It’s been a little while since I wrote an article, and there’s a few things to catch up on.

The first exciting news is that Draco Planum Chapter 2: The Last Snow Dragons of Altari has just been sent to printers so we should expect the first spoilers very soon. If you want to pre-order it, and save yourself a few £s in the process, you can do so here. Follow that link to get 15% off the pre-sale price.

However, that’s not why I’m here today. Charlie aka Viridian shared a new weekly challenge on Sunday’s stream, and here it is: build a legal palette with a combined total of no more than 80Δ (shards). To put that in context, most Rayders builds hit around 92-100Δ, while my favourite curse deck comes in at 85. I thought it would be fun to look at some of the early ideas here before Charlie shares them all next week.

To make this challenge easier, Lewis of achroma.tools has made a spreadsheet where you can enter in your decklist and it’ll calculate your shard count for you. The link is here.

First up, a palette from me, and you won’t be surprised to see it’s a variation on Rayders:

It’s a Pixies/Rayders crossover, coming in at exactly 80 points. Including 2 runes: Kaunan for Dracon/Full Palette/Firetender/Ray/Fall of Flutterby promo, and Peorth for all the achrom. It features the Blueprint Swirl/Dracon combo, but sadly has to miss out on Dr Hue’s Labcoat. It features Factory Production Line and Cintimani Stone, one of the best combos in the game, so I couldn’t resist retaining 2 copies of HAIM Shard Cache for some swingy double plays. And finally it features Bounce, mostly because I wanted a decent cheap control card to round out the build.

Next up, a palette from Dickon Thunder. It’s a build he’s shared before, under the guise of Torstein, Disney Princess because it features Torstein and a lot of critters:

The premise here is to spam the canvas with cheap characters like Snails and Salamanders so that Torstein cannot be erased. You increase your chance of playing him thanks to Kaunan. Then hopefully you can pull Club of Dagda (with the help of Eirik or Lacringi Forge) and board wipe every round. It’s a fun build, and the presence of lots of cheap characters means it comes in at mere 74Δ. I think I’d be tempted to swap in some Orium Diamonds for some additional gain (maybe swap out the Pouches, pushing you to 76Δ), and you could still keep it under 80Δ by swapping Jamshid Orb for a Cintimani Stone.

Overally, this deck is a really fun idea, and 74Δ is under 2.5Δ per card.

Next up, a dragon deck courtesy of fellow blogger Ricci aka playingachroma:

Only 76Δ for this one, despite the 6-shard legendary. It’s mostly a straight-up chroma build, featuring the Monastery Nest/Chroma Storehouse/Vast Volitarus trinity. I’m surprised to see Draco Planum Library not making the cut, but Strength in Numbers does push you to including more dragons and less tech. Ricci admitted being unsure about Serpent’s Ring, and suggested it could be swapped for Dyrnwyn.

Next, we have a deck from Char:

Another Strength in Numbers deck, this time only 69Δ. Even more dragons here, with 11 in the build, plus Dexter for the legendary, and Materno for the ultimate protection combo. The presence of the yellow shard on Materno’s Egg is such a shame, as it’s a good include, but without it (and Impundulu) this deck could run the yellow rune Algiz to tutor Dexter. It’s interesting that the only rare this has in common with Ricci‘s deck is the Vast Volitarus. Yet another solid palette.

And finally, a Curdle achrom deck from Antinomy93:

Another Ray deck (and why wouldn’t you; he’s amazing value and just 1 shard), and only 1 rare to keep the costs down. Despite these limitations, this is a genuinely impressive deck especially given its only 61Δ, an average of basically 2Δ per card! Definitely a winner for the lowest shard count deck.

Arabella’s Recipe and Achrom Blast offer burst damage, and naturally encourage you to build with a lot of cheap achrom cards, like Occultist Warlock, Rabid Dog, Cove Caves and Road to Ludlam, as well as Prism Sapper and Curdle Lane. Bothy and Hinkley are there to protect Ray, but if it were me, I’d drop these. There’s no tech for finding Ray, so in most games these are likely to be dead cards in a deck of cheap cards. I’d be tempted to swap them out for more achrom, preferably Cintimani Stone plus Alchemist’s Tincture and Corrupted Muon Trap. This would up the shard count a little, so does go against the spirit of the build, but would offer some powerful control, more cards for Arabella’s Recipe, and it’d still sit comfortably below the 80 mark. It would also offer a way of dealing with big characters as decks with just small characters tend to struggle against decks that like attacking.

I’d say this one is my favourite build of the lot. It looks strong, fun, and 61Δ is epic. I’ve already made my version of this deck (though I made a few tweaks and it ended up on 92Δ… I just don’t do cheap decks).

There’s still 4 days until the next stream, so if you feel like having a go at this challenge yourself, you still have time.

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