Today I’m reviewing one of the most powerful cards ever printed by Achroma, Dark Rainbow. I’ve mentioned this card several times in articles, such as my Top Picks from Curdle Cove, my Veil Chaser’s Nest Review, Ray’s Rube Goldberg Machine, and How to Beat Rayders. In fact, I think the only time you’d ever buid a Salum deck without this card is a Hex Clunker deck utilising runes to REVEAL the Clunker (more on that later). If you want to win games from 10 shards completely out of the blue, this is the card for you.

Ray’s Rube Goldberg Machine completely revolves around Dark Rainbow, but I thought I’d start by sharing a Dark Rainbow combo deck that doesn’t lean quite so heavily on the card:

This deck is an evolution of the deck I shared in my How to Beat Rayders article. It has slightly less achrom, so is less aggressive. On the flip side, it’s more consistent as a chroma deck even without the Dark Rainbow power play.

The concept is to cautiously build a board state with strong location cards, using The Veil Chaser’s Nest to do so without hitting your hand too hard. The choice of legendary may seem odd, but ultimately Issadora is there because she’s 6 shards, and if you play her she’s most likely at least 3 steal. You could swap her for Niimi if you were so inclined, but I wouldn’t swap her for any legendaries with a red or cyan shard as then you mess with the runes, so that knocks out the more obvious choices like Ray or even Asa.

This deck has proven to be pretty consistent in 1v1s, but I did give it a whirl in a 4-player just this evening and won on my second turn all the way from 10 shards thanks to a couple of Alchemist’s Tinctures and the fact one of my opponents traded their own Dark Rainbow turn 1, which I played with my Cintimani Stone.

One final thing I’d add is don’t underestimate Replenishment or The Veil Chaser’s Nest. I’ve deliberately skipped Abundance of Quintessence, so that Replenishment will always hit Alchemist’s Tincture and either another Replenishment or HAIM Shard Cache. Play Replenishment before you trade, trade the HAIM, play the Tincture, and you’re still up 1 shard and have set up for either Corrupted Muon Trap or Cintimani Stone. Similarly, the Nest will always hit either another Nest, a promo location, or the amazing value Rangled Wood. Whatever happens, you’ll probably end up with 2 cards on your canvas out of 1 card from hand, which is what you need when you’re trying to Rainbow your way to victory.

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The second deck I’m sharing is a variation on a Hex Clunker control deck. However, in this version I’m attempting to prove that you can play a Clunker control deck with Dark Rainbow. Typically you wouldn’t want to, as then you can’t use Kaunan and Isaz to REVEAL the Clunker. In this deck, I use The Veil Chaser’s Nest to do the job (I do so love that card).

After I built this deck, I thought I’d compare it to Fairybread’s deck from Beachhead 2023, and was surprised to note that the legendary and all 4 rares are identical. However, the similarities very much end there, as of the other 25 cards we only have 11 in common. Considering how many staples there are in Salum, this is a very low number.

While the palette list is quite different, the concept is broadly the same: 12 cards in this deck steal, erase, or restrain the opponent’s cards, so control their boardstate. My build uses Soloman’s Influence for my favourite play of the palette: it guarantees Apollo hits the canvas, and you play it when you’ve got a Clunker/Corrupted Muon Trap ready to go, so you can steal the card they’ve just paid for should they choose to do so. It’s worth saying that this deck doesn’t revolve around Apollo. He’s a nice bonus, but if he gets erased it’s no big deal.

The reason why I’ve included this in this article is because the most obvious win-con is a double Dark Rainbow play (using Cintimani Stone) several turns into the game. The only problem is that since I’ve included no runes, you’ve just got to hope you draw a copy, which is why it needs so many control cards to stall out until that happens.

The deck’s achilles heel is probably decks that want to trade to win. With minimal achrom to keep them in check, you’ll always lose against an opponent that realises that all they have to do is trade every turn, assuming they have the cards to do so. It will also struggle against aggressive achrom as then you won’t have enough shards to control the opponent.

I hope these decks offer some inspiration for your own Dark Rainbow deck. There’s a huge number of possible palette builds that utilise this ridiculous card. I’ve built around 5 or 6 variations on the first palette, using Kaunan and/or Isaz to practically guarantee you get to play Rainbow, but have flip-flopped between achrom or chroma core palettes, and the balance of setup cards such as Replenishment, as well as the balance of the objects I want to reveal with my Tinctures.

Happy palette crafting.

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