I have been seeing these decks all over. My personal experience is that they feel almost as ubiquitous as aggro war now. That's not quite true, but it's definitely more popular than it has been:
The reason is simple: these <$15 decks can really frustrate the $2k control decks - and I love it. Aggro war is also relatively cheap, so it should come as no surprise that these decks are popular: people can actually afford to play them!
Here's one aggro light take with 1700 games played!
But this is just one variant of the 'board buff' aggro light. You'll run into others with slight tweaks that also have 800+ games played. I've written an entire post on this deck, but the key is the focus on board buffs.
Other defining cards of this archetype:
Most of these don't run Sern, which makes the cost usually $15 or less. The basic idea is to get wide and get buffed BEFORE control decks hit their board clears at 5 (mage) or 6+ (everyone else). This is actually surprisingly easy to do as most control decks are dependent on single-target spells at low mana. Control war has Wolf-Cult vanguard and savage strike to watch out for. Magic has Tracking Bolt. These are decent, but these light decks can just keep refilling the board. As soon as you get 3-4 creatures to stick, you hit them with Benediction and it's GG (usually).
What caught my interest was a deck I came across in Solar Gold. Lilithboy used it to beat my aggro war deck even though he went second! It was a pretty dominant win. Here is the deck:
Code:
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Look at that overall win rate! 76% over 108 games is very impressive. I checked the match history, and a lot of that is in gold/diamond but for $8.47, I knew I had to try it out. I'm currently 3-0 with it (with my most recent win in Diamond), and I wanted to talk about why I like about this deck.
Holy Writ is such a good card, but the requirements mean that you have to exclude a lot of great cards from your deck. You need 2/2 (or less) creatures. Really solid cards like Wild Hog just work against the card. One of my favorite light cards is Militant Theist. Even Felid Jannissaries can work against holy writ by buffing stats too high.
With it removed from this deck, all those cards (and others) get to come back. There are still 6 board buff cards + a Blind Martyr. Importantly, these cards either don't care about stats (Radiant/Chaining) or only care about strength (Benediction/Asterious). You're able to pump survivability without worrying about bricking the Holy Writ you topdeck.
Finally, Holy Writ creates awkward situations where you wind up buffing your opponent's cards with your own. This is especially true when matched up against zombies.
Normally, I frown on a lot of singletons in a deck, but this may be the exception. It has a bunch of utility cards in it. Cards that can be win cons, but that you don't usually want to see 2 of in your hand at once. 2x Wild Hogs in your opening hand? Awesome. 2x Pacifists? Not good. 2x Martyrs? Terrible.
Vesper of Concession gives us the chance to hate on necroscepters, but it's also a solid card for this archetype in its own right. I could see running 2x. Extortionist gives us a nice PW/Obelisk answer if we can find it, but aggro war (our most common opponent) doesn't run a ton of 2 strength creatures.
Inquisitor Informant provides a nice, cheap answer to big frontline walls that can shut down the deck at 5+ mana. As a singleton, Sern is objectively better, but of course, Sern is more expensive than the entire deck. Informant is obviously playing the cheap replacement and does an admirable job.
I mentioned that front liners aren't really a problem until 5+ mana, which means Sern's one downside (higher mana cost) is basically moot.
The more I play these aggro light variants, the more ritual rod grows on me over Cudgel of Atonement. I haven't had a single game where the 4-points of healing decided the game. I have, however, absolutely won games due to the extra durability on the Rod. I like to have cudgel in my opening hand. With Ritual Rod, it's a fine top deck assuming you have Vicar on board. Vicar is hard to remove, and if you can get it buffed, there is usually quite a large window of time for Rod to get the buff.
Ultiately, this deck has a higher win-rate than any deck I've ever built, so I'm defaulting to Lilithboy on this one. đŸ¤£
Here are my 3 wins with the deck. I may be in gold/diamond, but these days, that doesn't mean it's a cakewalk. It's pretty hilarious to (soundly) beat these decks running power neutrals.
Definitely give the deck a try. If you have Sern, I'd swap him in, but as you can see, you don't need him. So far, this deck feels more dynamic than the Holy Writ variant. Possibly because it's new, but also, who wants to run Gleamweavers or Dread Pirates? These cards feel so much better. The variability of the singletons actually keeps games feeling different, but the various combinations of 1 drops all work, so you don't lose much in the form of consistency.
Highly recommend.
