Guardians' Creed Spoilers Review #1
So far, Guardians' Creed has been full of support for some underperforming archetypes from EOR and earlier. But how are some of these Warlords looking coming out of GCD and what ones look best positioned to shuffle up the metagame?
Titans - Gaia
For anyone who's been keeping up with the spoilers, it's no question that Gaia is receiving lots of love in this set, with some incredible buffs to the unstoppable archetype. Whilst Gaia had some solid potential coming out of EOR, the deck lacked a significant degree of agency and power outside of Reformation. Locking out attacks behind one turn of Blockade is a great tool that Gaia currently leverages, but the rest of the deck currently lacks the "oomph" needed to put pressure on your opponent, and to consistently find your needed pieces. Guardians' Creed looks to have the potential to solve these issues, providing Gaia with a ton of pressure and agency.
Two significant additions come with Unstoppable Momentum, and Unstoppable Titan War Smash. These two cards alone really help Gaia as effective starters, to start filling your Eradication zone with important pieces, and start churning through your deck. Unstoppable Titan War Smash especially is powerful as a starter, being able to tutor out, and later revive Jasmine, The Unstoppable Water Beauty to generate card advantage, and to provide an outlet to pitch any cards with important Eradication effects.
Bitterroot, The Unstoppable Sapling and Unstoppable Undergrowth are also some sweet new additions to the deck, giving Gaia more ways to remove warriors from the other side of the field or to trigger perish abilities, whilst also putting her own Warriors into play. These additions are key for giving Gaia more power to actively fight for more board control after using Reformation.
Arguably one of the most important pieces given to Gaia in the set however is Gaia's Unstoppable Presence. The once per turn of Presence allows provides an incredible amount of repeatable recursion, threatening a similar amount of value to Treasury Of The Fallen Priestess. The Static ability too gives Gaia access to an incredible amount of burn damage to start putting pressure on opponents to close out the game before they can manage to have a warrior survive a turn around the table. Presence can easily start threatening around 12 damage a turn, with a cap of 40 potentially closing out a game in 2 turns. The eradication ability is going to make Presence significantly easier to set and find, and easier to put back into play while your opponent struggles to keep it off the board.
Titans - Generic
Whilst Gaia is getting the most attention in the set, there are a few treats that can benefit any Titan deck as well. Land Of Dreams is a notably strong generic Exalted, giving any Titan deck extra conscriptions, card draw and eradication triggers, whilst also locking down your opponent's discard pile. While this card won't be the make or break for a Titan deck to function, it's a fantastic piece with a lot of value and utility.
Topaz Amulet and Unstoppable Extraction are two of the cards that can be activated on, or put into play before your opponents first turn. Whilst Extraction is an Unstoppable card by name, it has a ton of potential outside of just Gaia.
The three cycles of these effects are fantastic pieces to help break the advantage of play and draw, providing pieces of interaction when your opponent is going first. Both of these pieces are huge, helping to shut down a ton of different strategies, especially the ones looking to hit the ground running right out of the gate. The Titan Amulet shuts down a ton of different discard synergies, slowing down Sharn, Mortis, or Onoskelis decks looking to setup a ton of value using the discard pile. Unstoppable Extraction strips the keyword abilities of both Warriors and Warrior tokens, hitting both strategies reliant on Warrior keywords like Dwarves and Angels, and those reliant on token abilities like Dragons and Black Magic.
Prometheus may be able to especially make good use of these cards, seeing as the best performing versions of Primordial Aggro use Galterius, The Wayfaring Knight, going second for more immediate value. These interactive tools let you gain the same advantage from going second, whilst having the pieces of interaction to disrupt your opponent's turn one setup. Whilst any deck can make use of these cards to interact on turn 1, they have an extra bit of value in decks already wanting to go second.
Angels - Castiel
Unlike Gaia, Castiel came out of EOR with plenty of power, offering a faster tempo version of angels. Likewise, Castiel isn't receiving quite the same treatment as Gaia, but rather a selection of solid pieces to offer more variety and options in deckbuilding.
