Defiance of the Wulven - Darkclaw concepts for specific anti-hero-builds

[Cruxx]

Motivation
The Defiance of the Wulven concept came into existence whilst considering current flavour of the month heroes like Eladwen and death racing. Taking the following considerations into account, you will find an enteraining way to smash their teeth in!

Some decisions made for this specific example deck are tailored towards this goal, making a trade-off regarding its efficiency in the overall scheme. If you really want to build an Anti-Deck vs a specific hero, this one gives you a good understanding of the basics and a basis to start from.

The Defiance of the Wulven violates my own rules to some degree, focussing a bit more on specific cards than overall goals, which makes the deck experience less reliable in certain situations.

Let's take a look at this example deck to get into the concept.


Deck
Hero (1)
Darkclaw

Allies (12)
3 Infernal Gargoyle
3 Keldor
4 Plasma Behemoth
2 Shadow Knight

Abilities (27)
4 Jeweler's Dream
2 What Big Teeth
4 Speedstrike
3 Shadow Font
4 Captured Prey
2 Full Moon
4 Shriek of Vengeance
4 Shadowspawn


Strategy
In the current iteration of Shadow Era there is basically only one Darkclaw present, stalling and milling away. I'm not a big fan of this build because it's very boring to play (for both players) and it has some weaknesses a skilled player can exploit to great advantage.

We use this to our advantage though, since almost any player will expect us to be a stalling and milling Darkclaw. In this case they are prepared for our weapons we have in stock, but they will most likely sac some creature control and their common card draw abilities, at least in the beginning until they realise what's going on. We count on that especially vs Warriors and do not feature any card draw in our deck, but still have the option to deny our opponent's card draw later on (but in the case of one of the well balanced cards in the game: Blood Frenzy.)

There are some good old common goals present in our example deck though:

(I) Strong and versatile mid-cost creatures - Infernal Gargoyle & Keldor (Thaddeus left out due to weapons providing ping damage)
(II) Hard Hitters - Plasma Behemoth & Shadow Knight
(III) Creature Removal - Captured Prey & Full Moon
(IV) Making use of our hero ability - Jeweler's Dream & What Big Teeth
(V) Supporting our hero ability - Speedstrike & Shadow Font

There is also additional goals supported:
Survivability - Full Moon & Shadow Font
Additional creature removal - Jeweler's Dream & What Big Teeth + support cards & hero ability
Item destruction - Shriek & Weapons + Speedstrike combined with invulnerability to gnaw away at weapons and armors

And finally...
Deny opponent's special ability - Shadowspawn & Invulnerability effects

This last goal shows very well why Darkclaw is a very good candidate for any "Anti deck". Most heroes rely heavily on their special ability and at least one or more goals are designed with the hero's ability in mind.

Imagine starting 2nd, playing Speedstrike in the 3rd round, Jeweler's Dream in the 4th, activating your ability bashing away at your enemy or some important creatures and detonating a Shadowspawn in the same round, leaving you with no drawback but your opponent 8 HPs and all his SE short. We have this kind of potential (though this specific example isn't uber-reliable.)

We could also use Shadow Font and Full Moon to create an ilvunerability streak either towards the end of the game to finish opponents off or mid-game to let your opponent's SE gather up and then destroy it when it reached 6 or 7.

Since we can't protect our creatures like a Moonstalker, we need to use our weapons and creature removal to create an environment in which we can either play mutliple mid cost units or a hard hitter relatively safely.

Personally I feel including less than 12 creatures takes a lot of value out of our Full Moon and moves us closer to a standard stall deck - that's no fun.

If we want to specialise in kicking some Eladwen behind for example, because 4 out of 5 games seem to be against this hero (hello 200 rating mark) or you participate in a tournament where you expect a lot of those, I would probably make an exception and remove 3 creatures in favour of some Regeneration, just to be on the safe side that your defense holds.

Sticking with Eladwens, there is a lot of cool stuff we can do with this deck. Having the option of being invulnerable quite often and we already saw some Retreat! for example, we can try to provoke a Supernova with a hard hitter and don't suffer the damage.

Same goes for playing creatures later and letting her SE stack up a bit with invulnerabilty effects and then drop the hammer with Shadowspawn - it's good to give back!

Boiling down to the essentials we could also come up with a deck like this, focussing more on creature removal and creatures way late in the game. This gets somewhat closer to a standard stall deck though and might not end up being a lot of fun to play.

As said in the beginning, the Defiance of the Wulven should be understood as a concept to utilise Darkclaw to build around his ability, natural synergy with Shadowspawn, invulnerability effects and player expectations to screw with the hero ability and overall gameplan of your opponent. Enjoy clawing away!

[MistahBoweh]

OP well written. Deck seems fine if your opponent doesn't expect allies, if they know what you're playing then suddenly they don't make bad sac choices and you seem to be in a bit of trouble. Can't say for certain though with zero testing done.

[Cruxx]

OP well written. Deck seems fine if your opponent doesn't expect allies, if they know what you're playing then suddenly they don't make bad sac choices and you seem to be in a bit of trouble. Can't say for certain though with zero testing done.

It's more about the concept than the example deck itself.

My tests vs Eladwens were great fun though (actually used Regeneration instead of Captured Prey), beating her down badly.

[Junk Style]

bit of an old post but a cool looking deck. I was thinking if you took out used 4 IGs and 4 Badwolfs with Evil Ascendant, you might be able to put together some nice board control. That set up would probably work better with moonstalker though.