My Hexellent Adventure – Introduction

By Chris VanMeter.

Hello everyone! I am Chris VanMeter, and welcome to my new column here on hextcg.com. Every week in “My Hexellent Adventure” I will talk about my experience with delving deep into everything that HEX has to offer from the perspective of someone who has already been playing a well-established TCG for 20 years and was deeply entrenched in the competitive scene for quite some time.

All of the elements of HEX have drawn me in. As a long time gamer who favored role playing games early on, the PvE campaign portion of HEX has been extremely fun. There is something to be said about just how fulfilling it is to select a combination of race and class and battle through a story all while leveling up and gaining new abilities, and it is all included absolutely free with HEX.

Being an online game, one of the biggest drivers of fun is the community. Having people to play with and meeting new people that are a pleasure to interact with are some of the most important aspects of a successful online franchise and will drive the success, or failure of a venture. With that being said, I really feel like the HEX community is among the absolute best that I have ever been a part of. Everyone is extremely welcoming, and the number of times I have seen complete strangers go out of their way to help new players out is astounding.

I strongly prefer Trading Card Games rather than Collectible Card Games. This basically means that there is an actual economy within the game where you can buy and sell cards for the virtual currency and grow your collection with or without spending actual money. This is one of the physical components that I really enjoy about other games that I play, and I am very happy to see this put in place with HEX. It’s very easy to gloss over just how important this is, but giving players some other way to “get value” out of their collection and time while playing the game is huge. This also makes it possible to be a completely free-to-play player by spending your time accumulating things (cards, gold, packs) in the PvE campaign, and then trading or selling them to other players for currency and cards on the PvP side.

The part of HEX that speaks to me the most is the competitive PvP scene. Draft, Sealed, and Constructed are the headliners for that, and this week I want to talk about Constructed.

I wrote a pretty in depth article about learning the game and how my previous TCG experience helped me streamline that process, and I also broke down what the current constructed meta was at the time. Primal Dawn has been released since then, and with it the meta has changed quite a bit. New cards have been added to existing archetypes to augment them to a whole new level. Some of the obviously powerful cards from the set, like Rune Ear Hierophant and High Infinitrix have been creating new archetypes by themselves.

As one of the most popular champions before Primal Dawn, Winter Moon saw a bit of a falling out once the new set was released. This wasn’t too surprising, as new formats tend to favor aggressive and proactive strategies, and Winter Moon decks are generally anything but. Finding the right mix of answers for a meta where we don’t really know the questions yet is challenging, and as such we didn’t really see a lot of Winter Moon decks early, and the ones that we did see ended up performing quite poorly.

This all changed once I saw a list that fellow Rated Hex teammate Jeff Hoogland had posted that he was working on. Pairing the controlling aspects of Winter Moon that we already knew alongside more efficient, value-centric troops that could take over games all by themselves really sparked my interest in the deck.

Here is the first iteration of the deck after seeing what Jeff was working on.

The big revelation from Jeff was wanting to try Rune Ear Hierophant with Minor Sapphire of Sky alongside Major Wild Orb of Dominance. This took away the resilience we were seeing most people using with Minor Wild Orb of Conservation, but made our Hierophant’s more self-sustaining. With a greatly reduced number of blockers around, due to now having flight, we didn’t really need to play a large number of troops to help make ours connect. This does open them up to removal, which is ok since we are wanting to play for a late game and can recycle back into our deck with Winter Moon’s charge power. But we were still left with trying to figure out a way to interact with opposing Spellshield Rune Ear Hierophant.

When I first saw this card, I thought it was cute. Generating a random card from three options at the beginning of your turn is a pretty neat idea, and the extra ability of reducing their cost when it deals combat damage to an opposing champion was just icing on the cake. It wasn’t until I actually played with the card that I realized just how insane it is.

Artisanal Cheesesmythe fit the bill perfectly for what we were looking for. As a 2/3 Lethal troop it lined up perfectly against a Hierophant with Spellshield and could play additional defense against any aggressive decks that we were to face. It also attacks pretty well into opposing troops that our opponents aren’t really willing to trade off. Not only does this get in some chip damage to help close out games once we take control, but it also starts to ferment any Cheese cards that happen to be in our hand.

The real value is in the cheese. Dragon Valley Brie is surprisingly good in a large variety of match-ups. Obviously against aggressive decks any form of health gain is going to be awesome, but even against opposing midrange decks gaining a handful of health can translate into additional draw steps that can be very important when we can continuously make our deck better than our opponents with the Winter Moon champion ability.

Cheese Goliath doesn’t often end up making an impact in the games, but that’s usually because it rarely gets to a point where we are playing it. There have been a decent number of times that I’ve been able to just curve into the Goliath a few turns after I start producing cheese, but it’s mostly a huge threat that looms over our opponent since they don’t really know which one we produced.

