G'day friends, it's Bliss2Guy and for Friday the 6th of September, this is episode 1356 I've walked to work on my last stone podcast. Oh, I stumbled a little bit. I was trying something fancy with the date, as you can see, and I messed it up. Anyway, it's Wild Legends Storytime for September. Early in the month I noticed, yeah I said Friday the 6th of September and I'm already legend and wild. I mentioned this briefly yesterday, but there's like this new deck, it's not even that new, it is new, but it's based on an old shell of a druid deck and it's kind of ridiculous. I think I mentioned yesterday's episode that I was, what, around Diamond 6? I think I was one win away from Diamond 5 when I recorded yesterday, and then just played a few games throughout the day. The problem with this deck is that it's really quick. You win or lose very quickly, which means you can turn over games very quickly and I had 11 times a multiplier, so it did not take much effort to get from Diamond 6 to legend yesterday. The deck is a problem and not in the way that you might be expecting. When somebody says the deck is a problem, it's because it has too high of a win rate, which that can be a thing sometimes, but in this case I think the matchups are just incredibly polarising. So let's just talk a little about the deck first. It's a druid deck and we've seen this druid shell before in Togwagel decks. I talk about this at the very end of yesterday's episode, but obviously I'll go more in depth today. Unlike previous Legend Storytime episodes, I'm actually going to go a bit card by card here because the deck is, well it's not complicated once you know what it's doing, but if you look at it, you're like, "I don't understand what's happening here." Of course, I should probably think a patron while I'm here, where are we? Patron names. Somebody, because I was calling the deck ridiculous, and I think Ben Heathstone was like, "You should think ridiculous. How does the patron today?" He's not next on the list, but I guess that's a free thinking for him. Anyway, next up we have Gromok, and so we're thinking Gromok, who is not ridiculous, but they are a patron, and we really do appreciate that patreon.com/bus2guy if you can afford to support. If you can't, just tell a friendly review, hang out, listen, all that stuff helps. Now, looking at the deck list today, so the shell of the deck is basically what's it called a juicy psych melon, which is a four-manner epic spell, which is draw seven cost, eight cost, nine cost, and ten cost minion for your deck. Then also puppet master Dorian, is that what it's called? Yeah, puppet master Dorian, right? That's the one from WhizBank's workshop, which is the four-manner two-six. Whenever you draw a minion at a one-one copy for one-manner to your hand, so the combos you want to have Dorian play and cast juicy psych melon, drawing seven, eight, nine, and ten cost minions, and then also getting one cost copies of them to your hand, that are one ones, but that doesn't really matter. So to pull that off, that's eight mana. To find Dorian, you also run open summons, which is a four-manner spell endured that says recruit a four-cost or less minion from your deck, which means pull it out of deck and put it into play. Dorian is the only four-cost minion, so what we're looking at now is we've got three cards of cost for that basically effectively put Dorian into play. One of them is Dorian, the other two are open summons. So we want to pay four-manner to put Dorian into play, maybe less, actually, technically, if you're using open summons, you've reduced the cost of it, don't get ahead of ourselves. Dorian to play, and then spend four-manner to cast juicy psych melon. Now, that's eight mana, and that's a lot of mana, so druid obviously can do things about that. The rest of the deck is basically set around trying to find the pieces to play those two cards and also cheating mana to be able to do it as quickly as possible. When you draw these cards, the cards you're drawing, so the original shell of the deck was doing toggle wiggle things, and so there are two key cards in this, the ten and the nine mana cards for making this work, and that's A&R, you may remember that from Titans, because she's ten mana and a titan and has three abilities, one which is refresh your mana crystals, the others are not important. So you get a one-manner E&R, you play it, you refresh your mana crystals. Great, now we're back to square one on mana, and we can do a whole bunch more stuff. The nine mana minion is Aviana, she's a nine mana five five, one point she was nerfed to ten mana, she's a nine mana five five that makes all your minions cost one, so even if, for example, you've drawn your E&R naturally ahead of time, you haven't got a one mana copy, Aviana can let you play a one mana copy anyway, because everything is one mana, and you're going to want to play Aviana because now all your minions cost one mana, not just the copies that you drew of Dorian. So now that we have those in play, you've got to allow mana left and everything cost one, now you can play, let's get the name right, Lothama Theron, now this is the one that's from like, is it also Titans, I think, like the seven mana seven seven that doubles the stats of minions in your deck, because ideally you've drawn two of those by the way, one of which is a one mana one one, thanks to Dorian, you now can just play both those for one mana thanks to Aviana, and you just doubled the stats of course, things easy deck twice. Now you play the eight