Latest Brew – Opportunities of the Zodiac

There are a lot of theories on card advantage, but one of the most interesting has always been that of how to exploit virtual card advantage by turning your opponent’s cards in hand into complete non-factors. A great single card example is Nature’s Resolve. On its own merits it does nothing as it neither generates a card for you nor does it remove any cards of the opponents. Yet put it in the right circumstances and you can make an opponent’s entire hand of interrupts feel like they might as well be total blanks. So while there is no real card advantage being gained (they still have those cards in hand after all), the power of virtual card advantage means that you can leverage plays like Nature’s Resolve to overwhelm the correct opponents.

Bring that same theory up to the deck archetype level, and there are still multiple ways to exploit things like this on a wider scale. Action Control decks are nothing new to HEX, as even back in the first Alpha tournaments we saw decks that won on the back of nothing but card draw, removal, and Relentless Corruption being used as both a card advantage engine and a finisher. Resilient but forgotten decks built around Chimes of the Zodiac also were strong at various points during HEX’s first year, and it is there in which it is time to look at bringing back some troop-less control decks…

RS Chimes

Champion: Wyatt the Sapper



The basic idea of the deck is that primarily the deck plays out much like a control deck for most of the game. Instead of playing cards like Incantation of Ascendance or some other troop to attack for a few turns and win the game after control is established, instead the deck will drop a Chimes of the Zodiac and finish off the opponent underneath a number of copied Ragefires. While the actual act of finishing off the opponent has gotten a bit weaker than the last time Chimes/Ragefire was en vogue due to the streamlining of the copying mechanic, there still is more than enough punch from the deck to take down opponents from almost any health total.

What really gets hammered home from this build though is its complete avoidance of using troops in any fashion. While Archmage Wrenlocke synergizes perfectly with this style of deck, by excluding him we create a situation where our Mono Blood opponents now can draw Murders, Extinctions, and Terrible Transfers all day and have nothing to do with them. Phenteo the Brood Priest can be a big problem for control decks by providing an inevitable and uninterruptable source of troop removal, but if you aren’t worried about losing your own troops then all you have to think about when those Terrorantulas skitter in is how much more time you have to race that 5/5 body – not to belittle that troop size but it is a much simpler problem to worry about! All of this creates a number of scenarios for the deck to gain virtual card advantage against anyone running troop removal, which thanks to the presence of hard hitters like RW Cressida is something extremely common at the moment.

What really drives home that point though is Cerebral Fulmination. For many players, Cerebral Fulmination isn’t the type of card you want to be associated with the same IP you play on. It isn’t true card advantage, and in fact is actually card disadvantage when played since while each player gets a draw it was you who spent a card in the first place to do so! Instead, what we rely upon to get our value out of the Constant comes back to our focus on creating a ton of blank cards for the opponent. If their extra draw is a Repel while ours is an Arcane Focus, then we are starting to get somewhere. Draw the game out long enough and these small advantages add up, especially once you start playing Mastery of Time on top of a Fulmination to push things even farther. While not every troop-light deck is going to want to start packing Fulminations, the unique combination of cheap actions to create tempo alongside a heavily skewed deck build to make the opponent get the short end of the stick on each draw phase makes it a core piece of what Chimes is looking to do.

SWOT’s the matter with you?

Hang with me for a quick tangent that I promise will come back around. There are thousands of business analysis tools used today, and one that continually comes up for both its simplicity and power it what is called SWOT analysis. SWOT itself standing for “Strengths, Weakenesses, Opportunities, and Threats”. In short Strengths and Weaknesses are the internal characteristics that “you”/”your company”/”your deck” do either well or poorly at. Opportunities and Threats are the external elements that “you” can exploit or be negatively influenced by, respectively. You can go deeper from there if you want, creating matrices for each portion and digging into what those mean but for our purposes right now this is all the detail we need to think about.

