Latest Brew – Winter Moon

It has always been clear that Winter Moon is an extremely powerful champion, but the problem always came down to how exactly you wanted to build around her. At the FiveShards Sapphire Cup, the first post-Majesty tournament, Winter Moon was both the most played Champion and one of the least successful. However, a lot of that comes down to how Winter Moon decks need to have the metagame defined for them before they can start setting up their deck to best take advantage of the card advantage and recursion mechanisms that the Champion power gives you. With Ruby Wild Ramp, Mono Blood Control, and Azurecannon having established themselves in the first set of Constructed IQ tournaments, we have a target to build to. Get ready, because Winter Moon is coming…

Windsinger Control

Champion: Winter Moon



Aborean Rootfather gemmed with Minor Sapphire of Mischief, Minor Sapphire of Sky

Azurefate Sorceress gemmed with Minor Sapphire of Mischief, Minor Wild Orb of Conservation

At its heart, a Winter Moon deck normally wants the game to go on as long as possible. Many Champions value being activated multiple times, but Winter Moon puts even more value on converting those turns into more draws and thus increasing your chances of snowballing your card advantage engine into an unstoppable force. If the format is dominated by aggressive decks it becomes a difficult task to get those turns, but from the latest Invitational Qualifier results we know that 4 and 5 cost troops out of Mono Blood, Cressida Ramp and Azurecannon are the threats that matter. The important leap to make from there is to understand that just filling your deck with other card advantage generators isn’t enough, you need to have a strategic angle you are taking and let Winter Moon’s ability handle the inevitability. After all, without a plan how else are we going to exert our will upon our opponents?

With RW Ramp now being known as the format boogeyman, one issue that constantly frustrates control decks is the wide range of ways a Ruby Wild deck can take over a game. Arborean Rootfathers and the threat of them coming off of an Eye of Creation means you don’t want to be playing basic speed responses everywhere or else you risk having your health total be devoured in large chunks throughout the game. Crocosaur can easily 3-for-1 anyone that relies upon a troop-heavy approach. Balthasar and the previously mentioned Eye of Creation can come off the top of the deck and outdraw almost any attempt at disruption, and Periwinkle requires an answer to the Elf herself unless you plan on having two answers for every one threat for the rest of the game.

That in mind, we need to orient our control decks to be constantly ready with resources open on the opponent’s turn. One threat in particular becomes amazing with that in mind: Windsinger, Master of the Hunt. Windsinger checks off a lot of boxes for being a great threat in this format, most notably in the case of RW being essentially immune to Crocosaur and also creating parity out of an opponent’s Balthasar. Getting better and better the longer we can make the game go makes Windsinger and Winter Moon a perfect match. Many games of HEX can boil down the winner and loser into who drew more cards and who used their resources more efficiently, and Windsinger gives you a massive advantage on both those fronts.

So then, what makes a reactive quick-speed oriented control deck tick then? Nothing complicated, but you are going to have to fill the deck with interrupts and some sort of draw or card selection. We don’t have a ton of options that fit either the “Quick speed” or “cheap filtering” criteria, but the cards we do have are of a high enough quality to get us there. Arcane Focus and Peek have been touched upon before as an amazing selection engine, and low cost card selection gets even better with Winter Moon when you can Peek for a large number and find your enhanced card. After Focus and Peek, our best choice for some Quick speed card draw is Epiphany. While the rate might not be as good as even an Oracle Song, letting us hold up our resources to present the threat of an interrupt is big. Opponents have to respect it more from a Wild/Sapphire deck too than other shard combinations. Oftentimes against a Blood Sapphire control player the correct way to play was to keep playing threats until they ran out of interrupts since while Vampire King might be a great card it didn’t really punish you if the opponent played it as now their shields were down and you had an opening from them playing their relatively expensive troops. Windsinger breaks that mold, as it can easily come down and brutalize an opponent that used all their resources by quickly bringing back up the resources for the W/S player. So in a strange way, where Epiphany didn’t play well with Blood Sapphire it plays incredibly well with W/S where opponents are much more likely to try and take their time to avoid the wrath of the Master of the Hunt.

Another thing that might look odd is the massive number of 1 and 2-of cards. With Arcane Focus and Peek powering us though, we can play more situational cards like Polymorph Dingler knowing that we can dig past them when not needed but giving us greater access to those effects than normal in the matchups where they matter. Winter Moon also gives these cards a boost. Since games will often go long, recurring the cards that matter in a particular matchup can easily make it feel like you must be running 4 or more of a particular card when really you only have a couple in your deck. The reserves especially is somewhere to take a long look at your options, as strategic cards like Azurefate Sorceress (more on her when we talk about fighting Blood decks) don’t require a lot of reserves space to get full effect out of when you can dig to with your actions and recur with Winter Moon.

Now, we still require some form of removal as our interrupt suite isn’t cheap enough in terms of resource costs to stop everything. Wild and Sapphire are rather hamstrung already in terms of removal, but really when we stop looking at needing every removal action to be just as good as Murder we see that there are a few shining pieces that fit our needs. From Wild, what we really need is Carnasaurus to give an on-time answer to Periwinkle while also giving the deck a punchers chance at dealing with the aggressive decks. Carnasaurus doesn’t exactly fit our criteria for quick speed answers but at 2 resources it often is easily cheap enough to play in the midgame while holding up Countermagic resources (especially since Chlorophyllia can help us get there).

In terms of quick speed removal, Cripple deals with a great number of the present threats in the format. Murdering a Vampire King or Crippling one is essentially the same thing when we don’t care about the 0/4 left behind. It also can be effective against a Rootfather at preventing a big chunk of damage. Speaking of which Polymorph: Dingler is quite great in that position, as it both nullifies the 8/8 and stops the Ruby gem from dealing damage to you. While Polymorph: Dingler might not be the most resource efficient removal in the game, it answers pretty much any troop in the format right now from Periwinkles and Phenteos to Rootfathers and Reeses.

