Hi!

I'm quite new to this awesome game and I own one core set and one copy of all battle packs up to Silent Forge.

I would love to play some mean mono Dark Elves, but I don't really know where to start.

I would like to include some hard offense and some bit of control over the enemies creatures.

Would anyone be so kind to nudge me into the right direction with the Dark Elves?

Thank you very much!

I would say that I will give You a recepie for a DE deck.:

- give them some good buildings

- a littel bit a unit

- and a lot of tactic and support with Hex traits

And then experiment for Youself. After a couple of plays You will see how to play with them, what are DE weak sites and what could You make better.

For Dark Elves the current resource engine options are treasure vaults & forge support cards with the dwarven slaves unit to help needed developements AND / OR you can go with bottomless mine and some cheap units.

After that pick out what you want to do with the deck and roll with it. There are some tricks to trade that are commonly passed along here though.

The Har Ganith support combined with certain units makes for great shenanigans. Combine it with the Walking Sacrifice unit and you get an extra draw at the start of your turn. Combine it with the vile sorceress and vanguard of woe units and you get a hand control engine forcing a discard from your opponents hand on your turn. There are more little things like that I'm just drawing a blank right now on them.

If you are playing more than casual opponents you'll need to break the mono-dark elf theme a bit. Now I don't have much experience running a traditional destroy two zones victory strategy with dark elves but it can be done. I'd suggest a few long winter cards so that you can play developements without fear of never getting them back. Also they work well at stopping the order side's resource and damage engines as the current popular tactics on that side depend on having lots of developements. If you haven't bought an extra Assault of Ultuan yet I'd suggest it. The extra neutral cards alone are worth it as well as getting an extra mortella hero. I'd also suggest an extra core set if you can get one. The extra pillage, smash go boom, burn it down, vile sorceress, innovations, warp stone excavations, etc. are very very nice when it comes to building a control deck.

You'll want to look up or ask about some other situations as well. Such as what to do when your opponent resets your capital with a card (for example judgement of verena leaving you with nothing in play). And how to recover quickly from such resets. And what are the strengths to the different sides of the game. (order and disorder) Also what decks are the most popular right now. There's not much point running a traditional burn two zones strategy if your opponent is playing a unitless deck that rellies on stalling you with damage cancelation tactics and pushing units back into your hand.

I've build a somewhat capable Dark Elf Hand Destruction (Mill?) deck and played half a dozen games against my wifes' Dwarf deck.

While my Dark Elves do what theay do quite nicely (ie removing cards from the enemies' hand and deck, controlling some of their units), my wifes' Dwarfs just sit back and develop slowly, while waiting for 'Reclaim the fallen' to summon all previously fallen Dwarfs to their battlefield. One, twice, I'm dead.

I don't know how to counter 'Reclaim their fallen' and do damage to the tough Dwarfs. Suggestions?

Mortella counters it nicely if you can keep her out in your quest zone with some resources to play your own reclaim the fallen or a master run etc.

There is also a new card now that lets you pull a unit from your opponents discard pile corrupted in the zone of your choice on your side. Otherwise you just have turn up the speed on your mill deck. I use mortella, plague monks, infiltrate, and entropy combined with lots of support and developement control. But that's difficult in mono-dark elf. I end up using ork cards to get what I need with pillage, stunty smashas, and smash go boom in addition to my neutral burn it down tactics.

Do any of you have a few reference decks for DE?

@Darthvegeta: Check Deckbox.org

Thanks! Will do! As at the moment I'm a bit lost with DE.