So back to HEX, and more importantly, RS Chimes. Go back and look at the decklist for the meaningful Armies of Myth cards that make this deck work. It’s just Arcane Focus, which could have easily been Peek for only a minor power-level consideration. Compared to many of the versions that were around late last year it is a bit more streamlined, gets the slight power boost from Focus, and goes full on in terms of eschewing troops. If we were to have looked at RS Chimes at the start of Armies of Myth Constructed it wouldn’t have very many different Strengths or Weaknesses compared to previous versions.

Instead, what has changed are our external factors. What eventually brought RS Chimes to its knees was the emergence of Mono Sapphire control decks alongside a swell in numbers for GoreFeast decks packing maindeck Countermagics. Chimes of the Zodiac might be immune to Murder, but it isn’t safe from interrupts. With Mono Blood and RW Cressida continuing to rise in numbers, the threat from Countermagics and Verdict of the Ancient Kings is starting to hit new lows. If we were to fill out a simple SWOT analysis for RS Chimes today, it probably would look something like this:

So how do we address those threats? Few decks are brave enough to maindeck Vandalize and Nature Reigns, but you can certainly expect to see a few come in from the reserves of various decks. Those can be bad times, and often you’ll even want to look at taking out your constants and artifacts against players you expect to be packing hate cards like that in the reserves if you can to bring things full circle and blank even their reserve plan by switching them out for a different card type altogether instead. Just remember that HEX doesn’t show what nationality your opponent is, so be careful that you aren’t engaging in a battle of wits with a Sicilian.

Fortunately, the primary archetype we are trying to blanket with our troopless configuration (Mono-Blood) is also the one we are typically least concerned about when it comes to being able to deal with artifacts. We are probably safe in assuming Mono Blood will bring in something else over most of its removal, but that doesn’t mean they will suddenly have great answers to you Chimes themselves. That allows us to focus on the other decks, and we can certainly include some solid troop options to bring in against the rest of the field. Wrenlocke is a slam dunk against many opponents, especially RW Cressida where you don’t worry about having a second troop to expose yourself to Crocosaur and where you can be somewhat safe in assuming you will keep Braves and Pucks from powering out a Rootfather to kill you for dropping a cheap action deck’s favorite Archmage. Reese is another all-star option, as our multiple Mastery of Times create the always potent situations where you can either tunnel a Reese into play a turn earlier than expected or start generating lots of extra robots as the situation calls for.

As far as the rest of what we want in our reserves, things will likely end up being a bit all over the place. That isn’t a bad thing, and if you remember back to the previous Latest Brew you’ll remember that control decks really are fond of having 1 and 2-ofs to create more options with which to have available. First off, while the Sapphire Shard might look strange it primarily exists for those matches in which you are thinking about removing some of your artifacts and constants. Hex Engine can be a big part of your plan in many draws, as often your cards are cheap enough that you can afford to play a Hex Engine and another card or two on a single turn to set yourself up for the following turn where you suddenly will have a huge resource pool to draw from. Without those Hex Engines (or for slightly different reasons – if you have to take out some Fulminations that fuel your deck to draw resources in the first place), you’ll need more shards in order to get there the hard way.

As for the rest of the reserves we haven’t touched upon, Crackling Bolt is a concession to Vampire Princess as the scariest card that a Blood deck can toss out against you while Heat Wave combines with Bolt to give the deck even further aggro-suppression tools. Shoggoth is a card that normally I detest, but it can be a major player in control matchups for this specific control deck where Cerebral Fulmination means you likely need to be playing more towards resources advantages than true card advantages when trying to push through an important card. Ascendance is a card that would make for a perfect bait and switch card against people playing just artifact removal in their reserves, but cards like Nature Reigns and Scorn of Oberon mean that constants can be hated just as strongly upon. Finally, the Suffocates are there primarily because Arborean Rootfather can be such a bear to deal with if the opponent tries to race to them quickly.

Until next time, may the Chimes toll for thee…

-Wurtil

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