This big stink of the cheeses is Kraken Barrel Cheddar. The ability to get back any card from any crypt into our hand is pretty amazing, especially when we are getting to reduce the cost of the Cheddar while we are chipping away at our opponent’s health. The controlling cards that are at our disposal in Winter Moon are so good when we get to reuse them with our Cheddar, it quickly turns games into futile situations for our opponents. Transmogrifade, Countermagic, Time Ripple, and Mass Polymorph Dingler are all cards that put in a lot of work, and getting to play them multiple times is insane.

This isn’t even taking into account how great Kraken Barrel Cheddar is with the Winter Moon ability. Not only are we going to get extra draw triggers off putting already recycled cards back into our hand and replaying them, but we get to put used copies of Kraken Barrel Cheddar back into our deck and add “draw a card” onto them.

After playing through a gauntlet with the above list and finishing 5-1 there were a few things that became quite apparent.

First off, the games were a grind. As long as we could force things into the late game we were a huge favorite. Getting there usually wasn’t an issue unless our opponent had a hyper aggressive draw, but closing games out didn’t usually happen very quickly. This wasn’t really a big deal, but it is something to be aware of. Knowing when to scoop it up or try and turn the corner is pretty important since we are going to need our clock the majority of the time. In fact, my only loss in that first gauntlet was conceding in game two after being up a game against a Sapphire/Blood Spiders deck because my wife was waiting for me so that we could eat dinner. I had underestimated just how long a match could take with the deck.

Secondly, Mass Polymorph Dingler was absolutely insane. Against anything that wasn’t Morgan McBombus or Urgnock trying to kill you ultra-fast, surviving and generating card advantage was the name of the game until we can Dingler all of their troops and take over the game. Against decks like Kagulichu and Warmaster Fuzzuko that were becoming extremely popular, I even wanted a second copy in the reserves. The number of games that I won because of Mass Polymorph Dingler was just staggering and really helped shape how to navigate the early turns of games that I was playing.

There were some slots in the deck that I felt were a little questionable and had just wanted to try them out. With a successful gauntlet under my belt and some chats with the team, here is the final list that I arrived at.

There really wasn’t much changed in the deck, outside of swapping the Wellspring in the main for a Cyclone Shaper. This was a card that I had been wanting to try for some time, and it slotted very well into a singleton as something that we could use in the late game to create plenty of velocity.

Often, I found myself with a lot of cards in hand between Archmage Wrenlocke drawing cards, Artisanal Cheesesmythe producing cheese, and Windsinger, Master of the Hunt also drawing cards. I couldn’t get through them fast enough, but with Cyclone Shaper we get to fly through our cards in the late game in addition to having a 4/6 flight body once we play it empowered.

Just having a 2/3 flight for only three is also pretty decent, as it can brick wall a Vampire Princess or a swarm of Bumblebots from Morgan McBombus.

I wasn’t qualified for the Cup of Fate, but I did share the deck with the rest of my team. Only a few people ended up playing it, but none of them were able to crack into the Top 8 of the event.

I still believe that Winter Moon is a strong deck for the current constructed meta, but I would recommend getting in quite a few games with the deck so that you can learn its limitations and be able to control the pace of the game the way that you need to so that you can finish the game and make your opponent exhaust their resources to the point that you can overtake them with yours.

MATCH-UPS

Here is how I would swap with my reserves against the currently popular decks in the constructed meta.

BRING IN:

TAKE OUT:

BRING IN:

TAKE OUT:

UzzuCannon

BRING IN:

TAKE OUT:

Blood/Sapphire Spiders

BRING IN:

TAKE OUT:

BRING IN WHILE ON THE DRAW:

TAKE OUT WHILE ON THE DRAW:

BRING IN WHILE ON THE PLAY:

TAKE OUT WHILE ON THE PLAY:

BRING IN:

TAKE OUT:

BRING IN:

TAKE OUT:

I hope that everyone enjoyed my first piece here on Hextcg.com, and I really look forward to sharing my experiences each week with you. Please feel free to check out my stream for Thursday Night Hex at 6:00 PM PT, a dedicated HEX night where we will play whatever format I will be preparing with for an event, or whatever I am currently working on trying to get better at; also, I give away lots of stuff.

Good luck in your gauntlets, and may Kismet smile on your pack openings!

Chris VanMeter

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With 20 years of TCG experience, Chris VanMeter brings a unique perspective to HEX. Favoring constructed decks that can either go under the competition or as far over it as possible, you can find Chris playing draft, sealed, and constructed on his Twitch channel and talking about his experiences endlessly via social media.

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