Pantheon specifically, blew me away. When I was opening my packs at Worlds I just kept gushing about how much I liked individual cards over and over again. On a whole the set is great, but I reached out to WWG to see if I could get the full resolution art for 10 of my subjective favorites (in addition to the clear objectively best one, Cast Out, at the top of the page). Every image can be clicked for its full resolution.
#10
My favorite part of this piece is the use of past champions’ art to clearly illustrate the mechanical effect of the card.
Poor Faithful Pegasus can’t catch a break. Even though Steed’s Loyalty 2 ability can’t target champions, this is still an effective piece at demonstrating the incredibly threatening nature of this Satanic Murder Horse. (Let me know in the comments who all remembers this reference.)
#8
Okay, so I’m biased on this one since it’s one of my favorite cards mechanically from the set, but the vanguard charge into the horde with the backup visibly framed by the champion works great.
While the artwork doesn’t directly depict the card’s mechanics, it is a fairly good representation of the Silver Wing Savior -> Resurrection loop charging headfirst into Evil’s unending removal.
#7
The mass gathering extending beyond the card boundaries, the detailed markings, and the ritual being cast create a haunting and intriguing scene.
I also like how the unarmored cultist seems dangerous enough to be a 6/5 0-cost champion, stronger than Knight of the Dawn and approaching Ankylosaurus range. I believe it.
#6
While I liked the original art on the promo version of this card, the new artwork is even better.
Einiosaurus just breaking through nine human tokens as if they weren’t even there. One soldier realizes the futility as the dinosaur doesn’t even bother to look at them.
#4
The artwork exceeds the expectation of the card’s name.
If I saw a dragon silently phase through a mountain to attack me, I’d probably react like middle soldier. Front soldier doesn’t even have a clue they’re about to die. Dragon just looks sick too.
While I initially thought this would work better for an unblockable champion, the idea of a dragon that is literally untargetable as it kills you is pretty terrifying. It also fits well with how the card plays; the threat of this as a surprise blocker turned attacker is real.
#2
I initially thought this was my favorite card art in the set before I looked through them all again for this. The pose, the spear, the clouds.
Wow. The hails of arrows. The trebuchets. The purple magical discharge. That massive punch windup. It’ll take an Apocalypse to stop that titan smash.
Afterword
These are my 10 (technically 11) favorite pieces from Epic Pantheon. Let me know your favorites either from this set or Epic as a whole. (Yes Cast Out is based on me.) Also not all of the Pantheon art is spectacular **cough**ScrapGolem**cough**.
In the meantime, I have started filming my Epic Constructed Tiered Card Ratings. I am also contemplating starting a massive scale project to work on concurrently. If I go through with it, it’ll probably take weeks to months but would be awesome (hopefully).
Now that my Constructed Card Ratings are up (except for the card by card analysis videos), I’m more determined than ever to use/break low rated cards. Erwin here we come.
The potentially underrated cards that formed the core of what I wanted to do were Erwin, Time Walker, and Scarred Cultist. (Cultist got an incognito tier bump partially because of this). Erwin could theoretically let me hit loyalty in two different alignments which is interesting. Cultist seems like it could be quite powerful, but I wasn’t able to find a deck for it. Time Walker works with both, and it’s the card that keeps making me want to build a 30/30 Evil/Sage 0-cost champion deck. So, that’s where I started.
I’ve built 0-cost blitzer decks in the past (bounce-based and Banishment/No Escape-based), and the biggest hurdle is always Raxxa’s Curse. If I play Little Devil, attack, and it gets Cursed, I fall so far behind. Therefore, instead of focusing on blitzing 0’s for my bounce deck, I wanted to focus on value 0’s, namely Scarred Cultist, Hunting Pterosaur, and Forcemage Apprentice. All of these give immediate value when they enter play, are worthwhile threats if not removed, and are great to get back to hand. If one of these gets Cursed after I’ve already retrieved a card or broken a Muse/Plucker, I’m okay with that.
Next, I worked out which Loyalty 2 champions I wanted to pursue, since Erwin needs a justification for inclusion (beyond playing it before Time Walker/Reset for a free recycle). Obviously I needed to be able to hit Evil loyalty for Cultist, I always want Medusa if possible, Angel of Death is amazing, and Necromancer Lord has some nice tricks in this deck (Final Task, Time Walker, Scarred Cultist). For Sage though, the only particularly interesting one was Time Walker. Therefore, since it is impossible to get 33 of 60 cards in both alignments, I decided to focus on Evil (since I want to hit Evil Loyalty early and often) and drop my Sage count to 24, making room for the Hunting Pterosaurs.