mana card, because that was the E&R's 10, Aviana's 9, Lothama's 7, and 8 mana is Call for, Call for O the Artist from, what do we call it, from Wizbang's workshop. Now the original combo here was instead of Call for O the Artist and Lothama Theron, you had Togg Waggle, who costs 8, King Togg Waggle, and Azalina who costs, what should we call it, seven. Now Togg Waggle switches is a eight mana five five, both play a switched decks, and you give your opponent a ransom, which is a five mana spell, if they play that spell, it switches decks back. Azalina is a seven mana three three, so you play Azalina, and you replace your hand with a copy of theirs, so you switch decks with them, giving them a ransom, and then you play Azalina, copying their hand, and now you have the same hand as them, which means that they swap decks back, you can just swap back again, and that's that, they're stuck with your deck, which probably has very little of note in it, and then you can win that way. So that was what the original deck did, and I think, when I'm thinking about this, like it is the same number of cards, I think in the combo, I was thinking that there is less, there's more in this deck to make it less consistent, but now they think about it, it's like, no we're just replacing two of those cards, the other cards were still there, so it's basically the same deck, but anyway, a different combo, because now what we're doing, when we played North them Arthur on twice, and doubled the stats of minions in that deck, oh no that is, yeah so, so the Aviana, the Aviana into togwegle and Azalina combo is just those cards, leaving the rest of the deck free to have no spaces, the version I'm playing is less consistent, because it also has two or three more minions that don't cost seven to ten mana, because you wouldn't accidentally draw them, oh I've got a sneeze coming, very summery morning, but, of course that's going to stir up the hours, it's, we've got a high of 29 today, that's the middle of summer weather in New Zealand, and it's barely spring here in Sydney, anyway, I forgot about the other minions, so this deck is less consistent than the togwegle one, because it devotes more card slots to these minions for the combo, so we've got our seven to ten mana minions that we just talked about, but at six mana we can have, you know Roy Jenkins, reckless rocketeer is something I've seen people play, I'm playing two dread deserter from Perils and Paradise, I originally started with three minions there, Leroy and two dread deserters, basically because the list I copied had that, and then I saw Corbet talking about versions on H.S. Guru and the highest win-rate ones on air too, so I was like let's just try two, the problem here is that if you start drawing these things naturally the deck just does nothing, because the idea is that when you play Cholopharo the artist, after having pulled out your seven to ten mana minions from the deck, and having pulled out the Dorian because you used Oaken summers, the only minions left in the deck are dread deserters, or Leroy or reckless rocketeer, and they've had their stats doubled potentially twice, and so what you end up with is a board of five or six, if they're dread deserters 24/24s, if they're Leroy's then they're like 24/8, but that's a heck of a lot of charge damage, and in theory you can be taking someone for, I know 120 odd, like it's a lot, and you're like okay well that's pretty cool, now why is this better than the Togwagel version, this is the crux I want to talk about here, because the Togwagel deck's been around for a while and it hasn't really been a meta-breaker, and the Togwagel deck is more consistent in this because it doesn't have to devote deck slots to Leroy's and deserters and whatever else, right? The thing to look at here is that the deck is very polarised in its matchups, it cannot beat aggro, generally, like you can, the odds are very low, but what you do do is you beat everything else quite single-handedly outside of potential disruption, and we'll talk about that in a moment as well, so we've got a very polarised matchup spread where this thing is just caving into aggro and just crushing everything else when it's a Togwagel deck. The problem here is that this, to be able to do, to beat the other decks that aren't aggro, you need to be a certain amount of consistent, right? The problem is it was so consistent that you can afford to reduce that consistency a little bit by removing two of the rampy cards to add in the two dread deserters, and the deck still crushes those matchups, like you may be losing a slight percentage in win rate by being the charge version as opposed to the Togwagel version, but that percentage is not enough to sway what's happening on those lopsided matchups, like you are just still crushing the decks that can't really interact with you quickly enough, which is a lot of decks and wild, like any Reno deck either has to disrupt you or you're still just going to kill them. At any deck that is not incredibly hyper aggro, they have to disrupt you or you are going to kill them. It's just really nasty. Anyway, the aggro decks, you can't really beat them because they go so fast. The problem here now is that the reason the Togwagel deck was, I guess, on the fringe was not only because it couldn't be an aggro, but because sometimes you could pull off the combo so quickly, but you still died to the aggro that was on board. Like, ha, I've made a big board now, you're like, okay, I still kill you. Yeah, right, yes, of course. Whereas