Castiel's Alchemic Bloodbond is immediately a great addition to the deck, giving Castiel his very own version of Michael's Proclamation. Whilst this negate isn't necessarily more powerful than Controlled By The Chaos Divine, it does give Castiel more backline control potential and versatility, especially as it can also negate Warriors, and doesn't require a Lost Messiah card in hand to activate.
The eradication ability is another nice piece of utility, letting you pitch unneeded Bloodbonds off of Acceleration Into The Chaos Divine to recover a bit of DCM.
Lost Messiah - Punishing Light gives Castiel access to a different removal piece. The deck currently has Bow Of The Archangel and Lost Messiah - Righteous Dark for taking cards off of the board, and Punishing Light will certainly be competing with those cards for slots, but the eradication ability is also incredibly significant here, giving you a solid midgame option to use Empire to charge itself up with Holy Counters.
Subtly the most exciting addition to the deck may just be Eshreal, Lost Messiah Diviner. The renew ability has some fun use cases, letting you revive Eshreal back from your eradication, but the important part comes from two things, the "Lost Messiah" archetypal naming, and the Sanctify Keyword. With this, Castiel has access to a Sanctify warrior to grab off of Army Of The Lost Messiah, letting you start generating a ton of counters significantly sooner.
The Sanctify keyword here is also incredibly powerful with Empyrean Empire Of The Lost Messiah, as whenever the Sanctify ability triggers on your Eshreal, Empire will add another counter to itself from it's static ability. This can already be used to great result with Helios & Luna, but Eshreal is a significantly easier warrior to tutor for, with a built in way to revive it to boot.
One new option for Castiel is equal parts powerful and adorable: Wooley. The new familiar cycle of cards gives your Guardian's consume ability an upgrade, in this case, 5 holy counters on all of your angel warriors. If you're using this alongside Alexandria, her consume ability will put 7 holy counters on every angel warrior you control, 35 across a full board.
This offers Castiel a new Guardian option, trading the power of Sigrid and Halo Of The Lost Messiah for a win condition a touch less finicky and vulnerable. There is of course a trade off here, losing access to an immediate Empyrean Empire, and the use of the new Lost Messiah - Punishing Light. That being said, Alexandria has been a useful sideboard swap out for Castiel in the past, being able to grab important warriors like Helios & Luna right off the bat. Versions of the deck using Alexandria have the potential to perform better into these matchups where the Warrior tutor versatility is more useful than the utility of Empyrean Empire.
Ultimately, it'll take more testing to determine if the Lamb of the Divinity Realm can make Alexandria a more desirable guardian for Castiel. In current Michael builds where Alexandria is the Guardian of choice, Wooley is a solid option to help fill the board with counters to drown your opponent in board control.
Angels - Sanctify
One interesting sub-archetype supported in GCD for angels is a more midrange style utilizing the various angel Sanctify warriors. These warriors can quickly stack up counters to protect themselves, and thanks to Citrine Amulet and Radiant Orb Of Divine Light, can get buffed up to hit significantly harder.
Whilst there are existing cards that synergize with the Sanctify keyword like Pious Orchard and Virtuous Oasis, there hasn't been a specific win condition to promote a style of gameplay less connected with the standard Seraphim and Lost Messiah archetypes. The board buff offered by Citrine Amulet and Radiant Orb could potentially be enough to support a midrange archetype able to keep warriors on board and pressure an opponent over several turns.
Ultimately this archetype will need a bit of testing, and especially testing between the two different Angel Warlords available, but there's a ton of unexplored options with the Sanctify archetype.
Angels - Generic
Apart from Castiel receiving some powerful tools, and the Sanctify archetype getting a push of power, the Angel Realm has some of the more powerful potential combo breaking tools. Tethered To The Chaos Divine is one of the most powerful options in it's cycle, threatening to shut down any and all draw effects and tutors for the remainder of the turn. Similarly to void hollow, opponents will be able to stack card draw and tutors in response, but they won't be able to play out a turn one combo style chain if Tethered resolves.
Pious Punishment is another strong tech piece. Unlike Tethered, it may not be as strong on the first turn, since it's easy for most opponents to play around. Notably, it may be a stronger breaker against Dwarves, which can have more ways to bounce and conscript additional Warriors for turn. Being able to set another fortified with it is also significant, allowing you to get powerful fortified cards into play before your first turn, or to have more points of interaction on your opponent's first turn.
