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Faie
Summary
Final Destination: S rank.
An old favorite of mine, and my go to Vanar deck for a couple seasons now. It’s a proper ramp deck, running all three of Vanars ramp cards to really commit to the archetype, giving you the ability to drop massive minions and powerful control spells back to back, and very quickly.
Long Description
So lets talk about the decks powerful endgame. With the expansion and the new meta I lowered the decks curve a bit and added Maruader, who is super cool and a really natural fit for the deck, and since you rarely play more then one minion at a time and are running EMP, who is a hard counter to a ton of the meta, his drawback affect barely matters. Despite the nerf to Ghost Seraphim its still the backbone of the deck, and the deck was barely affected at all by the nerf as her oldschool Spirit of the Wild is as incredibly potent of a combo as its always been, especially when you have other big fatties hanging around to get targeted by it. Nothing wrong with using Spirit of the wild without Ghost either, those giant board warping stat sticks really close out games quick.
Did you know Shivers was a Vespyr? Combine that with another underestimated card, Cryogenesis, and you have a ramp/control/card advantage engine wrapped up in one. Also flying is always handy. Shivers tends to get replaced past the first turn or two because it is no longer needed, but continues to serve its purpose turning Cryo into a proper draw card since you can just keep replacing the last copy of shivers.
Aggro is the only thing that can really give the deck trouble, I tried out neutral healing, but it just didn’t really do the job. So instead I packed in the really annoying Concealing Shroud to buy you the extra turn or two you need to close out the game with your powerful endgame. Typically you want to replace it early unless your up against aggro and hold off on casting it until your in danger of lethal, preferably multiples back to back.
We of course have the Shimzar/Hearth/Thunderhorn package that is a mainstay in every vanar deck. I skipped out on other aspects and the third chromatic cold to fit everything. Between the decks high curve and the advantage generated off of Cryo card advantage is just not an issue. Its a very powerful list that I play in S rank a lot, and it just doesn’t really have a bad match up.
Blood and Oil: Competitive
This deck sports a powerful and aggressive midrange kit, featuring the new bloodsurge cards Mentor and Redsteel paired alongside Cryptogropher, and our oil from Deceptibot/Silver.
Its got a lot of ways to dish out chip damage and control the field while simultaneously maintaining its hand. Aspect of Shimzar has its tried and true combo with Thunderhorn, but now we can also add the Deceptibot/Silver package to that mix as well.
Alcuin can push even more face damage or it can enable chaining together shrouds to tilt any aggro match up in your favor, or alternatively let you pull off extra aspect combos.
Its a very effective deck, but it can struggle a bit against slow late game decks with a lot of healing, meaning healnar/finality magmar can give you some trouble, but you can often outpace them. While solid its just not quite on par with most of the top tier decks.
Kara
Summary
Heavy Metal: Highly Competitive
Man kara has some heavy armor on, yet now she has decided to load on a whole new plate, and then reinforce it again!
The deck is a lot of fun, crystal reinforcement can lead to truely massive bursts and is great with good old bear who also got a nice bump from tide. Animus Plate is pretty huge for the vespyr archtype in general and is a natural pair with reinforcement. The deck is packed with vespyrs, and yes barrier and Wintertide both work with bear/elemental and of course plate.
It has an aggressive curve with chaser to help with card advantage, solid control, and lots of ways to buff things out of plasma range. This one is less Swarm the board focused and more of if a vespyr lives for a turn you can win out of nowhere. Add that to the Shim/thunder package and Kara’s mini combo with luminous and it’s been very effective and quick deck.
Blood Bending: Competitive
Blood Bending: if you get the reference, it makes a lot of since here, vanar is ice/water themed, and this deck is all about using arcane bloodsurge magic.
Initially it started out just as a swarm focused deck, but considering it was already going to run circulus and prismatic regardless, and the fact that the deck spams spells, mostly your bbs, constantly it only made since to switch it over the rest of the way to arcanysts. Although unlike the usual arcanyst decks it doesn’t run any of the their lategame cards and it sports a fair number of non arcanysts.
So the core of the deck revolves around developing a massive field and buffing it to insane levels thanks to a combination of Cryptographer and Bloodbound mentor, then we combine our large field with Auroraboros and it becomes next to impossible to completely remove. Alcuin adds even more bbs spam or lets you chaintogether shrouds to beat those aggro match ups. Mix that in with the usual snowballing of owlbeast and a couple vanar staples and its a pretty effective deck.
While it can struggle against heavy AOE it has a lot of resiliency with the ability to bring things back from the dead and buff things out of most AOE range. While solid its just not quite on par with most of the top tier decks.
Ilena
Summary
Average/Limited Testing
Overall I am fairly unimpressed with her, compared to the raw power and or synergies of the other generals BBS she feels underwhelming. This is the best I have come up with so far to make her viable, its based on a Faie deck I had pretty good success with.
The core of the deck is all about abusing Concealing Shroud and Artifacts. You can chain multiples of them together with alcuin or follow one up with a Grove Lion. And thanks to Shroud/Lion your well prepared for any aggro or high burst matchups which is traditionally what vanar struggles with.
While the walls from white asp are rarely actually useful they force your opponent to play awkwardly, and sometimes they come in handy thanks to corona and hearth sister. But a really cool trick is if you kill things with coldbiters effect while you have white asp equipped, you will indeed get some walls.
Even with dispel in the mix though you can usually get instant value off of any shroud you cast, its the backbone of the deck so you almost never want to replace it, you mainly want to chain shrouds together early on to abuse artifacts as opposed to the usual shroud tactic of chaining them together towards the end of the game to prevent lethal. While preventing lethal is always a valid option, dispel makes it a risky tactic to crutch on to much.
The deck sports loads of control, decent card advantage, and tons of neat little tricks. But unfortunately dispel is pretty common, and despite Illenas personal artifact, Faie is still likely just a better bet.
I have made it to S rank for many seasons now, with frequent top fifty’s when I have the time to play competitively and occasional top tens. Since I have not had the time to stream as much as I want, I just try to share some of my things each week to fill in the downtime. You can check out the rest of my stuff here: