By Dimos

Well, it seems like it’s Oldhim season right now. Or at least that seems to be the outcome of the National Championships held this past weekend. Adding to the barrage of these wintery forces is Iyslander. Both of these Ice heroes have very strong end-game states and have a unique knack for winning games that go long. Hopefully this article can give you a few tips and tools to help combat this and come out with a late-game victory of your own. While the rest of this article aims to look at broader strategies of long games, I’ll put some brief notes specifically on Oldhim, Iyslander, and Dash here. None of these strategies are guaranteed, but they can provide you with some outs; these heroes have strong endgames that can’t always be overcome.

Oldhim can quickly and effectively set up his powerful Guardian-card-fueled second cycle by using Crown of Seeds. With enough pressure in the early- and mid-game, you can force many Oldhim players to use Crown of Seeds in awkward ways. When presented damage in fragmented amounts that encourage pitching a card to use the effects of Crown of Seeds and Rampart of the Ram’s Head together, it is hard for Oldhim players to deny the efficiency of using their defensive equipment. Even if this comes at the cost of late-game organization. Additionally, any effect you have that can wreak havoc on the deck count or the pace of hands being drawn can negatively impact how their pitch stack comes up. Instead of seeing cards 1-2-3-4 they may see 1-2-3 and then 4-5-6-7. If card 4 is the Pulse of Isenloft that Oldhim needed to fuse Oaken Old, then you’ve effectively bought yourself an entire turn of pressure. If you can keep pressure up during this less-effective second cycle, you can possibly give yourself the advantage required to win. Watch out for Oldhim’s Ice reaction (or other disruption) as it will interfere with your own pace of drawing cards (since you’re seeing the affected card twice in a row), and could throw off the count for your second cycle.

Iyslander and Dash have very similar endgame states and if they are trying to set these up, they expose themselves to being pressured and punished. Odds are you can race to kill them before they get to their ideal state. They both need to spend a lot of resources on building permanents on the board (Frost Hex, Induction Chamber, Plasma Purifier, and even Insidious Chill). Each item or aura that these heroes set up will cost them six (or more) points of value. They each take two full cards (one to pitch, one to play), and can consume a valuable action point (or Iyslander’s once-per-turn instant). Over the course of three pieces that cost your opponent 6 life apiece, you’re already halfway to killing them if you can keep up an adequate amount of pressure (an average of 12 damage per turn, or an equivalent amount of value in disruption). The general message here is to keep throwing damage. However, be careful and don’t overcommit since they can pivot away from these set-up strategies and both have strong tempo-based games.

To pick up where we left off last week, you’ve now identified that a game is going to go long, and you’ve identified the different ways that it could go. All that’s left is to decide what your out is and how you’re going to push towards it. As a reminder, there are different fatigue states, soft and hard. Soft fatigue aims to run your opponent out of threats while you still have a few to keep pressuring. Hard fatigue forces them to block with every card in their deck because they’re out of options, then keep attacking after they have no cards to defend themselves with.

Let’s decide what our out is now: Are you racing to kill your opponent before they set up? Are you trying to disrupt their second cycle so yours will be stronger? Or are you trying to be sneaky and hide the fact that the game will go long at all? The key question is: Will your late game be stronger than your opponent’s? Once you answer these questions, you should know how you’re trying to see the game to it’s end. The general strategies are listed below.

Try to end the game as fast as possible. This is something that you only do when you know your opponent has inevitability on their side. Frost Hexes, Induction Chambers, or even just knowing that your opponent has a better second cycle (common against Guardians, and some mid-range classes). It can sometimes be a panic option, but it can also help make the best of a bad situation. It is important to count your opponent’s graveyard and your own. Know what immediate threats you have left and know what immediate threats they have left. One power card is rarely enough to get this job done, so you may have to arsenal some power ahead of time to get over their defenses. This could mean arsenalling a Crippling Crush and waiting to draw into another power card to guarantee strong back-to-back turns. Or it could mean arsenalling a Morded Tide while waiting to draw your last Revel in Runeblood to push a lethal amount of damage.

Pitch a key combo to see on your second cycle: This is a strategy best used when it appears that neither nor your opponent has set-up for a strong late game. This requires a balance of life totals. Both players need to be low enough that a powerful combo will close the game, but your life total needs to be high enough to keep enough cards in hand to actually play out the combo.  This can manifest itself in a few different ways. Each hero has strong combos, usually predicated off of two key cards. If you’re playing your deck, you should know what these are and how to pull them off. One of the advantages of pitching a combo is that you often have more resources than normal to pay for it, due to the high number of blues that have been previously pitched. This can add extra damage through resource sinks like Grasp of the Arknight, Metacarpus Nodes, Shock Charmers, or using the variable costs on cards like Sonata Arcanix or Ice Eternal. Rhinar can guarantee that he can swing both Mandible Claws and follow up with an extra attack after a Bloodrush Bellow because so much of what’s left to draw from the deck is blue cards. Even if this pitched combo doesn’t kill your opponent, it will hopefully leave them low enough that they need to dedicate nearly their entire hand to blocking from this point out, giving you the option for fatigue against them.

