Deck Drilldown – Blood-Ruby Darkspire

By Jeff Hoogland

There is no doubting that the best deck right now is the Boris Blastforge “Rocket Rabbit” deck that is powered by Spellshield Rune Ear Hierophant. As of my sitting down to write this post, Boris composes just over 20% of the decks being played in constructed gauntlets in the last week.

Today we are going to take a look at something that is very much an “anti Rabbit,” or the Elmer Fud of the current Hex constructed. A player with the IGN of Presumably played the following decklist to a 7-2 finish in the Fiveshards Blood Cup in June:

Champion: Kranok

This deck is essentially playing all the best tools in the game for beating back Rune Ears:

Inquisition lets us snag Rune Ears out of their hand before they even get deployed or clear Countermagic so our Heat Waves and Extinctions can resolve.

Alongside these mass removal effects we are playing troops that we are content if they die:

In fact in addition to the effect that the Darkspire provide when they hit the crypt, we have two other cards that encourage us to kill all of the troops in play as often as possible:

Tunneling a Monsuun on turn two, playing out a bunch of Darkspire threats, and then sweeping the board the turn before Monsuun un-tunnels is card advantage most decks cannot keep up with. Having a Gallows Ghasts in our hand early on is often a way to steal games you otherwise have no shot of winning. Between throwing our own troops away and killing everything our opponent deploys, Ghasts quickly becomes a lethal threat thanks to the Major Ruby of Destruction and Minor Ruby of Ferocity.

Ideas for Improvement

After playing a number of matches with the Blood-Ruby Darkspire deck, there are a few changes I wanted to make. First is that I wanted a few more aggressive troops to increase the number of games I was able to pressure my opponents while removing their threats. Tezozo seemed like a fairly natural inclusion since, in addition to being an aggressive turn two play, he also helps enable our copies of Quash Ridge Rubble.

The second change I wanted to make was having additional methods of interacting with Flickering Gobblers. Morgan McBombus is the second most popular champion in gauntlets right now, so I wanted at least eight methods of killing Flickering Gobbler between my main deck and reserves. A couple of copies of Crimson Bolt fill this role nicely.

Next, the one copy of Crackling Vortex was awkward on more than one occasion. This deck has double Blood cards like Inquisition that it wants to play early. It even has a triple Blood Threshold card in Darkspire Tyrant. Thankfully, the extra charge that Vortex provides was rarely relevant for me, so I was easily able to cut it for another Blood Shard.

Finally, the big thing that was lacking in the reserves was an answer to the card Closed Coffins. Not only does this card turn off the value cards like Monsuun and Gallows Ghasts generate, but Darkspires have to “die” to have their effects trigger. Closed Coffins prevents this from happening as well. Unfortunately, Blood and Ruby do not have efficient methods of removing constants so the only real solution is to play a few copies of Chaos Key.

This brings me to the following updated decklist:

Champion: Kranok

In addition to the few changes I mentioned above, I also cut back on the copies of Heat Wave. Eight sweeper effects felt like a bit too many and they could be awkward at times with the addition of Tezozo.

Match Ups

The Boris Blastforge matchup with this deck is good for the reasons I mentioned at the start of this article. The most important thing to keep in mind when playing is to not be too greedy with your sweeper effects. Trying to get more “value” out of a sweeper like Extinction often means you are just giving your opponent more chances to draw Countermagic – kill the Rune Ears while you can.

The Morgan McBombus matchups can be tough game one as they are more action rather than troop based. All of our basic speed sweepers cannot interact with Flickering Gobbler, and we do not have a means of stopping them from peeling Rage Fires to kill us in the late game. Thankfully, post reserves we get to trade out our Extinctions for additional Burns and Crimson Bolts. We also get to bring in Vampire Princess to both buffer our health total and take away annoying cards like Combat Training.

The matchup against Kagulichu variants is fairly good game one. It can be difficult for them to keep up with our value generating threats and an early Monsuun will often be game ending. Our four copies of Extinction also give us a nice reset button should things ever get out of hand for us. Post reserves, things can get more difficult depending on how many copies of Closed Coffins the Kagulichu player has access to, but between Chaos Key and Inquisition we can handle Coffins most games.

I have not encountered Uzzu Cannon while playing the Darkspire deck yet, but on paper it seems like it should be an OK matchup for the Darkspire deck. In addition to Inquisition helping break up their combo, we have both Heat Wave and Extinction to kill Spellshield Azurefate Sorceress. Post reserves, Closed Coffins is a beating they often cannot recover from.

There is not currently a very defined Wintermoon deck in the format, but Wintermoon decks definitely have the tools needed to beat decks like this Darkspire deck. Countermagic makes Monsuun much worse and our Darkspire getting Transmogrified feels really bad. Not to mention, our removal is awkward against decks that tend to be a bit troop light.

Gameplay Videos

I spent some time streaming with different iterations of these decks that you can find below.

Wrapping Up

If you are looking for a deck that lines up well against all of the Boris decks that are running around, then I would highly recommend giving the Blood-Ruby Darkspire deck a try.

Have a question about this archetype that I did not cover in the article above? Let me know by leaving a comment in the forum!

Thanks for reading.

~Jeff Hoogland

Jeff is a professional gamer who enjoys the competitive aspects of HEX: Shards of Fate. Constructed is his preferred format and he is always looking for that new piece of technology to give him a leg up on the competition.

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