It is crucial to try to craft a gamestate where the opponent can either interact with what we have on board, or play around Atrocity. This card has shaped a lot of decks and metas over the two or so years that I have been playing the game: it allows decks with no burn to have a certain kind of ‘I win’ button that requires the opponent to not only play around it, but also to avoid the game getting to a point where Atrocity will lose them the game.įor the Thresh Nasus player, it is the opposite: we want to maneuver the game in a way where Atrocity (often cast on Nasus ) is 'lights out' on our opponent. The second large departure from MtG's Green Black midrange is Atrocity. This simple mechanic has all sorts of interesting effects: backline champions like Ezreal or Aphelios are no longer safe, and your high-power units with low health are less of a drawback because you get to trade them off with high-priority units of your choosing (instead of, say, a House Spider your opponent has laying around). Vulnerable is a LoR keyword that allows the attacker to drag a Vulnerable unit and force it to block whatever attacking unit the attacker wants – a "reverse Challenger" so to speak. Players who are familiar with the Black color from MtG will find themselves mostly at home with this one: the only thing being drastically different from a Green Black midrange deck in Magic the Gathering is the existence of Vulnerable and Atrocity. This archetype operates on a slightly different axis than some of the more ‘normal’ decks in the meta – namely, it slays its own units to provide either tempo or card advantage. Still, I believe Tri-beam is, and will always, be the quintessential midrange deck to get started. This archetype does have its bad matchups, specifically decks that don’t play a lot of units until they hit their hard-to-deal-with win conditions – Feel The Rush or Lee Sin, for example. This flexibility encourages players to tweak their list to suit their needs, instead of blindly following what their favorite youtuber is playing (lol). For example, we can add Aloof Travelers against decks that rely on a high-cost win condition, and Culling Strike is a fantastic option if low-powered backline champions like Azir are prevalent. One of my favorite parts of Ezreal Caitlyn is its ability to tech for any given meta. Avarosan Sentry pushes this idea well, sometimes being a powerful defensive option to slow your opponent's turn, and sometimes putting the screws to your opponent on your attack token, setting up a lethal Tri-beam Improbulator into a one-two punch attack. Pilots playing this deck will quickly learn the importance of tempo, and how to use it to your advantage. While these are important skills to learn, I believe players will see much more growth overall by picking a deck that has to, depending on the matchup, go for one role or the other. If you’re playing Burn, then you’re almost always the beatdown, and you are always the control player if you’re playing Anivia – each one of these decks teach you to play only their side of the spectrum. I believe such decks teach you to play the game by requiring you to take the time and learn how to properly assess your role ( as Mike Flores asked in his classic article, Who's the Beatdown?) in each individual matchup. And most importantly, in my opinion, is that I want to pick decks that aren’t incredibly polarizing – the closer to midrange, the better. I want to pick decks that stand the test of time, and aren’t just good for a patch or two. Instead, I'm going to attempt to do something a little different: I am going to recommend decks that I think are not only strong, but have a high skill ceiling as well as a generally high skill floor. Or, I could name the simplest archetypes that are still strong and that would allow a new player to learn how to operate their deck proficiently as quickly as possible. I could tell you which are the best decks right now, because they would be the most likely to allow a new player to win.
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