when we pull off the combo with this deck, you don't pass the turn back to your opponent, you hit them with a lot of charge minions. And so you gain a few percentages against aggro decks here because you win immediately. And also any other deck that might also happen to beat you after, like, if you were, I don't know, it seems unlikely, right, that an opponent could have, say, a nice block can play so that you make you big charge minions and then you, air quotes, kill them and then the ice pot pops and then they can somehow kill all these stuff on your turn. They're not very many decks that do that, but I'm pretty sure the new hostage mage, which is a bit of noxious, could probably actually do that. Or they could at least freeze your board forever. It's not very pleasant. Like, there are things that could do that. So again, a few corner cases. The major thing from slower decks that can disrupt this, um, Reno priest playing razor scale can be nasty. The first few times I faced that I just did lose. And they would do, like, I'd be like, okay, I want to hear a parrot and hear a parrot and hear a parrot because you're a Reno shadow priest, you can't heal it. And they're like, uh, hear a parrot myself to finish it and then raise dead to play it again. You're like, whoa, I'm in trouble. Uh, Blade Master O'Kani is something I've seen a lot while though. It's a little easier to play around. If they play Blade Master O'Kani on spell, you're fine. It's fine. It's when they play Blade Master O'Kani on minion, you're a little bit either. So you hope not to draw Dorian at that point. You have to open someone's Dorian out and then you draw your cards and then you have to just throw away one of your one cost minions to trigger the O'Kani first. So probably the one minor, uh, Califro the artist and then you can play your, uh, inner. The good news is that you'd have extra turns, uh, when they're that kind of deck to be able to set up that kind of recovery. Um, I've comboed through a razor scale before, which is pretty easy. Uh, yesterday as a Reno priest, I played against the head of razor scale and play. Um, I just opened someone's out the, uh, the Dorian and then played, uh, juicy psych malon, just filled my hand with stuff was like your turn. And then they're like, uh, it was even, they went theater, tried to theater me. Uh, the problem is at this point is I have two of every minion that I want to combo with, because even if you only have one Lothamath there on and you're doubling the stats, it means that you're still getting like five, 12, 12s. That's plenty. And I had five, 12, 12s and they had two taunts and like, this is still 36 on your face, right? Like, it just adds up. So there are lots of ways to play around the ways people can disrupt you. Uh, but the best way to disrupt you is just to be really aggro and play things like cult near fight or low theme and stuff like that. Don't stand a chance. And the thing that was interesting about this deck was I lost plenty of games in my climb. And maybe in some ways, I was carried by having an 11 times multiplier, but I'm pretty sure my win rate was still high enough to get legit if I had a 10 times multiplier. The difference though, maybe that if I had a 10 times multiplier, I might have faced even more aggro. So that's hard to say. But the problem with this deck was not that the deck had such a high win rate, because I don't know that it did. It was that the games were so quick. Oh, it's aggro. Let's play it. No, I lost. Most, most of the time I lost. Sometimes I did win. Oh, okay. I turned three or four kills. I got them. Um, and often it's like, okay, it's a slower deck. We just win. Sometimes I didn't. Sometimes I messed up the combo. Like my first final boss, I did mess up the combo. It was a quest line warlock, right? That's a nasty deck when you're a controlled deck or whatever. Not, no, it's fine. It should be just an auto win. But unfortunately, I just messed up what I was doing. And, uh, I think I went Dory and something and then didn't actually have the monitor play the combo pieces or something like it was like, oh, no, whoops. Uh, and then they just, uh, cleared everything I did quickly. And then, uh, got into fatigue and did a quest lock me out. I was like, how? Well, that's on me. I've waited one extra turn, which I could easily have done. They were not pressuring me. One extra turn I would have won. Uh, whoops. Like it's a ridiculous deck. It's so silly. Um, I did say I was going to talk about all the cards and I've only talked about the combo pieces. But the other pieces are kind of important. For example, the list that I played is possibly wrong. Like, a key card here, I think, is capture cold, gold tooth mine. And I have one copy and maybe it should be two. So, capture gold tooth mine is, is clever because if you have a way of getting Dory in into play, but you don't quite have enough money to play the juicy psych mail and you only have three mana instead of four, then you can play capture cold tooth mine to draw the most expensive card in your deck, uh, which would be E and R and you'll get in one mana copy of it and then you play one mana copy of it. Uh, and then you refresh your mana crystals and now maybe you can play the juicy psych mail. Or maybe you can play a second, uh, capture cold tooth mine and get avianna, but like that only really works if you already have other combo pieces in hand. So, it's, it's quite a case, but it's worth it. The other thing capture cold tooth mine does is you, you know, choose