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Thomas Neilson

Sh'Lara Mystic Fire Ramp | Deck & Primer | January 27th, 2026

Written by - Thomas NeilsonJanuary 27th, 2025

What's Left

When it comes to Sh'Lara, there are really only 2 pieces on the Left Side that are crucial to your gameplan, with your Warlord and Synergy.

Unexpectedly, Sh'Lara is unchangeable, not only are many of your best Warriors locked to her, but she's frankly one of the strongest Warlords in the game. 80 DCM is always a nice boon, and her abilities are fantastic. Getting to destroy a Unified or Fortified off of your Magical Attack is fantastic, and the revive from the Special Ability has plenty of utility, even if it's a little more expensive.

The Synergy doesn't have any locked pieces, but it is the more notable in how it affects your gameplan. Ancient Ashborne Sanctuary makes you up to 5 of your Phoenix Hatchling tokens, heals you for up to 15, and lets you get back two incredibly important engine pieces in Awakening The Mystic Fire and Mystic Fire Arena. The consistency of access to these abilities on your third turn is huge for what you can reliably have enabled when trying to pull ahead of your opponent, and also lets you use Awakening and Arena more aggressively in the early game to start building up resources, even if they won't/don't stay on board.

Veil Of Enchantment // Magical Realm is just plain good. Finding any Mythical Beast Unified is great for setting up engine pieces when you're trying to end the game, and finding any Mythical Beast Fortified is awesome when it comes to matchups where you'll need to go a little longer.

The Guardian Slot for Sh'Lara is also more flexible, but I'm personally still a fan of Serenasada. The ability to have a more consistent early start is always useful, especially in a deck with more situational cards, and 80 AP lets you get greedier with powerful but AP hungry pieces like Magical Ward and Majik Void Collapse. That being said, Zenacon, The Magnificent Marvel, Viviana, The Festival Royalty, and Snapper The Roving Island are all similarly solid main deck considerations, just so long as you adjust your AP usage if you're using a 50 AP Guardian.

Turn 1: Kindling The Flame

The Core Engine

When it comes to your early game, there are a few notable pieces to consider. First is the core of your engine with two cards, Mystic Fire Arena and Awakening The Mystic Fire. These two cards are useful at every stage of the game, and they're key pieces to look for in your early draws and during mulligans.

Awakening The Mystic Fire lets you make a Phoenix Hatchling once per turn, but it's other once per turn is where the real power is, with the ability to sacrifice 2 Hatchlings to draw 2 cards. The ability to trade your tokens in for card advantage is huge when it comes to digging through your deck, and making room for more Warriors to enter play.

The other half is Mystic Fire Arena. In the early game we're most interested in the on-play ability to draw 2 cards and discard 2 cards. While Sh'Lara isn't a discard heavy archetype, the ability to filter cards and setup a few key ones is particularly useful. The Static ability is also important, but I'll get into that later.

Tutor Everything!

Now, alongside the ability to turn your birds into fuel, Awakening is important for another reason: some cards in the archetype get stronger if you have Awakening in play, especially with your two tutors.

Sh'Lara is absolutely loaded when it comes to good tutors. Most notably is Flame Of Mystic Fire Origin. For Bloodbourne 8 you get to search your deck for any Mystic Fire card, and with Awakening in play you get to search for another, making this a crucial way to find most of the pieces in your deck.

Mystic Fire Offspring isn't quite as flexible, but tutoring any Mystic Fire Warrior to play offers a bunch of flexibility for creating tokens, drawing cards, or blowing up the board. Again, Awakening powers this up, letting your Warrior of choice be accompanied by up to 3 Phoenix Hatchlings.

Niboosh, The Mystic Fire Jinn isn't as great when it comes to early setup, but it's another good tutor to mention here, this time for Phoenix Flames cards. While most of your deck is Mystic Fire, Phoenix Flames Conflagration, Phoenix Flames Bombardment, and Rebirth In Phoenix Flames are all great cards to be able to access.

Warrior Value

Now Sh'Lara isn't too Warrior heavy of an archetype, but you do have a few ways to recur your Warriors for extra value. Curious-Eyes, Mystic Fire Imp is awesome with Wisdom for filtering your early draws, and Progeny is great to make some early Tokens to sacrifice with Awakening.

Merv And Quase, Mystic Fire Eclipse Dragons is effectively just a third copy of Curious-Eyes here. The deck isn't too Warrior heavy, so using a conscript to just replace a card is a fine enough rate that's solid early.

