By:  Yuki Lee Bender

Lightning Death Dealer featuring Snap Shot was the first deck I built when Tales of Aria released after reading Karol Ruszkiewicz’s article on fabtcg. Chaining together Snap Shots to go wide and draw lots of cards for a big combo turn is exactly the kind of thing I gravitate towards in TCGs. However, no matter how much I tried, I couldn’t quite make the deck feel as good as I wanted it to. Some major problems were that the deck had trouble utilizing New Horizon since Death Dealer requires an empty arsenal and sometimes even though you draw a bunch of cards, you don’t have a way to use all those cards other than Shock Charmers. Drawing cards is great, but you need to actually play those cards for it to be real card advantage. After a bunch of testing I eventually shelved the deck and wrote the idea off as not quite good enough.

Leading up to Everfest we caught wind of the Briar errata and upcoming bans and many people speculated the meta would slow down as a result. Because of this, I was once again drawn to Lightning Death Dealer as a way to possibly attack the early Pro Quest meta since linear aggressive decks tend to perform quite well early in a format. As I was looking to update the deck, I decided to browse through all the cards I could play and Flock of the Featherwalkers immediately caught my eye. We’ve seen how powerful this card can be in a deck like Chane who is able to give Flock go again using Snap Dragon Scalers, Shadow Puppetry and Art of War. However, Lightning Lexi is even better than Chane at using Flock and in my opinion is the best Flock user of any hero in the game. Not only can Lexi give Flock go again very easily by flipping up a lightning card, but New Horizon means you can almost always arsenal the card you reveal off Flock if you play it at the end of a turn.

Flock Lexi

Class: Ranger

Hero: Lexi, Livewire

Weapons (1): Death Dealer

Equipment (7): Fyendal's Spring Tunic, Heart of Ice, Ironrot Gauntlet, New Horizon, Perch Grapplers, Shock Charmers, Snapdragon Scalers

Core (46):

(3) Electrify (red)

(3) Enlightened Strike (red)

(3) Entwine Lightning (red)

(3) Flock of the Feather Walkers (red)

(3) Lightning Press (red)

(3) Lightning Surge (red)

(1) Pulse of Volthaven (red)

(3) Snap Shot (red)

(3) Flock of the Feather Walkers (yellow)

(1) Lightning Press (yellow)

(1) Lightning Surge (yellow)

(3) Snap Shot (yellow)

(1) Blink (blue)

(3) Electrify (blue)

(3) Flock of the Feather Walkers (blue)

(3) Frazzle (blue)

(3) Lightning Surge (blue)

(3) Snap Shot (blue)

Sideboard (26):

(3) Fatigue Shot (red)

(3) Frazzle (red)

(1) Frost Fang (red)

(3) Snatch (red)

(3) Fatigue Shot (yellow)

(3) Frazzle (yellow)

(2) Frost Fang (yellow)

(3) Light it Up (yellow)

(2) Blink (blue)

(3) Heaven's Claws (blue)

See the full deck at: https://fabdb.net/decks/xgJwARym/

Ultimately with how the meta shaped up, this deck didn’t completely get there, but I believe it remains a solid Tier 2 deck and is quite a bit more powerful than Lightning Voltaire lists. Given the right metagame or a few more tools this deck could definitely be a major contender. Alternatively, if people are able to shore up the Runeblade and Starvo matchups I believe this list could be an excellent choice. Flock Death Dealer Lexi just has very high and consistent damage output. I ended up playing this deck at Fabled Hobby to a 4-2 finish, beating two Prisms, Starvo and Oldhim but losing the Death Dealer mirror to Isaac Jessen and losing a very close game to Levia where I did not play around c&c pummel.

Pros

• The deck has a high damage ceiling of 30+ damage
• The deck consistently can deal 15+ damage across multiple attacks and break points
• Few non-attack actions means the deck rarely has non-functional hands
• The deck is heavily favored into Aura Prism
• The playstyle of the deck is quite fun, there’s lots of interesting decisions and you get to draw a lot of cards.