one, draw the most expensive card in your deck or draw the cheaper card in your deck. Usually what you use in capture cold tooth mine to do is just draw another zero cost card in your deck because you want several of them to try and go off. It's just that because of the flexibility of being a little short on mana and I could actually, uh, can only get three mana. I can't quite afford to play my, my, uh, uh, juicy psych mail. Maybe you can afford to play it, but you wouldn't be able to play any minions, but if you capture cold tooth mine first drawing the in, uh, and then play the in, uh, and then the, uh, juicy psych mail and maybe win that turn. Like it's, another one is things where that could give you more wins against aggro. Anyway, there isn't a zero amount of stuff, like aquatic form is zero amount of discover, uh, a card from the bottom of your deck or a dredge, right? Uh, and if you can afford to play it, draw it. I still keep saying I'm going to an episode on aquatic form one day. Anyway, uh, and innovate and lightning bloom of a zero mana, uh, that generated on mana. Uh, biology project generates a lot of mana. Uh, funnel cake, funnel cake's good because you use it on opposing minions and aggro matchups. That's one of the ways you actually get wins against aggro, but also against other matchups. It's one mana to basically refresh three mana crystals because you refresh their minions. Uh, Reno shadow priest, if they draw their cathedral of atonement, uh, we'll put it in between their minions. So maybe only get to refresh two mana crystals, but that's okay. Uh, capture court with mine, of course. Uh, invigorate is basically wild growth, but instead you could draw a card if you need to. Uh, moonlit guidance and juicy psych melon, both just say discover a card. Now moonlit guidance is worse than, uh, then, uh, not juicy psych melon. Uh, what is it called? Uh, bottomless toy chest, bottomless toy chest and, uh, moonlit guidance, both say discover a card, but moonlit guidance discovers a copy of a card, which means if you're trying to get something from your deck that you don't want to have, like, if you're using moonlit guidance to discover juicy psych melon, you still have another juicy psych melon in your deck, which means what you're hoping to draw now is like zero mana cards to help go off and you could draw another juicy psych melon. The odds aren't very high, but technically bottomless toy chest is better here and we have no spell damage. It's only ever discover one card. So we got all these two mana cards that discover cards to help set up the combo that we want. Uh, a lot of cheap cards to ramp mana and to get mana free. Uh, but the cool one is life winders gift, which is the two mana spell choose one, add two random nature spells to hand or reduce the cost of spells you have by one. Clearly you're doing the second one because if you have, uh, open summons and juicy, uh, psych melon, reducing their cost by one makes the total of six mana, which makes it a heck of a lot easier to go off. Uh, it also will make the biology project one, uh, from one mana to no mana. Biology projects, the one that gives both players, uh, two mana crystals. So in the screenshots I posted on Twitter, I'm like, whoa, wilds in trouble. Uh, you can often see where it's like, oh, that's not so bad. You're on turn six. I'm like, no, no, no. You can see my opponent has, uh, a total of six mana, two of which is unspent. That's because they actually only had a total of four mana and I played biology project. So it gave them two more mana. That's why it looks like I have more mana this turn because biology project ran to me, but they did not have extra time. Like sometimes you can play biology project ahead of time, but you risk getting overrun quickly because you gave your opponent extra mana. But if you life winders gift to make it zero mana, you just play it on the turn you're going off. Anyway, the problem I have with this deck is the the polarized matchup spread. Like, just the fact that it's so effective against a type of deck and it's the type of deck that people like playing. In other words, not aggro. It's so effective against that. And so ineffective is the other thing. It just means that more and more people have to play aggro or they have to play a lot of disruption. Like the latest version of a mystery egg lion hunter in wild that I've seen, it just cuts out some of the other stuff that it may not have had before and runs like a bunch of snipes. And I've seen people running pressure plate because they're just trying to disrupt something like this, because their deck is a pretty good combo deck, but can't beat this. Like this is like ramping, ramping, ramping, kill you. It's sickening. Now, I did post some screenshots on Twitter of wins that I had somewhere between four, five and six mana generally. Six mana obviously, if it's a slower matchup, you've still got time to do it. I did post a little video clip of the combo going off. It was, I think, a diamond one opponent or a diamond two opponent. The problem was the final opponent conceded when I was pulling the combo off, but that was because it was a mirror match, I believe. And I said that because it was turn three in which I was doing this, which feels unreasonable, but you can kind of tell. Like if a druid deck starts and Renetho triggers, not a mirror match, if a druid deck starts, and there's no Renetho you like, but it's probably a mirror match at this point. It could be togwiggle, but like they're doing the same thing you