I love when you state that your deck is 60% focused on support removal and someone responds with “Bring support removal”. When 6 of the 10 cards in your deck are directly centered around removing supports, and you can still lose to a cascade of supports by Turn 2 - and not due to the supports themselves mind you, but because those supports grant the AI a single ability at the start of Turn 3 that instantly kills you - that’s poor design and it’s a lack of balance.
Just because something can be beat, does not mean it’s well designed.
For the love of everything good, stop using cycling as a metric. Cycling can beat the entire game because the AI has no answer to it. It is not something to be measured by in terms of how properly designed a given node is.
You are right on this node. But if I want to solve a problem I use a proper tool. And if I have a ‘swiss army knife’, why don-'t use it. Okay for fun, …
As an Option I think a Garruk-Deck centered around Ghalta (and no other creature), Ucage Menagerie, Elemental Bond, Path of Discovery and rampage could work well. Ramp is very effective against supports and 200+ hp are no problem with a hand full of Ghalta’s.
Prevent Damage (Gideon’s Intervention and Haze of Pollen both work) will save you from this ability. Admittedly, Haze is best in a cycling deck, but it’s still an extra chance to escape. Also, 9 loyalty is way too cheap for a potential instant win, with how easy it is for the AI to set up with one or two cascades.
I’ve played this match 3 or 4 times and only won once. Even with a Samut supportkilling focussed deck (Manglehorns which are killed right away, By Force, Demolish etc) it only takes him one solid turn to go from 5 to 10 and gain the Blessing of Valuetown.
That, plus him packing so so SO many killcards, makes it the most annoying match in my view.
Cycling drakes would be quite useless (though I didnt think of Pollen yet, cheers), hexproof is useless, don’t have Starfield…anyone else got a solid idea?
I almost lost to Azor with cycling, because he had that vampire dude, which is a great answer to cycling. Growing for every Faith activation is very hard to beat, and it definitely took me a couple Floodwaters to survive.
The loyalty for that ability should be bumped up to 30, that would make it more in line with another boss battle with a “timer”, Uncage the menagerie. Still would be formidable, but much less susceptible to bad luck.
It seems quite susceptible to beat-face. So far I’ve won every match against it without really having to really panic (aside from originally reading the ability game 1). My advice: Spend less time worrying about the opponent collecting the pieces it needs for its Death Star Planet-Destroyer and more about just beating it. The cascades weren’t too bad during each of my matches, I may not be as lucky in future battles tho.
I realized the same thing, went full Samut Blitz and have won 2 out of 3 (with the 1 loss coming with it having 10 health left). Kill the supports when you can, but the key is to not let it take too long
It should be >10 turns, it’s still an interesting challenge. His death abilitiy is too cheap though.
I did it in 46 turns with Vraska, Manglehorn, gemchangers and still some support destruction, I’d love a count on City Blessing, I beat he was on 9 sometimes, but I got through.
44 turns . . . and I still lost. It killed my creatures on every single turn and then on turn 43 from a wiped board via Great Aurora, just dumped the world out, drew cards and kept going until it had City Blessing. Turn 44, dead.
I have no clue how people are keeping creatures on board. Vona’s Vona’s Vona’s Vona’s Bounce Bounce Vona’s Vona’s. Seriously 40 turns of that.
For me, my best method so far is using Samut as my planeswalker and running Demolish, Dissenter’s Deliverance, Violent Impact, and By Force in the deck. This really keeps down the number of supports it’ll have in play and keep the city’s blessing from going off.
On top of that, the only creature it will summon is a 0/7 defender, and Samut’s second ability to give afflict to your creatures will help keep the damage going even if that gets summoned. Sandwurm Convergence helps a lot here too since it loves to bounce and blow up your creatures.