Finally, we need some way to actually win as a 4/6 ground troop isn’t going to win every game by itself. One card definitely fits our build perfectly, as Arborean Rootfather with the Sapphire gem of Mischief both gives us a Quick speed threat as well as providing a way to turn it into a draw during the early game while we focus on establishing control. Generally, if you have an opening to use Rootfather’s secondary ability and draw a card with it that will be the best thing to do until you have established control of the game. I say generally, because there are also times when recognizing that just having available a blocker at 7 cost is what you need, even if it gives the opponent an opening. Mass Polymorph Dingler is the other way the deck typically ends the opponent, preferrably after having a Windsinger in play. Nullfying every troop in play and hand for your opponent means that pretty much every troop deck is now incredibly far behind with Windsinger only making that gap worse and worse if they don’t draw something that matters quickly. Even outside of this deck, Mass Polymorph: Dingler is a card that RW decks fear greatly as it turns off a huge portion of their strategy if you can survive to play it.

PRIMARY MATCHUPS

Against Cressida Ramp, the key is to make sure you don’t leave yourself open to any huge damage chunks off an Arborean Rootfather. While Carnasaurus is primarily for killing Periwinkles, using the Dinosaur to eat Puck or even Howling Braves if it will keep the opponent off of getting into Rootfather range before you have an answer is important. On the draw, you often are going to have to accept that a fast 5-drop is probably going to come down before you can do much about it. You are going to have to treat your health total as a resource in this case, but thankfully both Cripple and Polymorph and be used at the end of the opponents turn once your interrupts slow down the rest of their plan. Windsinger or Mass Polymorph are almost always both extremelly powerful swings in the game for you, so once you land one of those you can breathe a bit easier. The deck is mostly tuned to accept that R/W is one of the most common matchups you’ll face, but typically I like to tweak towards a few more removal actions on the draw and a few more interrupts on the play.

Mono Blood has grown extremely popular over the past few weeks, surpassing Blood/Diamond as the go to Extinction deck. With so much removal in their decks, you have to remember that you can try to leave them without any good targets for most of the game and let the Winter Moon engine rev up to speed while your interrupts and card draw take over. Often their Vampires will find themselves Cripple’d if they ever do make it past your interrupts, meaning there are only a few common cards to worry about. Phenteo can be the biggest pest, especially if they are able to land it on the play before you can possibly have an interrupt available. Windsinger Control draws so many cards that even just a few activations will mean an inevitable army of Terrorantulas spinning towards you. Polymorph or the old “Time Ripple into an interrupt” can deal with Phenteo in non-optimal ways, and the Armies of Myth limited all-star Incubation Webs can also do the job somewhat, but be aware that Phenteo is one of the most common ways for Mono Blood to win this matchup and mulligan accordingly.

Remember how Azurefate Sorceress can be a major strategic shift to bring? Mono Blood is where she shines, as with the minor gems of Mischief and Conservation she can come down with Spellshield at the end of your opponents turn. If you happen to follow that up on your turn with a Windsinger (who now also then has Spellshield) and then have all your resources at the ready to interrupt any Extinctions that make come, then now we have pretty much locked down the game. Windsinger can be a trump to any versions that plan on abusing Pact of Pain, but given that you really need to either be quite late in the game or have a Sorceress out then it is advisable to bring in a Return to the Soil or two to deal with the card drawing constant.

Where Windsinger Control is happy to see two of the three major archetypes at the moment, the rise of Azurecannon is not something it is well equipped to deal with. The problem lies with how well Azurecannon can create big turns, as it can sequence a couple tunnelers to come out at the same turn. Combine that with a Quick speed Azurefate Sorceress, Tetzot’s Champion power to make a big Rock Elemental, and just playing a troop or two in addition to all that and it is possible that Azurecannon can present 5 or 6 threats in a single turn. Windsinger control operates on the premise of interrupting one thing at a time, so obviously it can get quickly overloaded should even a few of those things all happen. With often their own Countermagics for your Windsinger (who could at least help with stopping end-of-turn Azurefates), seeing Tetzot before the coinflip often means you are going to be looking for keeping hands that ensure you can keep drawing and hitting resource drops, as likely your best path to victory is to hope they get a bit shard-light and you can get a Windsinger or Mass Polymorph to stick. Verdict can be big out of the reserves as often you can get to 8 to play Windsinger with Verdict backup before they can get to 6 for a double Countermagic hand, thanks to your card selection and Chlorophyllias.

Random aggro can also be a bit of a problem for the deck. While Carnasaurus can be great against one-drop based deck decks like Mono Ruby Aggro where it can kill and stick around to trade with something else, it is not as great against aggro decks more based around 2-drops like the Darkspire decks that have been popping up in Gauntlet. Crocosaur is a must against those types of decks to bring in, and Howling Brave joins with them primarily to help ensure the deck can actually hit the triple Wild thresholds.

BONUS SECTION – What’s the plan?

It can be helpful to think about a matchup from both sides of the table. With that in mind, lets look at a few opening hands in the R/W Ramp and Mono Blood matchup. In the comments, post for each hand about whether:

A) Would you keep the hand? B) If you kept the hand, what is your plan?

1 – Windsinger Control on the draw against Kranok

2 – Kranok Mono B on the draw against Winter Moon

3 – Windsinger Control on the play against Cressida after a 7 shard hand mulligan

4 – Cressida Ramp on the play against Winter Moon

The point isn’t to be right or wrong, but rather just to stop and think about different situations that can occur. I’ll post my own opinions as well.

-Wurtil

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