Infamous D in The Deck of Destiny

We all want to find the deck that will take us to Orange County and eternal glory. Wurtil brings us today’s Latest Brew!

Getting that deck just perfect is one of the big draws to a game like HEX where the target is constantly shifting and all of your personal creativity is required to keep up. However, designing decks by yourself is often too difficult a task to sustain for long periods of time. Your own ideas start to coalesce around the same core lines of thinking, and as a result you end up getting stumped due to the diminishing returns from leveraging just a single point of view. Thankfully between forums, twitch, and in game chat it is surprisingly easy to start up conversations around deck building. After all, you have a pretty sweet point of reference to kick off conversations with…

For the deck that Team Rated-Hex used in the last round of qualifiers, its origin necessitated a merging of ideas. My good friend Infam0usNe0 and I just so happened to be working on some Mono-Diamond solutions to the metagame at the same time, yet both came to the table with wildly different approaches.



Personally, I was starting to get some decent testing results with a Righteous Paladin centric lists that brought tons of removal to the table alongside recursive elements like Ethereal Caller to ensure that the deck always had the largest threat on the table. A combination of health gain, Diamond removal and a large beatstick like Paladin was proving to be very potent against the Ruby Gem of Destruction focused boogeymen of the format. The deck was not without issue though, as the deck relied upon the Paladin to grow large enough to meet your opponent’s troops in combat. Only Living Totem created a backup way to have a gigantic Diamond troop on the cheap. Having Dimmid and troops like Adamanthian Scriviner meant that the deck could find itself behind in long games against the card advantage focused control decks.

Ne0 in the meantime was working on a deck to break Noble Heart in every way possible. Utilizing threshold enablers like Lixil, the Deathless Gem and Royal Herald he could start dropping Noble Hearts very quickly. Once you have a Steadfast, Invincible troop with Flight like Spearcliff Cloud Knight, Angel of Dawn, or Living Totem the game often became close to impossible to win for decks like Cressida Ramp to win as her 8/8s just weren’t going to do anymore damage. The issue this time however was that Lixil, Herald, and other low-cost aggressive Diamond troops were often at a strategic clash with the Noble Heart plan. as Noble Heart wasn’t helping Ne0 push through damage when he had a hand full of Diamond weenies.

It sounds easy when writing it out, but the breakthrough was realizing that Ne0’s Noble Heart + Flight/Steadfast was just better in most matchups than a gigantic Righteous Paladin. Now, instead of relying upon health gain mechanics to power up a single card, you could create a core of Diamond’s best troops to be enabled by Noble Heart. This also freed the deck to look at what Champions besides Dimmid could be used, and one unexpected Champion in particular is in a great spot for the current meta – Prairie Meadow! One of the few drawbacks to Angel of Dawn is that you get little control over playing around a Crocosaur when bringing her. Prairie Meadow’s ability means that you typically can have multiple troops out and be relatively confident that your entire board isn’t going to disappear due to a single Dinosaur. Prairie Meadow also is quite good against the rise of AzureCannon where holding back then protecting a Cloud Knight against a multitude of damage actions is key, as well as the upswing in Terrible Transfers that were being brought by Mono Blood. Throw in some Hopeheart Unicorns to further the decks plan of creating one master troop to rule the board, add in a bit of testing from the rest of the team to flesh out numbers and we have a contender:

Infamous D

Champion: Prairie Meadow



It might look strange having Meek and Pride’s Fall sitting right next to each other, but save Mono Ruby virtually every deck has important troops to hit that are range from big to small. Crocosaur and Periwinkle. Reese the Crustcrawler and Azurefate Sorceress. Even Vampire King and Vampire Princess fit the mold, and so it means that having a wide range of removal options to stall out the game until you can bring an Invincible troop online is important. Solitary Exile does a fine job in most cases of being a catch-all, but being unable to hit most of AzureCannon’s troops before they do their damage (literally and figuratively) is a big knock against it. You do have to be mindful of Meek’s somewhat poor interaction with Monument of the Martyrs, but typically you only will be playing Martyr first in the most dire of situations.

One big technology in the reserves is Reversion. Scorn of Oberon has seen occasional play in Cressida Ramp’s reserves with the actual reversion portion being a bonus rather than the focus, but here we are counting on using Reversion against especially AzureCannon to help give us more time. Rock Elementals go back to 0/0s and freshly un-tunneled Reese’s suddenly make insignificant Worker Bots again. Scorn is also is a fine card to bring in against the Sapphire control decks looking to use Cripple and Polymorph: Dingler to nullify your troops.

Against AzureCannon, we bring in some Reversions but also look to add a few Deathless Guardians to the mix. Living Totem and Spearcliff Cloud Knight are both vulnerable to Burn and Heat Wave, so Deathless Guardian gives one more layer of protection for them to have to defeat in order to deal with your best troops. These will often come at the expense of the Solitary Exiles and His Majesty, King Gabriel (who is particularly vulnerable to Countermagic himself) followed by a shaving of Unicorns and Noble Hearts. Even though Noble Heart might be the namesake of the deck, drawing too many against AzureCannon can be a big problem as they can build up for big turns with Time Ripple and Mesmeric Hypnoscientists which will require you to have troops and removal at the ready. Prairie Meadow often will try to protect a Living Totem when you have resources open to give it +1/+1 in response to any potential Burn, but if the AzureCannon player gives you an opening to put Prairie Meadow’s power on a Cloud Knight you will happily run with it.

