Absolutely, but Portalis an inherently broken card.
That said, lets take a look at Eladwenaggressive. Turn 2 it will lay a Blake, turn 3 it will lay an Aldon/Jasmine/Blake
, turn 4 it will lay a portal, turn 5 it will lay two creatures and be low on cards. If you've been laying creatures in this time also (which you should, in a relatively balanced way given the mirror), at worst you have nothing on the board and he has pmety, but you've lost no life and built up some shadow power or at least lost very little. In a better case you'd be trading some critters for some critters and the board position would be relatively even (60/40 or 75/25 in Eladwen
's favour due to her own ability). The top and bottom of this is, when you hit the early midgame (4-5 resources), as long as Eladwen
hasn't completely overwhelmed you (Puwen kills Blake so he has to be dealt with, that's why he's a great roadblock) you're starting to enter Tidal Wave board reset territory where the game becomes so stalled that your mill starts to take effect. If they play into you, they lose card advantage and you continually heal up at least some of the damage. If they don't play into you, you outheal their effective 'dps'. Also remember that a typical Eladwen
deck plays 6 cards with no use other than their resource pile (3 Portals and 3 Research) so your 'time to decked' is even faster - Eladwen
will have to hold those cards in its hand to avoid death by draw damage, at which point you win because you still have resources.
If Eladwen doesn't play hyper aggressive - it needs to get a research down, it drops a Sandrasomewhere, etc - you are also getting what you want. Eladwen will try to establish board control and then beat you down. Beating you down when you're spamming cheap roadblocks and healing 1hp/turn is, in reality, not that easy, and as soon as a Tidal Wave
hits that board control is severely diminished.
What this essentially comes down to is the same thing that Darkclawdoes to Eladwen; make Eladwen unable to kill you, and then kill it slowly. This deck just does it better (albeit more difficult) but can do the same to most decks rather than dying to certain matchups.
Let me just re-caveat this though; this deck will not beat Eladwen every time by any means. Eladwen is abhorrent and trying to find a perfect solution to it is simply not possible as it is just better. What this deck does do is certainly give you the tools to beat it, and give you the tools to exercise your superior skill over an Eladwen (or other) opponent.
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