are. Anyway, the final boss, the second final boss, do you remember the first final boss was a quest time warlock that I missed up? It's not very compelling. I thought it was going to be compelling because I was like, oh, oh, I'm going to go off this turn. This is going to be great. And I miscounted my mana. I ended up one mana short and I was like, uh oh, I really missed this up. I think I missed, I was like, I was going for the play where you get Dorian in play, and then play juicy side melon, and then pass to him back with handful of cards, knowing that you're probably safe, because even a dirty rat probably just pulls one minion in it, it's not both. Like if they just pull one aviana and it's the cheap one, you're probably still okay, because you can just play one mana in one mana, Lothmar Theron, and refresh your mana, because it was getting a 5'5" and now you get three minions in play, and then one mana colifero without the aviana, just the copies. And now you have three 12-12s with charge. That'll probably still kill a quest loan wallock, right? Like, there's lots of ways we still just win by filling handful of stuff, even if they have a dirty rat or a, uh, well, I mean, theater could be a little worse, but even then, like you usually have redundancy. They can't, if they take the one mana aviana, you can still use the combo I just mentioned. If they take the one mana, um, they take either of the Eonar's, that's what they see, then the one mana aviana and the other Eonar just gets you where you want to, like, it's really hard to disrupt. And so I tried pulling that off, but I think I didn't have the mana to play the juicy side mana. I was like, oh, let's rush the Dorian to the play. And they're like, oh no, I can't play juicy side mana. And so I was like, well, let's hope they cannot kill my, uh, Dorian, and they could, so I didn't win. Anyway, the second final boss, the matchup is only about three minutes long, but I'm pretty sure there's lots of decision points to talk about with it. So let's get into that. Oh, I did that thing where I turned the volley up on my phone and then it won't let me open my photo library here. Okay, not that one, not this one, this one, I think. It's like, not that video. That video is electric call boys, techno train, which is what I kind of sampled for the video, a couple of the combo demonstration on Twitter. Fun. Anyway, here we go. Unmute. Is it playing? Is my volume up? It is up. Oh, I know what that, there we go. Now we can hear it. I think the spinner goes for a while. So what we're looking for in our mehand is basically juicy psych melon and oak and summons. Like sometimes you'll see like a ramp card, you're like, it's pretty good. I want that ramp card, right? It's like, no, there's a ton of ramp cards in the deck and you'll draw them. You need the combo pieces and everything else will come together hopefully. And if it's aggro, you could be stuck, but we shall see. The back button's gone, we have an opponent, a worthy opponent. What a surprise. All right, I'm going to remember to pause. That's us. That's them. So drew it on, drew it. Okay, let's pause. Opening hand, I see oak and summons. Fantastic. I see moonlet guidance. Cool. Probably should be the second capture call to his mind, but I still keep forgetting to make the change. And we see a dread dessert. And a dread dessert is a six minus six, six haven't really talked about this. And if it didn't start in your deck, it has charge. The reason this works as a combo, by the way, is you're drawing a dread dessert with califerro and then turning your minions into dread desserts. Now those copies of dread desserts you turn your minions into didn't start in your deck, so they have charge. This one does have charge. And so there's only one use for this in hand. And that is if your opponent has played Blade Master Akani and you need to trip that before going into a combo turn, because you happen to also draw Dorian and you can't pull it out with Oak and summons. Pretty unlikely, right? I mean, like we have Oak and summons and it's not going to happen, right? Well, not necessarily because if I draw Dorian, then the Oak and summons no longer pulls Dorian. And then you're like, that's cool. You can play Oak and summons to survive. It's like, if you need to play Oak and summons to survive, you're telegraphing that you have Dorian in hand. And then someone's going to be like trying to dirty rat you. So anyway, clearly looking at this hand, we have an Oak and summons, we have a moonlit guidance and a Dread Dessert. I don't remember what I kept exactly. I know that I will have thrown away the Dread Desserter, because this deck has a fail state and that's where you draw the Dread Desserters or Dread Desserters and Lee Royce if you're running three charge minions. If you draw them in your hand, you just lose. It hasn't happened to me once. And I played this deck a lot from like, all the way to legend, I think. I mean, I played something else first, I think probably some of the questline major had been playing at the end of the last month, but I played this deck a lot and I didn't want to lose to drawing those. I lost other things obviously. But again, the game time was so quick. It was like game game game game game game game game game game legend. Okay, so let's move on. Obviously, we're keeping the Oak and summons. Oh, we've got the coin and we've got a Lifeminders gift as well. I kept the Lifeminders gift and the moonlit guidance, which is a little dicey. But my thinking is that if I'm throwing