Written by Liam Bosecke
This deck was made using the contents of: Two pre-constructed decks (Waveshaper and Flamecaller) and one Alpha Booster Box. It was cobbled together to demonstrate that you don't need a plethora of empty booster packs to gain access to unique and interesting deck building strategies.
After opening the Booster Box, I discovered that I had two mana fixing artefacts: Mix Aqua and Mix Ignis. Both of these artefacts will form the basis of todays build as I will be attempting to form a strategy using both Fire and Water.
To see what we used for this build, check out our Sorcery: Contested Realm products here.
Signed Sorcerer card can be found in the Pledge Pack.
The generic Sorcerer was picked to be our Avatar due to it's flexibility and card draw. Creating a dual colour deck presents a couple challenges with a limited card pool. One challenge being Synergy, what will our decks focus or theme be? Another is finding the synergistic pieces within so few cards, esecially only one set's worth of cards at that.
Forming our Atlas
To begin lets start off with finding twenty Atlas pages. I looked at all of the Atlas pages that the starter decks provided and read their abilities to get a general feel of fire and water.
Here is what I have learnt about Fire and Water:
- Fire has affinity with Spellcasters
- Water synergizes with other waterbased sites (eg. Flooded sites)
- Fire synergizes with Deserts
Knowing these three things, we can start to form a picture of how the rest of our deck will look. I chose each Unique and Exceptional site in both pre-constructed decks seeing as they weren't specific Water or Fire only and then picked ordinaries for each to form a basic Atlas for this deck. Going into the future, the Atlas will need to be drastically improved and refined based on what Spells and Minions we carry in our Spellbook, but this will do for now.
Our basic Atlas, will be changed in further versions.
Priming our Magic
Next, I looked at the Flamecaller decks Magic cards. I believe Fire's ability to deal out raw damage from a Spellcaster is something that will be very powerful in any Fire deck. Magic cards such as Firebolts, Minor Explosion and Fireball will all be included in this deck. I also picked a few favorite minions which I believed provided the most value towards aiding our damage orientated strategy, but is not the focus of it.
Clamor of Harpies: Will allow us to bring enemy minions into range of our Magic spells.
Doomsday Prophet: Allow us to deal double Damage from these Magic spells.
The waveshaper deck also had ample and powerful Magic. Many spells that flooded enemy sites and kill spells that submerged enemey minions. However, I only chose to use one Magic spell from this deck, and two Auras.
Wrath of the Sea: Allow us to destroy enemy sites and provide synergy with water.
Flood: The same as above.
Abundance: A very interesting and versatile card. We could potentially use this on flooded sites that we've taken over or to support an element we may be lacking in mana.
Picking out our Spellbook base.
Summoning our Minions
To cast these spells we need... Spellcasters. Fortunately, both Fire and Water have Spellcasters in abundance. The pre-constructed decks don't contain many (if any) unfortunately, however, the base set provides many Ordinary Spellcasters for us to work with.
Cauldron Crones: Provides an outlet for card draw aswell as a vessel for our Spellcasting.
Fenvale Muse: Synergizes with rivers (Scry) and also another basic vessel for our Spellcasting.
Unfortunately, we only pulled one Adept Illusionist, so his upside is nullified. We will be looking to drastically improve this Minion base in future revisions of this deck, this does provide a great start however. There are probably many much more viable decks that could be built using the same amount of cards, the aim wasn't to build a competitive deck however, it was to have fun deckbuilding and put our creative energy into something enjoyable.
One of the few Uniques we plled opening our box.
The Orb Speaks to Us
If you've ever played Magic: the Gathering then you would be familiar with the power of copying instants and sorcery effect. This deck looks to harness the inneffable power of the Orb of Ba'al Berith to double all of our damage outputs that we create on the board using Magic and Spellcasters.
Orb of Ba'al Berith: The basis of the deck. We are looking to spread maximum amounts of long range damage around the board.
Drums of Doom: We aren't mucking around, we want our enemies to hear the sounds of their demise all across the board with two copies of this card.
The complete deck list.
Just for Fun
This deck isn't built to be competitive and is unashamedly untested. I look forward to using it against my friends and building upon it as I get access to more cards in the future.
Things to improve on next time:
- Multiples of powerful cards (Oasis, Mix Ignis etc.)
- More Spellcasters
- Refined Atlas
- Playtesting to see what works and what doesn't
Until next time!