Niboosh, The Mystic Fire Jinn is the last notable piece here, and while it's not an immediate card advantage Warrior, it's useful to both make Phoenix Hatchlings and to tutor some of your Phoenix Flames cards to start setting up your midgame pieces and win-conditions.

Turn 2: Building The Fire

When it comes to a Ramp Strategy, you're able to take over the lategame by methodically removing your opponent's resources while constantly building up your own. To let that happen however, the deck needs enough control tools and interaction to have the room to multiply it's resources. Luckily for Sh'Lara, you've got access to some fantastic ones.

Majik Void Collapse

My advice for Majik Void Collapse is that if your deck can run it, it likely should. Both halves of the card are fantastic, with the Static shutting down on-board Warrior abilities, and the Once per turn as a repeatable unified negate, albeit one a little consume heavy.

The ability to shut down Warrior Abilities is incredibly useful in a deck like this with a very limited number of on-field Keyword Abilities. The only 3 that clash with Collapse are Abraxis, The Mystic Fire Sphinx, Curious-Eyes, and Merv & Quase. The 3 Draw Warriors aren't ideal to shut down, but you're not as recursion/revive heavy as many archetypes, so most of the time you'll be able to drop your Draw warriors prior to Majik Void Collapse into play.

Now, Abraxis is a bit more of a relevant anti-synergy to be aware of, but frankly both of these cards are so incredibly potent that it's worth the risk.

Jolkure, The Mystic Fire Alpha

As it turns out, the real alpha diet consists entirely of Phoenix Hatchlings, and Jolkure's been bulking up to rip your opponent's board to shreds. With his Perish ability, Jolkure lets you turn any number of Phoenix Hatchlings into the destruction of a face-up card, letting you break through boards easily.

Mystic Fire Dragon Clash

The Magical Realm is home to many things, but not Retrieve Warriors. In their place however, Mystic Fire Dragon Clash fills a very similar role, losing the looping abilities inherent to true Retrieve Warriors, but with an incredibly relevant Static Ability to add another destruction trigger on top of all of your other destruction abilities.

Feathers In The Wind

Not a control tool, but a draw engine, Feathers In The Wind is a great way to increment your advantage over multiple turns. While your opponent tries to break through boards of Warriors, you get to tally up your Feathers In The Wind count to draw a whole bunch of cards. The in-discard ability is relevant too, especially against decks like Angels and Mortis, which can be some of the most difficult matchups for the deck.

I usually use Feathers In The Wind pretty aggressively, even if just to draw 3 cards, but you can also set it up proactively, such as with Abraxis, The Mystic Fire Sphinx. Which, speaking of...

Abraxis, The Mystic Fire Sphinx

That's right, Abraxis gets her own entire section - it's well deserved. Abraxis very well may be the strongest card in the entire Mystic Fire archetype, and she has great utility in practically every single stage of the game.

Early game, the ability of Abraxis to Swift, immediately destroy all Warriors and Recycle means you always have the ability to turn Abraxis into a new card at any point for 5 AP. When it comes to surviving, Abraxis can be just as strong as Ecrutek, getting to remove an entire board completely on demand.

The Swift here also lets you trigger a destruction off of Mystic Fire Dragon Clash on demand, especially useful at the end of an opponent's turn to destroy any one card on the field.

Even more useful then destroying your opponent's board however, is Abraxis's ability to extend a huge variety of playlines/win conditions, and to power up certain key cards.

Feathers In The Wind cares about the total number of Mythical Beast Warriors destroyed in a turn, while Mystic Fire Beast Power and Golden Urn Of Mystic Fire count the number of cards destroyed by Mythical Beast Card effects. Abraxis is one of the easiest ways to power all of these up, destroying a bunch of Warriors at the same time easily. This can also be done later with Mystic Fire Offspring, tutoring out Abraxis, and destroying all of the Phoenix Hatchlings you make with Offspring to rack up the destructions.

The last key is being able to setup a kill by destroying your own Warriors. You're often able to build multiple boards of Tokens in a single turn, and Abraxis is the easiest way to clear away Warriors that've already attacked to build another.

Turn 3: Burning It Down

Now, once you get into the late game, you're generally looking for an opportunity to close out the match, but you don't need to aggressively push for a win. Mystic Fire is great at grinding out the game by continually creating value, and blasting through your opponent's board until you exhaust them of resources. While the deck certainly can pursue a quick kill, let's start by looking at some of the tools for the deck to grind out value.

