Mercenary Spotlight – Single and Ready to Mingle

There may be comfort, consistency, and reliability in companionship… But, that’s boring!

“Variety is the spice of life.”

“The world is our oyster.”

“There are plenty of fish in the sea.”

Okay, I’ve made my point. This isn’t an Entrathian dating profile, it’s the Alachian Sea! Let’s get to the meat of it – mercenaries offer a unique departure from our normal deckbuilding conventions. And, there is one in particular that singles itself out as special.

“One what?”

“One Eye… open? Ugh, a cyclops!”

“One of a kind. Yes, a single copy. You could even say… singular.”

Enter Sin’glar! The cyclops singleton mercenary!

The first supported content in HEX for singleton play comes in the form of this campaign mercenary with 23 starting health!

Now wait, you might say. We can only have 1 copy of any non-standard resource in our deck…. How in the world is that going to be any decent? Well for one, we can avoid nasty hate cards targeting multiple copies of a particular card (here’s looking at you, Herofall). More than that though, building around a mercenary with campaign deck building requirements and a shard grid that goes so wide comes with huge benefits.

Sin’glar has a 3 cost charge power “Soul Purpose” that heals us for 2 and allow us to fish. This power could be an engine for choice recursion abilities, like Hereafter (with reversion) or Rotten Rancor to cheat a big troop into play. If that’s not enough to sell us, the major benefit of Sin’glar is in his passive ability called “Only One,” which says, “while there is exactly one troop in play, troops you control have Rage 1 and Unblockable.”

[Cue obligatory 80’s film reference]

His strength does not stop there, however, because we can upgrade our Sin’glar mercenary with “Rally the Rabble” to give all our troops in play +2/+2 if we have 4 different named cards in play under our control. This is fairly easy to achieve with a singleton deck!

Finally, one unique troop in our campaign character’s deck (or any of the other mercenaries in our party) will start the game with +1/+1 just for having Sin’glar on our roster. This could be great with any unique card in our main deck that is easy to get into our hand or into play through equipment.

Looking at Sin’glar immediately draws 3 things to mind: unique troops having no downside to play, replicate allowing us to bypass the singleton rule, and Exiled Bard granting massive board buffs.

The Building Process

The first challenge with building a singleton deck in campaign is finding ways to make equipment useful. How are we going to benefit when the likelihood of us drawing the 1 of the 6 or less cards in the deck is slim? There are a few possibilities with cards that pop out of the deck based on something happening in the game like Piranha Swarm and Ethereal Healer, however both utilize the same Feet equipment slot. I quickly narrow down my list and move away from that concept. Let’s think on that some more.

The second major challenge of a singleton deck is making sure our threshold fixing and curve are still being carefully considered despite our extra deckbuilding restrictions.

I look at humans for our first thematic consideration. We have access to some great unique cards. Humans let us build around many extremely fun cards that have strong combo potential. We also can take advantage of a few cards that have deck building requirements here like Servant of Shathak and Ardent Crusader.

We drop in our Exiled Bard and work on the low end of our curve. Peppering in Holiday, the new Lord Bernard P. Dunthorpe, Lord Benjamin, the Wise, Her Majesty, Queen Grace, William Rowan, and Ardent Recruiter as our 2 drops, I can’t help but notice that HEX unique troops have really long names.

With our Lords and Ladies present, one of the first game ender options presents itself. Why not splash Ruby and live The Triumvirate dream! Lord Alexander, the Courageous and Lord Adam, the Powerful become a quick auto-include. We will adjust our resources slightly to make a little room for the Ruby threshold requirement, which should be pretty easy to do with resources like Carloth Cobblestone.

Without mentioning every single card on this list (as many are simply there for power), let’s focus on a few utility troops and our actions.

Starting with our troops, Lady Devonshire is there to put powerful actions from our crypt back into our deck. This is particularly nice in combination with our charge power since we can toss anything we want to return. Archmage Wrenlocke with his Chest equipment will allow us to take an action out of our crypt and put it in our hand. He will also draw us cards every time we play an action. Ascetic Aspirant provides us with an opportunity to hand pick our game-ender from our deck. Finally, Bowie Starlight with the Head equipment allows us to dig deeper into our deck while building up the board with Bowie and Starlight.

Our actions are primarily based around creating replicas, which remove the unique tag from the replicated troop. This will enable us to have multiple Lord Benjamin, the Wise in play to fish more humans out of our deck or more Archmage Wrenlockes entering play to get our actions back into our hand. We find that we can utilize some nice equipment for Replicator’s Gambit and Replica Reinforcements, so we add both to the deck to increase our replica strategy.

We also want to get Tale of Destiny in our hand ASAP. In fact, because Tale of Destiny is a thing, we focus on having card draw on troops, include Scheme to make more copies of it, and utilize bounce to get bonus turns because of it. Tale of Destiny just became an enjoyable side quest in the deck.

Clash of Steel, Purge, and Chronodaemon are all clever picks as they can minimize the board to 1 troop on our side. Normally, resetting the board like that is pretty good. It becomes quite great when we consider Sin’glar’s passive “Only One” (Unblockable + Rage 1).

The final card to mention is Awaken. Running the Chest and Boots equipment for Awaken lets us bring it back out of the crypt, and each time we play it we get two random shift necrotic troops in play!



Lord Bernard P. Dunthorpe is socketed with the Minor Diamond of Wind.

Ardent Crusader is socketed with the Minor Diamond of Wind.



Equipment



Crown of the Goblin King (Bowie Starlight)

Replica Charm (Replica Reinforcements)

Repurposed Robes (Awaken)

Gloves of the Archmage (Archmage Wrenlocke)

Embezzled Boots (Awaken)

The Mirrorblade (Replicator’s Gambit)





Other ideas to explore for Sin’Glar

Initially 5-shard midnight called out as a potential theme here. I think it is worth exploring. Also, consider utilizing troops with sockets if you go that route.

We could also look into building around all the cards with deck building requirements. Consider both copies of Underworld Crusader and Ardent Crusader as well as the new campaign cards spoiled earlier – Caribaur Antlerguard and Vampiric Nightstalker.

Finally, some form of a re-animator deck could become popular and be well crafted around this mercenary. His champion power facilitates this kind of strategy, giving us an easy outlet to move troops from our hand to our crypt and then back into play.

How would you build Sin’glar? What one way to play stands out above the rest? Make sure to let us know in the forums!

I hope everyone enjoyed this first Mercenary Spotlight and deck build. We can quickly see the immense number of ways in which mercenaries will diversify our campaign experience. There will be more to come, so stay tuned and get hyped!

-Nico

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