First and foremost, thanks to the guidewriters in this section of the forum: I've read some older Amber guides who inspired me to play her, and this decklist should be a bit similar to some others, but I wanted to give a better insight on the deck itself.
Amber Rain is a Warrior Human Hero in Shadow Era, whose skill in combination with the rest of the cardpool available for Human Warriors allows her to play a really strong Aggro-Control (commonly refered to as "Tempo") strategy. Being an Aggro-Control deck means that you are playing the most versatile kind of deck possible, one that rewards good play more than most other decks in the field. Generally, an aggro-control player has to know when to play aggro (or be the beatdown, go for the face, play a low-economy game, finish as fast as possible) against slower decks and when to play control (card advantage and quality, field manipulation, favorable trades and X-for-1 scenarios, inevitability) against faster decks. And since you are the one who decides the pacing of the game on the fly, it's almost like leading your opponent in an improvised waltz of death and sorrow. Thus, the deckname, Valse Impromptu.
Now, why Amber? Well, not only Amber has a great cardpool to select from (Her weapons, Retreat!, Layarian Seductress...), but her quick skill along with her weapon allows her to go for the face when aggro, take care of more threats when control, and overall keeping the board clear and accelerating your deck, putting her right in the middle of the spectrum compared with the slower Boris or the sometimes faster but more ally reliant Tala.
Card List:
Hero: Amber Rain
Allies (16):
4x Yari Bladedancer
4x Priest of the Light
1x Spirit Warden
2x Fleet-footed Messenger
3x Layarian Seductress
2x Yari Marksman
Abilities (17):
4x Crippling Blow
4x Retreat!
2x Glimmer of Hope
2x Smashing Blow
4x Blood Frenzy
1x Enrage
Items (6):
4x Jeweler's Dream
2x War Flail
First, allies.
Most of them are a reasonable drop on an empty board. Most of them have high health and most have effects that allow them to be useful even if they only last a single turn, and lots of those effects are removal of pseudo-removal. The tradeoff is that they mostly have low attack, but the weapon package compensates for that.
Yari Bladedancer is the best 2 drop for removal available for Human Warriors. It has good attack for racing your opponent down, good health, and paired with another ally, you can remove some bigger allies that otherwise would counterattack you. Layarian Diplomat is also another choice if the meta calls for it, and he does more the turn he is summoned, which is the theme of the allies in this deck.
Priest of the Light solves one of the big issues this deck has: Hero Powers, mainly those based on removal (Zaladar, Nishaven, Praxix). 1 life is also cool (nulls one turn of Blood Frenzy), and good attack, but lacking in health for a 3-drop. Recurring this with Retreat! breaks the legs of decks that rely on Hero Power.
Spirit Warden is a tech choice (AKA a matchup-specific card, in this case, graveyard recursion decks). It also has great toughness.
Fleet-footed Messenger has a great effect for cycling additional unneeded weapons, Blood Frenzies and Healing attachments. Also has nice toughness and Haste, which makes him a good weapon breaker.
Layarian Seductress has not-so-good stats, but considering that you don't want to have that many resources available, she's just such a good delay option for you... Great when you are a bit behind and trying to regain control, or on the draw, but a bit bad on the play, so you only run 3.
Yari Marksman is great removal and has nice attack for racing. He's the start to turn a bad board into a winning board. Being your bomb, you run 2.
Now, for the attachments/items/support abilities:
Crippling Blow and Retreat! are real stars in this deck. So cheap, yet so effective in buying yourself some turns to really dominate the board early on... When the opponent spends all of their 4 or 5 resources on a single ally and you just stop them, with no bigger cost to you, even more so with JD equipped... Use them right in the earlygame and it's really hard for an opponent with no mass removal to retake the board. Retreat! has another function of allowing you to replay allies with summon effects, like Layarian Seductress, Priest of the Light, and Yari Marksman.
