In the Hex meta-game since the release of the Herofall set, Aggro, Control and Mid-Range archetypes have all put up excellent finishes. What type of deck is missing from that list? Combo. There are a lot of possible Combo decks in Hex, but they've tended to be more fun than powerful. The most commonly played Combo deck in the meta has been Starlight Pathfinder control, but that is rotating out. However, replacing it is a combo deck that can win on the spot. It's definitely fun. Winning immediately is unquestionably powerful. The million dollar question, then, is whether or not the deck can consistently assemble the combo and survive long enough to play it. With a bit of help from our Battleshopper exclusive spoiler card, I think the answer is a definite “Maybe”!

Here's the card, right off the bat. Webborn Apostate is a 2/1 for two resources with a single Sapphire threshold requirement, and has “Deploy - each opposing Champion loses a charge. Gain a charge for each charge lost this way.” So why is this modest looking card potentially meta-altering in Standard? Let's take a look at Dread Transport Combo: How it works, what pieces it needs around it, and why one of those is likely Webborn Apostate.

If our spoiler card seemed rather modestly powerful for Constructed play, Dread Transport looks downright weak at first glance. However, Dread Transport may be the most influential Constructed card we've seen so far in Scars of War spoilers. Here's how the combo works: Give Dread Transport Cost -2 and Speed. Play it, activate it, play it again, activate it again, repeat until you have enough dreadlings to attack for the win. But giving a card Cost -2 and Speed may not seem like the easiest thing to do. It may be easier to assemble than one's first thought, however, due to a Champion that hasn't seen much Constructed play so far, but is just perfect for this deck.

A Burning Banner gives troops you control speed (gives them an extra point of attacking power too, but that's not what we're interested in). Importantly, troops you control enter play with speed. If we were relying on actions to give Dread Transport speed, there would be a chance for our opponents to disrupt our combo by killing the Transport in response to our action. Not so with a Burning Banner. If we play Dread Transport and our opponent has no way to interrupt it while it is on the chain, the combo is immune to removal (theoretically - it's possible this doesn't work quite the way the card reads, and if it doesn't, this deck may never get off the ground). Because returning Dread Transport to one's hand is part of the cost of the activated ability, there's no opportunity to kill it in response. So Haraza is doing a very good thing for our deck. She's got a solid 23 life to work with too. But her Charge Power costs seven charges, which is a lot.

We've got two parts of our combo in place though: Dread Transport and Haraza + 7 charges. We just need a way to give Dread Transport cost -2. I've seen forum speculation that Mindcall could be an option, but in my opinion, the card disadvantage inherent in playing an action that doesn't leave a card behind in some form (cantrip, answering a card of your opponent's, leaving a troop behind, etc.) is a bit too severe to justify running Mindcall - particularly as we would need two of them to give Dread Transport cost -2.

Fortunately, there's a better option.

Now this is a card we can happily play four of! A flash 2/4 gives credible defensive utility, able to gobble up many of the format's more common early attackers such as Boltspasm. It can be played at our opponent's end step when we are ready to combo off, leaving them little opportunity to respond. So we've got our three part combo together: Dread Transport, Coralcove Witch and 7 charges. How do we live long enough to find our Transport and Coralcove Witch and get to 7 charges?

I think the answer is to play a primarily Sapphire control deck with a splash of Ruby for our Champion's charge power and possibly cremate. We'll want lots of cheap, early interaction such as Dingle, Transmogrifade, Thunderfield Seer, and, finally bringing us back around to our spoiler card, Webborn Apostate. Against a lot of decks a 2/1 troop isn't worth a full card. Against aggressive decks, it is. A charge is not generally worth a full card. But to Haraza Transport Combo, it is. Needing to hit 7 Shard drops is a much slower proposition than only needing to hit 6, particularly in a deck with a low cost-curve. Coralcove Witch also helps us survive early aggression. This deck will need the ability to draw a lot of cards to find the combo, which means Lanupaw's Sight would be fantastic. If our only troops were Dread Transport, Coralcove Witch and Thunderfield Seer, we wouldn't have enough to reliably draw three cards off of Lanupaw's Sight, but adding four more troops to the deck fixes that issue nicely.

Here's a tentative deck list that is at least a place to start for testing purposes:

Troops

4x Thunderfield Seer

4x Webborn Apostate

4x Dread Transport

4x Coralcove Witch

Actions

4x Arcane Focus

4x Transmogrifade

4x Lanupaw's Sight

4x Deny

2x Dread End

2x Dingle

Shards

12x Sapphire Shard

8x Ruby Shard

4x Well of Innovation



This deck looks fairly promising to me. We've got lots of ways to disrupt and delay aggro decks, enough card advantage to play a long game, and against Mid-Range and Control decks, we've got what should be a very difficult to answer combo as our winning condition. Dread end gives us a way to clean up messy game states that Sapphire/Ruby control has lacked in the past, as Mass Polymorph: Dingler was terribly slow. I'm not sure how many copies of Dread End we want in our main deck, but am fairly confident it's at least 2, and it might even be 3 or 4. We can even diversify our winning conditions by adding a Mad Robomancer and a Psychic Ascension to our reserves. I really like that on the turn we execute the combo, we've got all our our resources open, meaning that we can protect it with interrupts such as Deny or Verdict of the Ancient Kings (out of reserves, in the latter case). The match-up with Angus is both unclear and critical. I'm hopeful that this list has the tools it needs to survive, but that will need to be left to testing. I can't wait to try it!





While ThufirHawat's time in the game has been short comparatively, he has a lot of competitive achievements, including finishing second in the Constructed Ladder in Season One, finishing third in the Constructed Ladder in Season Two, and making the top eight of the last two Cosmic Crown Showdown events. Including going undefeated in the swiss rounds of the last Cosmic Crown Showdown. He also has authored multiple top tier decks including Mono Wild Shoku and Diamond Sapphire Banks control.

