Raph's Pop-up Tourney Winning deck "Ninja Darkclaw"

[Raphael Majere]

Yep, found it. Thanks!

Still, I am a little curious why Snow Sapphire is not played more, especially for stalling tactics.

Because stall decks generally don't work too well (unless it's the dreaded millstalker), and that ss armor is available for only mages and warriors which tend to be more aggressive in nature, if so, it makes more sense to pack more cards that push the deck to win ( more win cons like allies, KP, weapons, burn, draw) rather than put a defensive card like ss armor. Also ss armor can be destroyed with a variety of cards, like lln and sb.

There are fun decks with freeze. Like elad shatter ice decks with VoW and frosted urigon.

Likewise ss armor also stop or hinder most Gwen decks greatly.

[hitmantb]

Doesn't a single heavy armor ruin you?

Like a snow sapphire or even King's Pride?

Just curious how you deal with items, will definitely try it!

[Raphael Majere]

Doesn't a single heavy armor ruin you?

Like a snow sapphire or even King's Pride?

Just curious how you deal with items, will definitely try it!

See Above for ss armor. King's pride, not really, as long as I play it well, his buffed allies cannot attack due to fm and rd.

[recluse]

Really like this deck ralph, look alot like me own But just saying, Snow Sapphire is still a problem for this deck as long as your opponent knows what you are playing. In many tourney's right now you can see your opponent's hero's before playing, and if they happen to have a mage... well you will see 3 - 4 Snow Sapphires in the deck. But yes, you are right, normally it won't show up. If it does, you really are forced to run some ley line's, which are really hard to budget in my case but you gotta do what you gotta do.

[Conquestadore]

Really like this deck ralph, look alot like me own But just saying, Snow Sapphire is still a problem for this deck as long as your opponent knows what you are playing. In many tourney's right now you can see your opponent's hero's before playing, and if they happen to have a mage... well you will see 3 - 4 Snow Sapphires in the deck. But yes, you are right, normally it won't show up. If it does, you really are forced to run some ley line's, which are really hard to budget in my case but you gotta do what you gotta do.

Not sure about what rating you are playing in or what tourney, but Snow Sapphires are really rare in the meta right now. They do exist, and I have a superb deck that runs 4 of them. But they are outliers, and I would not specifically tech against them. So does Rothem's, which star with low frequency in the meta.

[Raphael Majere]

Really like this deck ralph, look alot like me own But just saying, Snow Sapphire is still a problem for this deck as long as your opponent knows what you are playing. In many tourney's right now you can see your opponent's hero's before playing, and if they happen to have a mage... well you will see 3 - 4 Snow Sapphires in the deck. But yes, you are right, normally it won't show up. If it does, you really are forced to run some ley line's, which are really hard to budget in my case but you gotta do what you gotta do.

I totally agree with u. But truly, the better mage decks out there don't run ss armor. This deck is similar to solo/semi solo Gwen, which relies on rapid fire and ss bow.

The idea is to deal max damage within the least amount of turns. 6 dmg for DC, 8 dmg for Gwen.

If either of these heroes can hit only once, due to ss armor freeze, then the strength of the deck is severely hampered, cos not only is the dmg halved, the hero (DC/Gwen) cannot even attack again for 2 turns. And after the freeze is lifted, the DC/Gwen is yet again delayed when it attacks the opponent.

However, what I want to highlight that once ss armor hits board, it's sick too the stomach, but not an auto loss. If u See OP, I did suggest that you can try swapping some cards out for acid jet.

So tweak as U like. there is no perfect deck out there due to fairly excellent balancing by PFG. The idea is to build and play decks that will do well in a said meta or said pool of players (can be small or big).

[Conquestadore]

So tweak as U like. there is no perfect deck out there due to fairly excellent balancing by PFG. The idea is to build and play decks that will do well in a said meta or said pool of players (can be small or big).

^

[fzian]

Thanks for the detailed explanation. I did mention that it is only natural that decks have some weaknesses at some point; just glad that in my testing the strength of the deck far outweighs the weaknesses

[Raphael Majere]

Thanks for the detailed explanation. I did mention that it is only natural that decks have some weaknesses at some point; just glad that in my testing the strength of the deck far outweighs the weaknesses

Ah yes, u got it.

On the tourney side, there are slightly less people playing mages as compared to QM, hence this deck is definitely 'stronger' in QM than in tourneys.

In tourneys, you'll have good players with small deck sizes with ele/zal packing morphic, ambers packing sabre, priest packing FP, bb/maj packing shrieks/colossus which can be very hard for this deck.

[Thirroxin]

My darkclaw is strikingly close to this yet has horrible match-ups against the more solo setting hunters. Where they double shot each turn, use Rain Delay + Into the Forest sometimes even with Negatia. Any tips? 2.gif