Latest Brew – Hideous Conversion

The Ruby/Wild Ramp decks have remained a predominant force in the metagame even with the banning of TItania’s Majesty. A lot of the power in the deck comes from how simple its formula is – take the best resource generators in the game (Howling Brave, Chlorophyllia, Puck the Dream Bringer, and Cressida herself) and pair them with some of the best threats in the game (Crocosaur, Arborean Rootfather, then flavor to your liking) and fill your deck with nothing but those cards. You end up with a deck that pushes out heavy hitters too quickly for most aggressive and midrange builds to deal with and has enough threat density to hang with most of the control decks. The traditional answer over the past month has been to go hyperaggressive with the Mono Ruby builds, either maximizing a base of one-drops and Fierce Warlord or going for quick Kindling Skarn/Sunsoul Phoenix attacks with lots of burn actions to fuel them up. But that can’t be the only answer, right?

Like Tadashi told Hiro when inspiration seemed lacking, “Look for a new angle!” It is hard to win a traditional battle against RW Ramp by playing troops and attacking with them as they are just so much better at doing those things than anyone else. Instead, our thoughts should turn to ways in which we can beat them without having to play on their terms. There are a lot of tier 2 and lower combos that exist in HEX, waiting for their time to shine, but the one that stands out is when you can combine a combo shell with a great ground stall game to buy an extra turn or two. RW Ramp typically sets up relatively quickly, but outside of Periwinkle into Rootfather blowouts it doesn’t kill quickly, so we have some time to set up as needed. And no card likes to be set up like a Replicator’s Gambit…

Hideous Gambit

Champion: Bunoshi the Ruthless

At a high level, the deck looks to utilize a Replicator’s Gambit on a Darkspire Priestess, and then find that Priestess (which is made easier thanks to the inherent Darkspire tutor ability) to make a bunch of copies that can easily create lethal damage (especially when combined with Hideous Conversion for a mass sacrifice effect). The key to this combo-centric build is the card draw engines we surround it with, with both Cerulean Mirror Knight and Harvest of Sorrow generating the potential for some massive card draw abilities.

The actual way the deck typically combos off is a bit more intricate though. Hideous Conversion is the glue you are typically looking for, as once you have Hideous Conversion you are able to start turning Shroomshaw into positive resources (as sacrificing it and the Battle Hoppers will turn your 2 resources into 3). If you have Cerulean Mirror Knight out, then you get to keep card parity as well. If you don’t then Harvest of Sorrow will perform pretty much the same function, but in both cases the goal is to get your mind deep in that Shin’hare place where every troop lives only to die the moment it can be useful to you.

Possibly the best way to show that though is with a quick video (sorry for the watermark) of the deck going through the motions…

Sudden Awakening is another key cog to the combo portion of the deck, providing redundancy to both the draw engine, resource generation, and eventual kill mechanism. When looking to start moving the combo forward, Sudden Awakening with Shroomshaw is one of the best things to give yourself a quick boost by acting as more copies of the Battle Hopper generator and letting you double-dip on any potential Mirror Knight Inspirations. It gives another chance to tutor for a Darkspire card and lets you bring back a Gambit’d Priestess to kill the opponent if things get rough. All that and it still acts as a fine anti-removal card to boot, especially for protecting Mirror Knights against the removal heavy Blood decks.

Speaking of removal heavy Blood decks, Extinction is a card we can utilize here as well since often your combo isn’t realistically coming online until turn 5 or 6. While the deck can survive most ground-based assaults thanks to Shroomshaws and Darkspires, flyers can prove to be a real problem. Combine that with the effectiveness of Extinction at buying a couple turns against Ruby/Wild and the games best safety valve is more a metagame call to include rather than a key part of the combo.

Arcane Focus needs little introduction for a Sapphire deck. It plus Hideous Conversion allow the deck to play an abnormally low shard count (and in fact, it is constrained more by threshold needs as a dual shard deck than by pure resource needs). It typically is fine to be a bit more aggressive with your Focus’ in this deck than a typical control deck, as normally you are using it to dig for the pieces you need to combo off.

Finally, as for the champion choice while I prefer Bunoshi it is for metagame reasons and would recommend playing the deck with Bertram Cragraven when first starting out. Bertram gives you a bit more flexibility on your combo turn as the Worker Bot is +1 resource under Hideous Conversion, showing just what lengths we will go to in order to get the equivalent of a Cressida activation. Bertram also is a bit better against Mono Ruby, but Bunoshi really shines against the control decks that seem a bit more popular as it creates a legitimate way to atttack for the win with Darkspires. Bunoshi also gets extremely strong post-reserves, where it can combine with Vampire King and Vampire Princess to stifle opposing Blood decks (with Sudden Awakening providing support to keep your big Vampire in the game).

