Greetings, the main reason I wish to share this deck is that it focuses quite heavily on proper positioning and a few simple mind games that for old players, is reminiscent of “Do I play around dancing blades or third wish?”.
Deckbuilder’s note: The deck here is far from perfect and is tailored to a more slow play style, for most people increasing the number of early game is advised if you are not a Mulligan Wizard.
Q&A:
Rasha’s Curse or Rust Crawler?:
Overall Rasha’s Curse is better than Rust Crawler in my experince however there are two exceptions. First against Songhai (especially Reva) the tempo gain from destroying their one mana artifact (compared to 3-4 mana artifacts) especially in the early stages of the match is far too smaller to justify using Rasha’s Curse since in most cases you will not also able to develop a minion and use the dervish generated to take out a minion. While rust crawler on the other hand neutralizes their artifact and develops (for the stage in the game) a well stated minion. The ratio of Curses to Rust Crawlers changes depending on which match ups you are most likely going to be facing.
Skywing and Dust Wailer?: The premise here is when going second you develop a skywing, this reduces the cost of Dust Wailer to 5 which makes it playable next turn if you get a mana spring (likely since Skywing has flying). From here you can play either Dust Wailer or Dancing Blades depending on the foe’s positioning. If they play around Dancing Blades, they likewise play into Dust Wailer. And vice versa.
Why astral phasing?: Astral phasing I find is a good card when your deck runs a decent amount of medium sized well statted minions. Emerald Rejuvanator, Chakkram, Dancing Blades. This is so since, the most common method of neutralizing said minions is to body block them with token minions (like wrailthlings) so that they can not get value from trading favorably with their high cost minions like four winds. Bestowing Flying bypasses this and is also a nice counter to daemonic lure/repulsor beast. Since said minion have enough attack to one shot most important minions (anything above 4-5 health you just Falcius+bbs anyway) the negative of not having an attack buff from the spell is negligible.
Why no wings of paradise?: Frankly the reason I do not run it, is that I find that the attack buff on it to be irrelevant too often, and that it alongside skywing are not good in the late game. Skywing has the two advantages of enabling the potential play of a turn 2 Dust Wailer, and that a second Skywing in the late game is acceptable if you develop a windshrike on the same turn 5-6 mana for a 3/3 & a 4/3 with cycle. This is decent tempo and does not sacrifice card advantage to achieve it.
How to manage the board state: In this deck you want to force your opponent to “waste” horizontal movement with Vertical Movement. By this I mean that if they advance to your side of the map one hex instead of two, that increases the amount of time you have to develop minion/get value from positional effects. This is hard to explain, but basically if they are trying to stop your units from taking either of the two central column mana springs, they are not putting pressure on your general.
This by all means not a refined list, however the success so far with Skywing/Dust Wailer/Dancing Blades is interesting. And well statted “vanilla” minions with astral phasing has been performing well so far.
Has anyone else found success with Dust Wailer in other lists especially those with conjunction with dancing blades?
