Check out the other articles in this series: Blood, Blood/Wild, Diamond, Diamond/Ruby, Ruby, Blood/Ruby, Sapphire (Artifact), Sapphire (Flight)

Hello future Hexers and Gen Con goers. Grissnap here with another WDSIM, but taking a special look at the upcoming playable decks announced for Gen Con 2013. Find the announcement containing all 6 deck lists at the official Hex site here: http://hextcg.com/gen-con-decklists/

Over the course of the next few days I am going to examine all 6 deck lists, discussing their general theme, strengths, weaknesses and strategies. Hopefully with enough time before Gen Con next week to prepare and decide which deck you’ll take to the Hex LAN League and win fabulous prizes. To copy and paste from the Hex Kickstarter page:

The HEX LAN League will be open from Noon – 10pm Thu-Sat and 10 – 2pm on Sun in the TCG Hall. This info is available from the Gen Con events finder: www.gencon.com/events/find



I will not be able to attend, but my misfortune is your gain! Once I am done looking at each deck, I’ll give my analysis as to which decks are likely to be the top performing decks, so stick with me for the next few days for my predictions.

Okay, enough introduction, let’s get into the mix. In today’s post I’m going to be examining the first of two decks making use of the Blood Shard.

First up is the Mono-Blood deck. Take a look at the deck here: http://hex.tcgbrowser.com/#!/deck=120

So at first glance you might be like me and notice that the quality of the troops you have at your disposal seems to vary a bit. You’ll also notice that there are exactly zero one-cost cards. My first impression of the deck was not so good, but looking a bit closer you do see a couple themes pop up that might add some hidden strength to the mix. That being said, Mangled Zombie and Xentoth’s Chosen are subpar at best.

The first theme deals with affecting your opponent’s hand. Giant Corpse Fly will make your opponent discard a card, early on it might not be so great, but later on you might force your opponent to throw away that removal card that he or she was saving. Shadowgrove Witch also has the potential to make an ace in the hole turn into a card not even worth playing. Of the two, the Corpse Fly is one of the few flying cards available at Gen Con. So once in play, he is also likely to be a source of small but consistent damage.

An other, possibly more important, theme in this deck is the deal and heal aspect. Cards like Corrupt Harvester with life drain, Life Siphon, Terrible Transfer, even the Champion’s charge power does this. This is important because you will likely be taking large amounts of damage at the beginning of the game.

Finally, the last and I feel strongest part of the deck, is the amount of card advantage this deck has the potential to generate. Pact of Pain (which has gone up 1 cost since I last examined it) is still an insane potential for card draw. Compared to other decks available to choose from, this one will be netting you the most cards in hand. Bone Warrior is also an excellent source for advantage, allowing you to block early on then sacrifice to Necessary Sacrifice or Xentoth’s Chosen.

The largest weakness of this deck is the amount of difficulty it will encounter to the highly aggressive decks. No 1 drops and sub par 2 drops mean that it will have to work hard to stabilize before its card advantage and life gain can turn the match around.

So overall, I feel the strengths of this deck are:

Card Draw

Removal

Life Gain

Weaknesses are:

Lack of early game troops

Sub-par finisher (Xentoth’s Chosen)

Weakness to early game rush

That’s it for now. Come back tomorrow, where I will take a look at the Blood-Wild deck.