While I seriously dislike including Loyalty 2 cards in factions with less than 33 cards of that alignment or 55% (see my Epic Constructed Process article), in theory, this deck has some tricks to subvert that soft-restriction. First, I only have 3 cards that need loyalty outside of my main faction. Second, these are cards I believe I’ll generally want to wait until a bit later in the game to use. Third, Erwin, once drawn, will spend most of the rest of the game in my hand, meaning I only need 1 more card to activate Walker. Fourth, Ancient Chant Recall off-turn can potentially provide that second Loyalty card, so can Scarred Cultist (although I cut most of my other 1-cost Sage champions…). I’ll be curious to see how well this works. I don’t want to play it safe and go down to 2 Walkers because it is one of the strongest cards in the deck. On the plus side, if I do draw all 3 Walkers, at least I’ll have loyalty for them.
So, the goal of this deck is to win by chipping down the opponent with 0-cost champions while outvaluing them by repeatedly playing incredibly powerful loyalty 2 champions. While less of a focus as in the past, playing a 0-cost champion and attacking or passing is a strong option for this deck. Where similar decks falter, however, is that they don’t have strong on-turn gold punishers to follow up. This is particularly true because Evil has historically had little to no worthwhile on-turn gold punishers. Steed of Zaltessa changes that. If your opponent spends their gold first on your turn, you get to hit them for 11 and leave a 7 defense airborne champion in play, incredible. (I think I want space for 3.) The fact that Evil now has a powerful on-turn gold punisher is a huge deal, and it is one of the reasons why a 6/5 version of Corpse Taker (Cultist) can actually be a powerful card, more on this in the constructed ratings videos. Winged Death is also a strong board-control gold-punisher.
Fairy Trickster is the final interesting piece of this build. Ideally, I’ll ambush it in off-turn, expend it to target my deck, and flip any of my 0-cost champions, effectively drawing and playing that card, not bad. I’ve used it in the past in similar decks, and it’s been okay, but I’m curious about experimenting with it in this deck. One interesting note is that if you use this off-turn and/or during combat and you turn up a slow champion, you can actually play that champion (effectively as if it had ambush). Surprise Attack on a body could be interesting, particularly with Winged Death, Necromancer Lord, Time Walker, Mist Guide Herald, and Winged Death. We’ll see.
Current Concerns
Right now, I’m a bit lighter on card draw than I like to be, especially since I’m being overly generous and counting Fairy Trickster as card draw. Theoretically, the AoE bounces from Time Walker and Reset could keep me stocked with cards, but I won’t know until testing. Due to this lack of card draw concern, I shifted a bit away from Mist Guide Herald, which can in theory be pretty strong when it hits Time Walker. Due to the decreased MGH count, Final Task becomes worse, as does Teleport.
If I continue with this deck, I would probably end up cutting the Tricksters, MGH, Teleport, and decreasing the Final Task count. The 2-2 Little DevilCorpsemonger ratio might shift too. Hopefully the final two as of yet unspoiled Pantheon packs will give the final cards needed for these slots.
Below are the 264 currently-legal cards for Epic constructed divided into 9 tiers (Core, Tyrants, Uprising, and 4 of 6 Pantheon packs [not yet available for retail]). In constructed, the power level of each card is heavily influenced by the other cards that are being played, the “meta.” For example, if everyone is playing untargetable champions, non-targeted removal (Scara’s Will and Winged Death) are effectively better while targeted removal (Erase and Drain Essence) are effectively worthless.
Therefore, since I want this first rating to be relevant for as long as possible, I have tried to keep it as meta-agnostic as reasonable. Instead of rating the cards based on their power level at this exact moment, I have grouped them by relative power level that can fluctuate based on the meta. From these tier groupings, I plan on making around 9 videos (about 1 per tier) to explain the cards’ strengths and weaknesses and my rationale for their placements [edit: first video is up going over all of the top tier cards, future videos will be broken up into small packages of similar cards]. The videos also go over community terminology and key Epic concepts. I recommend focusing on tiers 1-5 when building decks. (I might also write a meta-based ranking to accompany this article that I can update as the meta shifts.)
