Today was the Spirata Fall Grant Tournament, which was won by Torus playing a Draco Planum locations palette in a very close final against experienced player Sara, running Rayders. This article will be looking at the palette that won the tournament, and where it came from.

Back in June I wrote a review article of Rayders, probably the most powerful palette in competitive achroma. It had just won the Salum Spring Grand Tournament, and since then it’s dominated competitive play, with Rayders mirror matches in the final of the Draco Summer Grand Tournament and the Patriot Games tournament at the end of last month. I finished my June article by saying, “looking forward to seeing what the community come up with to combat this deck”.

Last month, the Realm Modifiers hit this deck. This prevents the palette from double trading in a turn (though it can still play Advance Scouting Party and trade afterwards). However, I’ve tested the deck a lot with modifiers, and while the probability of a turn 2 win has dropped, it’s still crazy powerful, and still a thorn in the side of competitive achroma.

Irrespective of the success of something other than Rayders at today’s Grant Tournament, something still probably needs to be done about the deck. For more on the power of Rayders and the state of the meta, please check out Lewis’s excellent article on achroma.tools here.

As I hadn’t seen anyone come up with a deck that could beat it consistently (approaching or better than 50:50 against an experienced player), I thought I’d have a serious go myself last month in the run-up to Patriot Games. First though, a reminder of the deck itself. Of course, there’s different versions, but this is my favourite:

This deck is all about sprinting to the finish line as quickly as possible, featuring a few (though admitedly not many) powerful control cards to help it along the way. So how do you beat it?

Option 1: Outsprint it to 30 shards
Given that Rayders is all about sprinting to the finish line, this is an implausible option. The only deck that consistently outsprint Rayders is Rayders. It has all the most powerful gain cards in the game, and the best trade fodder of any palette. Proposing playing Rayders to beat Rayders isn’t a solution to the deck.

Option 2: Discard their hand
Rayders loves trading, so it stands to reason that getting rid of their hand will stop them in their tracks. But it doesn’t work. I’ve tried it. In 9 games with a range of strong discard heavy palettes (all Draco Planum) I lost all 9 games to Rayders. In the games where I got a good start and killed their hand, it simply cost me too many shards and cards to do so. Thus, it became a game of who can draw into the best cards to win the game, and Rayders will win that game 9 times out of 10.

Option 3: Play the long game
Rayders is a sprinter. It gets to 30 incredibly quickly. However, it tends to run out of steam after the first couple of turns. If you can manage their shard bank while simultaneously building a decent board state, you can overwhelm the deck. And this is the avenue that I have had most success with.

Managing their shard bank means steal or drain. While Pixies is the fastest drain deck in the business, I find it tends to fall short more often than not. Without a strong gain engine in the deck, it then tends to lose in the long game, or if you play aggressively and finish turns with a low shard count, Rayders picks you off with HAIM Shard Caches, Sorrono, Carmella, Imps, and Cintimani Stone.

Norso just doesn’t cut it when it comes to draining or stealing quickly (yet), so that leaves you with the Salum and Draco Plana (yes, that is the plural of planum). Consequently, I have two decks to share, both of which have had success against Rayders (mostly tested pre-Realm Modifiers).

The first deck is a Salum steal deck, with some nasty Dark Rainbow tech. I’ve actually already shared this deck on the Achroma discord:

I keep making tiny tweaks to this palette, but it’s always essentially doing the same thing: steal as early as possible, keeping Rayders in check, then go for the chroma win through a combination of trading and a big Dark Rainbow play. It has Isaz and no cyan cards except Dark Rainbow, giving you effectively 3 copies of Rainbow. Once you play Dark Rainbow, you can recur it using the Alchemist’s Tincture/Cintimani Stone combo. This deck has a 5:7 success rate against Rayders in testing, so slightly under 50:50. But all that testing was done pre-Realm Modifiers, so I would expect this to just about have the edge now, even if Hostile Takeover now costs 4 shards to play.

This idea was the precursor to the Ray’s Rube Goldberg Machine deck I posted earlier in the week, but takes a little longer to get the combo pieces together. However, this deck is much better at managing the opponent’s shard bank up to the point you pull it off, making it a better match for Rayders. That being said, I haven’t tested the Machine against Rayders yet…

The second deck is a Draco chroma deck, with a healthy amount of control, Freeze, and steal. This deck I have not previously published, though I did share a more location heavy chroma version for a recent weekly palette building challenge:

This deck (or at least it and similar builds) I’ve had the most success with. In 22 games I’ve played against Rayders, it’s won 14 games, and this palette just won the Grand Tournament in a final against Rayders, clocking up an additional 4-1 record (2-0 in Swiss, than 2-1 in the final).

I met up with Torus at the end of November, and played this deck against him a couple of times. I explained the idea behind the deck and the successes I’d had with it. I told him I was planning on publishing it in the run up to the Grand Tournament. He’s played a lot of Draco location decks in the past, and loves the archetype. I was complaining about the fact I couldn’t make it to the Grand Tournament, so he made a suggestion: that I hold off publishing the palette, and he turn up with it and play it in the tournament. I loved the idea, so that’s what happened. And he won! Against Rayders! Massive congratulations to him on the victory; yes, the palette is very strong, but it takes a steady hand and a skilled player to win an event regardless of the deck.