For Cressida Ramp, more removal in place of some Unicorns is the biggest change. If you suspect or have seen Scorn of Oberon then Stoneskin can come in, but otherwise you are going to be banking upon getting the game to a point where your Invincible Flight troop will dominate the board. Cressida Ramp typically isn’t too hard of a matchup once you understand that you are sitting firmly in the control seat for the matchup and try to prolong the game accordingly. Above all else, do not walk yourself into a Crocosaur if you can avoid it even if you have Prairie Meadow available.

Mono Blood is a very fun matchup from the Diamond side. Noble Heart can be completely back-breaking against them, and only Rot Cast is cheap enough for them to hold up throughout the midgame while trying to move their own position forward. Obviously you can lose to the patented Mono Blood perfect discard hands, but with Stoneskin helping out against those hands and Soul Marble being backbreaking against them you are quite favored here.



Mono-Ruby isn’t the best of matchups in Game 1, as the Diamond deck doesn’t have a lot of great ways to get ahead of them. After reserves you get the backbreaking Deathless Guardian who requires an immediate Crackling Bolt from the Ruby side or else they risk losing everything. Spiritbound Spy helps you survive until you can get a Prairie Meadow activation, and once you get a damage shield on almost anything the game gets much easier (and if you can sneak in a Cloud Knight with a damage shield you are going to be extremely favored to win).

Finally, the Winter Moon decks aren’t the greatest matchup for this deck. Drowned Shrine of Ulthar can help, but you need a perfect mix of aggression followed by the Shrine for it to be effective. Winter Moon decks can be extremely varied, and ironically it is the versions running Crocosaur that you are most happy to see as it will give you a target for your otherwise dead removal. Versions that focus on Blinding Light loops or go interrupt and draw heavy create too many dead cards for you to be favored in a long game.

Infamous D is a solid deck for beating a metagame relying upon spot removal and haymaker troops. The formation of the deck was more important than the deck itself, however. Two mediocre decks with some interesting ideas in them can give the insight needed to create a truly spectacular deck. That only happens when multiple players are willing to share their information and grow trust with each other. That willingness and growth can come from many paths. Heck, Ne0 and I became friends before we even knew the other person was halfway decent at HEX, all because we just happened to start talking about ideas in the same place. HEX continues to have one of the best communities in gaming, and with the competitive aspect growing rapidly there is no better time to get out there and connect with other players in order to get yourself prepared for all the tournaments to come.

BONUS SECTION – Rise of the Phoenix

Some quick talk on the meta in general. There was a lot of gnashing of teeth even just a month ago that Cressida Ramp and Azurecannon’s dominance was proof that the damage gem was too oppressive and would ruin the metagame. While I don’t think many will dispute the claim that those two decks are in the top tier right now, it seems like people are figuring out that there are many ways to fight those decks successfully. For instance – Eaglov’s winning Winter Moon Control deck from the December 6th IQ takes many of the concepts from builds like Future’s and the one listed in this column previously, but then makes its own tweaks—like the addition of Sapper’s Charge. While Carnasaurus might be more powerful against a Mono Ruby opponent and more efficient against a Periwinkle, Sapper’s Charge can answer an Azurefate Sorceress looking to try and combo kill you while still providing that early game protection role.

Others are realizing that many tier 2 strategies can just kill faster than the damage gem decks and are exploiting that advantage accordingly. Mono Ruby aggro decks typically gets lumped into a bucket together, but neither Khendral nor King Gabriel’s list from the IQ should be categorized the same as most other Ruby beatdown variants. Khendral’s list is a take on the Mono Ruby Benvolio deck (often titled “Crazed Phoenix”) that has been in the background for a couple months now. Psychotic Anarchist and Cerebral Fulmination fill your hand with cards while Mindpyre makes the exchange unequal for your opponent. Kindling Skarn exploits filling your hand now with lots of damage actions, and then Crazed Rummaging can power out Sunsoul Phoenix in multiple ways. Did you keep the Phoenix in your hand? Play a Scorch and another action and you get a free 4/2! Did you discard Phoenix? Void some of those actions and you still get your free Legendary out on the table and attacking! King Gabriel’s list might be even stranger still, as all-time champ Baby Yeti makes an appearance as KG tweaks the typical Mono Ruby formula to focus even more on flooding the board with 1 cost troops that can get in some damage as quickly as possible.

Going forward, we are likely going to see some cascading effects of diversity. The format is hitting a very balanced place between the aggro and control decks levying diverse requirements upon the Cressida Ramp and Azurecannon decks to keep up. That means that for at least a short while there will be an opening for some truly innovative decks to come in that may have been oppressed by the sheer number of tier 1 decks that were in the meta, as well as potentially some flashbacks to the Shattered Destiny metagame. It is easy to forget that Gorestorm, Mono Sapphire, and Dwarf Robots were all tournament winning decks just a few months ago. If you have been scared off by the constructed scene lately, then there is no better time than now to browse through Hexmeta.com, Fiveshards.com, or this very article series and grab some of the really cool decks that are showing that damage out of a gem slot might not be as unbeatable as you might think.

-Wurtil

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