Match-ups

As stated in the opening, the goal is to keep ground-based ramp and midrange decks in check. Even with access to cards like Heat Wave, Hideous Gambit has enough card advantage engines to get back into the game while only things like Periwinkle into Arborean Rootfather out of RW Ramp really threaten enough damage quickly to match the Gambit deck.

With Gambit in the name, it is pretty much implied that you are taking some chances. Where that really shows is against the Mono Ruby decks that seem to fluctuate in popularity from week to week. A turn 5 kill isn’t impressing a Quash Ridge Tusker deck anytime soon, who can consistently kill faster than that. That leaves the Hideous Gambit deck in the position of trying to spend Shroomshaws and Darkspires to slow down the onslaught, but game 1 with Harvests and Awakenings that leaves Gambit with typically nothing worthwhile to stall into. The reserves factor in greatly here, as using your multitude of two-drops to stall into the Vampire royalty package is something that can win games. Still, you don’t like having to throw away a game 1 no matter what, so Gambit isn’t a deck I would recommend bringing if the meta of the day is defined by one-drops Ruby troops.

Mono Blood and Blood Diamond are both close matchups, with the margin really depending more about their troop choice than anything else. Neither deck is quite aggressive enough to force you to make chump blocks early, nor are they going to be disruptive enough to shut you out of eventually landing the combo thanks to all your card advantage engines. What is often comes down to then is the Blood deck’s flyers combined with the right amount of discard or removal to keep you off the combo just long enough to win.

Blood Sapphire is sort of along the same lines. The only issue is that Verdict of the Ancient Kings and Countermagic can be much more effective as preventing a pure combo win than other types of disruption. Bunoshi comes in big here, as does Storm Cloud, because unless you can provide a legitmate threat to win by attacking there is no reason for Blood Sapphire to use all their resources on their own turn as no one is scared of the Cerulean Mirror Knight and Shroomshaw beatdown.

Another deck that takes a different angle of fighting the format and has been showing up again recently is the variations of Archivarius’ Immortal Winter Moon deck from the August VIP (decklist here:[https://www.hextcg.com/august-constructed-vip-decklists/]). These Winter Moon builds look to use Scheme and Winter Moon’s champion power to continually loop Blinding Lights and Immortalitys, effectively never being open to dying in any given attack phase. The problem those decks run into against Hideous Gambit is how exactly the combo kills people with a dozen Priestess triggers rather than a singular swing. That means that at some point once the Gambit deck gets set up (which these particular Winter Moon variants aren’t well positioned to stop) then it can respond to any Immortality-like effects with another Darkspire sacrifice, and it is almost a given that the Gambit deck can put out more Darkspire triggers than the Winter Moon deck can put out Immortalitys.

Other Notes on the Deck

Hideous Gambit has a lot of interactions going on. I’m not sure I’ve ever played a perfect game with it, as there are numerous choices to make throughout the game that can be difficult to figure out, especially when first trying the deck. It definitely isn’t a deck most people should just jump into Gauntlet or a Scheduled Constructed first, and like many decks I recommend using Arena to at least test the concept and figure out what good hands look like in order to make better mulliganing decisions.

One of the hardest things to do is balance the “Value” Harvest of Sorrows versus the “Combo-starting” ones. Sometimes you are presented with the chance to turn a Storm Cloud with a few counters into a bunch of cards when combined with Harvest, and other times you get the chance to Harvest for 2 or 3 if you make some early trades and/or chump blocks. The question you have to keep asking is if the cards you are “cashing in” will actually be worse than what you likely will draw. Sometimes you just need to turn some Stormlings into a chance for finding your Hideous Conversion, and other times you need to keep your troops in play in order to ensure you have enough resource available should you draw the last combo piece you need. I typically try to use my health total as a resource instead of playing Harvest of Sorrow for purely value if possible, but it isn’t a hard rule by any means.

Lastly, on the reserves. The Vampire package is primarily for the aggressive decks, but I’ll bring it in often whenever I feel like my opponent is playing too much disruption for the combo and the better path to victory will be through Vampires as finishers to a BS troop shell. Taint is almost exclusively for Mono Ruby, and gets the nod over Sorrow as they are both about the same on the draw (where you want to play Sorrow as soon as possible to avoid hitting your own troops) but the quick speed Taint is better on the play when you can Taint a Tusker and then drop your two-drop. Inquisition is for the Sapphire based control decks, where you need to clear the way (and often I will bring in the Vampire Princesses as well in those matchups, especially on the play). Finally, the Mass Polymorph Dingler is a great one-of against Blood and Blood Diamond when I plan to stay on the combo plan. Eight resources is a lot, but Hideous Conversion actually makes it quite easy to hit and turning all opposing Vampires and Angels into insignificant Dinglers is back-breaking.

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