Road to Champion | Season II

Hey y’all! Before we get started, let me introduce myself. I’m WholesomeGMNG, I’ve been playing Mythgard since March 2019, when it was still in alpha. I’m a Mythgard Partner and have casted and competed in both official and community tournaments. You can find me on YouTube, Twitch, and Twitter.

My Gameplan

We all know aggro was extremely strong this past season with the release of The Winter War expansion. It gave yellow aggro some great cards such as Thunderbird Egg and Grit Instructor while red aggro got Carny Rioter, Sunken Acolyte, and the notorious Brinebound Believer. The expansion also improved the entire aggro archetype through the addition of the best aggro path we’ve seen yet, Alliance Command Center. I decided to play aggro last season, mainly because the games are quick and I don’t have much time and because I wanted to see if aggro can make a comeback in Mythgard.

YP Aggro 23-14

I started out the season on YP aggro, which was really good, a few people even secured Champion with it the first week. So what’s unique about this deck is it wants to spam 1 drops adjacent to each other to get a full value Juiced. Once you have the Juiced buff or even a Grit Instructor, it makes your 1 drops fairly hard to deal with, whether it’s through removal or trading. It then tries to close out the game with Instabeast plus agile with Sister Spitfire, or using burn effects like smite, Death Mark, or Fire Scroll. The biggest weakness of the deck is when your opponent starts removing your 1 drops before you can get them buffed with Juiced. Even when you juiced, red decks have the potential to blow you out with Vulcan Brand, especially if you didn’t utilize the Swift effect when you Juiced them.

So, I started losing to YR decks and mono-red decks that removed all of my minions and denied me juiced value. Since the ladder started to target YP, I decided switching decks was in my best interest. The first couple of days of the season I was sitting at #1 or #2 on the ladder at M05 with YP, but that was just the beginning of the real climb. I entered at #2 in the champion ladder after reaching champion with a very high Kismet (elo) rating. Let’s talk about how I ended up there.

While testing on ladder I had some success with the following lists, which had pretty good matchups to most of what I was facing. My matchups involved a healthy amount of aggro, a variety of midrange, and quite a few combo or control Fires of Creation decks.

RG mid 6-3

Red Green midrange has been one of the top decks for a few seasons now. Between the two colors it has access to some of the best removal in the entire game. Both colors give it access to great draw spells like Ichor Feast and Raid The Tombs and some of the best top-end threats, such as Seven Ring Ritual, Chort Stag, and Iku-Turso. This midrange deck has it all and can put up a fight no matter what deck or archetype it’s facing. Unfortunately, its weaknesses come down to draws and starting hands, which ended up costing me quite a few games against aggro.

OP Rebebls 12-7

The Rebels tribal deck really came together with The Winter War expansion. The deck does a great job of keeping the pressure up because of all the pseudo card-advantage it develops through the new Rebels which add burnable cards to your hand. The most notable addition to the Rebels tribal is Kaveh, Khyber Warlord. If it is not dealt with immediately, you will most likely be able to overwhelm your opponent by tutoring so many rebels from your deck every turn. My variation utilizes Journey of Souls to get the value Rebels back into my hand. It also benefits from the additional cards by getting more value out of Ready For Anything. White Metal Ox allows us to keep targets we temptation through Bounteous Jug, which is such a cool interaction. Overall, the deck is a solid midrange list that worked fairly well for me but got out-valued by greedier decks.

I finally decided I should start playing YR aggro to beat the slower decks, that were simply outvaluing my midrange decks, and have a good matchup against YP aggro. This list changed a bit over the course of my climb and ended with this. Shoutout to Tune Star for tuning this one.

YR Aggro 23-6

This deck was the star of my climb. It carried me through some rough patches and was always a deck that I could turn back to for a solid win streak. The only decks that gave me trouble while playing this were different variations of mono-red. One of the silliest interactions with this deck is when you play a turn one Thunderbird Egg without your pursuit (the free Triforge Trooper as protection), but are still able to play an additional one-drop next turn as well as using Hysterical Strength on the egg to attack whatever the opponent used to contest it with. Despite not having agile like the YP variant this YR list gets to run some rush threats that can easily close out games, such as Wings of Abaddon plus Mantle of Authority for 6 face damage. It also has access to Ignition, offering you control in the aggro matchup, opening up a lane to push damage, or simply going face with it to push that last bit of damage for lethal. The other main reason to run this over YP aggro is BrineBound Believer, which demands an answer, and can push tons of damage while discarding your opponents cards, if left unchecked.

After climbing mainly with YR aggro and losing a couple of mirror matches, I decided I wanted to target aggro even more and ended up with this mono-red list. It took me on a hot streak to M09 until I switched back to YR aggro for a 13 game win streak into champ.

MonoR 8-2

This mono-red list was very successful at out-grinding aggro and going under control. It was one of the better decks I played this season due to its favorable matchups on ladder. It can struggle against some bigger midrange decks if it doesn’t manage to beat them early. Ichor Feast lets you out-grind aggro to find all the burn and rush cards so they can’t keep anything on the board. The deck also has insane burst potential utilizing cards with rush and Hysterical Strength. It can even use Alacrity or Guise of Phobos as lethal tools or to simply push enough damage to finish the opponent off with burn spells. Lastly, Seven Ring Ritual is the perfect top end that can close out a game and most of the time it will be a breeze burning to 7 gems because of all the draw. One drawback of the deck is that since it only runs ten one-drops it has the potential to be a little slow in certain matchups when you want to have an explosive start.

Other decks that I tested and weren’t working out for me:

RG mid forge, RG forge reanimator, BG OTK, YR mid-control, and PG reanimator.

Closing thoughts:

In my opinion, this was honestly one of the best metas we’ve had in the game. I saw a wide variety of decks, had the most awesome Aggro mirrors where the games were super high tension from Turn 1, intense roping every turn to evaluate the best possible lines, and every game felt like the slightest misplay would lose me the match.

I’m happy that the patch toned down aggro a bit, while not completely removing it from the meta. For example, we’ve had seasons where the greediest decks will quite frequently win and games would take 45 min to an hour, which was brutal and unenjoyable for me. Anyways, I’m very much looking forward to how things will shape up after the next patch and will be trying to find the next best deck to maintain a high rank on ladder in hopes of earning some qualifier points (QP) for the 2021 Mythgard World Championship.

You can find most of my decks on Mythgard Hub