Additionally, Radiant Orb Of Divine Light itself is a fantastic piece in any Angel deck, regardless of focused Sanctify Synergy. The stax piece static combined with the repeatable Negate makes for a fantastic overall package.
Dwarves - Alehouse
The Alehouse dwarves have gotten two new pieces, including a new Exalted Warrior. Helga, The Alehouse Brewmaster is a perfect inclusion in any Alehouse deck, able to find any Alehouse Drink, trigger your drinks on both players turns, and recover any eradicated Alehouse pieces.
The brew ability is fantastic here, as it lets you use Alehouse Drink - Wine to find any other Drink. Additionally the Perish can both be a recursive piece to find back important pieces from eradication, such as any Drinks or Warriors eradicated by The Twilight Gardens. This can also be used to reset any copies of Exit The Alehouse, sending them back to deck to find again.
Alehouse Fisticuffs is another addition with plenty of cool playlines and options, buffing a warrior by up to 25 ATK in the right scenario. The reveal effect also provides a great way to conscript extra Alehouse Warriors from hand without having to pay the Bloodbourne to conscript with Moonshine.
Dwarves - Blastforge
The Blastforge archetype only received a single archetypal piece in the set, Grue, The Blastforge Hunter Owl. Whilst this is the only explicitly "Blastforge" card in the set, it's a great addition with tons of potential in the Blastforge archetype, and the various Archetypal crossover builds.
Check out the LRAW preview article for Grue here for more thoughts on the card!
Whilst Grue is the only archetypal piece for Blastforge, the deck is similar to Prometheus in that it can potentially make strong use of the first turn breaker cards from the set alongside Galterius. Onyx Amulet and Frozen Elemental Avalanche could both provide the deck with access to strong interactive pieces whilst maintaining the second player advantage of Galterius.
Frozen Elemental Avalanche is especially an interesting piece, potentially shutting down all of the interactive pieces set by your opponent on their first turn, letting you get the Blastforge running easier and safer. With the Frost Tempo lists tapping into Blastforge and Frozen archetype pieces, Elemental Avalanche could find additional value being a more easily recoverable and tutorable piece of disruption to setup Melt-Cannon kills.
Dwarves - Frost
Whilst Alehouse was given the Exalted, the Frozen archetype received some powerful options to let the archetype stand out more independently amongst the rest of the Dwarf Archetypes. Frozen Adventurer, Glacialina is huge in this way, giving us a Frozen Adventurer to revive with Freezalina which offers a solid amount of card advantage, whilst also helping to setup mill abilities. One notable factor with Glacialina is that she can loop together with Ancient Frozen Frontier to offer a potential route to find lethal. Costing 10 Consume per loop however, does mean you'll need a Frozen Adventurer Pick-Axe or two to have this combo push in enough damage to be worth the cost.
Apart from just the loop, Glacialina gives the Frozen archetype plenty of card recursion which can only get better as more Frozen tools become available.
Frozen Fist is the last of the Dwarves first turn breakers, conscripting or reviving a Frozen Dwarf to destroy up to three cards. To some degree the conscript/revive ability may be more of a cost than you may anticipate, as it requires you to have a Frozen Warrior in hand to use it on your first turn. As such the card is likely to be a solid option in the various Frozen combo decks at the moment such as Frost Tempo and Cold Brew, but the card is likely at it's strongest in a full Frozen deck
There'll undoubtedly need to be testing to see if Frost finally has enough pieces to stand on it's own, but if it does it'll be able to effectively leverage some great removal/control tools.
Whilst Gaia continues her unstoppable siege through the Unbound Realm, Castiel draws in more alchemic power over the Divinity Realm, and the clashing clans of the Frost Realm continue to power up. At the same time however, Mal'ady channels her Putrid Infestation across the Necro Realm, Merrisod continues to bolster her draconic forces, and the Demons of the Scorch realm continue their scheming...
Make sure to check out the second Spoiler Review, where I'll dive into the new additions for Titans, Demons, and the Mythic Beasts.