This thread will never blessfully go away if people keep responding to it. Been on many CCG forums for many years (ran a couple) and this might take the cake for most ridiculous thread ever.

CAlexander said:

LOL!!!

And I thought that I was the only one that held a similar opinion to yours.

>Carnage< said:

Hundred is too much. In my opinion U should 2 tactics and get 2 units instead. Imaginary Warrior and Fake Sorcerer are the best i think in this configuration.

On September 4 said that he should post the decklist the night after. Three days have passed.

I don't want to be offensive or what else, but this is quite ridiculos, don't you think?

By the way, if this "Mighty Deck" really exists, i'm really curious about that.

Guys look at the way Fang is being treated in these threads. Certain individuals love to trash his ideas and ideals. He doesn't want to claim to have the answer to these same individuals deck and then find out he was wrong. They will act like pricks (not sure if that word is allowed and will edit if asked to) and make him even more upset.

For the reason above that is the same reason I don't post anything constructive or theoretical in this games forum. I don't like being insulted, angered, or embarrassed so I preemptively avoid these confrontations by not posting anything that could be torn apart. I don't take well to internet threats.

Sometimes I cannot resist posting my 2 cents or defending a fellow forumite. But for the most part I act like the deck construction thread is invisible.

Is this really necessary?

I mean really, if you're not saving the idea for a tourney or championship, just share it. Like you said, there are other capable deck builders here, if holes are found in your idea, we can help strengthen it.

If you're afraid the deck is going to be mercilessly picked apart, it will, I guarantee it. Just like the bolt thrower was before people played against it.

Even if it is, good original ideas should always be welcome in a card game environment, regardless of whether or not they beat the top tier decks.

Curator said:

So you are here to troll against the trolls? xD

Okay, let's clear things up before I start typing up this huge post and decklist:

1. I'd planned to post this much sooner than the other day, however, I felt that it was far better to get more games with the deck under my belt for a variety of reasons, all of which should be obvious to anyone.

2. But the main reason I did not post this deck the other day (as planned) is that my 1-year old son, Noah (who has Bilary Atresia - which is a failing Liver that will require a transplant within about 5-9 months) had to go to the Hospital the other day, with a possible blood infection (very serious thing) so things have been hectic for me and I simply did NOT have the time to post anything as lengthy as this type of post. I would hope my fellow W:I fans would understand something of this nature. He is still in the hospital and we don't have results back yet from his blood cultures but on a very positive note, his fever seems to be gone. So that's great.

3. As I tried to explain in this thread already, please lower your expectations as no single deck is perfect and I have to admit that my initial enthusiasm was probably a bit higher than it should have been. Though I do think this is a valid top-tier deck in the right hands and with the right build (just my opinion, however, and as Curator has said, certain elements in these forums will most likely rip on this idea/deck as ineffectual or as something they'd already thought of - and I'm okay with that, it may not be all that great or all that terribly innovative after all.) Who knows?

===========================================================================================

So here's what happened with this deck. One day not long after GenCon, I was musing over the currently hated (and rightfully so) Bolt-Thrower deck and how it functions. Most folks focus on the Bolt-thrower itself (fair enough) as the problem but I was considering how insanely powerful the actual Support-based economy backed by recycling (my term - some of the M:TG types here prefer "Recursion") functions. I started considering how it could be paired up with some other type of theme and then it hit me. I realized a way to make a very potent Mill deck using the main aspect of the BT deck: it's resource/recycling engine.

I'll list the deck in a second but in a (quick) nutshell it replaces the "tip of the spear" from being the actual Repeater Bolt-Thrower card to the Dwarf " Runesmith " card ( 2R, 1L, 1P, 1HP - "Quest. ACTION: Spend 2 resources to have a target unit gain 1 Power until the end of the turn. "). I'll list the deck (or at least this current permutation as I'm still tweaking it) and then discuss some more how it works and how you could play it.