If you disagree or want clarification on any of the cards’ positions below, let me know in the comments. I’ll plan on spending a bit more time talking about those cards in my videos. Also, I know this clashes with most players’ views on at least a few cards, so tell me why I’m wrong!
Tier Name (# of cards in tier / # of cards total legal cards)
Brief description of tier
Alignment (# of cards in alignment in tier / # of legal cards of that alignment total) [# of cards in the alignment for this and all previous tiers]
Individual cards are searchable with ctrl + f / cmd + f. Clicking on a card name will currently open the card’s linked image in a new tab. Once the videos are up I’ll, ideally, switch the link to the timestamped video where I discuss it (this has begun).
I am a better limited player than a constructed player. I tried to factor out my personal biases for these rankings as much as possible, but doing so completely is impossible and ultimately undesirable.
**Update 10/21/20: I am a much better constructed player now**
These changes are based off of my experiences with constructed on the app up through Uprising and Duels (no Pantheon). I avoided demoting cards except for egregious cases. I also avoided changing most Pantheon cards.
Promoted Cards
Angel of Death: up from Tier 2 to Tier 1 (One of the best defensive cards in the game, that 6/5 airborne body is such a frustrating blocker and a reasonable threat too)
Angel of the Gate: up from Tier 5 to Tier 4 (Excellent tech card in my anti-Wild Untargetable deck)
Bruger, the Pathfinder: up from Tier 8 to Tier 7 (As more wolves get added to Wild the potential for this rises)
Burrowing Wurm: up from Tier 9 to Tier 7 (Lost to it in a Mist Guide Herald, Surprise Attack deck, new Surprise Attack 0-cost coming in next sets)
Corpse Taker: up from Tier 7 to Tier 6 (Maybe it fits into a Time Walker deck or something similar, great art though)
Courageous Soul: up from Tier 5 to Tier 4 (Lynchpin in Human Tokens which is a real deck now)
Crystal Golem: up from Tier 4 to Tier 3 (Staple for Mist Guide Herald decks and pretty reasonable as a draw 2 and on its own, Army of the Apocalypse potential as well)
Demonic Rising: up from Tier 3 to Tier 1 (One of the most powerful cards in the game, gives token decks an absurd finisher and defensive option)
Draka, Dragon Tyrant: up from Tier 2 to Tier 1 (9/9 airborne evasive gold-punisher that sweeps 3 defense champions such as tokens, all of those things are consistently highly valuable, it will practically never be a bad card and it’s an absolute backbreaker in some matchups)
Entangling Vines: up from Tier 8 to Tier 5 (Was pretty devestating in a Wild deck against me, the meta has to look a very specific way for it to be reliably powerful though)
Fireball: up from Tier 8 to Tier 6 (With tokens becoming more and more powerful, having another off-turn clear for non-demon tokens seems possibly valuable)
Force Field: up from Tier 8 to Tier 5 (Seemed amazing in theory crafting an airborne deck for no-core constructed)
Hands from Below: up from Tier 6 to Tier 3 (Powerful token filler that also removes Thought Plucker and the currently popular Knight of Shadows while supporting Demonic Rising)
Ice Drake: up from Tier 3 to Tier 2 (Almost a Tier 1, amazing pay-off for playing Sage, great defensively against board-centric decks, especially tokens, and great offensively to negate potential blockers, returning it to your own hand for multiple plays is great too, Tier 2 because there are too many situations where I feel forced to just play it as a 6/8 airborne)
Inner Peace: up from Tier 5 to Tier 2 (Very strong card in Kark decks and control decks in general)
Mist Guide Herald: up from Tier 2 to Tier 1 (This card makes most 1-cost champion based decks better, it lets you find your most nescessary cards for the matchup, and/or more establishing cards while also providing an airborne chump blocker [it can attack too] If running this, I recommend at minimum 20 other 1-cost champions [with Crystal Golem and Street Swindler being excellent filler], but I’ve been trying for ~25 recently)
Necrovirus: up from Tier 5 to Tier 4 (This is another “over-draw” card similar to Soul Hunter but for token decks with Evil, also reasonable as off-turn removal against no-core airborne decks)
Noble Martyr: up from Tier 6 to Tier 4 (This is another “over-draw” card similar to Soul Hunter but for token decks with Good)