The Grind

When it comes to late game value, this is where some of your top end shines. Golden Urn Of Mystic Fire offers a constant stream of Tokens, alongside the ability to build up Ash Counters for some potent DCM recovery.

Sh'Lara's Special Ability is also notable here, with the ability to revive 2 Mythical Beast Warriors being especially fantastic with the new Curious-Eyes, Mystic Fire Imp to pay back half or all of the DCM cost while continuing to dig cards and build up boards.

Between Urn, Curious-Eyes, and Ancient Ashborne Sanctuary, Sh'Lara has plenty of resources to pad out your DCM and to win a game of attrition when matches go long. That being said, when you've got the opportunity, Sh'Lara can also close out a match through almost any DCM and any wall of Warriors...

Winning The Game

Now, one great thing with Sh'Lara is that your win-condition is pretty easy to generally define:

Make a board of Phoenix Hatchlings
Turn them into Mystic Fire Warriors
Buff 'em

For step 1, you've got a few options. Dominion Of Mystic Fire Cinders is one of the best options, but it needs a little setup. The on-play is a decent option to clear out Warriors and get back a little DCM, but the real gold here is the in-discard ability to eradicate it and increase your Warlord's Cool Down to make a full board. Notably, this ability can't be used the turn it was sent there, so it's a pretty good goal to try to get a copy of this into your discard pile as soon as you can to setup for a future kill.

Ancient Ashborne Sanctuary is also great for making a full board, alongside it's awesome recovery potential so it's a potent option past Veil Pierce.

The third option is also the easiest with Rebirth In Phoenix Flames. Bloodbourne 10, make a board of Phoenix Hatchlings, ez-pz.

Lastly, you're definitely able to build a board just off the other ways in the deck that generate tokens, such as using Mystic Fire Offspring to find Niboosh, then killing Niboosh, but the easiest way to setup a kill

For step 2, there's really just one option: Phoenix Flames Conflagration. Conflagration's Static is the main piece here, turning your Phoenix Hatchlings into Mystic Fire Warriors, which lets a few more cards interact with them. For one, you can now destroy them with Niboosh's Perish Ability, but more relevantly, they can now be buffed by Mystic Fire Arena and Mystic Fire Beast Power.

Now that your chickens can be buffed, let's get to closing out the game.

Mystic Fire Arena

Mystic Fire Arena gives your Mystic Fire Warriors +1 Atk for each Phoenix Hatchling Warrior you control. With a full board of chickens, that's 35 Atk on board. While that doesn't kill on it's own, it can kill if you're able to wipe your board clean. One easy way to do this is simply by using Awakening to sacrifice two of your Tokens, followed by using either Jolkure or Abraxis to destroy the rest.

In combination with 2 ways to make a board of chickens, (Dominion, Rebirth, Sanctuary) you'll be able to kill most opponents.

Mystic Fire Beast Power

Now, Arena is a solid/consistent way to push in damage, but Mystic Fire Beast Power in the much more exciting way to close things off. Beast Power tracks the number of cards destroyed this turn by Mythical Beast card effects to buff your Mystic Fire Warriors, and it's easy to use build this into a full kill with some of your big destruction abilities like Abraxis or Jolkure.

Math-wise, with a full board of Phoenix Hatchlings you'll need a +11 Atk buff to kill 65 DCM opponents, or +14 for 80 DCM.

In terms of getting to those numbers, Mystic Fire Offspring can be a great setup. Using Offspring you can tutor either Abraxis, The Mystic Fire Sphinx, or Jolkure, The Mystic Fire Alpha - depending on how many Warriors your opponent has. If they've got a full board, Offspring -> Abraxis will tick you up to 9 cards destroyed already, leaving only 2-5 more needed. That being said, most opponents will have paid some amount of Bloodbourne and/or you'll have dealt some damage to them prior, so you don't normally need to go quite this crazy.

Adding IT UP

There's a few other places you can squeeze out some board buffs too, with Phoenix Flames Conflagration's Once Per Turn ability to (Bestow) +1 Atk, and Phoenix Flames Bombardment giving a (Bestow) +2 if you've got an Arena in play.

If you're looking for some quick numbers, this chart has some quick reference numbers for damage ranges to hit.

Matchups & Sideboarding

Now for Sh'Lara there are two main "pain points" when it comes to matchups, which is generally more aggressive strategies, and decks with resilient boards.