away moonlit guidance, that's just getting another, I get one in 26 shot or two in 26 shot at the piece I want. Whereas moonlit guidance is a discover, so it's probably a better shot at it. So I do like keeping the discover things if I have one piece of the combo. If I have no piece of the combo, I want a hard mulligan to get all these shots in the opening hand of getting combo pieces and you can draw things like your bottomless toy chest and moonlit guidance to find the other combo pieces. But this time I had Lifeminders gift, I had moonlit guidance and I had Oak and summons and I was like, you know what, let's chance it. Let's only throw away the dread deserter and see what we get back. And hopefully moonlit guidance can find us a juicy psych melon. Now, I've already said that I win this on turn three. So I'm assuming you know what I got back off the mulligan and that's right, it's juicy psych melon. So what we know we can do now is on turn two, we can play Lifeminders gift to reduce the cost of spells in my hand by one. And now I'll have a three mana open summons and a three mana juicy psych melon and all I have to be able to do is get the mana on turn three to be able to play all that. So let's see how we go. And that I think is the bulk of the discussion of this, but let's see. The opponent drew it first, they draw and they probably do nothing because you don't do very much on turn one in this deck unless you have something specific. Like sometimes you do actually play biology projects and immediately like an invigorator or a bottomless toy chest just because you're like, I'm going for it, I'm setting up, let's just go. But anyway, they're having a think. My turn, they do nothing. I draw bottomless toy chest. Cool. So we have a couple of combo pieces, I could have pointed out the Lifeminders gift now, making everything a lot cheaper. Like if I could play, let's just pause again. Like pointing out Lifeminders gift here seems terrible when I want to save the coin for the combo turn, right? But what I could do is I could coin out Lifeminders gift on turn one, it would reduce open summons and juicy psych melon to three, it would also reduce one was toy chest and then moonlet's guidance to one, which means on turn two I could play both the guidance and the bottom was toy chest. And what I'm hoping to set up is like, I don't know, like innovates, lightning blooms and stuff, just to help me play all the stuff out in turn two. But I feel like, if I'm hoping to find innovates, why am I wasting the coin on turn one? Like I clearly want to save the coin. Anyway, turn two, our druid opponent is playing invigorate. It could mean anything from a druid opponent, but I'm pretty sure it probably means a mirror match. Any druid deck will probably be playing this. They play that on turn two. Our turn. We draw an aquatic form. Now aquatic form is a really good card, it's a zero mana dredge. And if you can afford to play the thing that you dredging, draw it instead of putting on top of your deck. Usually I want to wait until I have four mana with this. And sometimes you get these dicey turns. I did have one last night on the way home from work where I did win because it's like, if I chance coining on three mana here so that I can open summons, do I find the thing I want? I did coin open summons, found me, I think the juicy psych melon, oh no, actually no, it was better than that. What I saw was a second aquatic form, I think. I don't quite remember actually. But I remember I saw two things and I was like, oh wait, I can actually get both those because I have another, maybe I had two aquatic form in hand. I was like, I want to get juicy psych melon, but I don't think I can win. But what I saw was like juicy psych melon and I think maybe maybe it was a lightning bloom or something. I was like, wait, because I can get both those cards. I can actually win now on turn on four mana, which was probably turn three or four, I don't know. But it was pretty intense. So anyway, I've drawn on two mana turn. This is the turn where I'm planning to play a life minder's gift to reduce everything in my hand by one. Now, while I usually like to wait on a aquatic form until four mana because I'm looking for juicy psych melon or open summons, I already have those. And so what I really want now is either a zero mana card that's going to rent my mana next turn, a one mana card like biology project, which will rent my mana next turn, or even maybe what's it called? Funnel cakes? Funnel cakes. If I find it now, it goes into my hand, it costs one mana, and it's heal a minion and it's neighbors and refresh your mana crystal for each one over healed. So if we life minders gift with that hand, it goes to zero mana. Then we get to open summons, pulling out Dorian, play a zero mana funnel cakes on it, which refreshes one mana crystal. So it's another innovator at that point. So I think what we're planning to do here, of course, is zero mana, open summons, not open summon, zero mana, aquatic form, hope to find something that enables the combo and if it's biology projects, we're about hit it with a life minder's gift to make it a free next turn. So let's see what we see. Aquatic form with two mana, pause. Okay, brilliant. We see invigorate. So that would be totally fine. That would be a great thing for us to take now if we weren't about to life minders gift. I mean, I could life minders gift and then coin invigorate. So I'd have an extra mana gain to next turn, but I wish to see Ian out of the life minder. We clearly don't