It's been a real whirlwind of a week, so I thought I'd give my brain and stomach a break and pick the Golems back up with a few tweaks from last time. In my personal notes from that event I had written that the deck tends to have some really clunky draws, so I attempted to smooth that out by lowering the curve just a tiny bit. I removed a 7pp Follower and a 4pp Follower for some 1-2pp removal, and added a third Merlin.
Merlin provides good value on a body for a reasonable cost, but maybe more importantly is a source of card selection in a game that is largely devoid of tutors and deck manipulation. It's such a solid card that we're playing it in the golem/earth material deck even though it has absolutely no explicit synergy with what the rest of the deck is doing. I guess being able to play Merlin on 3, search Golem Protection to play on 4 is at least snug on curve. You do have to hope your opponent leaves her alone to get the full value from the evolve though, which is unlikely.
Only the second time I've played this matchup, but I took the lessons I learned in the first and looked to press damage where I got the opportunity. I had a very decent looking opening hand that would allow me to trade with Royal's 3/3 bodies while generating some Earth stacks, before sitting behind a big [Ward] or getting more removal with Merlin.
My opponent actually wasn't putting much of a board together in the early turns, and I curved into a Remi to push quite a lot of damage in a short space of time before closing the game out with bolt snap bolt Merlin, Demonic Strike, Merlin Evolve.
Nice to start the day feeling like the deck is firing on all cylinders, but that might also be because my opponent's hand was unusually slow for the archetype. We take those.
1-0
Round 2: Nightmare Midrange/Control
To my genuine surprise, people have been moving away from the aggressive version of this deck and picking up the controlly midrange version that opts for the big value sexy angels and demons over the sleek, aerodynamic but maybe a little less sexy ghouls and skeletons. I'm surprised because in my relatively short career in the ShAdoWrEaLm (by the way, apparently there's an anime for this game??) it's the aggressive version that I've had more troubles with.
Anyway, I decide that if he's going to be on the midrange/control plan then I ought to put my angry beaver hat on and switch gears to aggro, which is an important thing to recognise that you need to do in situations where you know you can't beat your opponent at their own game. I get my opponent to about 10 with everyone's favourite neighbourhood Alchemist, until a familiar face turns up.
It's the creep with [Ward] that gains a load of life and blows up my best thing when it dies. Exactly what you don't want to see when you've bought one way tickets to Aggronesia and you're not representing best girl Lily. I take a deep breath and enter the think-tank, and realise that I'm doing almost all my damage through Alchemist-burn and that I might be able to just ignore this poser like I do all the other problems in my life.
I play Golems around the Alchemist and by the time it gets to the point where I CAN'T leave that thing alive any longer, I finish it off by trading my last Follower so that he has nothing to kill and thus no life to gain. Looks like the dominos have fallen like a house of cards. Checkmate.
2-0
Round 3: Bishop Control
I left my angry hat on because there's no way I'm going to out-value Bishop, which may have been a mistake. I'm still not sure. One problem I have with this deck is that I really am still not sure about what my role is in a lot of these matchups, and I don't have the card draw or card selection to pivot mid-game. I made a crucial mistake turn 2 by electing to remove his follower that searches an amulet rather than deploying an early threat, which seemed innocuous at the time, but in the end game I fell short by about one attack and Kaguya took over the game.
2-1
Round 4: Nightmare Control
A replay of round 2, except as the game develops I notice my opponent is opting for a few different cards to my previous opponent. I certainly made at least one mistake in the early game, by not opting to add +1/+1 to my golems with Golem Protection against a board of 3/3 and 3/3 (my golems would have been 3/4 instead of 2/3). I didn't do it because I wanted to save the Earth material for something I was anticipating to be more impactful, but it meant that my fourth turn and Golem Protection was a waste of both value and tempo.
One particularly frustrating but interesting combination of cards my opponent took advantage of was the interaction between the two below, to repeatedly wipe my board while gaining life to stay exactly 1 life above the lethal amount I could have done. In hindsight I should have just shoved the damage in advance so that he couldn't replay Path to Purgatory, so I'll take that lesson from this game.
My favorite yoga pose is downward facing dog :) fyi I'm not unsubscribing.
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