Sapper’s Charge - $0.12
4x Bottled Vitae - $0.36
2x Ragefire – $3.40
1x Heat Wave - $1.80
4x Ruby Lance - $0.12
4x Oracle Song - $0.12
3x Hex Engine - $0.27
2x Chimes of the Zodiac - $1.10
2x Burn to the Ground - $0.18
4x Shards of Fate - $0.12
14x Ruby Shard
6x Sapphire Shard
Total Cost – $9.77
It feels so wrong to play just two Ragefires, but access to the first Heat Wave is important in a deck that can quickly draw cards and might need it as an out, and the rest of the budget rares still cost just enough to force the deck from playing the optimal number of the escalation card. We’ve seen the Welding Bot package countless times already, but with Farhny here it especially can be a great play to help kill whatever might be ailing you. This is easily one of the most fun decks to play with on this entire list, because when it all comes together you are playing a flurry of cheap cards that draw you some insane amounts of cards that continue to fuel themselves onward – not to mention that Fahrny’ing your Bird O’ Plenty for 4-7 cards pretty much immediately gets out of hand.
Darkspire Knight
Finally we come to a deck that at least will try to maximize the power of Cerulean Mirror Knights as we can in this budget format. Ruby/Sapphire ends up having issues with Mirror Knight builds as the primary reasons to play Ruby are Gore Feast and Royal Falconer – and with one banned and the other just expensive enough to cut into the rest of the deck we instead turn our gaze elsewhere. The other big Mirror Knight deck that has shown up from time to time the the Blood/Sapphire version first brought to light by ne0 and Mantic but most recently used by DeckofManyThings to a second place finish in the first HexTechs open. Blood provides common troops that already can bring value plays to the table, so when paired with the Cerulean’s it presents a potent combination.
Champion: Feather Drifting Downriver
4x Darkspire Priestess - $0.12
2x Cerulean Mirror Knight - $6.80
4x Cerulean Mentalist - $0.76
4x Brood Creeper - $0.36
4x Giant Corpse Fly - $0.12
4x Buccaneer – $0.12
3x Xarlox, the Brood Lord - $1.05
1x Rot Caster - $0.09
1x Prophet of Lodegan - $0.25
3x Time Ripple - $0.09
4x Murder – $0.12
1x Call of the Grave - $0.03
3x Shards of Fate - $0.09
13x Blood Shard
9x Sapphire Shard
Total Cost – $10.00
Once we start to go down the path that we want to hit our opponents with troops inspired by Mentalist, first Feather becomes an option and then we start to see that the Vennen duo of Creeper and Xarlox show up again, happy to take flight and spawn those spiders. These style of Blood / Sapphire decks tend to want to be very troop heavy to try and maximize the chances of getting your troops inspired by one of the Cerulean duo, and this deck is certainly no exception to that rule as it wants to set up a troop that does something when it hits and then use a combination of your champion power and the Murder / Ripple conglomerate to get the opponent’s stuff out of the way. Historically, this is another deck that just didn’t have a good enough Blood / Diamond control matchup to warrant playing, despite it being very favored against the majority of other decks. With no true Blood / Diamond and no turn 4 Gore Feast kills, the power is certainly here to come out and dominate.
Take-Aways
While all the decks look competent, I think a certain subset looks like it clearly has the most powerful decks for the format – and that is the last section with our originally only fringe playable decks. In hindsight after going through the work to create these, that seems a bit obvious. The powerful Tier 1 decks rely upon certain cards to be optimally efficient, and because those decks perform well in the Constructed meta it means that those key cards end up bringing top dollar prices. Parsing down those decks without their key cogs just ends up turning those decks into something they aren’t normally accustomed to, and if at a baseline the deck can’t operate efficiently then it just isn’t going to win many tournaments.
Likewise, building up your deck from Starters or Rock League heros also doesn’t look particularly strong. Those decks were originally designed with different goals in mind than what this format actually might look like, so while Spellshield linear decks might prove to still be strong that doesn’t mean that they are equipped to handle more efficient aggro decks or decks sporting powerful (but $ inexpensive) rares.
Instead it makes sense that the decks that already have a proven baseline of performance in a vacuum but lack the pedigree of success against the (now-format defunct) Tier 1 decks are likely the best place to start. Decks that previously couldn’t beat an Angel of Dawn now don’t have to worry about that fact, and because the deck was suppressed in the HEX Constructed metagame that meant that the prices on their key cards was also held low – a fact that we certainly look to take advantage of in our deckbuilding for a format like this.
So while you might never play in the Budget Cup, at least walk away from examining it knowing that just because a deck is old and in a poor position in the current metagame doesn’t mean it should be forgotten – you never know when the script will flip and it will be time to bring out something to fight a new format.
.
Mazzi a basso costo |
