Primordial Knowledge – Two Kings

With the second Cosmic Crown Showdown in the books, it’s time to take a step back and analyze the current constructed meta. What better place to start than with stats from the constructed portion of the tournament?

I filtered the hexmeta data by champion in order to identify what decks were played and by how many players. I then filtered that data to only include players with five or more wins. I felt a five win threshold was low enough to provide a meaningful sample, but high enough to be considered a strong performance. The third column shows what percentage of players playing a specific deck achieved seven or more wins. The last column indicates the deck’s percent popularity.

To no one’s surprise, Shoku The Botanist was by far the most popular deck in the tournament, taking up a full 25% of the field. The overwhelming majority of these decks were Mono Wild in the style popularized by Thufirhawat. In fact, with Thufirhawat recently joining Dragonborn, it was the also the deck of choice for most of the members of Dragonborn participating in the tournament, including myself. After several weeks of intensive testing we settled on the following list.



Rune Ear Hierophant is socketed with Minor Wild Orb of Brawn and Major Wild Orb of Conjuration





While the inclusion of Oberon’s Eulogy was what brought this deck to prominence, we found in our testing that Eulogy was an incredibly poor card in the Shoku mirror. The vast majority of mirror matches ended early at the hands of Mightsinger of Ages or Rune Ear Hierophant. It became apparent that these two cards were by far the most important in the mirror and that, if we wanted to win the mirror, we would need to build our deck in such a way as to maximize their effectiveness. Enter Oakhenge Ceremony. As soon as Thufirhawat suggested this card to the team, it instantly clicked. Oakhenge Ceremony gives you another turn one play as well a way to dig for either Mightsinger of Ages or Rune Ear Hierophant the turn before you want to play them. It has the added bonus of smoothing out our resource usage and searching for dinos for late game removal. Due to Oakhenge Ceremony, our build of Shoku was able to find and play Mightsinger of Ages and Rune Ear Hierophant more consistently than any other. With an overall 24-13 record across the team and two members achieving top 8, we were more than happy with the deck’s performance.

Burning Bright

As well as Shoku performed, however, Burn stole the show. With only seven players piloting Angus the Arsonist, more than half achieved five or more wins and three made top 8. That is impressive, especially considering the deck was coming off a miserable performance in the Radiant Rumble a month prior (52 players and only six with seven or more wins). The big change for Burn was the prevalence of Shoku.

We had identified Burn as one of the few poor match ups for Shoku but were uncomfortable playing it against the field. Turns out there’s little reason to be uncomfortable when Shoku takes up a quarter of the field. While Wild has historically had many of the most powerful answers to Ruby, the current iteration of Burn is one of the few decks which can consistently draw hands which beat Shoku’s best openers.

Our Primordial Brew

If you’ve been following my stream, you know I’ve been playing an immense amount of our CCS Shoku list on ladder, securing spots as high as rank 3 Cosmic. To change it up a little this week, I thought we’d highlight a different deck.





This is Zooch’s undefeated Burn list from the CCS. While it is fairly standard, there are a few interesting things to comment on. First is the inclusion of Boltspasm. Many builds of Burn have chosen to pass on this powerful one drop due to its ineffectiveness in the late game. While that may be true, the card also gives this build much more explosive openers – something that’s very important if the deck looks to oust the popular Shoku decks.

This deck also packs three copies of Lazgar’s Vengeance. After Mama Yeti, Lazgar’s Vengeance is probably the card I have lost the most games against when facing Burn. It leverages the deck’s cheap speed troops to play the powerful, game swinging action as early as turn three.

Blamsmith is an interesting but important card in the reserves. Socketed with swiftstrike, it can be a beating in the mirror. Most critically, a scrounged Blamsmith is able to trade favorably with both Mama Yeti and Matriarch of Flames.

Two Kings

Congrats to Shinshire taking home the crown with his B/W Shin’hare Rush deck and masterful draft performance. With two champions crowned, the ladder is once again open to all those looking to take up the challenge.

Be sure to tune in to my stream tonight at 3:30 PM PST. I will be piloting today’s Primordial Brew on the Constructed Ladder. As always, there will be Primal Pack and free Draft, Sealed, and Evolving Gauntlet code giveaways.

See you on the ladder,

Varranis | Twitch | Twitter | Team Fade 2 Karma

Varranis is an analyst for professional gaming organization Fade 2 Karma. He has played countless TCGs over the last eighteen years and brings a unique lens to HEX theory crafting and deck building based on his historical experience. Varranis has numerous tournament wins and top finishes to his name across several popular TCGs and has coached and supported players in world championship level events.

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