I mentioned to Bravetofu that one of my favorite new combinations is Craniax with the Sheik - Craniax is a strong fighter, but a little bit reckless. Which is perfect for the Sheik, as it gets his attack pushed by that - and as a Life Leecher, more attack (and magic on top!) is even better. It's the perfect masochist.
Let's have a quick look at the card, and the I'll present two battles to proof my point.
As you can see, the bloodline is Djinn - no Archon of that bloodline available (yet) as there aren't many in Modern. In wild, it looks different though:
Some quite powerful cards in the Djinn-Bloodline. Even a Gladiator. But I'm not sure if Bloodline-Gladiators can be summoned via according Archons, anyway.
Back to the Djinn. It flies - earthquake is no problem. It has life leech - as a magic monster, that's extremely useful. At level 4, it get's painforge, and that is the real treat on this card. Every time it gets damage, its magic attack gets boosted, making its life leech more effective. One hit by Craniax, and the Sheik is net-positive on life as the damage is 1, but it leeches 2LP out of the 3 damage that it will make.
Affliction at level 8 is a nice and useful extra, but not the main reason for its power.
Wild silver tournament!
5 units, plenty of mana, common & rare and - poison. I went for a combo that worked perfectly: Flank Tank with immune behind it. Scavenger Unit with Opportunity to attack the wounded ones. The Sheik - it will get stronger with each poisoning, while leeching more life. And, in the end, the Deep Delver, a fantastic unit with corrupted healing - as this unit heals up the rest, it itself will get healed by the summoner's Triage.
Here you can see the Sheik launching the last attack of the battle:
7 Attack points. More life than in the beginning. This one was a line-up I'm proud of.
I went all in on Painforge. Stupid me, I did ignore the Fog of War rule-set, so the Filthy Scavenger was kind of useless there. I got a little bit lucky with the enemy line-up, to be honest. Still, the Sheik did not disappoint, ending the battle with 5 damage and more life than initially.
Yes, I do love this card. Bravetofu listed it as A-Tier, but I think it has enough utility to be S-Tier. Especially if/when a Djinn-Summoner comes around.
Both combinations worked great. Of course, for modern Clanktrapp + Craniax + Sheik is very strong, as Craniax gets Close Range that way. In Wild, there are way more options to make more use of the Sheik, but Painforge is more of a modern ability due to its brother Reckless and cousin Incendiary. They do sound like trouble...
Thank you very much for reading, I hope you enjoyed it at least as much as I enjoyed writing :-D If you have any comments or feedback - please let me know! And don't forget to leave your own posts for me to curate. Thank you very much!
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