Terrible Day For Rain - Mal'ady Garden Stax

MAtt Waller

Mal'ady Garden Stax| Deck & Primer |June 23, 2024

Written by - Matt WallerEdited by - Thomas NeilsonJune 23rd, 2024

Putrid Showers Bring Twilight FLowers

So you want to play Mal’ady, torture your opponents, and lock them down? Well this is the deck for you! This deck is comprised of 3 main sets of pieces, Engine, Stall/Taxes, and Damage. It is important to note that some pieces fit into multiple of the categories, ultimately it is better to have things fit in as many categories as possible where applicable.

The Engine

Starting out with the engine which is the easiest of the categories, these are things that will either set up our damage/stall pieces or things that will put us ahead more against our opponent. The main key pieces of the engine are Putrid Infestation Sentinel, Horrix, Putrid Infestation, Mal'ady's Horrific Harvest, and Putrid Eruption Bloom.

Putrid Infestation Sentinel, Horrix is the bread and butter of this deck, I would ultimately say that this deck is not powerful without Horrix. Horrix when in discard, on either player's turn you can pay Bloodbourne 2 and eradicate him to Eradicate 2 and draw 2. This sets up your own eradication effects while giving a really good card advantage. Adding onto this, you want to be able to have ways of putting Horrix into the bin to be able to reuse his Infest ability. Some cards that can do this are ways to revive him like Rotting Lake Putrid, or resolve effect of infestation. Another way to move him from the eradication to discard is to use Nothing Left But Putrid Plague, in which you just reset him to the bin.

Putrid Infestation is not necessarily an engine, but it can do a lot for you. It allows you to eradicate up to 5 putrid cards as cost and then on resolution will revive up to 5 target warriors from your eradication zone. This allows you to search and eradicate 5 cards and give you some really nice effects. The pile of what you search can vary but the standard idea is to go with Asphyxia to see her as early as you can, flower farm to make some tokens, and bloom to heal so the effect doesn't hurt nearly as much. What I search next really depends what is in my hand. If there is a harvest in hand, I would like to send things that I want to grab, these things depend but can be things like Mausoleum and Rain/Parasol. It is important to note that infestation eradicates for cost and revives on resolution, meaning anything that you eradicate with cost will resolve on the stack before you revive. Pro Tip: This is a time in which you can respond to your own stuff with suffocate.

Mal'ady's Horrific Harvest is a really simple card and doesn’t need much explaining, it destroys ALL tokens on the field, not just your own, then if you break 2 or more, add up to 2 Putrid cards from your eradication to hand, basically a Gifts From Arion that is hateful.

Finally, but not least, we find bloom. It mills up to 3 as cost, then on resolution eradicates up to 3 cards from your discard, not just undead, alongside that making up to 3 flowers. This can activate all the effects that you need from your eradication. This card has a second effect but we will talk about this later as it is not apart of the engine.

The hidden engine in the deck is the potential soon to be queen, Twilight Princess, Hyacinth, the twilight exalted from Creed. When she enters play, she searches for a twilight unified and fortified. When she leaves she adds up to 2 Twilight cards to your hand from your bin (Including herself).

Stall/Taxes (STAX)

This deck will absolutely punish you for greed, so you need to be fuel efficient with your engine, there’s no point in burning all your resources as you will run out of things to do then ultimately lose to yourself. How fast you need to play is a matchup dependent and ultimately dependent if you can suffocate out as well.

Speaking of, the key stax to this deck is suffocate, this is the most consistent piece and why this deck is absolutely played in putrid. Suffocate is a really fun thing that says “No more drawing cards until my next turn” Note that they still draw in reinforcements (if it has not been stopped OR was skipped), so any ability or effect that lets them draw cards does not activate. Important to note that this does not stop things like searching, retrieving or wisdom. Wisdom does not “draw” it “adds” 1 to hand, its drawing with extra steps but is not drawing which matters a lot.

Ultimately the next important piece to this deck, although you might need to fight the local community champion AJ for them, is Void Collapse. Void Collapse shuts off all their keywords but also yours, meaning it shuts off your prince and your hyacinth. Collapse also has a once per turn Consume 20 negate as cost card. Very important to note that it negates as cost, use it wisely.

