Hex: Heart of Darkness

I've decided depart from the realm of pointless speculation and insert a deck list that you might actually have fun with.  The deck's name is Heart of Darkness after the Joseph Conrad book.  Note: This title has absolutely nothing to do with Spiders and Zombies, so maybe just call it "The Swarm" or something.  I usually name my homebrews after books :p

Quick note before you continue: I'm not a pro, nor do I profess to be one.  If you're looking for a deck that will win you a tournament, you should probably look somewhere else.  I tend to make moderately competitive homebrews with a slight thematic twist.  My primary goal is to give you guys a deck that I've had fun with and that you can try out.

Heart of Darkness

Champion: Zared Venomscorn

25 Blood Shard 

4 Brood Creeper

2 Xarlox the Brood Lord

4 Extinction

2 Inquisition

3 Life Siphon

4 Murder

3 Relentless Corruption

4 Terrible Transfer 

2 Pact of Pain

3 Zombie Plague

2 Bottles Vitae

2 Chimes of the Zodiac 

Strategy

The strategy is straightforward: kill anything your opponent plays while swinging with troops that will generate generate spiderlings for you.  Zombie Plague, Xarlox, and Relentless Corruption will also whittle down your opponent's deck, giving you a potential out for decking them in extended games.  Chimes of the Zodiac will also allow you to replicate one of your nineteen actions in the deck to truly punish other control decks.  With Chimes, Life Siphon is lethal at eleven resources, and Terrible Transfer can swiftly turn the game in your favor with the massive board clear and life-gain.

There is one card missing from here that many people would likely expect to see: Xentoth's Inquisitor.  Xentoth's is arguably the most powerful card in the Alpha right now due to its ability to return to the field repeatedly.  The card's cost increase isn't working properly right now, and it was banned from competitive play in the most recent tournament, which was my initial motivation behind keeping it from the deck.  The array of troop destruction actions and your Champion ability should be able to make short work of Xentoth's Inquisitor your opponent's may have in its early stages (Using your champion's ability and following it up with an Inquisition will remove the little bugger for good).  That troop destruction will hopefully buy you time until later in the game where you can chain a few Life Siphons or Chimes of the Zodiac at your opponent.

I should also discuss the choice of Champion.  Zared is in the deck mostly to deal with Xentoth's Inquisitor and other important one-toughness troops like Ruby Pyromancer.  He requires four charges, which is steep, but the alternatives are Gozzog, who is strong and spammable, but I feel is underwhelming considering the life gain and reach your deck already has; and Herczeg, who essentially mimics Pact of Pain.  Zared is often a guaranteed kill spell on weak cards where Herczeg costs you life.  In the end it comes down to preference, and all three are fine choices, but since most decks have things that Zared can shot anyways (or could if the become infected by the plague), I feel he's a decent champion for the job.

Chimes of the Zodiac is fairly key for the deck, and I've wavered on whether or not to up the number of copies to 3.  You generally only want to see one in the early turns, and the deck can certainly win without it, but resolving one gives you amazing card advantage against other control decks.  If you cast a Relentless Corruption with Chimes in play, not only does the copy trigger the Escalation (if the copy draws you 1 card, the original will draw you 2, for a total of 3), but Chimes actually shuffles the copied Corruption back into your deck as well, effectively creating more Escalation cards for you to draw.  

Your Spiderspawning troops is a portion of the deck that is somewhat gimmicky, but these few men need a few rotations through opposing Zombie Plagues to be removed from your deck, unlike Xentoth's Inquisitor.  Additionally connecting with one of them can quickly snowball the game if your opponent doesn't have an answer. Spiderspawns can trade with most of the smaller troops in the game, and can even team up to take on the larger ones.

Weaknesses

The deck can have a hard time with creatures that have Spellshield.  Extinction is a nice catch-all, but maneuvering around Spellshield can be tricky, which is why it is important when dealing with other creature decks to try to withstand as much as possible by either creating an army of spiders after an extinction or by stalling the game state to a point where you can use Chimes to reap massive Card Advantage off your opponent.  Early Zombie Plagues are key in long games to ensure you decay their deck, and hopefully will generate some men in the process.

For your reserves, consider additional copies of Zombie Plague, Inquisition, and Chimes of the Zodiac.  Corrupt Harvester can give you a nice, consistant source of life gain against very aggressive decks, though at four resources you really need extinction more than not.  Chaos Key works well against Indestructible troops, and Bone Warrior is deceptively annoying, ensuring you board presence after an extinction and giving you a consistent Xentoth's blocker.  If you don't fear the Plague, feel free to add in the Inquisitor with the rage gem.  I don't find this as strong as Brood Creeper, but the ability to play the Inquisitor over and over again isn't something you can readily ignore--it is kind of cheap though.

That about wraps it up.  Enjoy the swarm. 