Scarros, Hound of Draka: up from Tier 3 to Tier 2 (Excellent finisher, board-clearer, bounce-resistant threat for heavy Wild decks)
Second Wind: up from Tier 5 to Tier 2 (Excellent anti-aggro tech card that I put into a ton of decks currently, also absurd in Kark)
Secret Legion: up from Tier 5 to Tier 3 (Excellent card I would never leave out of human tokens and can fit into some Good decks with incidental humans)
Shadow Imp: up from Tier 4 to Tier 3 (Excellent in aggressive to midrange Sage-heavy decks, assuming it isn’t your only 3 or less defense champions/0-cost champions)
Spore Beast: up from Tier 3 to Tier 2 (Absurdly powerful against decks that rely on 1-cost champions to attack or block breakthrough champions [fairly garbage against decks that don’t], another card that effectively forces decks to run small removal [Muse/Thought Plucker/Spore Beast answers])
Standard Bearer: up from Tier 8 to Tier 7 (Okay card in human token lists)
Steel Golem: up from Tier 5 to Tier 4 (Excellent tech card in my anti-Wild Untargetable deck)
The Gudgeon: up from Tier 4 to Tier 3 (Just a solid “draw 2 and” champion, reasonably in generic Evil or Mist Guide Herald decks)
The Risen: up from Tier 8 to Tier 7 (Introduction of Eager Necromancer and other aggressive 0-cost Evil token cards)
Thundarus: up from Tier 8 to Tier 7 (1 ofs of this have been cropping up in competitive decks here and there as bounce [Erase] has been falling out of favor)
Warrior Golem: up from Tier 5 to Tier 3 (I’ve been impressed by it in aggressive-midrange Sage decks as a bit more added pressure that frequently recycles)
Watchful Gargoyle: up from Tier 4 to Tier 3 (Effectively a Fumble in a lot of situations, sometimes better, but it can be reacted to, critical to Kark)
Wolf’s Call: up from Tier 9 to Tier 5 (An okay part of my human tokens list I brought to Origins 2019 and other token decks, partner with Hunting Pack)
Word of Summoning: up from Tier 7 to Tier 5 (We’re reaching critical mass for aggressive Evil token decks and this can fit into that deck)
Cards I Felt Needed Justification for No Change
Noble Unicorn/Silver Wing Savior: No Change (I still want to believe [Pantheon does give Savior a lot of excellent toys, shhhhh though])
Zombie Apocalypse: No Change (While an incredibly powerful card, it doesn’t seem meta-shaping nor broadly applicable in my experience, not as powerful as Demonic Rising but that is a tough comparison, control decks are frequently light on champions and mass discard pile banishment remains popular, by the time in a game where you’ve survived an opponent’s opening rush and their mass discard pile removal, you’ve generally already won, it is another off-turn board clear which absolutely matters, but I don’t think it is necessarily that much better than the others, especially since it doesn’t banish the cleared champions like Wave or Martial Law)
Demoted Cards
Angel of Mercy: down from Tier 4 to Tier 6 (Due to its stats being too bad and its effect being too slow, just too easy to counter its gold expenditure [frequently for 0] before gaining value)
Dark Assassin: down from Tier 7 to Tier 8 (I can’t imagine this ever having a home in competitive constructed)
Gold Dragon: down from Tier 2 to Tier 3 (It hurts my heart, but 1-cost champion-based Good just consistently hasn’t been strong enough, maybe this goes back up later, but it relies too much on maintaining a board of Good champions which is impractical)
Herald of Scara: down from Tier 6 to Tier 7 (It seems unlikely this will ever have a home in competitive constructed, but maybe)
Palace Guard: down from Tier 2 to Tier 5 (Body too small to be relevant in a lot of situations, no evasion, and the slow 1-cost slot is too valuable, in a world of Kark, Brachiosaurus, and tokens this just doesn’t cut it)
Teleport: down from Tier 4 to Tier 6 (Defensively – Tribute and Loyalty 2 champions are too popular to get great value, Offensively seems like too much of a “win-more” card when ahead)
The Risen: up from Tier 5 to Tier 4
I was very impressed by the card in my deck for the November constructed monthly. It is now a solid tech card (at least).
Herald of Scara: up from Tier 7 to Tier 5
I was pretty impressed by the card in my deck for the November constructed monthly. A 9/7 airborne champion that selectively draws a card in heavy Evil decks and can trade with Draka is not bad at all.
