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

Okay, we are back from the weekend. On Friday we had new updates and a Twitch stream! Unbeknownst to most of us, the Twitch Stream introduced two other decks making a total of 8 decks you can play at GenCon. I had a nice timetable down, but now there’s two more decks I have to evaluate! So today and tomorrow I will be doing double articles. Today, in addition to the Ruby deck, I’ll be looking at the Blood/Ruby deck as well. The two new decks have been added on the original deck spoiler page on the Hex official site, so if you haven’t seen them check it out here: http://hextcg.com/gen-con-decklists/

So for the first of today’s decks I am going to discuss the Mono-Ruby deck that takes aggression to the next level. Let’s first look at the deck list, as always I’ve made a deck on Hex TCG Browser, which you can find here: http://hex.tcgbrowser.com/#!/deck=156

Ruby decks like this one are aggressive and designed to front load damage through high attack, low cost troops; then use direct damage actions to finish off the opposing champion’s health. As you can see in the card list there are seven 1-cost troops, ten 2-cost troops, and four 3-cost troops, with the majority being high attack and low health.

This deck works best when you are sending in troops for attack without being blocked. You will want to make efficient use of your direct removal actions like Burn or Ragefire and the troop Bombsmith to deal with early blockers. Your 3 cost Veteran Gladiator can also neutralize the most troublesome blockers on your opponent’s side.

The trick to being effective with this deck is keeping pressure up on the opposing champion’s life total. Ruby Pyromancer and Poca’s charge power in combination work well to do this, since the Blaze Elemental gets boosted attack to deal 4 health on turn 3. This is also where Emberspire Witch plays an integral role in your decks overall strategy. Certain Blood and Diamond decks rely on recovering health through life gain or life drain effects. The Witch’s ability allows her to nullify that strategy completely. Of particular note is that the mono-Diamond deck has no way to destroy her except by blocking or using Repel, so as long as you don’t attack or block when they have 4 open resources, you can stop them from healing indefinitely. Her Swiftstrike keyword also makes it difficult or awkward for your opponent to deal with, so you have better chance of dealing damage with her.

As a final way to pour on the last necessary amounts of damage, you have direct damage actions that can put your opponent on a countdown, Inferno being one of the best tools at your disposal. It does deal damage to you as well, but if your deck has been doing its job correctly the card should be the final nail in your opponent’s coffin. Ragefire which has the ability to Escalate to double its effectiveness each time it is played means that you can also provide some unexpected burst damage if you draw multiple copies.

The negatives of this deck are the same with any type of all-in aggressive front-loading strategy: if you lose gas or the upper hand too early, there is almost no way for you to recover from a disadvantageous state. To start, it has very few ways to deal with high health troops, and you are very unlikely to draw direct removal that can eliminate a 3 health or higher troop. You might have to do unfavorable trades using two of your cards to get one of theirs. There is absolutely no card draw in this deck. Finally, I feel that this deck is perhaps running too many resources than it needs, so you might have some risk of resource flood and not enough playable troops to curve out.

So overall, the strengths:

Plentiful and aggressive troops

Good direct damage options

Ability to shut down certain decks completely

The weaknesses are:

Card draw

Removal

Resource flood

If you want to stick with me, feel free to click this link to jump to today’s other article.