Glimmer of Hope, I feel, is better than Bad Santa, since you only want to use it to fish for a Blood Frenzy or Jeweler's Dream, and you'd rather not give more cards to your opponent if possible. 2 is enough to bump your Turn 3-to-5 Blood Frenzy to very consistent levels.
Smashing Blow is against weapons and armor: they are oppressive when you are behind, and slow you down when you are ahead. Artful Squire is another chance, but costing 4 is hard on your gameplan.
Blood Frenzy is absolutely mandatory. One life for one card is simply broken, ask any Magic player. Since you don't concern yourself with card quality for trading (Retreat! is at -1 for card advantage, for example), you simply need more cards, as to not lose steam later on. Care on the timing to drop this, since it does not lead to board advantage.
All 3 healing attachments have their qualities. Mettle is slower but safer, Enrage is the fastest but not permanent, Rampage is the middle term but has bad synergy with some of your removal. I run one Enrage and that's enough for me, I seldom need it.
Lastly, weapons:
Jeweler's Dream: We all know this card is broken with Amber. Best case scenario it's 12 damage to the face for a net +4 resource, and most times, at the very least, it pays for itself. This is just plain acceleration and makes the deck so opressive when on a lead it's not even funny.
War Flail is your bomb, the weapon that will remove most annoying threats and deal a lot of damage, up to 16. Run 2 since it's expensive.
This list is not set in stone though, you should swap some things if needed to take care of popular decks!
Some Considerations:
Unlike a Midrange deck, which mostly plays whatever card is individually strong and has good aggro and good control cards, an Aggro-Control plays mostly cards that can be used both in an Aggro sense and in a Control sense. The midrange deck, or even a pure aggro or control deck has good agressive cards or good control cards, but their cards aren't versatile enough. On any given game, a portion of cards are amazing and the other portion is not, while on an aggro-control deck all the cards are good at any given moment. Yari Marksman is a huge beater or removal. Crippling Blow is protection for your creatures and removal. You get the drift.
This means that you need to be able to correctly identify if you need to be the aggro player or the control player. Since your deck can easily shift between both modes, you are pretty much always ahead of the curve in Rated games: most decks won't directly counter yours, unless it was created with that purpose. Being able to exploit this fact leads to better winrates. At the same time, the deck is really hard to play correctly, since every single play changes the state of the board and forces you to alter your plan and assess if you are still on beatdown or control mode. This is an interactive deck, not a deck that is looking to do its own thing every game. Every game is different, every game is fun, and every game is a chance to learn how to better play your role.
A thing you have to keep in mind is that you are mostly concerned with having a stronger board than your opponent. This means that spending life on Blood Frenzy, taking damage to remove allies and bouncing cards back to the opponent's hand are all choices you are willing to make to achieve a stronger board position. Every ally has to be dealt with swiftly, every weapon of armor broken as soon as possible. The opponent must not play the match. Make his life hell. This is what I mean by Aggro-Control also being a "Tempo" deck: you are the sole person who decides the pace of the game. If an opponent loses a turn due to a Retreat! but you still have enough resources to put down one of your allies, that's a major gain of tempo for you. Most of the time, you are the agressor, you keep the pressure, but if you recognize you are going to lose the get-to-zero-life race, just change gears! Controlling the pace of the game is what you do best, so do it!
Also, beware on dumping cards as resources every turn. Since your cards are very versatile, you want to avoid dumping them as much as possible. Some times, if I don't have JD in hand for turn 4, I don't even drop the 4th card in the resource pile. And I rarely go above 5 resources (the exact amount for War Flail). Be mindful of how you spend your resources to maximize the differential between what you, and your opponent, is spending.
Matchups:
Unfortunately, I'm not going to post a "matchups" list, simply because I don't have that much experience with every single matchup and there are lots of brews going on. I am currently around ~280 rating with the deck with 9 matches played (7-2, my 2 losses being my first 2 games back before tweaking the cardlist), and I'm sure this deck can go quite high. You can search for "Hallgrimsson" in-game to watch some games, I really only play Amber. You can also contribute your thoughts on specifics and I may add them with due credits to the original poster.
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