Master Theorycrafter – Cerebral Fulmination

by Adrian Sullivan

I’ve been working in the gaming industry for almost twenty years, and in that time, I’ve worn many hats. I’ve been an editor, writer, designer, communications professional, commentator, and consultant.

A part of why I’m writing this column is because of the “professional CCG player” hat that I’ve had, on and off, for most of that time. One of the things I’ve always tried to bring to the table is a fresh and unique perspective. In this column, while you can expect to see me looking at HEX with a focus on competitive decks, I’m very interested in exploring the unexplored. For me, though, it isn’t about being different for different’s sake, but about bringing the wisdom of a successful two-decades’ long history of CCG innovation to the table.

It’s been almost three years since I was out to Cryptozoic to check out HEX and had my socks knocked off by the game. Even in its early stages, it was a game that really captured the imagination and I was curious to see more of it.

Now, life can get pretty busy, especially when you’re working in games. Unfortunately for me, Cory Jones declined to take me up on my offer to let Cryptozoic regularly send a jet to take me from my home in Wisconsin out to sunny California, and so Hex was like many other games I play: on the back burner.

Of course, it didn’t disappear from sight.

I’ve been working in the gaming industry for years, and it was no surprise when people I knew started being deeply involved in the game. Then, late last year, I did get a little surprise: a dear friend from Wisconsin had just started working on the game. “You’ve got to check out where HEX is at, man. You’ll love it.”

This wasn’t the first time I’d heard that. A friend of mine that I knew from high school, Eric, had already been reaching out to me to come back to try out the game.

Hopping back in was quite interesting. One of the first things I did was look up one of the original cards I remembered from before, Sliver of the Immortal Spear.

It hadn’t changed much at all since a few years back. I was thinking of this card not because I thought it was somehow incredibly powerful, but instead because it was one of the most memorable cards that was exploring what it means to be a TCG in the almost limitless space of the digital arena. Sure, it’s cute to be able to do 5,000 damage, but the reason that the card resonated for me was that expressed this idea clearly: you can win the game with this card, but only by engaging with its power which would be cumbersome to express non-digitally.

I love that.

So, I waded back in, and there was a lot to make sense of. One of the first challenges was just taking in all of the cards. There are over 700 cards in the game at this point, and that makes for a lot of variation. Still, tough, I had a plan. I was going to work on making a simple but effective beatdown deck, probably of only one shard (in my head I was imagining it being either Wild, Ruby, or Blood), and just working on the basics for a deck like that:

1 – Efficiency

The plan was going to be working on a curve of costs so that I’d be able to regularly deploy all of my troops to threaten to end the game as quickly as possible.

2 – Power

Hitting hard is important. It isn’t enough to just have enough things that cost one and then enough that cost two that you’re hitting your curve, but you also need to be able to have those things matter. Figuring out the baseline on this can be difficult for someone new, especially when you’re still trying to understand what it is that everyone is playing. In an incredibly aggressive world, a card that does a lot of damage for a little cost might not be good if it has a drawback that makes you lose a race. In a world that is more controlling, you probably don’t care. The trick for me would be to figure out where that line was.

3 – “Play”

I didn’t know the names of any of these cards. What I knew was that all TCGs have cards that can turn the plans of an opponent on their head. These are cards like Inquisition, which can knock an opponent off of their plan, or Escalation cards like Ragefire or Crash of Beasts, which can contribute to a game plan that either goes around your opponent’s defenses (the direct damage of Ragefire) or goes wide enough to make defending against it a real challenge. You want to be able to have cards that give you some room to play against anyone, so that you either interact with them directly to stop their plans or you present a new axis that they’re unprepared for.

I was pretty excited about taking a TCG back to the early roots of TCGs, in terms of strategy. Then, of course, I got completely derailed.

I found something to love.

I fell for this:

A card like Cerebral Fulmination is special.

While symmetrical effects are things that we typically expect “serve everyone equally”, the truth is that if you have your deck built to take advantage of a card and they don’t, the symmetrical effect is anything but equal. Shortly afterwards, I found Mastery of Time, and I knew that my plan to create a tightly curved aggressive deck was in the wind.

Here was my first draft:

Champion: Daughter of Stars

I built this deck without any glancing at pre-existing versions of the deck. I was sure that they had to exist, if only because Cerebral Fulmination is simply so powerful an effect, and when you get to take more turns, it is a pretty absurd ability. I loved that Ragefire would be a great way to stay alive, and also be a card that I could use to end the game very quickly. A card like Chronic Madness might actually end the game more quickly, but it wouldn’t keep you alive.

I quickly learned that there were problems with the deck. The resources were definitely off. My reserves were a shambles, and I had no coherent plan for what to bring in and what to bring out, as well. Furthermore, there were powerful countermeasures to the deck that I hadn’t realized existed:

Clearly, there would have to be some going back to the drawing board.

But, regardless of some of the early troubles, the deck was a blast! I’m sure that my opponent wasn’t enjoying the games I had completely sewn up, but even in those games where I was the one losing, I was trying to stitch together something that was just intriguing, and it was fully capable of running away with the game. I had one exciting game where my opponent hit me with Tiaanost, removing all of my Cerebral Fulminations, and yet I won on the back of Chimes of the Zodiac into Mastery of Time and Peek!

It was time to take myself out of the isolation booth and check out other people’s decks. I wasn’t too surprised to discovery that I wasn’t the only one who’d been working this Mastery of Time angle!

Here is one such deck that went undefeated in 2014 in the hands of a player named Cirouss:

Champion: Bertram Cragraven

There are some things I love about this deck, and some things I don’t.

