Intro

I've been working on this deck a while, and some of you may have seen my post about Twisting Talisman a few days ago. This is the full deck. I talk strategy, synergies, and give some gameplay examples. TLDR: this deck is aggressive while also countering other aggro decks.

The Deck

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Admittedly, most of my games have been in practice mode (1v1 using keyword 'practice'). Gone are the days where you can test out new decks in ranked. You have to do that initial tweaking in practice, otherwise, you de-rank too quickly.

Strategy

Fill your board while reducing the strength of enemy creatures. At 6 mana, Armory Heist wins the game.

Underneath that, there is a bit more going on.

Strength Reduction

What makes this deck what it is. Beguiling Blade is missing. This is a tough call, but it's missing the guild tag. Even so, I'm sure you could find room for it.

Strength Dominance

Having the strongest creatures is its own reward, but we also have some additional payoff in the form of:

Drawing 2 cards for 2 mana is fantastic. Heroic Brawler helps buff our board passively. Generally, you want to kill off your echo 1/1s so that the buff can go to another creature that can benefit.

We also take advantage of their creatures having low strength. Firstly, with frontline and armor:

As you'll see in my gameplay vid against nature, the armor allows me to just chop through all their weak creatures until I can secure victory. The frontliners are also helpful protecting our 2/1 and 1/1 creatures in preparation for Armory Heist.

We also get to use stat manipulation to great effect:

Stat manipulation works through ward, so we can kill any 0/X creature with the above cards. These also have really surprising offensive uses. A 2/6 Pyramid Warden becomes a surprise 6/2 for lethal. After buffing your creatures' strength, you can attack face and then swap to make them harder to kill. Then swap them back next turn for more face damage.

There may be better cards than Dionysian Drunk, but you're only giving up 1 hp for an effect that is really useful in this deck.

Legendaries

These two fit into our deck really well. The Hollow is easy to lay down after their creatures have been neutered. Likewise, this deck nearly always has answers for their deadly skulkers after Marcella dies. I rarely waste the mana to hide her. 0/1 deadly skulers do absolutely nothing but clog the board. Your opponent's best play is to sack them into your creatures giving you favor.

Armor Heist

This card is 100% being slept on. Mortal Judgement has given aggro deception a replacement for Rapture Dance. This deck fills up the board quickly with echo, armor, and frontliners. Heist capitlizes on that to win the game, but it's not just win-more. You can wreck your opponents board (as I do against nature) to come back from behind in a big way.

Deadly 1/1 skulkers from Marcella turn into 3/1 nightmare fuel for enemy Guild Enforcers.

Gameplay

Game 1

Here we beat a meta aggro nature deck. We are limping along and falling behind until 6 mana. Heist comes down and wins the game - completely countering their wildfire. At that point, we just keep chopping down trees (and everything else) while we build our board.

If they had hit board buffs earlier, it would have obviously been harder, but still competitive.

Game 2

In this game, we can feel our opponent's frustration and sure enough, they concede early.

Conclusion

This deck excels against other aggro/creature decks. Many of it's tools are useless against control decks that focus on removal spells. For those, the deck relies on traditional deception aggro techniques to go fast quickly. Selfless Guildmate boosting Armor Lurkers, Guild Enforcers, and Switch Duelists are key. Swapping your buff stats between strength and health is a great tactic for these matchups.