UNITS ( 5 Total ):

2x Lelansi - HE Unit

3x Runesmith - Dwarf Unit

SUPPORT ( 18 Total ):

3x Warpstone Excavation

3x Contested Village

3x Ancestral Tomb

3x Mining Tunnels

3x Treasure Vaults

2x Abandoned Mine

1x Alliance (HE/Dw Banner)

TACTICS ( 32 Total ):

3x Master Rune of Valaya

3x Gifts of Aenarion

3x Flames of the Phoenix

1x Judgment of Verena

3x High Elf's Disdain

1x Drain Magic

3x Innovation

3x Order in Chaos

2x Stand Your Ground

2x Long Winter

3x Forced March

1x Will of the Electors

1x Burn it Down

3x Demolition!

==================================================

Okay, first thing is that it's been very hard to trim this down to the popular prescribed minimum of 50-cards. Testing seemed to show that using between 1-5 extra cards didn't screw things up, really, for this deck.

So what you do is build up this massive resource engine, use your damage-canceling or tactic-canceling cards to keep yourself in the game, and the fire off your Runesmith on your foe's turn, forcing him to draw out his deck. The tricky aspects are knowing at one point to start firing off the Runesmith so that you don't actually help your opponent by giving him a ton of cards - if you start using it too early, you're giving your opponent some powerful card advantage but you may not want to entirely wait for a one-shot killing blow either; it's a tricky balance, I must admit. One other huge key is to focus on destroying his resource production, first and foremost. He can draw a million cards but without a large amount of resources those cards will be (mostly) useless to him. Keep an eye on his Kingdom Developments as well, since you don't want him to play 2-3 Innovations at once to suddenly build himself back up.

You can use Forced March to keep his units out of the battlefield or Kingdom and into his Quest Zone, thus speeding up your deck. One thing to watch out for is once someone realizes what you're doing (usually after they've lost the first game to this deck) and then refuses to play a Unit into their Quest for you to boost with your Runesmith for the killing blow. To address that you can do one of two things: 1. Use your Forced March to put a guy into their Quest Zone, thus forcing the issue OR 2. go on the offensive and use the Runesmith to pump one of the other Runesmiths or Lelansi for a 2-turn win (do 8 or more on one turn, then another 8 or more on the ensuing turn). The deck provides some nifty flexibility in that regard. If your opponents try to kill Runesmith , you can save your Tactic Cancelers for that situation or keep one hidden as a development to pull out with Long Winter or Abandoned Mines OR you can simply use Stand Your Ground to put him back into play.

It beats Orc/Skaven rush 90% (or greater) of the time. Watch out for Grimgor by keeping his units off the table (thus denying him crucial loyalty symbols to play Grimgor) and/or by keeping his resources down, too.

It draws about even with BT since I have decent support destruction. With BT decks, since they rarely have Units (if ever), you have to just attack and save your tactic-cancelers to handle their damage-cancelers ("Fogs" for you M:TG types) so that your damage goes through.

Its worse match-up ends up being Dwarves where it wins about 40% of the time (depending on the build I've used - when I've tweaked it to be more potent vs. Dwarves, it's tended to end up weaker vs. the other decks by a bit.) So I'm still trying to solve its match-up vs. Dwarves to some extent.

It has some difficulties against Empire though it seems to beat it about 65% of the time. Empire is always tricky due to the Jumping Jack cards and Verenas - hopefully you'll face a build with less tactic-canceling capabilities and in general, Empire decks will have a less beefy Resource engine, so you should have the edge there, imho.

It wipes out nearly everything else on the destruction side, in particular, though you have to be careful (as any deck does) about facing Scouts - but that's what Underground Mines and Long Winters are for.

Hope you find this deck archetype potentially interesting/fun/useful.

I would like to see a game between this deck and a DE discard/control. Cool mill idea. Thanks for sharing it.

1. All the best wishes for you and especially your son. I do hope you'll find a donor (if you haven't already (I don't know exactly how this works)).

2. Thank you for finally satisfying my curiosity.

3. Arrrgh... another "almost" unitless deck.

This looks indeed interesting. I was also looking into the milling/draw strategy (principally by moving the opponents units with Osterknacht and Forced March/Order in Chaos to the quest zone, i.e. absolutely useless against BT), but definately didn't think to use the Runesmith for this.

I'm not sure if Burn it down really fits the deck (I assume that you'll probably won't play many developments into the battlefield).

Maybe Asuryan's Cleansing might be an option to look at (very weak but possible threat for Grimgor and the BT).

