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Ok. Back to your normal channel. I have a new archetype for you kids at home. I'm trying to showcase the "other" side of High Elves here. This isn't a kosher tier 1 deck but it's nipping at the heels - you definitely have chances to win vs. the major competitive archetypes right now (i.e. Dwarves and Thrower). I am undoubtedly missing some tuning which will make it more competitive, but in the end it may just need a bit more juice from the next BPs. In any event, I would expect it to make a significantly better casual deck than the normal defensive HE unit archetype. It also represents, in my mind at least, what the game seems to "want" you to get out of the indirect damage theme of High Elves rather than the normal fogathon. I think I have made my feelings on the normal Thrower archetype clear enough at this point.

The plan is to do a ton of indirect damage to present diffuse pressure and finish off zones with efficient units. The deck looks pretty terrible at first glance but it's a lot better than it looks. The deck simply does not work without March of the Damned and Silent Forge. If you don't have them, get some proxies or wait till you have those sets if proxying brings you out in hives.

3 Veteran Sellswords
3 Envoy from Averlorn
3 Loremaster of Hoeth
3 Sea Guard Captain
2 High Elf Spearmen
3 Silver Helm Detachment
1 Descendant of Indraughnir
-- 18

3 Innovation
3 Charge of the Silver Helms
3 High Elf's Disdain
3 From Beneath The Waves
-- 12

3 Warpstone Excavation
3 Contested Village
3 Outpost of Tiranoc
3 Citadel of Dusk
3 Elven Warship
3 Temple of Vaul
2 Repeater Bolt Thrower
-- 20

Alright, now some process-of-design notes.

The Warship damage turns out to add up pretty fast, especially if early Outposts don't get demolished. I originally added From Beneath the Waves as a joke but it turned out to be actually pretty decent since you often have to keep 2 resources up for Disdain anyway - I'm a convert. I'm not saying it's amazing, but it is definitely playable in this archetype. As a bonus, the flavour text on FBtW is classic. No, before you suggest it, Surprise Assault is still terrible.

Envoys, Temple of Vaul and Citadel of Dusk make for a solid early resource engine. 6 resources a turn and as many cards as you can get is normally what you want. I toyed with the amusing idea of looping Loremasters via Lelansi but it's too fiddly and Lelansi doesn't do anything on her own.

I seriously considered playing Finreir's Guard (the 1-toughness unit) to help race Thrower but I don't think they do enough.

I am probably going to have to cut a Charge just because I can't find enough units with more than 1 HP. As is, the Spearmen are pretty questionable since they die to Master Rune of Spite, so they may also get cut at some point once I figure out a better idea.

I sorely want to play more Descendants because they are just so cuddly, I mean, enormous. Swinging for 8 is very tasty - you usually burn the zone you swing at. But they are really pricey - you normally only want to be going the Thrower route or Descendant route, not both.

Comments, questions, haikus and jokes are welcome as usual.

This deck is *really* good. I'm probably more a fan of it than Clamatius is, and I would absolutely agree it is nipping at the heels of tier 1 status. It forces some complex attack phases, and is difficult to play around. You need to be thinking 1-2 turns in advance to assign your indirect damage properly.

Vs. outpost thrower it put enough pressure on that thrower was required to have a good draw in order to win in convincing fashion (which it did). An average draw did NOT cut it however, and optimal play is required to win with most of thrower's average openers. I think the matchup is slightly in thrower's favor, but it is probably the closest to 50/50 we've come since Silent Forge, and certainly the only order deck anywhere in the ballpark.

Sleeve this up and give it a try - its quite difficult to play against though, so give your opponents some time to learn the matchup before concluding anything win-%-wise.

I see no real reason why you would claim that Surprise Assault is "terrible.' None at all. A cheap way to do more direct damage than what you've paid (without having to hassle with loyalty costs, to boot) doesn't seem to fall into the category of "terrible." Sounds like a good bit of hyperbole there, Clam. Just my opinion, though, of course.

Still, it seems like a fairly spiffy deck. Could be fun for a change of pace.

