Hello everyone, Tritros once again coming with a spicy deck article. Today’s deck will feature my favorite card in the game, Stubborn Tengu. Now I know first reactions to this card aren’t that high but stay with me. Stubborn Tengu is a card I have been trying to make good since I first started messing with purple. So the standard combo with tengu is Stubborn Tengu plus Stratagem Thirty-Six and a rush giver. With this in mind the colors we are going to look at are Blue for sidecar and Red for ringmaster and Fast Lane.My first tengu deck was all 3 colors for the most reliable way to give rush to him but sadly this was really slow because both rush givers are two gems so we are going to not go that way.
Tengu Blue
So first we will look at the Blurple version of the deck because sidecar and speedway sound like a fun win condition. Because I didn't like brainstorm at the time we will be going rainbow and having all the fun blue enchants with tengu. We will also add minions that are nice in the sidecar so Tyr is coming along for a ride. Now that we have some basic ideas of what we want, let's see what I did with it. The deck can be found here.
So there are probably two things that seem a little weird with the deck. One is that it runs foresight as a power, and two is that it runs two sniffers. Foresight is for looking for the four different combo pieces you need to win and sniffer is so you can do it for free while also getting max value off your rainbow. The deck has a decent time fending off early aggression but against control you will have a bad time unless they mess up their placement of minions. If they try to contest speedway it will let you do the lethal combo with an overrun tengu smashing through their minions and their health. The other problem with the deck is that if they seal the sidecar you most likely will lose the game since there are not a lot of finishers in the deck without it. Next we will look at the Red Purple version that contains the all mighty fast lane.
Carnival of Crows
Here is the deck that I played in the recent tournament that KG hosted, and placed second. . This deck as Erobert mentioned is the closest to a combo deck that exists right now in Mythgard. This deck is a lot more resilient to slower decks than the blue version. The trade off is that sometimes your early game doesn't come together that fast. The main play of this deck is to cast Stratagem on Tengu, and then finding one of rush givers. The one that you would prefer for lethal is Fast Lane but Dashing Ringmaster is better for clearing the opponent's board. Trident is included in the deck as a backup for tengu if you don't draw it or if someone happens to seal your tengu. Blood moon is there for card draw and some needed lifegain in the late game. You also just have the good Red minions like Oak of Dodona and Magmataur to help you out.
The Game Plan
I will go over some of the thought processes of this deck since it is a bit weirder than normal decks. For the first few turns you want to mitigate damage and set up your zero cost tengu. If your choices are to take damage and get a zero cost tengu, or lose tengu but take no damage the answer is to take the damage since the free tengu is vital for the deck to win.
Does this mean you will never trade with your tengu? No, but it usually only happens if you have a second tengu in hand to stratagem. Once you have gotten your zero cost tengu you will be looking for the best enchantment in the game, The Fast Lane. A good bit of the lethals with this deck come from Fast Lane since ringmaster has a habit of dying suddenly. Fast lane however is more resilient to dying since it is an enchantment instead of a minion.
Once you have both the zero cost tengu and the rush giver, you are looking for the finisher or payoff to the unending demise of tengu. So the main finisher is Wings of Abaddon and the main payoff is Red Carnival. If you have the wings you can summon tengu on fast lane and hit face then sac it with wings and keep doing this for a massive burst of damage to the opponent’s face. Now, if you have red carnival and a minion on field, immediately summoning tengu on fast lane and moving it off will buff the minion by 2 attack every time. With this you can get some really big swings with your other minions buffed by the glory of tengu. Now that we have a basic understanding of what we are trying to accomplish let's look at some games to see the plan in action and how I implement it.
Sample Games
Game 1
In our first game we are matched up against the player Gerren playing some FoC. Our starting hand is not the best against aggro, luckily Gerren is not known to play aggro so we have a chance against him. For our early turns we will just try to contain any snowball plays and wait for our tengu combo. Which will involve burning a pup so we can play a pup and then burning any enchants we draw.
We managed to stop his early plays and limit how many cards he drew and we are getting the pieces of our combo. The only piece we are missing is the stratagem but we can still use tengu right now. We will play the ringmaster in lane one and tengu their builder. Sadly they did have another racer to answer our ringmaster but we still have a backup and we didn't want the builder to become too big and be too difficult to kill.
Here we had a pretty easy play of magmataur and a racer to kill vixen.Also because magmataur is five mana we get our ringmaster back to our hand so we still have two to mess with. Next turn we will have ringmaster and tengu to clear the builder he is going to get back from god of gamer’s crown.
He had to spirit away our ringmaster which means he doesn't have a racer anymore and that his removal isn't good right now. Knowing this we will burn our pup and play Cerberus Unchained on our 5 Spirit Gate to get back Magmataur which will let us look for a nice carnival lethal with the best boi in the game.
He had no way to kill our good doggo. We are going to carnival under Cerberus and play ringmaster in lane seven. This leaves us with enough mana to summon two tengus and clear off his chunky Forgeling. After these attacks we have a nine attack Cerberus which hits face and knocks Gerren all the way to one. He doesn't draw something to answer ringmaster or cerberus and the game goes to us.
Game 2
The next game we are going to showcase is one where I fight fellow Kryptik Gaming member Rune. Our starting hand is full of enchants we can burn and some nice four drops. Rune is playing the FoC deck known as Ice Wall (Ejecty has a deck article of Ice Wall here) so we do not have to worry about strong early game. We start out by burning carnival and playing pup which lets us try to gain some life since we don't have a lot of options for life gain.
Now we are going to trade into the forgeling and play our tengu on the market so we can get more items. We will also use compass to guarantee a free draw off rainbow. Rune opts out of killing my tengu which gives me the opportunity to stratagem tengu and get our main part of our combo.
We have now set up our fast lane and our zero cost tengu which means we are just looking for a payoff. So first we are going to clear his board with two tengus to kill his Kara, we will then play the three cost tengu in front of his forgeling and pup onto the market to get some more items.
Ok here we have the option of playing Seven Ring Ritual but because I am playing against Ice Wall we opt not play it because if he has Thunderclap or Magnus we insta lose the game. Luckily we top deck a nice little Magmataur to clear his board and then have enough mana to summon tengu on fast lane hit face and then impel it off so it can be back in our hand nice and safe. Rune then top decks his seven ring ritual but we draw our other magmataur and clear his board. Next turn he summons Oak of Dodona, Wings of Abaddon and a kraken to try and finish us off.
We finally find our Oak again which gives us some needed life gain. We also have one of our wings and can deal some nice damage to his face. We will play oak in lane seven, trade magma, and then summon wings in front of his wings. From there we keep hitting him in the face with tengu and sacrificing it to our wings which in the end lets us break his Norn Datacore.
This ends up being the final turn of the game. Rune decides not to block our fast lane which means we have lethal because of our amazing Wings of Abaddon. We will play our wings in lane seven and then summon tengu on fast lane, swing face with tengu, sacrifice the tengu then summon tengu again. We repeat this process and finally swing with abaddon and end up winning this game against Rune piloting a very good Ice Wall deck.
Conclusion
Now that we have gone over two games hopefully you have a better time understanding this deck and how to pilot it. Each game with this deck is different but it is a really fun deck to pilot and can come out with some explosive turns. We might have only gone over some ranked games but this deck is also really good in the melee game mode which is also known as 2v2 .Hopefully this deck will let you try out some of these underplayed cards and have a fun time doing it.