want to dredge that on top of our deck. We want it in the deck, and the last one is biology project. So that's perfect. We can aquatic form the biology project into our hand, then play life minders gift, reducing the cost of biology project to zero mana. We clearly don't play at this turn. Our opponent just played invigorate, even if they're not a mirror match, giving them enough mana where maybe they can theater tower us next turn, that seems bad. And having a zero mana biology project, you can just do that on your turn when you're going off. So we take the biology project, and I'm sure at this point, my brain's like, wait, is this a turn three kill? I don't know. So we draw the biology project. I'm looking at stuff in my hand. Like, do I want to discover to try and find an innovator or something? Because maybe I, you know, get better ramp and then life minders gift next turn and say, no, just go for the life minders gift. So let's just pause before we pass it away, pass it in. But anyway, we've got two mana in play. Next turn, we'll have three mana. We have the coin. So next turn, we can have four mana if we want. We've got three mana open summons and a three mana juicy psych melon, and we have a zero mana biology project. So between the biology project and the coin, we have six mana, which means at the very least next turn, we can open someone's out of Dorian, and we can play juicy psych melon to draw all of our pieces. Now, if we have too much stuff in hand, then like maybe we overdraw one of the aonars, and maybe that's a risk, depending on the kind of droid opponent it is, but it's probably a pretty good position to be in. Anyway, we pass the turn back. It's our opponent's third turn, they have four mana, because they played invigorate on turn two. What do they do? They're having, you think, they're hero power. And I think at this point, I'm like, I think I win now, because they're hero powering on turn three with four mana and passing it back, because they don't quite have what they need. So anyway, we just drew a second life-binders gift. Does this change the math very much here? So we had a total of six mana, which is pretty good. That gets us through the open summons in the psych melon. It doesn't get to put anything in play, but what's interesting here is if we life-binders gift first, that makes a toy box and a moonlit summons zero mana, and it makes the open summons in the juicy psych melon two mana. So we're still spending a total of six mana on the combo, the two mana on the life-binders gift, and the two mana on the open summons and the psych melon. But now we also have a zero mana moonlit guidance, which is to cover a card from your deck, and if you play it, let's do it and draw that copy. And a zero mana bottomless toy chest, which is to discover a card in your deck, and if you have smell damage, you should get a copy of it. If you don't have smell damage, we don't care. So clearly what we're going to do now, on turn three, is play the life-binders gift to reduce the stuff in our hand by one. We're going to play coin, we're going to play biology project. Well, maybe before we even do that, we'll just play the life-binders gift, and then we'll probably play the toy chest and/or moonlit guide to see if we find the ramp to finish off what we're doing, because maybe we think about maybe holding a turn. But the fact that our opponent here appeared on turn three when they had four mana suggests that they could be well set up to pull off some kind of a combo in the coming turns. They maybe have biology project, innovates, lightning bloom, and the two combo pieces, and they could easily go off next turn, or they need just one more mana. And they're just waiting. Anyway, so let's play it out, because I'm pretty sure that's how this goes. I look at this, I'm counting stuff, I'm looking at my hand, and I'm like, can I believe my luck here? There it is, life-binders gift. That's two of my currently three mana. Reduce the cost of spells in your hand by one. Now I have zero mana, bottomless toy chest, and moonlithe guidance. Start with the bottomless toy chest, I see innovate, capture court with my invigorate, let's take the innovate, because I'm pretty sure now I have the kill. We could also moonlit guidance, so let's do that now. We see innovate, aviana funnel cake, I just take the funnel cake. Now I'm just going to pause on that for a moment. When we get Dorian into play and play juicy psych melon, we're about to fill our hand with eight new cards, the four minions, and the four copies. So we want to get as many cards out of our hand as possible. So the fact that we have the funnel cakes here, and it's going to be one mana, and if I play it, I get to draw another card. It's like, yeah, never mind. But what I have, other than the funnel cakes in my hand right now is innovate zero mana biology project in coin. I have one mana available, that's a total of five mana, and we've got two mana, open summons, two mana juicy psych melon. So that's enough to play all the combo stuff to reduce my hand to just one card, which is the funnel cakes, and to draw everything, I'd have one mana left over to be able to play the one mana earner, the life binder, refresh the mana crystals will give me five mana, because that'll play biology project. All I need to do then is play one mana, aviana, I can then play another earner. You kind of don't want to play another earner, because when you use the earner ability, it summons a five-five, you run out of board space if you're not careful. So