Guardians' Creed Spoilers Review #2
A few days ago we covered the new cards from GCD coming to the Titans, Dwarves, and Angels. Today, we're turning our attention to the Necro Realm, Scorch Realm, and Magical Realm.
Undead - Mal'ady
Second only to Gaia, Mal'ady has also been blessed with great new options to give the putrid archetype significantly more power with some great starters, engine tools, finishers, and stax pieces.
Putrid Eruption Bloom and Putrid Infestation Sentinel, Horrix give Mal'ady an incredible amount of gas to start the game out and to keep cards flowing. Mal'ady has been able to find some success in the past, but it's largely been reliant on the Grimm engine to keep going. These additions allow the Putrid archetype to have much more gas on it's own, as well as some great recovery off of Putrid Eruption Bloom.
Asphyxia, The Putrid Silencer and Putrid Poison Spreader both play double duty for the deck, giving Mal'ady ways to burn out your opponent, and acting as stax pieces. This is fantastic for giving the deck significantly more flexibility and overlap with it's tools, letting it take advantage of the tutors/recursion pieces that Mal'ady can leverage.
Asphyxia's Suffocate ability has the potential to heavily constrict certain decks, locking out card draw abilities. Against certain decks this won't hurt the most. Angels for example, can lean heavily on Wisdom triggers which get around the ability. Luckily there are variety of ways to hate out Asphyxia's Ability with Concrete Catacombs locking it out of Eradication and removing it, and Majik Void Beast stripping away all of it's keywords. The Perish is great too, letting your Decay triggers turn from minor annoyances, to a major threat.
Putrid Poison Spreader is both a great way to find your important Warriors, deal some incremental damage to your opponent, and to reset your Special Ability to keep the board locked down in a debuff.
Undead - Generic
The tech cards available for both Mortis and Mal'ady offer a selection of tools for more interactive gameplan, with Amethyst Amulet being an interesting option for an Undead deck focused on milling out it's opponent alongside Haunted Labyrinth. Hissy and Unholy Trinity also offer new ways to force your opponent to sacrifice cards, ripping apart a boardstate.
Demons - Generic
Demons have consistently been at the top of the totem pole through EOR, with both Onoskelis and Adramelech being some of the best performing warlords in their respective archetypes. Remedying this, neither Warlord is receiving a significant amount of support for their central archetypes, but rather pieces of support for adjacent archetypes, alternative game plans, and some solid generic interactive tools. Additionally, with both decks being previously more reliant on explosive openers, the plethora of strong interactive pieces should help to push both Demons into more fair and interactive game-plans.
On the generic end, Aeshma, Consumed By Hate is one of the stronger entries in the "Anime style" cycle of cards. Being able to select and rip a card out of your opponent's hand is a strong ability, but as a 1 for 1 which costs 5 Consume and 5 Bloodbourne, it's certainly not free, and hand hate cards can fall off significantly in power as a game goes on. Eradicating the right card can put your opponent on the back foot right off the bat and hit important pieces, but these hand hate cards can quickly fall off, and it's not a great top-deck in a grindy mid-late game situation.
Soul Scourge is another new solid interactive piece, negating a warrior for cost, similar to the Angel knockout card. With this one, you get the benefit of completely stealing the warrior and it's keywords, with Corrupt being fantastic in the right matchups. Having a Consume cost additionally makes this an appealing Warrior negate option for the Demon realm in comparison to others like Final Resting Place.
Demons - Onoskelis
The Fallen Control archetype saw little attention in the set, understandably with it's historic over-performance. Onoskelis has however received some fantastic support for the Mount Bane archetype, a more midrange version of Onoskelis, focusing on Rapture On Mount Bane and the "Lava" and "Mount Bane" Warriors.
Mount Bane Magma Chamber is a great consistency piece for the archetype, finding your important Warriors in your Mount Bane Monster, Sekhmet, and Sinister. The discard ability is also a solid way to fuel your discard effects, giving you the needed synergy without relying on otherwise dead or weak cards.
