Dark Elf/Undead Control

By Harliquine, in Warhammer Invasion Deck Building

This is still a work in progress but so far it seems to work well. Slow but effective.
Dark Elf Kingdom
Units 26
Walking Sacrifice x3
Mortella x2
Hellbanes Raiders x2
Wight Lord x2
Countess Iseara x2
Mountain Brigands x3
Dwarf Slaves x2
Nagaroth Spearmen x2
Shades x3
Crypt Ghouls x2
Vanguard of Woe x2
Sorceress of Ghrond x2
Supports 10
Withering Hex x2
Witch Hag's Curse x2
Word of Pain x2
Slave Pen x3
Contested Village x1
Tactics 14
Burn It Down x3
Hate x3
Whip The Slaves x2
Innovation x2
Chill Wind x2
Raise Dead x2

The concept is to maintain control of your opponent's hand, resource, and draw in order to build up a cycle of bring units back from the dead and using your opponents own tactics that you forced discarded to hurt him. Commonly opponents play their expensive cards from hand as developements thus keeping you from tossing one of their cards into the discard. The win condition is 2 burned zones unlike my earlier dark elf mill deck. It has similar elements to said deck and uses them to buy time and strengthen the grip of it's control. If you can reliably get them down to four or less resources and one card draw a turn then this deck is doing everything right. It's only a matter of time before you can get some heavy hitters on the table or use their own tactics to reset them into oblivion.

I see it as weak vs weeny decks full of 3 or less cost cards. Rush is also a pain in the butt to deal with.

I really wish I could get behind this deck, but as it is built now I cannot. The only factions I can see having any immediate difficulty against this build are Chaos(because it's Chaos), and HE Indirect Damage(if they get a bad draw and you get a good draw). You have a lot of indirect damage fodder, which gives you the edge over the HE, but the deck is just slow. Consider subbing the Hel Raiders and Word of Pain with economy boosters and seeing how it works.

I think you have got too many ideas in this deck: Early disruption (Hate, Hexes, Mountain Brigands, Shades), hand destruction (Shades, Vanguard of Woe recycling, Helbane Raiders), Battlefield Development (Drawf Slaves, Burn it Down, Spearman), Hex recycling, Necromancy loops, sacrifice Economy (without lash)

I would kick the battlefield development plan out and go for Black Guard Aspirants as a beat down stick. And I don't get why you have the Countess and Raise Dead in the deck and the same with chillwind.

I don't have too many ideas in the deck. It works. It's a mid to late game "I'd like to play a game by myself now thanks very much" theme. I dumped the "raise dead" and it still works but sometimes I wish I still had them in there.

I don't use Lash the Prisoner because you need 3 loyalty symbols for a free cast. Yes I can cast it for 1 as long as I have anouther dark elf symbol on the board somewhere but innovation, hate and mountain brigands works just as well. The fact is I so far I've only needed 4 resources to run the deck. It's slow, it plods on, but once it's got it's claws into you it's relentless. The harder you fight with fancy tactics and a big units like descendant of inaugar the better my deck works. I do need to test it more and change a few things but for the most part it works and it has driven one of my local opponents to fits over it.

So far I've tested it against the new and very nasty chaos corruption and high elf indirect damage with an eye towards some meta vs this deck. I've almost lost many a game but as said before once it gets control it's so difficult to break free. The fun is getting to that point the bad it that it's rinse and repeat after that because it feels like you are playing a game by yourself.

I finally had this lose to the new jumping jack knights and it wasn't even a tuned jumping jacks. I just tossed two of every knight into the deck with a host resource boosters and developement control. I mean it was a very close test game but I ended up playing unit control instead of any other form of control but hey at least it did that well.

The deck is just very good a doing whatever another deck can do... fairly well and making the other guy do his own thing rather poorly in the process. The knights on the other hand where all but unstoppable with the exception of keeping enough knights who weren't hexed or destroyed by a wight lord on the table. And again the knight deck was just garbage in a pile.

It makes me sad. The dark elves now work great vs rush and indirect damage and do awesome and being a bully but the empire just has so many tricks up it's sleeves now that I think those dirty humans have more than just two sleeves to hide things in if you get my drift there.