This is the deck that won West Coast Regionals (played by Kent using a High Elf capital):
In order to convince Kent to play in the tournament with me, I told him about the unitless deck f7eleven had posted. I also thought that I could come up with a much better deck. So I started building a deck from scratch and worked on it (for about a week). We playtested it Friday night and he tweeked it to this set list Saturday morning.
3 Innovation
2 High Elf's Disdain
3 Master Rune of Valaya
3 Wake the Mountain
3 Flames of the Pheonix
3 Gifts of Aenarion
1 Judgement of Verena
3 Pilgrimage
3 Reap What's Sown
= 24 Tactics
3 Warpstone Excavation
3 Contested Village
2 City Gates
3 Dwarf/High Elf Alliance
3 Keystone Forge
3 Repeater Bolt Thrower
3 Treasure Vaults
3 Abandoned Mine
3 Contested Stronghold
= 26 Support
It turns out there are only 8 cards different in this version than in f7eleven's, EIGHT! I don't know if this is a symptom of the limited card pool or his deck was really that good (probably a combo of both). Great deck f7eleven, here are our thoughts on the card differences between the decks:
-1 High Elf's Disdain : Great card but only 2 are necessary. The only thing that you really want to use it for is to prevent a pillage on your Bolt Thrower. Almost everything else really doesn't matter. As a side note: Kent did use it on me when I Innovated to play a Bloodthirster, but I think this is because I showed my hand too soon and he used it to cancel the innovate. If I had let the innovate resolve before showing Bloodthirster he probably would not have used High Elf's Disdain on it. Lesson learned.
+1 Judgement of Verena : I had this idea from the start. I think that splashing it into every order deck is a bad idea but this was perfect. Adding just 1 was not a huge cost (from a deckbuilding view) and it did so much. If your opponent was not ready for it then you devastate him for a win. If your opponent was ready for it by developing into each zone, then he had to make subpar card choices (unless he normally developed into every zone which does not sound like a deck I have heard of).
+1 Abandoned Mine : The idea is to get cards you want to save for later on the board as developments where they will be useful and safe. There are not too many tactics being used which destroy developments so this strategy is what Kent used during the tournament. Therefore, getting the development back is critical to his plan and having 3 Abandoned Mines gives better odds at retrieving those key cards.
-1 City Gate : There are enough developments on the board with 3x Wake the Mountain, 2x City Gates, and being able to develop each turn. Having 1 less seemed to work fine and it was not missed.
-3 Banish and +3 Pilgrimage : This was an easy choice. Pilgrimage is just a better version of Banish (imho) because Banish has the attachment limitation. Also, Banish costs 3HH while Pilgrimage costs 4 -1 for every development in your quest. So you can throw a development down in your quest to give you the discount and it costs the same as Banish (more than 1 development in quest rarely happens). Also, having a development down in quest is already necessary to save that zone from Judgement of Verena.
-3 Temple of Vaul : Not sure I agree with this choice but Kent said "I don't like doing my opponent's job for me". I think this stems from a game we played while testing the deck. I had 1 zone burned and a significant amount of damage on another zone. He played Flames of the Phoenix which stopped me in my tracks. I had to rebuild my army but instead I prevented his card draw by pillaging all his support cards in his quest zone. It took 3 turns after that for him to die but it was the Temple of Vauls that killed him in the end. I don't think he is ever going to play with them again (I still like them though).
+3 Keystone Forge : Kinda the opposite story of Temple of Vaul since it saved him in a couple of games when playtesting. Also, the extra loyalty symbol for Wake the Mountian is a plus.
Well that's it folks!
