Just an idea to bat about over the Christmas Holiday. Are there enough cards to build a Chaos hand Destruction Deck?

obvious candidates are:

Will of Tzeentch

Slaanesh's Domination

Journey to the Gates

Infiltrate (neutral quest) I know it is not per se hand destruction but it works the other end of the equation.

Does not seem that there is enough there to really build a deck, so while we are whiling away the winter hours, we can speculate on what kind of hand destruction cards we might see in future sets. I will go first...

1. A new mutation that forces a discard after combat damage is dealt. Reasonable but maybe a little too much like scout.

2. A new support card that works like Warpstone Meteor, how about discard one card or take one damage?

3. Another "caster" unit with a quest zone ability burn 3-4 resources to force a discard?

Anyway, what do you folks think?

In theory attacking an opponents hand usually is a good strategy (depending on the speed of the format). Generally these strategies work a lot better when the format is more dedicated towards "control"ish decks as opposed to aggro (where cards that affect the physical game state of the board are much better suited). Also discarding strategies tend to work better in games that have limited ways of drawing extra cards where more cards generated generally leads to more victories (unless of course every card produced from your opponent is just that much more relavent than anything you have done up to that point). These situations are also attacked by things like "virtual" card advantage by producing an effect that results in a X for 1 (X= the number of cards "blanked" or answered by 1= your single card). Examples of these situations would be "sweeper" cards like Troll vomit etc or combos that produce an effect that continually generates a positive effect for you while producing something negative for your opponent like cloud of flies+Urguck.

In this game however attacking a players hand seems much less effective than in other games based on a few reasons.

the first reason is this game absolutely promotes overextending your hand. By this I mean the game has VERY little cards in it currently that deter a player from playing their entire hand every turn while worrying about a swift recourse from their opponent ( a common way to "play around" discard").

Second EVERY deck in the format has the ability to draw obscene amounts of cards if they want. As much as this hurts a discard strategy this could very well be a good thing as well. You could in fact put your opponent in a situation where they must draw a large amount of cards to keep up, but by doing so put themselves on a clock where they must finish you off within a decent amount of time or lose to decking themselves> It may be possible to add "milling" cards to your strategy to speed up this process paired with sweeper effects to simply stay alive long enough for them to deck themselves. You also my be able to find a way to corrupt enough guys a turn to where they are never able to attack profitably.

I think currently how the game plays if there were enough scout cards in the format you could most definetly build a deck based around discard where board control was your main focus while stripping their hand would be a subtheme and a way of protecting you from things that were not permanents. As it stands I dont really feel the card pool available to us doesn't support this type of deck yet but I can forsee soemthing like this in the future.

(Btw this post is being written and sent DURING my flight back from florida atm :-P wifi on planes now woot)

Thanks for the in depth analysis. Going to file this idea away and see what the next few battle packs bring.