I also shared an earlier iteration of the deck with LordTHEN at Patriot Games. He made a couple of changes to that earlier version, including a little more control, and then he also played it at the Grand Tournament, finishing in the Top4 and only getting knocked out by Torus in the semis.

The deck features a frankly astonishing volume of steal, gain, and control, with most cards performing 2 roles to help you build towards a victory. It normally wins by chroma, but can take an achrom win in some games.

Steal:
As already stated, steal is fundamental to beating Rayders. You keep them in check, while gaining shards in the process. This deal has 3 cards with ±3 (including HAIM), 6 cards with ±2, and 4 cards with ±1. That means you have an 86% chance of getting at least 1 ±2 or more card in your opening hand. As with my Salum deck, I’ve got 4 promo locations; apologies to those without these cards, but they really are fundamental if you want to maximise your chance of defeating Rayders. If you’re looking to pin down the core principal of this deck beyond classic gain and control location Draco decks, it’s steal.

Gain:
Monastery Nest is a solid +3 for 3, Ice Falls is huge given this deck contains 18 characters or locations with a cyan shard, Valli Caves is +2 amazingly considering its ability, and Chroma Storehouse is just crazy value. Chroma Overflow is a nice little bonus card, but since you really don’t want to see this card early game, 2 copies seemed too risky.
The average shard value of cards in this deck is 3.3, with 12 cards of cost 4 or more, so you’ll normally have something decent to trade. Fun fact: the average shard value of this deck is higher than Rayders.

Control:
You can FREEZE Ray and other pesky cards with 5 characters/locations with FREEZE: Harusk Freezes everything, 2 Valli Caves which have a once per turn Freeze, and Tarni River has a FREEZE Action. All these cards have a solid resolve, so you’re controlling the opponent and building your canvas boardstate simultaneously. However, this is not a Freeze palette. It’s taken the best Freeze cards, and discarded the rest. I did have Snowdrift Sanctuary, Isaz and Jewna Hare in an earlier version, and LordTHEN kept these in, but Torus and I mutually agreed that swapping them out tended to push the wincon more consistently.
Erasing cards can be achieved with 2 Wolfgang Woods (which also have a handy drain 1 on resolve), 2 Summon the Mist, 2 copies of the ever powerful Breath of Fire (Ray and Splat Square gone), Kocora Bri, plus Fibron who normally erases at least a couple of cards thanks to the 5 Freeze cards in the palette. The control suite is rounded off with Chromatic Extinction. With only a handful of characters, this can be massively swingy against many palettes.
Jali has fast become my favourite include in this deck. Every time I play them, the value is astonishing. 4 shards for ±2, you get hand knowledge AND get to discard a card of your choice. Discarding a Dr Hue’s Labcoat or any of the many 5 shard cards is essentially a 5-6 shard swing against an efficient player. I said that I thought this was the most powerful card in the set when it was released (here), and I stand by that analysis.

Possible changes:
Jewna Hare could be swapped back in. In a deck with such huge power plays, it always felt like the odd one out. It does boost Ice Falls, but in the end it was swapped out to double up on straight up erase effects: Wolfgang Woods and Summon the Mist. Note: this deck runs Summon the Mist over Breath of Ice as an artefact of having Isaz in an earlier version, as you don’t want to accidentally hit it when playing the rune.
Chroma Overflow is a possible flex card, since it is a bit situational, and situational is not good when you’re trying to beat the most consistent palette in the game.
I would not swap in Slayscorch Pools. There’s just not enough Freeze to make this consistently worth it, and the rares all work very hard to pull their weight already. Also, there’s not enough characters to justify Cintimani Stone.
When Dexter’s Dragon Riders comes out, Thisp is a shoe-in to make this palette better. For a review of this card, check out this article. It’ll be interesting to see if this palette gets any other gifts from that expansion when it’s released next week.

My favourite thing about this deck is that while it may be more powerful than Rayders (!), it has an Achilles Heel. Due to its reliance on locations, Salum Planum decks with Hostile Takeover, Tempest, and Achrom Surge could steal and control your boardstate with relative ease. I haven’t built a deck specifically to metagame against this deck, but I honestly don’t think it would be too hard. Torus found this deck struggled against Dickon’s Hex Clunker palette, and while I haven’t seen his decklist, that doesn’t overly surprise me. Prevent, anti-location cards, and Salum control are a nasty combo for this deck to face.

When playing this deck against Rayders, you need to go hard and fast, overplaying your hand as much as possible as they have little in the way of control cards to manage your location heavy boardstate. Against most other decks and realms, especially Salum, you’ll want to play a bit slower so if you do get hit by a blowout control card (Tempest, Harusk/Fibron, Samr Smash) you have room to recover. This will also save you from a sneaky Dark Rainbow win.

If anyone else tries this deck out, I’d love to hear how they got on. I have only ever lost with this deck once against a non-Rayders palette. I used it in the 3rd place playoff at Patriot Games, a game where I got Achrom Surged twice, and a couple of matchups against a prevent heavy Salum palette post-Realm Modifiers. There is no doubt that it is strong. But is it the next Rayders? Time will tell.

Have fun.

---

Next time you’re ordering achroma products, please use the discount code dracotemple at checkout on the achroma webstore for 10% off all orders, including pre-orders. By using this code, you are also supporting me, as I also earn commission on any sales using this code.
To activate this discount, enter the code at checkout, or go to shop.achroma.cards/dracotemple to automatically apply the code.