Hex: Patch v824 Review

Today I'll be going over the latest patch from Hex, currently in alpha.  You can view the Patch v824 Breakdown and Update Notes here.

Probably the biggest thing about this patch is the new card layout.  The new card layout is much better for viewing gems, and especially for viewing rarity and faction.  The Card Modification/Doubleback features haven't been implemented yet, but that's probably where you'll find the collector's numbers, which is the only information lost from the old layout (not that it meant much at this stage).

Most of the general changes are quality of life changes: card manager remembering decks, overlapping text on abilities such as living totem.  One of the major changes is cards getting discarded to the correct graveyard.  If I remember correctly discarded cards went the graveyard of the controller of the effect, so you would Inquisition them and the card would go to your graveyard.  This actually effects gameplay, since Uruunaz can resurrect things from your opponents graveyard when he hits, so this is a pretty important fix for decks that run him and cards that interact with the graveyard. 

For gameplay updates, there's a fix to Lixil where her Uniqueness works as intended. There are rarity changes to Shield Trainer and Kraken Guard Mariner: these two cards basically swapped names, so the rarity changes at this stage is likely just to ensure one card shows up as often as it should in limited.  Archmage Wrenlocke had its correct text back: he draws cards when a spell resolves. This is important for understanding his interaction with cards like Chimes of the Zodiac (one of the three new cards released this week), where the copied spell will also draw you a card.

Chimes of the Zodiac

Speaking of new cards, we got some awesome ones this week.  Chimes of the Zodiac is a pretty broken effect, automatically doubling every action you take.  At seven cost, it will require you to build around it, but if it sticks, it will quickly turn the game.  I've already mentioned how powerful it is with Archmage Wrenlocke.  Even innocuous cards like Peek with Wrenlocke/Chimes puts you four cards up, two of which are trained.  Blood Control decks also have excellent options for copying like Life Syphon and Terrible Transfer for massive life gain, so even outside of control decks this card has potential to see some play in control decks.

Inferno 

Inferno is one of those cards you either hate on principle or will hate through experience.  A lot of people give Red Mages (specifically Red Deck Wins) flack in MTG, and it's not entirely unjustified: when the deck performs, it is incredibly difficult to stop, and often there will be nothing your deck can do if these sort of decks do what they need to do.  Often these decks will manage to get their opponent down into "burn range," where the other player has stabilized and is about to reap the rewards of card advantage.  Every so often, the fire gods will smile and tuck some direct damage safely on top of your deck.  While I imagine Ragefire will be more rage-inducing than Inferno since it can actually deal with opposing troops, Inferno has the potential to end the game on its own (though in which direction, no one can be sure).  People may not like cards like this, since it really does tilt the game more towards the luck side of things, but they have to realize that the person playing this card is also taking the risk it not only won't live up to the price tag for the damage swing it offers, but it might actively do nothing but kill them.  One thing this card does do is create pressure.  Often versus RDW, the opposing player will know when they are in the danger zone: when they can no longer wait on better value for Extinction than the lone Savage Raider constantly two-ing them in the face every turn.  They have to start playing fast and loose because their opponent might just have a bunch of burn in hand.  Inferno creates this board state, though in fairness I think Blood Decks can easily deal with Inferno with the plethora of life gain they have at their disposal, which I suppose is unfortunate for those few men who just want to watch the world burn.

Zombie Plague

I was honestly not expecting this card anytime soon, mostly because I imagine it to be a coding nightmare.  If Spirit Dance is still having problems, I can hardly imagine how reliable slowly infecting enemy troops, removing the, reverting them, transforming them, and putting them into play under control of another player would be.  Surprisingly I haven't encounters any weird affects with Zombie Plague in the Alpha yet, which is extremely promising.  As for the card itself, it is very good, and perhaps the most important card for the current metagame, where Xentoth's Inquisitor is dominating the metagame.  Zombie Plague neuters one-toughness creatures like this while giving you men in return.  Even if this only makes one guy it will be worth the cost, but it also scouts the deck and weakens finishers.  My early impression is that this card will be extremely important in the Blood Control mirrors, which is a shame because those are the decks that are running Xentoth's Inquisitor anyways. 

