Do Your Tributes

[Bell]

I've had lots of reason to study the attrition Terminus style of play before, and watching carefully to see which decks rose to the top, the one this is based on surprised me. I had large trouble building any deck of this type based on the others I saw, mainly because they relied so much more on stacking as many high advantage cards as possible. With what is available, they could never be stable. This one fortunately solves that, offering, finally, enough to work with.

Creatures (Lightning x 6, Gravity x 6, Wind x 9, Radiance x 6 - Total 27)
Avant Garde x 3
Rai Jin Hamar x 3
Ghost Jellyfish x 3
Nightmare Echo x 3
Slim Jackson x 4
Cunning Wyvern x 2
Victoria Gale, the Gifted x 3
Regain Dalia x 3
Ars Megistus x 3

Spells (Gravity x 7, Water x 2, Radiance x 2 - Total 11)
Wormhole x 3
From the Depths x 2
Memory Loss x 2
Tidal Turbine x 2
Lunar Projection x 2

Runes (Radiance x 2 - Total 2)
Sentinel Matrix x 2


The general idea of the deck is to suppress opponent's larger creatures while encouraging them to stall or distracting them into killing off your field, then drop Rai Jin Hamar repeatedly, possibly with the use of multiple Tidal Turbine (considering if running 3 may be better but so far not).

The difficulty presented here obviously is controlling the opponent's situation enough while still not necessarily removing their ability to swarm completely. Of course, Rai Jin's power/cost ratio and Damage 2 means that if you really want, you can just not care about its effect, using it primarily as a mass bounce system for Tidal Turbine when you need that, or as a large blocker otherwise.

For this reason, the deck is not really set to stop the opponent from attacking, but rather to absorb those attacks and then suddenly shut the enemy down. The critical point is the switchover, since you only get one or two turns to achieve that shutdown before you fall.

If your opponent is playing very defensively themselves though, you can achieve the lock frighteningly easily because they build up creatures that can't actually attack you but fuel the effect.

Still working on it, seems like it can morph from here in lots of directions just as the Terminus type did overall.