Hows is this for a competitive Elementalis deck?

[crazygambit]

MC and Transference are king, HBM is useful (but not necessary), feedback loops win, Elementalis heal is not necessary but can be helpful in some situations. Well tuned, either hero beats his opponent with his own cards.

There is no need to try to deck your opponent, and trying to do so causes more losses than it gains wins.

The real downside though is the prevalence of opposing elemental heroes you'll face. MC and Transference are now far from reliable when more than half of the decks you play against have the same tools. Not nearly as much fun now.

Actually mirror matches tend to be the most fun. Lots of strategy involved in when to use transference, what crap you keep on your hand to get transferred, when to cast allies and force the opponents to play mind control. There's a lot going on in Elemental vs Elemental and it's a lot of fun IMO.

[Thuull]

Actually mirror matches tend to be the most fun. Lots of strategy involved in when to use transference, what crap you keep on your hand to get transferred, when to cast allies and force the opponents to play mind control. There's a lot going on in Elemental vs Elemental and it's a lot of fun IMO.

Fun, sure...but this is a "competetive Elementalis deck" thread. Personally I agree with you...I enjoy those matches. But I pointed that out because the goal of the thread is competetive-ness, and facing so many opposing Elementals is a factor here. What is a "sure thing" against a none Elemental opponent becomes a complete gamble and a sweat inducing need to not screw up at all in so many matches.

[shannong]

Imba, assuming you play under the same name as your forum name here, I recall playing against you yesterday some time with my Zaladar "slow creatures" deck versus this deck or something nearly like it. You saw what happened.

I've had a hard time before as Zaladar against Elementalis "mill" decks that ran ONLY 4 sparks and was tuned down to 30 cards. A really hard time. It's why I now run with 1x Eternal Renewal even in my Zaladar deck and pray it doesn't show up too early or get stolen from me when I need it most.

But you need to trim the fat from this one. Only one Bazaar is all you need for your mill engine. Bad Santa is useless deadweight. HBM is somewhat weak against Zaladar in an Elementalis "mill" deck unless you can cycle through more than 4 of them by mid game, because Zaladar only needs 5 resources to do anything. An early HBM or two never fazes me at all when your early allies can't hit me hard. IMO HBMs hit much harder when they're in a Mage hero's burn deck (like that nice Majiya deck that Ice has been working on).

Put it another way, I tried an Elementalis mill deck again for a few matches and even though I was able to recycle HBMs relatively early in two of them, creating a serious resource imbalance in my favor by mid game, that resource imba didn't really help out the deck strategy by any significant amount. By contrast, putting out even one or two early HBMs when I play a Majiya deck really slants things in my favor and it's an uphill battle for the opponent after that.

I guess the best way to put it is that in a "mill" deck, your main path to victory is simply running them out of cards and then nibbling them to death. HBMs only stall them for a few turns, but after that they have all the resources they need to keep rolling until they run out of cards. A good mill deck doesn't need the HBM stall; you've got plenty of other stalling mechanics, and those 4 HBM slots could probably be put to better use for either more stall or more utility. Resource imba only benefits decks that can push out a lot of early damage, or that just need a little breathing room to set up their main engine for their path to victory without too much interference.