Zombie Plague is also one of those cards where the functionality of it can be a flavor-breaker.  Take Briar Legion, Rune-Ear Commander or Honeycap for example.  Now these cards get stronger based on the game state, but in the deck they have no stats.  Zombie Plague will immediately kill them when it finds them even if they would be stronger if they were in play.  Now this isn't a bad thing, and it doesn't make the card inherently broken, but Zombie Plague (and many Hex cards) seem designed from a very flavorful standpoint.  Zombie Plague is slowly infects the enemy, turning the weak into minions of your own and weakening the strong.  But the problem is these would-be strong troops just happen to be weak based on the game rules while they are in the deck.  Even if Rune-Ear Commander would be a 4/4, he's powerless in the deck (I believe he's also still bugged to die if Uzume tutors him up, which happened in a game of mine), and instantly becomes a zombie.  What this does it gives decks whose big creatures are printed with large Attack and Defense an advantage against Zombie Plague, for no reason other than functionality.  And functionality is perfectly acceptable reason to have a card work the way it does, but it does break flavor.  It's something the game, and player, has to do to work properly, but it's important to minimize this aspect in moments where this functionality will cause the person on the receiving end to roll their eyes and mutter "that's dumb," and I think Zombie Plague will be getting its fair share of eye rolls.  Also, like Blood needs any more help ;)

Overall the takeaway from this patch is that control decks are probably stronger, and the cards are much more legible, especially in limited where it is much easier to see you rare and legendary cards in sealed.  By my count there are still quite a few cards to go before they have their full PvP Set 1, though there were comments that the set would likely not contain the number they had at the onset.  I imagine they would still want to balance the shard so they each have an even number of cards though, so it will be interesting to see what gets added over the next few weeks: Ruby has five less cards than Blood for example, and Sapphire has more cards at legendary rarity than the other shards.

Until next time. 

Hex: PvP Set 1 Cards & Closed Beta

People seem pretty antsy about when Closed Beta is coming up.  Cory's 2nd Blog Post listed a number of features they want to include in Hex which aren't out yet, but most notably is the fact that all of Set 1s projected PvP cards aren't out yet.  If they're going to sell cards out of the pack, and have Sealed and Draft, they're probably going to want every card in the first PvP set out.  As of a quick count, we're at 313/356 of the cards that were datamined when Alpha first launched.  Some cards have been added that weren't on this list, but here are the cards that are currently not available for play in Alpha:

Green cards were not on the datamined list, but are available on the alpha.  Red cards were taken out of the set permanently.  Greyed cards have been released since this article was written (Patch v823).

Artifacts

Chimes of the Zodiac

Chrome Sphinx

General's Tent

Genesis Cube

Mysterious Portal

Rallying Banner

Shrine of Prosperity

Time Bug

Blood

Curse of Oblivion*

Darkspire Priestess

Grave Concerns

Omen of Oblivion*

Persecute

Ritual of Malice

Vampire King

Zombie Plague

Diamond

Alabaster Sphinx

Ancient Sentinel

Angel of Dawn

Chimera

Circle of Preservation

Hero of Adamanth

Oath of Valor

Solitary Exile

Spearcliff Cloud Knight

Trial of Faith

Ruby

Crushing Blow
Elimination Specialist

False Orders

Gore Feast of Kog'Teqtel

Head Games

Inferno

Kindling Skarn

Master Theorycrafter

Reginald Lancashire

Ruby Arc

Te'Talca, Orc Gladiator

Sapphire

Arcane Shield

Bird O' Plenty

Cerulean Mirror Knight

Disrupted Silence

Devoted Emissary

Meditate

Necrotic Merchant

Nuts and Bolts

Ploy

Spawn of Othuyeg

Stoneclaw Gargoyle

Windbourne Acolyte

Wild

Eye of Creation

Field of Poppies

Oberon's Tempest

Pheromones

Plant Garden

Puck Dream Bringer 

I haven't been following the patchnotes all that closely until recently, but Omen of Oblivion was likely changed to Curse of Oblivion.  Other cards like Cerulean Mirror Knight (the 3+ to target this troop version) may have been changed from earlier versions of combined with other cards.

Some notes also on the implications of this.  Many of the cards that have yet to show up likely have very unique coding involved.  Mysterious Portal just ports in something from another era... the reminder text actually says "Who knows what will happen?"  Some of those cards also have big implications for the current Metagame.  Plant Garden shoving out a 9/9 Crush or 5/5 Lifedrain after gaining health might be very good in an all Wild Shard deck.  

While Cryptozoic has been churning out new cards side by side with new features in a consistent fashion, getting the cards released as well as having them all work well will take at least six more weeks on an optimistic schedule.  Additionally, one of the side effects of the emergent competitive scene within the Alpha has created balance changes to PvP cards before the set releases.  Cryptozoic has stated that they will not change PvP cards once they are released, which means the second the collections are wiped and the cards go for sale, there are unlikely to be any more balance changes to PvP cards.  So as long as there are "good cards" still to be printed, it is to Hex's benefit to keep us outside the Kickstarter Bonus distribution Beta zone if they wish to keep this promise since a few weeks in the Alpha allows for the developers to see how these cards play in the metagame.

New Patchnotes usually drop Thursday, so I'll likely have an update with my thoughts after the weekend.  Enjoy.

Hex TCG: Patch v823 Review

Going to ignore most of the balance changes and give some opinions on the newest cards.  You can read the full patch notes here.

