War Journals – Ethereals and Torture

After playing in nationals at Gencon this past summer I spent a few weeks taking a break from playing conquest. During that time I caught up on a bulk of conquest podcasts and spent a lot of time thinking about results at nationals and the possible shape of the meta to come. I realized that I have spent nowhere near enough time playing as many of the warlords in this game. I resolved to work through the list and wrote down a schedule of what warlords I will play when. The War Journals blog series will serve as an open space for me to talk about this exploration, my findings, and really anything else I find to be relevant to the process of playing with the full breadth of different deck options available to this game.

Rotation 1 – Sept 17th to Sept 26th

To start things out I decided to build Aun’shi, a warlord I hadn’t managed to really touch yet, and Urien, a warlord I had played a little bit but was eager to try more. I played 13 games total, 9 with Aun’shi and 4 with Urien.

Aun’shi

Aun’shi was an exciting prospect to explore. When he first came out Alex, Jon, and a number of other local community members all jumped on board to try him out so I avoided hopping on the bandwagon and blanketing the meta with Ethereals. As a result I’ve only played a couple games with him up until this point. His deck has evolved a reasonable amount since Gift of the Ethereals was released. With the addition of Ksi’m’yen Orbital City he has much more staying power and a couple more tricks under his belt.

Starting out I found him quite brain busting. Having to plan out an entire combat phase ahead of time proved to be very difficult and slowed down my play substantially. Successfully assassinating the enemy warlord was much harder than I expected, and ultimately ended up serving as a fall back plan if I was losing control of the game in the first half. I also found that the results of a game largely depended on my ability to play out an Orbital City in the early turns. If I wasn’t able to get the tools I needed I would fall flat very quickly. In several of my games the copies of Earth Caste Technician I played failed to tutor any drones or attachments and then put an Orbital City on the bottom of the deck. I don’t think I won any of those games but regardless it was dismaying.

For deck includes I really liked the power of Experimental Devilfish and Carnivore Pack. I felt both proved to have excellent cost to effect ratios. The Devilfish constantly arriving from HQ with Armorbane ready to attack and adding to the command struggle was a tremendous benefit. The Kroot are also a hard hitting unit with an effective cost of zero. If they die in the middle of combat they help finance the deployment of an Aun’ui Prelate or other effects like Even the Odds and Kau’yon Strike. I also tried  running For the Tau’va in an iteration of the deck but realized that I rarely had enough attachments in play to benefit from its use.

All told I learned a lot from my games played. I think that, even though skilled player can get a very large amount of power out of this deck, because of the nature of the Ethereals there will be games where you won’t be able to win no matter how well you play. Realizing now the weaknesses of Aun’shi I find him far less intimidating to play against.

Urien

The other deck I played for this rotation was a Urien Rakarth deck. Urien is a warlord I had played previously so I decided to try playing him with Chaos and trying a few new cards. Pairing with Chaos provided marginally more of a command presence but ultimately seemed an uneven trade to lose the combat ability of a couple Warlock Destructor. I also found that while Crucible of Malediction created an interesting degree of control it didn’t really impact the game enough to be worth the resources and deck slots.

I didn’t get to play many games as Urien but I think that unfortunately he still just doesn’t have the cards required for consistent success. With a few more key cheap tortures this deck could potentially sing and I will revisit and keep tweaking the deck later on.

 

In the end I didn’t get quite as many games as I would have liked with these decks but I think it accomplishing my goal of expanding my horizons a bit. Next on the docket I have Shadowsun, Zogwort, and Swarmlord so look forward to my reports on these decks in the near future.