Timeline Tuesday: Anguish Flame

Genesis deckbuilding can get a little math-y with balancing chi values, aura pools, and having no card limit, so I’m here to help breakdown some fun archetypes you can expand on or rip apart and completely remake with your own ideas!

A Genesis: BoC Decktech Series

We’re gonna take a card and build an entire deck around that card.
and today’s card is…..

Anguish Flame!

This card is mechanically unique (at least at the time of writing) in that it provides stackable elemental Weakness. This might not seem like much on the surface, but this is similar to the yellow Calculated Assault in that you’re able to increase the damage for each successive one you cast. So how quickly can we spread our dark fire…?

Let’s add another couple of hugely impactful card to our fiery cohort with…

!

• 4chi, 10 Aura Action
• Continuous Enchantment: All Attack Abilities you play gain dark attribute.

• 6 chi, 15 Aura Alteration
• Continuous Phyr Hill: All Attack abilities played by champions or summons on Phyr Hill gain the Fire attribute.
• Continuous Fire Brand: While a champion or summon is on Phyr Hill, everything around Phyr Hill without Fire Weakness gain Fire Weakness.

So the first thing to note with both of these: they both are adding a relevant attribute to every *attack* (not cast, like our signature card) that we do, Dark Strength adding Dark and Phyr Hill adding Fire.

There’s some tricky business with getting an extra Fire Weakness stack if you’re standing on Phyr Hill *before* casting Anguish Flame, but if you move off for any reason *after* casting Anguish Flame, you lose that stack from Phyr Hill, as it only Brand only adds elemental weakness if they didn’t already have it.

• x5 Phyr Hill
• x5 Dark Strength

Card total so far: 10 cards/50 chi total

So far we’ve made all of our attacks do Dark and Fire damage, and we have Anguish Flame to cast first to stack the elemental damage we can do (+1/element/cast). Now we need some ways to attack at swift speed, close or create distance, and generally disrupt our opponent’s plans and attempts to interact with our combo.

With an errata to make it Swift speed, Revenge of the Phoenix has a niche spot in our deck, providing us with a way to not only negate a potentially huge attack, but counter attack with equally big damage (boosted by Anguish Flame and Brand effects), which makes softening up our opponent and making it easier to get our combo off with fewer and fewer cards (and thus being able to repeat it over and over). Given it’s use as a counter tool and not an actual combo piece, we don’t want too many copies floating around our timeline. Plus it has 7 chi, so only a few copies makes sense.

• x3 Revenge of the Phoenix

Card total so far: 13 cards, 71 chi

We can dip into Chaos for one of the most efficient cards for sculpting your hand to find that perfect combo piece in Underworld Dealings. 1 life for 1 card added to hand is already pretty good, but you can also spend as much as you want to scope out more cards from your timeline to look for the last card you need to get the combo to go off.

• 8x Underworld Dealings
• 8 cards/48 chi

Card total so far: 21 cards/119 chi total

We need some ways to attack at swift speed, preferably with a good awareness and range; we can even be super greedy and ask for some kind of disruptive effect too while we’re at it, because why not go big?

Now we’re cooking with propane and propane accessories. This is an obvious card (it’s basically free to cast for Shoon); it’s worth including for the fact that not only is it swift, range, more than 1 damage, and doesn’t cost any aura, it’s also *area*, so your opponent can’t rely on breaking line of sight to escape your combo.

• 8x Fury
• 8 cards/40 chi

Card total so far: 29 cards/159 chi total

The last couple of cards I’d auto include in our core is a few copies of ways to protect ourselves, and our colors have some of the best options.

Nullify

• 6 chi
• Forward Adjacent Awareness
• 16 Aura

Swift Cast: Negate all abilities on the stack by target champion or summon in Nullify’s awareness.

Shockingly cheap for just how powerful this is. Nullify doesn’t care if it’s a cast, attack, or doesn’t even do damage. And it doesn’t care how many abilities you’re putting on the stack either; it’s *all* getting flushed.

Mythical Protection

• 3 Chi
• 10 Aura

Swift Cast: You cannot be targeted by spells this round.

Mythical Protection is another shockingly cheap card that can have a massive impact in protecting us. Turning off targeted spells is incredibly powerful, especially considering you can cast multiple in a turn if your opponent feels forced to combo off. Do note that you’ll still be susceptible to Area or untargeted damaged (like Meteorite).

• x3 Nullify 3 cards 18 chi
• x4 Mythical Protection 4 cards 12 chi

Card total so far: 36 cards/189 chi total

Given that we’re locked into Red and Purple, our obvious champion options are Idiris or Shoon. Depending on how you build it, Shoon can really take advantage of the energy costs to have essentially free swift speed dual element attacks, and Idiris is already known to be incredibly strong statwise, and our combo would allow her to stack damage and then finish off with a whopper of a Fireball. You could also lean heavier into the Brand mechanic and Titan-archetype and go with Odara, as she has an awareness consistent with most of our tools, and she has a built in swift speed range attack that we can power up much like Idiris’s Fireball but sacrificing infinite range for better combo synergy with Phyr Hill and Dark Strength.

Top 3 picks for Champions:

J2: Idiris (Red/Purple) is the top pick here; his ability to stop damage at swift speed is incredible and can disrupt a lot of combos and thwart lots of plans. Green, while a newer colour, has LOTS of really excellent tools to navigate a Taru-infested Arena while maintaining board control.

Origins: Shoon (Red/Purple) is actually a really smart pick here; between Taru Stag’s targeting immunity while on Taru’s and the utility that blue brings (discard, healing, card draw, numerous abilities) allow you to keep up heavy threats even when out of aura by discarding the cards to qureen’s ability

J2/Metamorphosis: Odara, Queen of Rebellion (Red/Purple) is an old champion made new, so other than some boosted stats (+3hp, +15a, +1dmg, +1ER), there’s not too much of a difference in playstyle or deckbuilding depending on which version you use. The swift range attack is actually the real star here and synergizes well with the rest of our combo via Anguish Flame, Dark Strength, and Phyr Hill (and only gets better with the new Metamorphosis Odara). Add in the ability to have a Titan swing twice with a boosted Fire attack and we have some surprising potential.

Whichever champion you choose, you’re looking to fill 14 cards and 61 chi; more 4-5 chi cards but there’s definitely room to play by adding or swapping in more 3 chi cards.

If we choose Idiris, we can focus on more opportunities to combo with Fireball and other Fire casts, and we have the aura to drop some really Big Beckons if we need to disrupt our opponent.

If we choose Shoon, we can focus more on the *attack* style, as well as add in more movement and drain cards to keep the Fury train running hot. We can even look at abusing Shoon’s Blood Thirst to get easy counters on Fire Break, Burn Break, and Agility Break.

If we choose Odara, we have access to roughly the same stats as Idiris, but we have better tools to hybridize the two above strategies by combining attack boosting with titan branding and trickery.

Which version would you pick? What changes would you make to the deck suggestions, or how would you sculpt your own version? What other champions would you pair up with to take full advantage of Taru? Let us know in the comments, on the Genesis Facebook page or on the discord!

Also be sure to check back tomorrow, as I’ll have a full breakdown of the Genesis: Battle of Champions Kickstarter Reveal Video, as well as a spoiler for one of the tier rewards, and some brand new information from the official Edge of Exile press release!