The only piece that we have not covered in stopping them from doing what their deck wants to do is they can still search. Introducing Majik Void Aurora, the only thing that can be searched for is bounty, which is great since Hyacinth gets around it. But wait there's more! Aurora also protects all your face-down fortified cards from being destroyed, a nice little blanket never hurt anyone, except them.

This next card doubles in both Stax and in damage, it is Twilight Magnolia, able to be searched off of Hyacinth, and makes it so whenever a warrior enters the field (not including manifest) the controller of that warrior takes 3 damage and then the opposing player will heal 3. This will slow a lot of people down as they are punished for playing warriors. It also has a lovely once per turn to replenish your AP by 10, allowing you to reuse your consume and be more greedy with the consume, if this card gets destroyed, just kill hyacinth and you can get it back.

Death’s Doorstep is not to be reasoned, all perishes are my perishes, which is super good, and it has protection from Unified or Fortified cards. It is harder to remove and a lot of the time people will forget about it, as they will with a lot of your taxes.

The final Stax in this deck is Altar of affliction, all unified cards that do not have a Bloodbourne cost on any of its effects will now cost Bloodbourne 5, if ANY of the effects have a BB cost, it also costs consume 5. This also counts as a part of the damage outlet.

Damage

Being able to slow your opponent down is super great, but it is only good if you are closer. Being able to force someone into your jail does not matter if you cannot finish them off. However you can just lock them out and force a draw if needed (Not recommended for casual play, don’t do too much in tourney or you will not make top 8).

The decay package is the main damage, so these are your horrix, and then your tokens. (Yes horrix has decay, do not forget about it like I have). Your tokens are made by things like Acidic Rain, bloom, and Parasol (Which eradicates their warrior or your own, for cost). Decay does 1 damage for each time it activates, if only there was a way to make the decays happen more? Introducing everyone’s least favourite card to see but your fav card, Asphyxia! On her perish, she makes all your decay abilities activate 3 times instead of once. Important to note: if she dies at the same time as a bunch of decays, her perish will resolve before the decays are active meaning they will still be once.

Everyone’s second least favourite exalted, is Mal'ady's Putrid Mausoleum, which puts a negative 2 on the board and makes all warriors that die to a negative board effect deal 2 damage to all opposing warlords of the controller’s Mausoleum. Pair this with decay and now decays are dealing 3 damage, pair both this and Asphyxia and now your decays deal 5 damage. Acidic Rain makes it so that you pay 8 to make 4 flowers, if both of these are up you are dealing 20 damage for the price of 8.

An accumulative damage piece that will creep very quickly if not dealt with is Spores, in which the opposing players take one damage for each warrior in every discard and eradication zone at the end of each turn.

Eruption bloom can make damage however when it is eradicated is a big heal card, healing one for every putrid card in discard and eradication. With ways to recycle this you can have some really annoying ways to live.

There is not a bunch of unique damaging pieces but it does not need many more, what is important is that it is consistent and you can get a lot of residual chip damage over many turns.

Mulligan Tips

You are looking for either an infestation in your hand or a bloom in your hand to start the game. What’s nice is that you can start with either since we play Meg’Saria (best guardian), so if we see infestation we send Horrix as access to eradicate 2 and draw 2, but if we see bloom without infestation, we send asphyxia to eradicate her with bloom to set up suffocate.

Mal'ady's Horrific Harvest is another strong card if paired with Putrid Infestation, but you're primarily looking for Putrid Eruption Bloom and Putrid Infestation, and some way to have access to both Asphyxia and Horrix.

Conclusion

The way that this deck plays, very on theme with the deck, plays very much the way that snakes hunt. They tire out their prey and then when they are able to, they go for one foul swoop, ultimately suffocating their prey after striking when they are vulnerable. That is exactly what you do, force your opponent’s to spend their resources to do sub optimal things and get them to play around your taxes. If a maus sticks on field till your veil pierce turn you can do some crazy things, but the crazier things can be done on their turn. Snakes do not hunt in the comfort of their own home but stalk a creature from their home where they feel comfortable and let their guard down. That is when you kill them in one motion.

I hope this was a good primer, I want to thank you for reading all of it, if you do have any questions about it, my dms is always open, on the LRAW discord, my name is “Matt | TSW”. There were a couple cards that were not listed but were simply things like negates, blanket revives, prince for retrieve, or just staple cards like mists or void hollow.

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