Or, you could just have your own win conditions 
I play vets, hoping to get Noshrak soon. He seems like he could be pretty deadly when positioned right (and comboād with the proper cards).
Grandmaster Variax
1 Like
You can also ignore variax the same way you can ignore elder, maybe even more because the elder eggs that hatch have rush. Anyway, lets forget this comparison because they are very different minions.
Lyonar actually can deal with lilithe pretty well, early minions hugely outstat lilithes early minions and sun bloom efficiently deals with kelaino, as well as AOE spells like tempest and holy immo should deal with any board lilithe tries to make pretty well as well as pushing quite a lot of face damage. Slo will keep lilithe in place or force her to use removal for a 0 mana minion, and it is easy to refill on resources with trinity oath. Then finishers like tiger into roar or immolated things can finish lilithe before she can start amassing a lot of wraithlings. Also some people have started teching 1 copy of decimate, which blows up the board of wraithlings better than sunset paragon and allows more turns to kill lilithe. Heal lyonar actually has a bad matchup but tempo/any non-control lyonar can kill lilithe before variax has enough time to copmletely dominate the matchup.
Iām yet to see anyone play him, but it takes two turns to influence the game, and even if you use spells to play him early, then you donāt get your BBS each turn.
Seems strong, but Iām much more scared by something like Obliterate.
i might try to get some sunset paragons or decimate into the deck, i tryed to play multiple factions so donāt have much spirit to craft those.
everything you mentioned can be played around, and it isnāt even hard. every card abyssian plays is a treat:
kelaino - if you donāt have counter in hand he already bought turn or 2 extra to live. counter would be sunbloom or circle of life, immulation actually doesnāt help most of the time.
furosa - he just might get 3/3 or 4/4 wraithling without variax if you let it live and it costs 1 mana
bloodmoon priestes - spawns many free wraithlings if you donāt remove her immidiately you are in trouble even without variax, if he gets variax on top of it its gg.
wraithling swarm - gives abyssian early board controll or gets comboed with variax for 5 5/5s for 6 mana nothing you can do about it.
revenant - 6/6 with rush deals damage even if kills your minions, if you suicide something to kill it you still take damage. almost always have to spend removal on it or just lose 10+ hp trying to clear it.
variax - 7/7 body extremely strong effect especially for lilithe, dispell doesnāt help at all.
vorpal reaver - 6/6 with celerity that spawns 6 wraithlings on death. basically cheaper excelsious without provoke but can be played for 4 or less mana and very likely to just kill you from 20 hp if you let it live long enough to attack.
and what does lyonar have? a 5/5 silverguard knight that can just get removed by removal or killed by bunch of wraithlings, teleported away with demonic lure or simply ignored (kelaino can heal as much per turn easily anyway).
as far as i see it as lyonar you will always be under presure to remove abbyssian units or you simply lose if one manages to survive more than 1 turn. some of the removal you must use is quite expensive, that delays your damage and gives them again more turns to live which was their original goal. itās win win situation for abyssians if you spend mana and removal to remove thier treats you lose board controll and they get closer to their lategame where you just die. if you donāt, those treats just kill you anyway.
seriously have no idea what to do here. i do assume a descent abyssian player here.
sure there are some that just run forward and go face with horrible positioning take like 3 target holly immulation and just die on ~5 mana turn, those are usually easy to deal with but unfortunately there arenāt many of those in high diamond / s-rank.
i mean i migh be a noob(wasnāt in s rank yet, my higest was rank 1 so far, so probably qualify for the noob position) but i never felt so helpless when songhai dominated the meta and actually won most of my games against them, this just feels wrong.
Ä° dont understand the issueā¦Ä° use Variax but i dont win every gameā¦so what??
Perhaps you can make him to cost more manaā¦
Ä° cant Count how often i loose even if i played himā¦
Yes sometimes i win overwhelming the whole board but sometimes all the Shonghais, Magmars are fasterā¦
Ä° dont feel unbeatable using three Variaxes in my deckā¦
Ä°mo it would be Okay if the AwesomeBloodbornSpell only would buff the two Wraithling he brings outā¦
But please dont nerf him to death that would be totally unnecessaryā¦
EVER class has such Gamechanging WOWCardsā¦
Its a must each class can do such things to youā¦
Magmar- Warbeast, Silithar Elder, good AOES etc.
Vanar-Walls are strong, two very good Bloodburnspells, 7 Mana Taunt, Aspect of the Drake/Mountain
Lionar-Good dispell, in General good Minions, Ä°roncliff, awesome artifacts, the Healyoner Legend is strong
Shonghai-two fā¦ing strong deck archetypes
Vetruvian-the Obelyskdecks works very good, the other General isnt played often but when i Play him with all the artifacts iam amazed, Nimbus, Healer, the new Legendary
Abyssian- good working deck architypes, Revenant, Variax, strong spells
Ä° dont feel there should be too much complaining about Variaxā¦
He is new, he is strong, he is scaryā¦
Ä°f get nerfed a nouchā¦OKā¦Maybeā¦but dont say he is unbeatable and too unfairā¦please 
I ran into my first Variax today. Someone Darkfired a Gor (getting it right back) and then dropped this on turn 3. Then on turn 4 summoned 4 4/4s all around me on top of the 7/7. GG.