First of all, I love that Burn is in the deck, as a cheap answer to a fast troop. When you’re playing a deck with a card like Cerebral Fulmination, cheap cards are an important part of your game plan. One of the reasons a card like this works is that your opponent isn’t likely using a deck that is as efficient in its costs as yours. This means that even though you are both drawing cards they will struggle to use theirs.

I have mixed feelings about the troops. Bird o’ Plenty is actually pretty awesome on the defense against many decks, but the high cost (six!) can be prohibitive. In addition, though, I really like being troop-free. Stranding cards in your opponent’s hand is great. Even a powerful effect like the one in Reginald Lancashire just feels a bit too fragile.

Then there are cards like Twisted Fate, which I understand the impulse to run, but just am not on board with. This kind of deck wants to have all of its cards acting in concert towards an inevitable victory, all while keeping itself alive. Ragefire is great for this, as it literally can keep you alive, and kills the opponent wickedly fast; Twisted Fate neither keeps you alive nor kills the opponent quickly.

Still, Cirouss’s deck had some real food for thought, especially when it came to how many resources it was running.

The other deck that drew my notice was a “Turbo Burn” deck that made me grin, by Andrew.

Champion: Benvolio

Heroic Outlaw socketed with Major Ruby of Destruction and Minor Ruby of Ferocity

The first thing I love was the single-minded way that it approached the game. Classically, this approach was one of the first unfair decks in the history of CCGs, and it can truly be hard to fight. Overwhelming the opponent with direct damage is difficult to fight against!

Psychotic Anarchist was a card I’d noticed in my first pass at my version of a Cerebral Fulmination deck, and if you’re not averse to having a troop, it is really great at what it does. In a way, it is very similar to having eight Cerebral Fulmination. On the expensive end of the spectrum, Major Ruby of Destruction in Heroic Outlaw serves a very similar purpose.

Mindpyre has a similar problem to my mind that Twisted Fate does, with the difference being that since it is replicating the work done by so many other cards in the deck, it doesn’t suffer the problem of working in a vacuum. While if I were to build this deck, I’d need to figure out if this was a card I wanted to run, it could well be awesome.

Finally, I love Sunsoul Phoenix. This card just screams “Okay, you’re going to die now.” It seems shockingly easy to get several of these out during the course of a game, and even when your opponent manages to get rid of it, that doesn’t mean it is gone for good.

With all of these ideas swimming in my head and armed with my wins and losses from my first draft, I headed back to the spoilers, and reconsidered this little number from Armies of Myth:

A huge part of what I felt like I was missing was not only consistent early plays, but also a way to help smooth out my draws. Peek was great, certainly, but I wanted more Peek cards.

I also wanted to consider Benvolio. It has a high health total, to begin with. But in addition, drawing cards regularly is pretty good, even if Cerebral Fulmination reduces the value of a single additional card.

I think most importantly, though, is I wanted my resources to be as consistent as possible. I stitched those up a little, and ended up at this:

Champion: Daughter of Stars

The improvements in the resource allocation felt great. I did catch myself missing the extra Scheme, but Arcane Focus made it not hurt so much. Resource Optimizing Infusion Device was a card I very much loved in the original list, but four felt like a bit much, so I scaled it back.

Imp Hoodlums was basically a direct response to Drowned Shrine of Ulthar. To a lesser extent, so was Chaos Key. Chaos Key, while expensive, was also just a catch all; I found that there is just so much going on in Hex, I can’t necessarily expect to even guess what is going to happen, so having the means to just answer anything, despite being expensive, was important.

Incubation Webs felt really important as a means to answer any dangerous troop, as well as provide a means to win the game if everything else goes wrong. Between it and Shoggoth, the deck can still win the game if the Cerebral Fulmination plan goes awry.

I had contemplated several other cards as well, mostly from Armies of Myth.

This card seems to be everywhere, and for good reason. I really like my deck as a main deck troop-free deck. This troop, though, has it all. It’s efficient, it can clear out small troops, and it can slow down bigger ones. In addition, the blue-resource trigger is actually really impressive in a Time Mastery deck.

For a lot of decks, the only have the smallest amount of ways to answer what a Cerebral Fulmination deck is doing. Fifth Book of D’harsis feels like a great way to make those players have a sad day. While it is possible it might actually kill them, I’m mostly interested in burying their important cards.

This is a pretty nicely-sized body that only costs four, and if a Cerebral Fulmination is out, it could make some truly silly turns happen. On the other hand, I don’t think it does quite enough for me to pull the trigger on it just now, but I’ll be keeping my eye on it.

This one is actually incredibly interesting to me. All of the actions in this deck are very powerful, and making them copy themselves upon play seems incredibly potent, especially when you’re drawing extra cards. Where I am keeping my eye on Indigo Dreamwalker, for Thunderfield Elder, I’m strongly considering finding room for the card.

So, that’s where I’m at. Right now I’m rocking my Turbo-Time Mastery deck and loving it (even if some opponents are truly hating it).

Now, Cerebral Fulmination isn’t the only card that has sparked my imagination. I’m pumped about several others as well.

I’m excited to hear your thoughts on what I’ve been doing now that I’m back playing HEX. I’m still learning, so please give me your feedback so I can get up to speed! I’ll be focusing this column on developing exciting new ideas, and a part of that is figuring out what you and I both like.

These are a few other cards that excite me. Which one should I try to work with next? Go vote in the forums!

The Ancestors’ Chosen

Augur of Sirion

Crash of Beasts

Crocosaur

Jank Bot

Rhythmic Spiritualist

Servant of Shathak

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