I guess using Dark Abyss to fasten the opponents deck discard slowed your deck down too much.

Which capital board are you using? Dwarf (for faster starts) or High Elf (to spend less resources for their events)?

Very interesting. I finally had a chance this weekend to play my DE mill deck and started thinking about and Empire based option. The Runesmith would definitely add to my ideas. I'm curious though why you don't include Infiltrate! considering the Runsmith has to be in the quest zone anyway.

Did you try the deck using Wilhelm of the Osterknacht at all? I think that an additional option for moving enemy units to the quest zone would help immensely and chipping away at their capital every turn doesn't hurt either. Considering you said this deck doesn't suffer from an additional 5 cards, I'd be throwing in both Infiltrate! and 3 Wilhelms. Keep in mind I only play single set so I might be under 50 cards with your raw list to begin with.

Anyway, very interested to hear your thoughts about the above.

Please shield your eyes if you don't like honest criticism and you prefer to live in a casual, happy place where everyone gives each other praise for their ideas and no one cares about playing optimal decks.

...

I'M SERIOUS. If you are going to read my post and be offended when I give honest criticism of this deck, PLEASE DO NOT READ ON. Skip my post, pretend I said "Good deck dude!" and move on.

We'll all be a lot happier if you do.

OK.

(Curator, you should not still be reading at this point).

So, my honest appraisal of the deck for those who care about playing and deckbuilding optimally. Here goes.

This deck loses badly to thrower, esp thrower w/ outpost. They will just Master Rune of Valaya/Gifts of Aeneron you when you attack w/ a pumped up dude after you spend enough to make the attack lethal. No way you have enough resources to both pump and fight a counter war, and you don't exert enough pressure to make the critical turns happen soon enough to expect them not to have infinite ways of dealing with your attack.

Lelansi doesn't protect against Lobber Crew, FYI. Seems like Crew is the most likely way your smiths die, and SYG seems suspicious at best in a deck with 3 units it can bring back. I guess if you turtle til the critical turn, fine. But you have no meaningful way to kill their lobber crews, so expect to see 2-3 in play by the time you're ready to go off. Seems like that ups your variance a lot, and requires you to have a lot more resources available than thrower needs to win (esp w/ outpost).

Slave Pens beats you (most of the time). As does Grudge Thrower.

Yes, we had this idea already and didn't bother to explore it. Its cute, but isn't as good as thrower, and it is basically aiming to do the same thing.

You're incorrect - testing has proven that it beats Thrower 50% of the time (at least - if not a bit more). And considering that I played one of the better players and better Thrower decks at GenCon (imho), I'm feeling quite confident that we're playing the BT deck properly and appropriately to give it a great chance vs this new Mill deck archetype.

As a sidenote, however, it is admittedly amusing that you responded exactly as I (and others here) expected. ::: shrug :::

I appreciate the feedback but I can't entirely agree with most of your points here. I'll readily concur that it can use tweaking here and there, though.

qwertyuiop said:

Thanks, man. That would be quite a fight - in fact, I'll try to line-up this match-up and see how it turns out. Do you have a good build for me to use that you'd like to see this deck fight?

Jekothalep said:

Thanks for the kind words about Noah. He's doing pretty well (we just came back from seeing him and his fever is still gone so things are definitely looking up).

Burn it Down is somewhat out-of-place but is partly there to help with Support Destruction against BT decks. Probably could ditch it and it wouldn't hurt too much. Dark Abyss wasn't as helpful in my testing. Using a DWARF Capital board.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts.

WWaSP said:

You know, I wanted to include Infiltrate! but I felt like it tied up a lot of card slots. But you raise a really good point, perhaps I should go back and add it to this deck to see if it helps any. I do need to try Wilhelm, he's super useful and he can help when I need to attack, also. Very good points. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

Wytefang said:

I'm strictly single set, so I don't know how well any of my creations would fare against this(other than orc blitzing). The DE player definitely has to pay more attention to everything and try to use his extra cards to his advantage. Witch Hag's Curse would be part of it. Dark Abyss, of course. Smash Go Boom. Everything else is probably fairly typical DE Discard. I think it comes down to which deck gets rolling first. Empty the hand and find an interesting way to snipe one or two units (Take Captive..then something to sacrifice)

Edit: I still don't see what the big deal with BT is other than it may provide an automated gaming experience.