Yeah, ok, maybe terrible is the wrong word. I do not think that Surprise Assault is good in this deck at all though, and I don't think there is any deck that is trying to be competitive that wants it. If you were going to play SA, you would probably be on a Helblaster Volley Gun / Burn It Down / etc plan that wants heavy battlefield development. I don't think indirect damage does a whole lot of good unless you can do a whole lot of it - and right now I don't think you can shoehorn both of those plans into the same deck. Does Surprise Assault do something useful? Sure. I just think you could do something better with something else in the card slot in pretty much every case.

In comparison in this case, From Beneath The Waves doesn't need any setup given that you already have HE loyalty, you just fire it. Similarly, that's why Demolition is always better than Burn It Down if you already have Dwarf loyalty.

Awesome deck. I've only been playing for 2 weeks, but I have been struggling to make a decent fun High Elf deck, and with the support from the 2 new sets it looks like they are getting bumped up a tier. I posed a similar deck a couple days back but it ended up being far too expensive, so I integrated a few ideas from here into it. A couple of questions:

As I said, I'm extremely new, so I'm not sure what to think of Temple of Vaul. It seems brutal in it's drawback, is there a trick to it?

On the other side of things, do you get a lot of mileage out of Veteran Sellswords? I have yet to toy with them.

Thanks!

Connor

Interesting that you zero in on the two most "metagame" cards in the deck. Both of those are *really* bad against other aggressive decks. You definitely don't want to be the guy playing those cards if both players are trying to beat down.

But by the same token, if the other guy is taking 5-6 turns to set up an engine before he starts pressuring you, Temple of Vaul and Veteran Sellswords can both be excellent cards, giving you a lot more value than they cost. Essentially, if your deck is tuned to either win quickly or lose, your own "life total" is essentially a meaningless resource that is not being spent. So, spend it by playing otherwise undercosted cards that use it.

In our slower, more casual play environment, I splash 3 Keystone Forges in our high elf deck that uses ToV. Seems to work nicely - but again, our decks are probably about 70% the power level of the tier-1 dcks.

This is an awesome and interesting deck. I'm really looking forward to adding 10 cards to it, nerfing it a bit, and incorporating it into our local lineup of decks. I'm surprised there isn't a second dragon, though. Why only one? Isn't he sort of what the deck is built around?

I used to play Keystone Forge / Temple of Vaul in the original Thrower decks around AoU. This deck doesn't want Keystone Forge though, it's much too aggressive - if I wanted to pay Dwarf loyalty tax I'd play Mining Tunnels. As is, I have too many 3-resource supports (Temple and Warships) to justify the Tunnels in my mind, although I haven't totally ruled them out yet.

The reasons why there's not a second dragon right now:

* You rarely want to draw the second one. The Dragon and the Thrower are competing for your "late-game" plan where you have 6+ resources.

* The Thrower is much harder to deal with for a "real" Thrower deck. Master Rune of Valaya completely shuts down the Dragon but does nothing to your Thrower.

* I also found myself stuck on 4 or 5 resources, usually due to support removal where I couldn't get the Dragon on the table fairly often.

I did start with 3 Dragons but went to 2 Thrower, 1 Dragon because of those reasons.

As an aside, this is a deck where you want to go first all the time if possible. First turn Temple of Vaul is a solid start but when you are going second it is terrible because they will often play more hammers, wait till the Temple hits you and then demolish it. As a result you can't really open on a Temple unless you are going first.

I should also note that I would expect this deck to actually be a bit worse in the casual environment than it is in the competitive meta - it's a pretty niche design. Dwarves and Thrower rule the competitive roost right now and both of those decks take forever to do you any damage. Plus, neither plays many high-HP units. In a casual environment where you are more likely to see stuff like Bloodsworn or Mountain Brigade, your indirect damage is much worse. Oh, and Lizardmen will wreck you. I started out with a lot of my own lizards but Carnosaur Riders were too slow. Having said that, I have Spawn of Itzl instead of High Elf Spearmen right now. In a casual environment you definitely want to run Spawns because you desperately need to punish your opponent if they start putting damage on their units.

Clamatius said:

Ah, I see your reasoning now. I could think of reasons myself, but wasn't sure what had you disliking it so much. Now I know. Fair enough, very good points, Clam.

That would actually be a pretty funny casual Dwarf deck though. Wake the Mountain to pile a ton of developments into the battlefield, then use Order in Chaos to loop Surprise Assault. You could also go for the Book of Grudges/sac plan for more indirect damage out of Dwarf. If you can cast SA for 6-8+ each time then it's going to add up. Of course, this plan is a bit like using a pogo stick when you could just use a bike, but... yeah.