Cons

• Playing the deck optimally can be quite difficult, there are many lines and sometimes you need to think about what you might draw into.
• The deck is extremely fragile, it plays many 2 blocks and has little armor.
• Most disruption is effective against you, but especially arsenal disruption or Spinal Crush as you are heavily reliant on getting Go Again from your arsenal.
• Runeblades can be a tough matchup as they have similar output but lots of armor, but you can definitely race them if your draws line up well.
• Starvo can be very scary depending on their draws and how they build, their disruptive tools are highly effective against this deck.
• The deck has very few flex slots which makes the deck less flexible than most decks.

Gameplay

The idea of this deck is to start with some way to get Go Again, usually with a Quicken token or a lightning card in arsenal. Using this you can chain together Flocks and other go again attacks to go wide with all the cards you draw off of Electrify and Death Dealer. If you want to see examples of the deck in action, there are gameplay videos available on OK&Y’s YouTube channel showing both the Prism as well as the Dash matchups.

One of the most important parts of piloting this deck is ensuring that on your next turn you are able to empty your arsenal with your action point still up, so you can make use of Death Dealer’s card draw. The most ideal setup is to end your turn with an arrow and a lightning card in arsenal, so you can then start your next turn with that arrow. This is especially good for Frazzle as it lets us maximize the fuse effect by starting the turn with it. 

Examples of good arsenals:

• Arrow + any lightning card with Go Again
• Arrow + Flock (with a quicken token to start the turn)
• Any one card + Quicken token.
• Lightning card in arsenal
• Enlightened Strike in arsenal

Examples of risky arsenals:

• Snap Shot (requires you to draw lightning to fuse)
• Entwine Lightning (requires you to draw lightning to fuse)

Examples of poor arsenals:

• Any card without go again, with no quicken token or lightning card to clear it.

Tips, Tricks & Rules Interactions

This deck has a lot of tricky rules interactions that are important to understand. I have summarized some of the key ones below:

• When you activate Death Dealer as an instant it gives you an action point, because the ability has Go Again. This is just like using Spellbound Creepers with a Non-Attack Action that has Go Again.
• You do not need to have an arrow in hand to use Death Dealer’s ability as an instant to get Go Again, because loading the arrow is a “May”. If you do not load an arrow you still get your action point, but you do not draw a card.
• If Snap Shot has Go Again already, and then you activate the bow as an instant, you now have two action points (one from Snap Shot’s go again, and one from Death Dealer).
• If you have both an instant speed activation and a regular speed activation of Death Dealer, you get to choose which one to use.
• Frazzle applies to the whole turn, even if you break the combat chain. It also applies to Shock Charmers and to Electrify.
• If you fuse an arrow as you attack a Spectra, you do not get the fused effect because the arrow does not resolve.
• Frazzle and damage prevention are both replacement effects. This essentially means that if the attack is not fully blocked you always apply frazzle’s +1 effect first and then the damage prevention second. This works exactly the same way as Ball Lightning. If you want full details on this rules interaction I would recommend reading the fabtcg article which outlines it.

Sideboarding

Whenever I sideboard with this deck I try to run 18 blues, 21 arrows, 21 lightning cards. I usually do not run more than 6 red arrows, because too many arrows are very hard for the deck to properly utilize. Having yellows helps mitigate this because they double as resource cards.

Vs Prism/Control

+6 Frazzles

+3 Yellow Fatigue shots

+3 Snatch

+2 Blink

(vs non prism decks that play c&c)

+1 Iron Rot Gauntlet

-1 Shock Charmers

+3 Heaven’s Claw

-3 Blink

Vs Runeblade or aggro decks you want to disrupt

+6 Frazzle

+3 Light It Up

+2 Blink

+3 Frost Fangs

(If you go second)

+1 Snap Dragon Scalers

-1 Perch Grapplers

Vs Katsu/Ice Lexi

+6 Fatigue Shot

+3 Light It Up

+2 Blink

+3 Frost Fangs

(If you go second)

+1 Snap Dragon Scalers

-1 Perch Grapplers

Vs Starvo

+6 Fatigue Shot

+3 Yellow Frazzles

+3 Frost Fang

+2 Blink

In general sideboarding revolves around either more into damage or more into disruption. Figuring out exactly which disruptive tools to include is a bit tricky, I’m not entirely sure Frost Fang is the best choice, but I’m also not sure what’s better. Ice Quake seems like a reasonable include at first glance, but often underperforms when you draw it late in a turn.