What's your general line of play in the thrower matchup?

Speaking from thrower pov, I would stockpile fogs, let you attack until you threatened to win, and hold up multiple fogs in the same turn to play around counters. My resource/draw engine is just as fast as yours. My kill condition requires ~8 resources + spares to protect (IE playing outpost(s)/thrower on the turn i go off), yours requires 14+ over 2 turns. Theoretically there is no way you are even close to 50% winrate when playing optimally, unless I am missing some key tech or strategic insight?

FWIW, "yes huh it is so 50% winrate, trust me I'm awesome" does NOT fly around here, and nor should it. You are making a very, very bold claim so lets hear you back it up.

The thing is, is that anything anyone says can be easily countered by another player producing some magic play-through that might never happen during gameplay. Since each game will be different based on card interactions or player decisions, there's zero way to know that you'd simply "hold all my fogs and etc, etc.." Sounds good on paper but there's no proof that you'd ever magically have those all in hand in time to save yourself. Sure, in some games it may go that way, in others it doesn't. Try not to take this the wrong way, but that's the problem with your entire perspective about this game - you seem to put far too much stock into the deck builds and not enough into a player's real-time decision-making (as Dormouse cogently pointed out to you in past threads). We can discuss (until we're blue in the face) all the cool combos and uber-deck builds like we're all just masters of card gaming nerdvana but the reality is that when the cards hit the table and we're face to face in a tournament, a lot of theory goes out the door.

In any event, I don't need to back it up, really, just try out the deck yourself vs. Thrower. It's worked fairly evenly against it so far in our matches. But then again, I beat the Thrower deck I faced at GenCon with my Dwarves so maybe it's just that the BT deck is not as powerful as some think. Who knows?

Basically you just build up resources (the same as the Thrower) and pump the Runesmith - you'll need some luck in what particular counter cards you have in your hand but that's how the games go - always a bit of luck involved. Since these decks are nearly the same, it's 50/50 easily, and testing here has borne that out so far (at least). To negate BT a bit, you use your Support destruction as needed to wipe out their card draw - since against BT you're not trying to deck them, via this deck's normal winning methodology.

Like I said in my deck-listing post, BT isn't the deck I'm so worried about with this cool Mill deck - it's Empire or Dwarves, mostly, that can be tricky. But mostly Dwarves.

qwertyuiop said:

I'd encourage you (down the road) to get a couple more sets. You can do some pretty nifty stuff when you have the full range to work with. BT is pretty tough but as I wrote in my post above, I somehow managed to win my BT match-up at GenCon against Shubfan76 so it's definitely not unbeatable.

Is there a worry that the disorder mill decks work just a little faster and come with hand & unit control as well? Periculum and have been toying with dark elf and chaos mill decks and while we can't deliver 20+30 card draws like your order variation can we do have lots of spells for unit and hand control. We're using plague monks, dark vortexes, infilitrate quests, and enthropy cards to mill 1-10 cards a turn. I'll get the most current deck I'm using posted later today after work and I'll try to build a order side mill deck yours to test it against.

And what about high elf resurection decks that count on you or themselves making them discard tons of units until they can build their power base and then all their units back out in one go with the two resurection cards available now for an instant burn zone with a rinse and repeat cycle?

Wytefang said:

His points were:
Resources needed to win. Thrower needs less.
Your winning strategy. Milling with Pumping dont work against unitless decks. Attacking does not really work because they will save fogs.
LC kills your units. The hero does not protect.

So what is wrong with this points?

Wytefang said:

Harliquine, I would like to see your Destruction-based Mill deck - in our experiences here, they weren't fast enough to really get the Mill thing going on a consistent basis. I would love to see your ideas, as they sound excellent. And yeah, a High Elf deck using the uber-Epic spell would prove problematic, certainly...though every deck has a counter-deck that kills it, for the most part. Thanks for responding.

You claim testing has proved his points incorrect, so show us.

If you can't figure it out on your own based on my deck list provided, it's not really my job to prove anything or think for you.

If you don't like the deck or you think it sucks, feel free to simply not use it. I know it works and works well and that's all that matters.