Thatās not the ālong runā. Thatās early to mid game. Even if it drops on turn 5, thatās not late either. This card has sick stats and an utterly insane effect that is permanent and unavoidable and undispellable.
This card isnāt merely overpowered. It is mind-bogglingly broken, to the point where I cannot for the life of me understand how this got through gameplay testing.
And Iām told the Lilithe version is even worse.
It doesnāt even matter what the win rate is of this deck, honestly. What matters is the gameplay experience. This is not fun to play against. At all. And yes I know there are broken cards in other factions too. They also arenāt fun to play against.
Giving two martial artists AK-47s doesnāt mean the result is balanced.
The game is becoming, as a former Duelyst person who now is moving to another game put it, āa knife fight in a phone boothā. Who can pull their ludicrously overpowered cards first? They win.
Undispellable OP BBSes accompanied by 7/7 bodies are not a step in the right direction.
6 Likes
Sure its a strong card but this is what happens when the game becomes so fast. CP tried it first with nimbus, making a slow card really overstated in order to make it good. But nimbus wasnāt stated well enough in order to overcome this. So in order to make a slow card good they had to make it extremely overpowered.
I honestly donāt know how to feel about the card. In cass I feel like getting obliterated is way worse and on ladder at least running variax is probably less consistent. On Lilithe it seems very strong especially considering darkfire sac is way more common.
All in all it seems like a short term fix to the problem of duelyst having very powerful and cheap removal in nearly every faction which pushes expensive minions out of viability.
Iāve been playing artifact vet recently which generally ends game fairly quickly and have only played against the card 4 times and won all of those games. At the same time it frustrates me that other late game value generators are probably unplayable now. Those control decks whose win con is something like a pandora or elder just autolose to variax even though abyss can get to their late game way more consistently then these other decks.
I donāt think the card is too bad since a lot of aggro decks can probably compete but for the health of the game it isnāt very good. Due to this card I donāt think any control decks will be played outside of abyss and decks with out of hand damage (songhai or vanar?)
1 Like
The issue I have with variax has nothing to do with itās viability. It is more the kind of play it promotes. Winning the game on the back of a single button you have most every turn makes for a rather boring late game compared to winning with each card you draw. Emphasizing BBSes as win conditions in of themselves rather than as small advantages that synergize with your deck simply takes the ācardā out of ācard gameā and trades impactful deck variety for impactful bbs blandness. Variax creates some positional decisions but not the interesting ones you get from the rest of the game. Whatever the slow meta deck is it deserves to be more interesting to play with more interesting bombs than variax.
1 Like
Note that a Cassy deck which uses Gors and Darkfire Sac will have a bunch of inconsistencies and weaknesses.
Ramping into Variax early on requires creep development which you can slow down by dispelling or standing on them.
He just got lucky with his variance and you probably didnāt have a way to deal with his board.
You can compare it to Magmarās Chrysalis Burst or their ramping big creatures early. In both situations you need to counteract their development so they wonāt snowball. If you manage to do so you will set them very far behind.
The Lily version is indeed stronger because you require very little set up to gain value and snowball.
From the top 10 players in ladder, only 1 of them runs lilithe, if this card was as oppressive and extremely consistent as said here then im pretty sure that fact would be different. This thread is overreacted beyond belief.
Go on, keep crying, ofc all cards will be nerfed sometime, lets go back to playing golems because strong effects are āuninteractiveā (the very nature of swarm is interactive) or ābad for the gameā (because you personally dont like it).
Personally I donāt think variax is the problem, I think itās dark Fire sacrifice. Missing your 5 mana turn to summon a 7/7 isnāt a big deal, and your opponent canāt develop much board if they remove variax. But, on 7 mana if you miss that turn to summon a 7/7 your opponent has a lot more resources to spend on setting up lethal or preparing to weather the storm.
2 Likes
This cards broken and extremely toxic imo.
Iāve ran circles around players only to get absolutely shit on once this card enters play. The fact that its opening gambit makes this thing cancer imo.
Yes, this card might not be the greatest thing ever at the highest level of play (small minority of player) but me and all my gold/diamond pleb(large majority of players) friends all cry the same thing : cancer.
Fuck this card.
The simplest fix to this OP card is just to remove the words āopening gambitā. Then, to abuse the power Variax the Abyss player has to keep it alive and not dispelled. At least this way there is some sort of possible counterplay.
1 Like
That way Variax is garbage tier.
2 Likes
He did mention āSimplestā and not ābestā
Garbage tier? 7/7 for 7 mana with a very strong power. No trash detected.
With Dark Sac you can still trigger it on the same turn played.
Oh yes, so at 8 Mana i can get 2 5/5s and a 7/7, but only if i also have dark sac and a spare minionā¦ Quick analysis: Variax is only good when ramped out. If ramped out you most of the time donāt have a board outside of him, and only 2-4 cards in hand. If you make its effect dispellable/temporary, its straight trash, there is no point in commiting your entire gameplan onto one minion.
2 Likes
The simple solution suggested may not be a balanced one, but the current situation (huge body that can be brought out early with a very powerful effect that is permanent and undispellable) certainly isnāt either.
Yeah itās complete garbage. I donāt get why people even bother with it.
Kappa