Hey there i’m Forrest otherwise known as Firedrake22 and i’m excited to be bringing you the all-you-need-to-know-guide to Midrange Telvanni or as I like to call it, Nixrange Telvanni. I’ve played a lot of this deck in recent times with some decent success, with most of my play being in preparation for the fourth TESL Masters Qualifier.

Now ultimately I didn’t do too well, with a very experienced first round opponent and losing three times with Hlaalu, but I thought now that my secret sauce has been ‘revealed’ i’d give you all a run-down of this rather unexplored archetype.

In this first part, I will be running down the motivations for building the deck and my overall experience whilst playing and experimenting (pun intended). In the second part I will be going over the card choices in the deck and how to play it. In the third part of the series I will address changing the deck, tech choices and the prospects for the deck moving forward (in light of recent balance changes). So strap in and let’s get straight into it!

So what is it?

So I hear you ask, what is it? Well in order to answer that I figure that there’s no better way than to just show you, so without further ado, here is the list I took to the TESL Masters:

Why Midrange?

As people who know me from Twitch or Reddit might already know, there is no bigger fan of the midrange archetype than myself. In this recent meta however, midrange has suffered, A LOT. With Hlaalu going under it (too much tempo and value for midrange to control), and Tel Vos Magister crushing it from above (face ward OP), midrange has had such a small presence in the meta. As far as I am aware the only successful ladder decks in this archetype have been Giants Battlemage and Midrange Monk throughout the months of May, June and July.

In spite of this, or maybe to spite this, I decided to go about building a deck that could handle both the insane board presence and card draw of Hlaalu and the consistent inevitability of control’s lategame. And so the journey began…

Why Telvanni?

When Houses of Morrowind released in March and Telvanni started to see some play I began to wonder what a midrange version might look like. In fact I do this with all the classes; I’ve even tried to build aggro scout (I failed). To begin with the main appeal in my mind was the lategame tempo of Divayth’s experiments on existing, on-board high cost creatures. I seem to remember at one point our boy Ianbits during the preview event repeatedly playing Divayth’s experiments on Shearpoint Dragon and Leaflurker to the point where anything his opponent played was immediately removed. This. This I liked.

Cards like Divayth’s Experiments and the deck’s namesake Nix Ox also fix a problem that has long existed in Midrange Sorcerer since the nerfing of Supreme Atromancer, that is, a solid lategame to truly finish off control decks.

The Deck

In my 107 games with Nixrange Telvanni the deck went through several changes, with it having its beginnings as a Mentors Ring, Nix Ox, Genius Pathmage, Divayth’s Experiments combo in place of the top end. It eventually moved to something more similar to Midrange Sorcerer, with the top end being cut to Doppelganger, High King Emeric, Tel Vos Magister, Nix Ox, Ancano, Divayth’s Experiments, Red Bramman and Tazkad as you see in the list above.

How did I go?

Though the deck went through several changes, no one version stood out in terms of winrate. However, the winrate itself was a pretty competitive 68% (73 wins / 34 losses). As anticipated, the deck did well against aggro (55:45 favoured) and absolutely crushed control (70:30 favoured). The deck did struggle in the mirror however, with curve based midrange decks being able to punish the inconsistency of its curve and its combo-based nature, particularly in the earlier versions (30:70 unfavoured). I’ll be going over some of these reasons in the second part. Thankfully in the current meta, midrange as discussed above has been very poorly represented, which did help the deck’s winrate.

For the most part my losses were in running into these midrange decks (there was a 10 game run where I faced 8 midrange decks, all but one of which were losses). Other losses were Hlaalu highrolls (as we all know it can do very well) and the occasional game against Control Tribunal where I failed to draw my top end.

For the most part, matches against aggro and control felt very comfortable and I nearly always felt I was in a good position to win. Against aggro and control the deck’s ability to make extreme tempo plays using Blackwood Distiller, Doppelganger, Nix Ox and Divayth’s Experiments + Mentors Ring and Genius Pathmage in earlier versions meant that these matchups were often one-sided (extremely so in the case of control)

In earlier version I found there was an over reliance on drawing Drain creatures and Mentors Ring to recover, which is one reason why I made the change to a more curved based game plan in later (a change reflected in the version included above)

Highlights

To conclude the first part of this three part series, here are some screenshots of some of the more spectacular board states (and wins) I had with this deck. Have fun!

Turn 5 double Pathmage!

Comment below your favourite Telvanni card and why to get early access to the orginal version decklist!