New Cards

 

WrathwoodColossus

Once a deck gets to the point where it can cast Wrathwood Colossus, the deck has inevitability.  The card itself has everything you want for control/ramp: a gigantic 9/9 body with crush (read:evasion) the life gain makes it near-impossible to race against, and short of Inner Conflict, it just doesn’t die.  Problem is, Fist is bigger and also doesn’t die.  Wrathwood probably fits better into multishard decks, such as Blood-Life (possibly Sapphire), where Extinction allows you to buy enough time to get Wrathwood on the field, and possibly return Wrathwood for the follow up if the board is late and cluttered.  This strategy would work better if Wrathwood was more moderately tuned: replace the nines with fives or sixes and it’s much more attractive.  That said, Extinction/Wrathwood style decks still give you a good way to stem the tide of aggression while giving you options in the late game against control decks.  In limited, he’s a bomb, though dependent on the speed of the metagame he may not be as big of a push towards green.

Lixil,the Deathless Gem

I think most people will tunnel vision on the second ability without realizing Lixil is a perfectly average card with threshold fixing, which will be very important in an early metagame of Hex with only one or two sets out.  The threshold search can activate the Major on a Protectorate Defender or assure a Spearcliff Cloud Knight/Eldritch Dreamer hits the following turn, all while maintaining pressure.  In five-color decks where you actually want the Invincibility on, she goes hand in hand with Midnight Shepherd and Extinction.  Perhaps the Necrotic will have this Pentashard theme throughout their card development, though I’m almost upset Lixil isn’t a Human since she might fit in a Triumvirate deck.  In limited she’s very solid.  Though you more than likely won’t be turning on the invincibility, the fixing allows you room to play a little looser with threshold in your curve.

AdabtableInfusion Device

I like this card a lot in the pentashard decks, and possibly in the two-three shard artifact decks.  Pterobot, Rocket Ranger, and Research Librarian come online much faster with this guy.  Late draw is nice as well obviously.  In limited it’s one of those cards that let you feel better about splashing a third shard or playing a little loose with threshold requirements, but because it cycles so slowly, though I’d probably only add it to decks that have enough patience and pressence (read: bomb) that allows you to safely pay four to cycle it throughout the course of the game.

Bone Warrior

Bone Warrior wants to be a 2/1 so bad.  If it was, it might have enough presence to make you want to reanimate it again.  It’s good at stalling out draft games, though eventually evasion men will outweigh the cost of reanimating him again and again.  Props on the style points though.

Servantof Shathak

The average aggro deck usually has about 10-12 different non-shard cards in it, due in part to the consistency needed in the first few turns of the game.  Control decks and toolbox decks are much more flexible with one-ofs and two-ofs, especially if they have tutor effects.  That said, this card will slowly become better and better as the card pool grows larger, and more flying men and tempo effects are propagated.  Sapphire is already very strong on that front with bounce effects and counterspells, and Servant of Shathak will likely be a staple.  In draft he provides a very swift clock in the early game, though since most successful draft decks should be able to deal with a 2/2 flier, he needs more support to merit a pull to Sapphire, since he will have a massive bulls-eye in the early game.

Splinterof Azathoth

In draft he will rule the mid-game skies while providing an important hiccup to any answers your opponent will try to invest in.  The three threshhold looks dicey, but he’s actually a decent six-drop if you have two up to use his ability.  That said, the ability to play him on turn four allows you to maintain aggression and make full use of his ability, which doesn’t outright counter, but buys you time.  I’m actually curious how much play this thing will see in constructed.  He’s a pretty bulky tempo dork, though in a deck that’s trying to abuse air superiority he’s legitimately scary.  He’s also a decent card for protecting a combo as it’s about to resolve, or any spell that is imperative to resolve in a control mirror.

BriarLegion

Briar Legion has no evasion, but subsequent plays make it bigger and bigger as the game progresses, so if you have ways to return multiple copies from your graveyard to play, or Replicator’s Gambit, though there are probably better (or at the very least cooler) things to replicate.  That said, 4/4 are legitimate threats, and you only need to hit the second one before these guys become very cost efficient.  This is one of those cards that will be much better in draft than sealed since picking upwards of three is more likely.

BriarpatchConjuror

When I first read Briarpatch Conjuror, I thought she shuffled herself into your deck with counters and the Briar Legions she created stayed.  I’m kind of relieved it works this way, since Briar Legions can get out of hand once you draw enough.  Problem is your opponent will be drawing cards too, and I’d rather me creating a critical mass of creatures via Crash of Beasts than a single Briar Legion.  In limited this card is perfectly fine.  A few activations will put enough in your deck to make them legitimate threats, and the deck is small enough that you will see them more consistently.  I’d still rather have Ancestor’s Chosen, but ramming an increasing horde of gigantic monsters on the field is right up Wild’s field.