Rely on your already-stacked second cycle. When you think you have identified that this is a long game before your opponent, you can start to set up and give yourself the edge, even if they have some type of endgame plan already. When you draw into this cycle, you will be able to send multiple, consecutive powerful turns at your opponent. If this doesn’t outright kill them, it will set you up to take advantage of a soft fatigue state because they have been forced to block with useful cards. Setting up an entire second cycle takes longer to do, and requires your opponent to give you a bit more space, or at least for your plan to start at a higher life total. You also have to be more deliberate with it, particularly about separating out the power cards into consecutive hands. Again, there is nothing wrong with counting your deck or graveyard. It is a key component of making sure that your late game plan goes well. It is a real blow when you think you’ve got the game on lock and draw into a hand that is too awkward to play out due to your own miscount. This can mean tactically blocking with cards in ways that may not be perfectly efficient so they don’t mess up your pitch stack or change how many cards you draw in a turn.

Soft fatigue is a strong option if your opponent runs a deck that runs a conventional number of blues (which I would consider to be between 17 and 23) and you haven’t seen evidence that they are setting up a powerful endgame. Additionally, this can also be a strong option when your opponent has pitched well to set up a non-permanent endgame so long as you have well-timed defensive cards to weather the storm. Once again, it is very important to keep track, as best you can, of what your opponent is sending to the graveyard and what they are sending to the bottom of their deck. If you think your soft fatigue plan is going to work but your opponent still has four of their six power majestics in their deck, you may be in for a rude awakening when they start throwing a well-coordinated second cycle at you.

Hard fatigue is something that either arises opportunistically, or your deck is very specifically geared towards it. Throughout the game, keep an eye on how thick your deck is relative to your opponent’s. Often if you ask to count your opponent’s deck too early, they can be alerted to the fact that you may be aiming to hard fatigue them. This requires basically all of the previous considerations to be checked off, in addition to you having tempo and having ways of keeping tempo to ensure that all your opponent is doing is blocking. If you are running a fatigue-oriented deck, this strategy shouldn’t be a surprise to you and you should just be conscious of making card-efficient plays. For example, red Thunder Quake takes three cards to play (Thunder Quake and two blues to pitch for it), but it only takes one card out of your deck. It requires your opponent to dedicate three or more cards to defending it to prevent damage. In contrast, the standard rate for a zero-cost card is four damage, which only takes one card to play and takes one card out of your deck, and likely one or two cards out of your opponent’s deck to defend. The upside is that three zero-cost cards will deal more damage than one six-cost card like Thunder Quake. They are more card efficient at the expense of being less deck efficient. Weapons are perfectly deck efficient, removing zero cards from your deck, and hard fatigue strategies usually rely heavily on consistent, high-quality weapons to get the job done.

Bespoke strategies: These are pre-meditated outs in your 80-card list that you have as a back-up or as a counter to other decks trying to fatigue you. The single best example of this Last Ditch Effort. With a few blue resource cards and nothing more, one can put out an intense amount of damage at a point in the game that would otherwise have been written off. If you want to be extreme and actively look for yourself fatiguing as your out, you can run Mage Master Boots, Tome of Fyendal and one extra resource source (possibly an Energy Potion or a Tunic counter). With those, you can swing all three Last Ditch Efforts and a weapon all in one turn, usually for between 27 and 30 damage. For a self-fatigue option better suited to aggressive decks, Ravenous Rabble becomes a five-damage attack with go again and costs zero. That is hands down the best rate in the game, and is tough to survive such efficiency in the late game. Remembrance can go a very long way in enabling these strategies, as you’ll be playing or blocking with cards as the mid-game demands. Remembrance on its own can be a very powerful out for two reasons: It lets you cycle three key power cards back in and it lets you shuffle your deck to get rid of any poorly-stacked cards that you may have. If you are using remembrance, be mindful of the pace of the game. If you are on six life, it probably isn’t wise to shuffle back in Pulverize, as you can’t plan on ever having enough cards left in hand to play it out. Instead opt for some cheaper attacks that will make your two- or three-card hands more potent.

Overall, games will probably be going longer these days, especially with Prism out of the picture. And that means that you will need a plan for them. You can set up any of the options provided here so long as you can identify how the game is going to run long. You can add cards into your 80-card list that makes it a lot easier to do so without the mental stress of counting all game (like Remembrance or Pulse of Candlehold). Whatever method you choose, it should be proactive; you don’t want your opponent to start working on their plan before you do. Whoever plans first can usually execute first. Remember that you can also plan to counteract your opponent’s late game strategies, by lining up pressure, disruption, or defense to address their threats. Finally, knowledge is power, and rifling through graveyards is about as free as knowledge gets in Flesh and Blood.