Mount Bane is also getting a little extra revive power with Mount Bane Firestorm, which can also help to power through a burn kill in conjunction with your Sinister, Mount Bane Lava Spines and Molten Valley Of Mount Bane.
Other than the Mount Bane support, Onoskelis will be mostly playing around with the variety of new interactive pieces for Demons and Bounty to complement it's control game-plan.
Demons - Adramelech
Like Onoskelis, Adramelech is only seeing a few direct pieces of archetype support, but the few options give some sweet new synergies and play-lines. Black Magic Manipulation is an interesting piece to play into your turn 3 wheel ability, to help trigger some Erad effects and put more cards from your opponent's deck into their hand to charge up your Special Ability and Ermadexa.
The eradication ability also gives some sweet options with powering up your Soul Token purge effects, giving you a little extra oomph. It'll be exciting to see if Black Magic lists shift slightly to make better use of this card as a way to churn through both players decks.
Importantly, Adramelech will now be fighting through an additional amount of hate in this set, with Majik Void Typhoon being reprinted and much more accessible for the player who want it, and with the printing of Mysterious Mechanism which can mess up Adramelech's eradication synergies, recover important cards hit by eradication effects, and turning off the number of solid bounty negates and revival tools currently leveraged by Adramelech.
Mythic Beasts - Merrisod
Merrisod had a little more gas out of the gates on EOR's release in comparison to Gaia and Mal'ady, but she's still recieving a few solid pieces to bolster her damage output capabilties, and interactive pieces. Dragon Dangerclaw and Dragon Tail Beatdown give Merrisod a few more reanimation options, and Dangerclaw also provides a way to eradicate any Dragon card on your opponent's turn, as an incredibly flexible interaction piece.
Incendiary Dragon Fire is a powerful win condition for Dragons, threatening a solid 25 damage burst across a full board of Crystal Dragon Eggs. The Shed ability of Geode, Crystal Scales Dragon, is another solid piece for setting up a plethora of synergies and abilities, whilst also providing incremental burn damage.
Mythic Beasts - Generic
Ironically a few of the Dragon archetype pieces have some great potential to see play in Sh'Lara as well. Lamp Of The Dueling Dragon is one of these, whilst the card gets the most gas in Merrisod, giving almost all of your warriors swift, and a way to trigger your eradication abilities, but in a more zoo focused build of Sh'Lara, Lamp is a way to get extra warrior conscriptions of Merv&Quase, and Niboosh, as well as an extra bit of potential card draw with enough adjacent synergy.
Dragon Shimmerwall is a new Fortified negate, giving the Mystic Beast realm access to 2 different great negate options between it and Magical Ward. Importantly, Magical Ward is a consume cost, whilst Shimmerwall is Bloodbourne, letting you shift between the two depending on your reliance on your Consume and Bloodbourne. Shimmerwall also offering a negate on turn 1 can also help against explosive openers, including Sharn, which Sh'Lara can struggle to stop.
Morganite Amulet is also one of the stronger pieces in the cycle, stripping token keywords in crucial matchups such as Adramelech Black Magic and Sharn Boars. Both of these decks can be fast enough to run through Sh'Lara's grindy setup, so having a relevant hate piece is fantastic in these matchups.
Mal'ady's Putrid Plague continues to infest the Necro Realm, the Demons let their schemes come into fruition, and the Dragons put the pressure on with their Claws, tails and scales! In the Mortal and Ravage Realms however, technology and the arcane clash as the powerful Magi come forth, and Duxvox's terrifying doomsday devices begin to advance...
Check out the third Spoiler Review, when I'll be breaking down the final two legions of cards: Orcs and Heroes. Additionally, I'll be exploring some cards that got missed from this Spoiler Review and the previous one, including the titular Guardian's Creed!