Aggro Decks

Sh'Lara needs a chance to build up her resources, and aggressive decks can be a notable roadblock in this situation.

Sharn, as always, is one of the most notable decks in this facet. With the ability to break through smaller defenses, and with Rampage to punish a board of Warriors, Sharn can easily break through early defenses on a slower start.

Any other more aggressive decks is also problematic, but primarily those that can be more resilient. Castiel is another example of a resilient list which can push Sh'Lara onto the back foot and keep her there.

Sticky Decks

There are two main legions that fall into the "sticky" category: Angels and Undead.

In a deck based around destruction, Holy Counters can become an issue when it comes to unsticking a board. This hurts both in grindier situations when trying to remove key cards from play, but also when you're trying to close out the match. Helios & Luna shuts down Warriors from attacking, and if it's protected with Holy Counters it can be incredibly difficult to unstick the board to push in a kill.

For Mortis, with their Warrior recursion they can also retrieve any notable Act cards you destroy, and the Esmerelda -> Prysm death loop again shuts down your main angle of attack.

So, with those to consider, let's break down what I'm currently packing in my sideboard:

Waphoja, Jinn Of The Secret City

This guy might look a little funky here, but I've got him in the sideboard for a very specific reason. Waphoja's Consume ability lets you shuffle up to 3 cards from each player's discard pile back into their decks, then everyone draws 3. Against Mortis, having a way to break Death Loop, and shuffle away copies of Denial By Doomfire and Gone But Never Forgotten is fantastic for creating a window of opportunity to push in a kill from a grindy position. Having that ability on a Consume ability specifically, is great for ensuring you always have it exactly when you need it. I'm only really interested in Waphoja against exactly Mortis, but it's a useful enough tool in a difficult enough matchup that I'm a big fan of having access to it.

Zenacon, The Magnificent Marvel

Zenacon is a much less necessary option then Waphoja, but I'm a fan of having it against decks like Sharn when you lose the die roll. Being able to turn off starters like Sildud's Call Of The Orcbane and Reservoirs Of Revival Ooze is great for getting a little more breathing room early when going second. He's definitely not a needed sideboard card, but I'm a fan of having the option.
I would also highly recommend running the Fortified Devotion over the Unified Devotion with how valuable the Unified card slots are in the archetype.

Ecrutek, The Wandering Warlock & Alburdunn's Mayoral Announcement

As mentioned, Aggro decks can be a bit of a pain in the archetype, enough that I'm main-decking Welcome To Alburdunn with even more defensive tools in the side.
Ecrutek is my choice for Battle decks, since it dodges backrow destruction abilities, which is where you most need the backup.
On the Effect damage side I'm opting for Mayoral Announcement over Ecrutek, since it's easier to protect it's resolution over Ariyus, and has more value against incremental burn strategies.

Shallows At Emerald Loch & Sunrise, Consumed By Courage

These pieces are ways to tune your control tools into various matchups, Shallows At Emerald Loch lets you keep tutor heavy decks like Gaia and Sharn at bay.
Sunrise, Consumed By Courage is another way to help against stickier decks, getting rid of recursive tools in Mortis, or Holy Counter laden cards in Michael.

Concrete Catacombs

Catacombs is great, especially in a deck with barely any eradication effects, so I'm a fan of running max copies to have the most opportunities to shut down some of the strongest erad-focused decks in the meta.

Ephideon's Destiny Dust

Again, just a solid sideboard card, Mechanism is a rough card to include in a deck leveraging Majik Void Collapse and a higher dismantle/seal count. Ephideon's Destiny Dust is however a great card to have against the occasional bounty heavy list, and with an 80 DCM/80 AP setup you can pretty confidently pay the full price. That being said this is an easy slot to cut/tune depending on how much you expect Bounty lists to appear.

Closing Thoughts

Overall, Sh'Lara is a consistently potent competitive list with the ability to overturn some of the grindiest decks in the game. Additionally, there's a lot of room to build a competitively viable version of the list with a much smaller renown/exalted count, only needing Abraxis and Curious-Eyes to play, with the rest being tech slots.

I'd especially recommend Sh'Lara to anyone interested in exploring other Mythical Beast Decks. Dragons and Jinns both have some awesome lists, but can be a little bit less clear in their gameplans when it comes to learning decks. Sh'Lara has a much clearer end-goal, and clearer routes to get there, so it's a top recommendation of mine for new players looking to dip their toes into the competitive environment.

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