Deck Recipe

by James Przytulski

At the Origins Final Brawl I played a Dragon/Seven Masters deck I called the Story of the Three Acrobats. I finished third at the Final Brawl with an attendance of around 15-20. This deck is a combat trick deck. This deck attempts to go for an unstoppable or at least difficult to defend against win.

I built this deck on the hypothesis that the best four player decks are the ones that can break through the stalemates that plague multi-player games. The original deck contained one hundred cards with four Wu Bins of Turtle Island, five Scrolls of Incantation, and five Fighting Spirits for search and recursion. The deck would then play a large amount of combat trick events that are notorious to the Dragon faction. Events such as Back for Seconds, Flying Kick, Got My Mojo Working, and Old Hermit’s Gambit are very potent yet very narrow unless you are in the right position. That is why I only play one of each of the trick events. Scroll of Incantation allows me to search out an event, such as Got My Mojo Working, and play it in response to a card such as a Nerve Gas in the same scene. This is because Scroll of Incantation says the event can be played “immediately”. Over time the deck was whittled down to 64 cards. The current incarnation is 64 cards. In the next section I will go over the combat tricks.

In these beleaguered time, where no starter decks are available for purchase anywhere, demo decks are a crucial way to get new people to play our beloved game. If you have always wanted to contribute to the recruiting effort from your collection while cleaning out your closet at the same time, here are a few guidelines for building a decent demo deck.

The Purpose of the Deck

… is obviously to introduce new players to the game. Ideally, the decks should be fun and easy to play, and showcase some of the strengths of Shadowfist. You want lots of characters, and lots of free stuff, so that the new player feels like he can influence the game at all times. You don’t want tricky decks. You don’t want decks that are poorly resourced. And you absolutely don’t want any cards that are hard to understand, or that (even worse) have been errated and don’t do what they claim they do.

People who’ve played against me online have undoubtedly run into this deck at some point. The deck is amazingly robust; it can keep up with fast duelers and hold its own in multi as well. Ladies and Gentlemen, without further ado, I give you Turbo Ho:

5 Little Grasshopper
4 Golden Candle Society
4 Railroad Workers

1 Derek Han
2 Lui Yu Min
2 Kwan Lung-Wei
2 Redeemed Pirate
1 Hung Hei Kwon
3 Sword Saint

2 Shield of Pure Soul

2 Heat of Battle
2 Wind on the Mountain
3 The Red Harvest
3 Violet Meditation
2 Invincible Chi
4 Confucian Stability
2 Blade Palm

This is the deck I won the Shadowfist World Championship game this year at GenCon Indy. I would say this is the deck I decided to bring, but that's not exactly true. Going into Indy I was torn between bringing a known reliable deck tweaked with some new cards, or bringing a new deck based almost entirely off new cards. I had decided on the latter in the form of an Abomination deck, but in the wee hours before the tourney some wandering demonic imps caused me to lose said deck, with the remaining time before the main event I dug this one out, did some tweaking, and came up with:

The Long Strange Journey of Young Li Mao

Training Experimentation

By James Przytulski

(59 Cards)

5x Buromil Grunt
5x Assault Squad
2x Loyalty Officer
4x Colonel Wilhelm Reiger
4x Rapid Response Team

2x Rise of the Neoburo (Bazaar is better)

5x Dangerous Experiment (The best alt power gen in Shadowfist)
5x Imprisoned (Who's the Monkey Now? Proof)
2x Neutron Bomb
1x The Golden Spike

2x City Square
2x Fox Pass
4x Diamond Beach
2x Roller Rink
2x Mountain Fortress

5x Killing Ground
5x Bandit Hideout
2x Training Camp

This is the most complete deck I've ever built. It has everything I'd want in a deck. It has speed, alternative power generation, comeback potential, recursion, and flexibility. It can either sit and play a slow defensive game with recycling Buromil Grunts and Assault Squads, or play a speed Bandit Hideout soldier barrage. When I first built the deck I would play defensively. Recently though a more offensive approach has started to pay off.

By Robin Parmar

Robin used his deck, Double Dragon, to win the online Thunder Arena Proving Ground League’s Comrades in Arms tournament.

People know me as a Dragon player, though I was also one of the first to take to the Purists and developed a deck after Dark Future that I had to retire in my old playgroup -- people thought it was just too good. So for the Online League Comrades in Arms tournament I put together a Purist and a Dragon deck, and tested both.

The Purist deck revolves around Glimpse of Brief Eternity, which I personally believe is far more broken than Discerning Fire in this format. It costs nothing, almost always smokes a card, screws up some deck manipulation engines and gives you the advantage of seeing into an opponent's deck. Furthermore it does not target, and so is proof against Festival Circle and the like. As if that isn't enough, it cannot be stopped by Got My Mojo Working and Who's the Monkey Now?, since it is only when it resolves that a card is smoked.

The Modern Ex-Commando

By Michael Stadermann

Ex-Commando
Dangerous Vet
Cost: Dra Dra 3
Generates: Dra
Fighting: 3
Ex-Commando unturns when a Weapon or State is played on him.

This week, we’ll take a look at a good old friend and see how his work environment changed over the years. Instead of trying to provide a complete overview, I will provide a more in-depth view for a specific deck type and explain which cards fit into it well and which ones are less useful.

The Ex-Commando has been around for a long, long time. In fact, he’s been with Shadowfist longer than I have. I guess everybody who plays Dragons has played him at some point, found that he fit into a very state-heavy deck that rocked every once in a while, but mostly sucked, and put him back into the binder. The Ex-Commando’s job wasn’t easy when he came out. There was really only one free state that unturned him, Both Guns Blazing (BGB), and it was that same state that was necessary to pump his fighting. Unpumped, the Commando is a fragile little thing that can dish out a lot of damage, but can get eaten easily by interceptors. So you had to find those Both Guns in your deck to make it work alright, and maybe toss in a few Slo-Mo Vengeance for those rare cases where Both Guns get smoked and the Commando doesn’t to make the combo a bit more robust. Even if you did all that, you still have a very elementary problem: you have a deck full of states that all cost power, and you are very likely to stall because you’re sitting on a handful of guns.

I built Tiki God because I'm generally a pretty low-average multi player. I have no local playgroup in Cleveland and only a little time during the year for Gatling to keep my skills sharp. So when I decided to go to Jacktown (last fall) and to GenCon I figured my only good shot at victories in tournament multiplayer was to build a deck that was much lower on interaction than is typical in multi -- an engine deck in other words. From the name, you'd think the deck runs Purists (well, it runs one, but we'll get to that in a minute), or Lotus, or Darkness Monarchs, but it's primarily Ascended and Hand. I wouldn't normally post a non-winning deck, but this one's notable for a couple of reasons.