This week I tried something of an experiment in Kinguin. I knew that I was playing against Firebat, and decided to try biasing my decks in order to beat exactly what he has been playing recently. In the Conquest format, in order to win a match, you have to win a game with all of your decks, which means that if you can specifically target one of your opponent’s decks with no winnable matchups in your lineup, you can be all but assured of victory.

In virtually all of the events Firebat has participated in over the last few months, he has brought a lineup that has included Freeze Mage. Freeze Mage is extremely powerful against a lot of different decks, but it’s very fragile against prepared opponents.

My plan was to play three decks heavily biased against Freeze Mage to prevent Firebat from being able to ever win with the deck. I played MechMage and Druid with double Kezan Mystic, and even played two Counterspells and no Mirror Entities as my only secrets to further solidify the matchup. My third deck was double Flare face hunter, which probably paid the smallest cost in other matchups to strengthen that one.

Unfortunately, it seems Firebat was wise to my ways, as he played a lineup that not only didn’t contain Freeze Mage this week, but didn’t play any decks with secrets at all! I was summarily stomped in three games with my Druid deck, any of which might have been winnable if my Kezan Mystics had been pretty much any other reasonable card, but I paid the price for my attempted metagaming.

Anyway, here’s my lists. You probably shouldn’t ever play them, but I wanted to include them for completeness sake. I likely won’t try anything like this strategy again, since it’s clearly very exploitable if your opponent is on to you, but I like that the Kinguin Pro League provides opportunities to experiment with such things.