Dorian is one. In hours two, the five five taunters three, four is aviana. That's four board spaces. Then you want five and six to be the two Northamatharans, and seven you want to be the califro. And the reason I'm spelling this out now is because my opponent sees the writing on the wall and could see before I get to do any of this. But it is turn three, remember. So I can see that having found the innovate, so there we go, this biology project innovate coin. So now I'm down to eight cards, two cards in hand. There's the open summons of the Dorian, no one card in hand for the juicy psych malan. I'm drawing all the pieces. I don't remember if they stopped to see how many pieces I drew, but I'm pretty sure they know I have, because like the only other card in my hand is one that I, what you would call it, I moonlit guidance. But there I have, there's eight cards coming into my hand. There's my rope, by the way, oh gosh, am I going to run out of time? I play the one mana and my opponent concedes. They've seen I've drawn enough cards, but now I have all the pieces, they know I can go through the motions and do the thing. I'm assuming my opponent was a mirror, but all they did was play invigorate on turn two and hear a power turn three, which, and I'm facing my assumption of the system mirror based on the fact that I've done exactly that play as well. And I get into legend at 149 legend, by the way, which is pretty low, but it's also quite early in the month. So as you can see, the deck is absurd, and not just because it has a high win rate, because I don't know that it necessarily does have a high win rate, but because it does that, it just goes off. I guess if you're not pressuring it, and am I mean really pressuring it, because that turned there, if I'd had that against an aggro pirate, pirate demon hunter or aggro pirate shadow priest, or aggro pirate rogue, those are all aggro decks. A lot of people playing the shadow priest, aggro shadow priest, and a lot of people playing aggro demon hunter, those decks can just kill you out of nowhere. With that draw, I probably still would have won. They would have to kill me on turn three, otherwise I win, which is really saying something. And of course, you know, it's a bit of a problem that the deck says, what's your opponent? I don't care, just go for it. Just mulligan like you're going for it. You got to hope to get that. Now, sometimes those aggro decks may not kill you by turn four, and even then I have an extra turn to go off, but I honestly have been killed by these decks on like turn three. Like if they're on the player that's turn three, or they're turn four before I get to have a turn four, like it's kind of gross. And that's the way you beat what I was just doing there. But otherwise, just don't. And like, there's so little agency in what's happening there. There's a lot of, as you can see, there was a three-minute game. I talked about it for a long time. There's a lot of little decision points I was making, and I got very lucky. Keeping an open summons and only mulliganing one card and getting juicy psych melon back while having a life mind is gift is the dream. And then having everything else just fall into my lap, well, perfect. But of course, that you need everything to fall into that if you want to turn three kill. But still it's absurd. Like there's a lot of little decision points in there, and I'm a monster, I know. I enjoy that stuff. But like, as an opponent, you just got to hope I don't have it. And sometimes I don't have it. And so sometimes you win. Or you've really got to be stacking the disruption. Like, when a hunter's best player is like, turn to a pressure plate or turn to a snipe, because your hope, like, snipe doesn't even do it, right? Snipe data is six damage. I mean, snipe does do it, actually. Like, snipe does it because you open summons out Dorian, and then you play a one mana ENR, and the snipe kills it before you get to refresh your mana crystals. That kind of works. The pressure plate also works. When you go, open summon for Dorian, and then you play juicy psych melon, you draw a bunch of cards into your hand, and then Dorian dies. And you're like, ooh. Like, I've got all the combo. But if you need to go, open summons out Dorian, and then you need to play lightning blooms stuff before you play the juicy psych melon, then the pressure plate kills Dorian before you play the juicy psych melon. There's another train coming. I should probably get on this one. So like, there's a lot of ways you can disrupt it out of strange things. But like, when the meta game says you need to be running these secrets out and turn to, or you might just die, that's not a good position to be in. Anyway, look, time to sign off. Because, my gosh, what a deck. Like, I usually like to play other things in Wild, but once I figured this out, I was like, I have to be playing this, because it's A, it's good engagement, and B, it just seems silly not to be. And Wild's in trouble. Anyway, look, follow me on Twitch, Twitter, and YouTube, @edblistaguy. Follow the podcast, Walk to Work Hs on Twitter, and come hang out at discord.disco.me/blistaguy. It is always a pleasure to have you join me for my walk to work. That beeping is the other train going the other way, by the way. Good luck, everyone, and everything you do, because you're all absolute bloody legends, and I love you all. My god, what a deck. Don't cry this at home, don't cry off things for it. I mean, or maybe do, I don't know. Oof. This station is Billson's point. [Music]
