Final Pantheon Card Reviews (First 4 of 24)

Foreword

It’s taken me a while, but I’m finally getting around to writing up my thoughts about the final two Pantheon packs, since my first reaction video on Twitch timed out and I’ve had some time to think about and/or test these cards. I also decided to break these out into smaller chunks (because I realized I could go into more depth/go on longer rants this way and you’d be more likely to read them as opposed to if I put them all together) to make them more accessible.

In addition, Origins 2019 has announced that there will be a 10k Epic tournament this year:

#Origins2019 show co-sponsors, @wwizardgames, will be giving away some serious cash prizes! Players will compete to win their share of $20,000 at the @StarRealmsOrigins $10K Championships and the @EpiccardgameOrigins $10K Championship! Join us, June 12-16 at the @cbusconventions pic.twitter.com/w1vofTjRlg

— Origins Games Fair (@originsgames) December 20, 2018

WWG has not yet provided any further information such as what/which formats, etc.

Card Ratings

Carrion Demon Rating

Limited: Always Desirable
Constructed: Tier 5

Great in limited for all of the reasons you would expect: 0-cost blitz champion, 4 defense, and mass discard pile banish. Currently unplayable in constructed because it’s a 0-cost champion (Raxxa’s Curse), it has no immediate effect, it has no evasion, and the deck that cares about its discard pile the most (The Flock’s Gift/Tatian’s deck) has blockers that don’t mind trading with it. The “Break any champion damaged by this card” allows this to “trade up” with 1-cost champions and activates Ritual of Scarra synergy, but neither of those enable it to compete for the finite constructed 0-cost slots.

Limited

Carrion Demon is better than the guaranteed mass-discard pile banish cards in more aggressive/”get ahead, stay ahead” decks, but it is worse in more control/deck-out focused decks. This is because control decks are frequently “threat-light” meaning that your opponent is more likely to have a better answer saved up for this card when you eventually play it. Therefore, it is less likely it will actually be able to hit your opponent, and as a control deck, you basically need a mass-discard pile banish effect, especially if you are trying to win by decking out. In non-control decks, it is primarily another immediate 0-cost threat in your onslaught, meaning your opponent is less likely to have a strong answer to it, and if they are forced to throw a 1-cost champion in front of it to protect their health and discard pile, trading your 0 for their 1-cost champion is a major tempo advantage.

Constructed

In an environment with plentiful chump blockers, Raxxa’s Curse, and fast enough decks to ignore your 3 attack minion (and their own discard pile), this just isn’t impactful enough. It does have the Demon tag for Raxxa’s Displeasure synergy and what not, but if it can’t connect with the opponent, it’s just a worse Little Devil or stronger-starting but non-growing Thrasher Demon.

Rant

I spent a lot of time thinking about and trying to write this rant about how Carrion Demon illustrated the midrange-tech 0-cost problem, related to the lack of constructed-playable 1-cost discard pile removal, and the non-viability of Sage-based decks due in part to the meta-shift towards punishing discard effects (Plucker). But I couldn’t figure out how to do it adequately.

The gist of it was that if you wanted to consistently attack an opponent’s discard pile, against Scara’s Gift or Nashville’s heavy-recycle combo-Kark-like-decks, you needed to commit at bare minimum six 0-cost slots (Guilt Demon, Keeper of Secrets, Amnesia/Heinous Feast); this in turn prevents you from including otherwise synergistic 0-cost cards, which locks this line of attack off for most decks. Erratic Research and Grave Demon are technically 1-cost cards that can attack your opponent’s discard pile, but they seem just too weak to be worth much: they are one-time effects (so they’re pretty ineffective against decks that consistently burn through their discard pile and keep it at only a few cards at a time) and a draw 2 or an 8/8, evasion-less champion, isn’t worthwhile for most decks.

However, I kept running through potential scenarios that potentially invalidated these thoughts. For example, hard control decks could theoretically run Erratic Research since they need to use draw 2s throughout the game (but hard control is currently ill-positioned against the crazy draw potential of Wild/Sage midrange). An aggressive Raxxa’s Displeasure/Dark One’s Fury/Rift Summoner deck, on the other hand, might be able to run Grave Demon (assuming it can actually break through Scara’s Gift decks before running out of resources). However, even if neither of these are true, I’m not even sure if it would be desirable for every deck to have reliable options to attack discard piles, especially since Amnesia is still reasonably popular anyway.

So, I don’t know…

To address this potential problem, I have been fantasizing about a midrange/aggressive, 1-cost Sage champion with a Sage-specific, repeatable, targeted discard-pile banish effect. Such as

• “Ally->banish 2 cards in a discard pile”
• “Whenever a (Sage) champion you control deals damage to a player, banish a card from that player’s discard pile,” accompanied by a Loyalty effect that deals damage multiple times
• A Carrion Demon effect attached to a 1-cost Sage champion with either unblockable + loyalty 2 -> blitz or ambush + loyalty 2 -> unblockable (probably at 4 or 5 toughness).

Dark Prince

Limited: Frequently Desirable
Constructed: Tier 7

It’s an 8/7 airborne blitz demon. Solid gold punisher, matches up great against 6/8 airborne champions, and you can effectively ignore the expend text, because it’s bad. However, without the demon tag, this would be Tier 9 for constructed because there are better blitzing airborne champions.

Ritual of Scarra

Limited: Situationally Desirable
Constructed: Tier 4

A couple reminders,

• This only counts your evil champions (yo Dark Leader or more practically Zannos)
• It does make your evil champions do the damage, so if you have a “break any champion damaged by this card” champion in play (Carrion Demon), this is effectively a 0-cost “break target champion” (even off-turn)

Therefore, if you have any of those cards in draft, this card is nuts (especially since it’s also an “or draw 2”). Even without those, it is solid in an Evil deck.

However, all of the champions with “break any champion damaged by this card” are weak in constructed. It can still be decent in aggressive, wide Evil token decks because it can let you focus your 1-cost cards on offense (Plague Zombies), but in chip-damage-based control decks it is generally either a worse Consume against small champions or a win-more card when ahead.

Red Mist

Draft: Always Acceptable
Constructed: Tier 6

The dream: play Ice Drake on your opponent’s turn then play this on your turn. The reality: 1-cost Evil draw 2.

I may have used the non-draw effect on this once, and it was a pain to set up, just to break one or two champions. The fact that you generally can’t even attack before playing this, to give your opponent a chance to spend their gold first on your turn (since this would expend one of your champions), holds this back even more.