You said you didn't like the Spearmen, I agree. Why don't you replace them with 3 Initiate of Saphery. Still cost 3, 1 less power, but you gain the cool healing ability from them which could be useful.

Initiates are way too slow and not aggressive enough. I do not like those guys. If they were 1/2 for 2, maybe I'd think about it but at 1/3 for 3 no way. Healing is a pretty marginal ability at best. It's one that players really want to work (much like lifegain in MtG) but the power is just not there at all at the moment for competitive decks.

ddm5182 said:

This is a really good insight that I have been trying to reason out myself for some time. I've been trying to come up with a rough rule about how much self-damage is too much when trading it off against resource accumulation or damage to the opponent. "Too much would be killing yourself" is the easy answer, but it isn't really helpful... I guess it depends on turns and whether your system can run independent of the other player's system for a couple of turns.

Yeah. It also depends on just how much aggro you can expect in the meta. Right now the Dwarves and Lizardmen should kill off any other aggressive decks like Orc/Skaven (or x/Skaven) - the dominant decks are slow damage-wise. Empire with Volley Guns or Standards can be pretty fast. I'd think that that's your realistic aggro opponent right now.

I must say that the HE are now a very good deck. When You have some good Building and Spell cards HE are really hard to beat. And those very good units like Swordmasters of Heoth and Descendant of Indraugnir. When I started playing W:I I did not liked the HE - those were to weak but now after the Silent Forge those are getting to be one of my favourite. I can't wait to have the March of the Damned to get some new cards in this deck.

I love this deck right now - it's so much fun to play. I made a few minor tweaks and here's where my current version is:

3 Envoy from Averlorn
3 Loremaster of Hoeth
3 Sea Guard Captain
2 Shadow Warrior
2 Skinks of Sotek
3 Silver Helm Detachment
3 Spawn of Itzl
2 Descendant of Indraugnir
(21)

3 Innovation
2 Steel's Bane
3 From Beneath the Waves
3 High Elf's Disdain
(11)

3 Warpstone Excavation
3 Contested Village
3 Citadel of Dusk
3 Outpost of Tiranoc
3 Elven Warship
3 Temple of Vaul
(18)

A version of this type of deck has preformed pretty well for me lately. I really like to have High Elves Disdain right now to combat the powerful Dwarf Tactics like 'Master Rune of Spite' and "Reclaim the Fallen'. My version currently has a few dwarf cards in it. The biggest issues that it normally has involve it's general inability to destroy units. I'd suspect that a well built skaven deck would give it problems.

3 Envoy from Averlorn
3 Loremaster of Hoeth
3 Sea Guard Captain
3 Silver Helm Detachment
2 Spawn of Itzl
3 Descendant of Indraugnir
(17)

3 Innovation
3 Charge of the Silver Helms

3 Demolition!
3 High Elf's Disdain
(12)

3 Warpstone Excavation
3 Contested Village
3 Citadel of Dusk
3 Outpost of Tiranoc
3 Elven Warship
3 Mining Tunnels

3 High Elf/Dwarf Alliance

(21)

So how much do you really like the Charge's? I had them in initially and they were used to boost a Detachment in the Kingdom or Quest for a turn. But the supports are so good in this deck and you do want multiples in play, so they all get played and you end up with plenty of resources and cards.

Mining Tunnels and Demolitions are definitely good enough to fit in. Do you miss Temple of Vaul though? I love Temple to the Quest, Warpstone to the Kingdom first turn.

Also - Spawn of Itzl are awesome in this deck!

The Charges are probably the worst card I have in there. A charged up Descendant has destroyed a zone more than once for me though. The support base is so good in this deck that you dont really need the charges for that a lot of the time, but around here people play a lot of support removal, so having the ability to pump at start of turn has been ok. I do like the spawns quite a lot, they are great in this deck.

Clamatius said:

Well, that answered my question about Mining Tunnels. How do you feel about Empire Tax? Temple of V is probably too expensive. How often are you losing resources in this deck?

Hi there i've been playing with this deck a lot since march arrived and find that it's generally good unless theres units with toughness on board which just stops this deck cold sadly.

How do you guys handle toughness then?Was just wondering with the decklists above,thanks