This idea can also apply to the 3 copies of The Howling Abyss, a card that is extremely slow to develop and almost worthless against an opponent trying to end the game quickly. As a slow spell, both Grappling Hook and Siphoning Strike give our opponent a chance to react before resolving, typically opening a potentially disastrous situation. My problem with those spells is that the condition they require us to fulfill usually is more limiting than the rewards we will get from it working. In the same spirit, I understand that Siphoning Strike and Grappling Hook have a great synergy with Udyr, as they allow the generation of more Stances Swaps and grow our threats even more out of control. In that sense, I have the feeling that the deck was built with the idea that most games would go as planned, and a large part of the flexible slots in the decklist was chosen with the idea that the deck would manage to be in a dominant position on the board. Indeed, Akshan is the key card in our deck in order to be dominant in the early game, and it can often feel hopeless trying to answer our opponent using the rest of our early curve.īecause most of our late-game units are rather slow, and perform much better if played in the position of the aggressor rather than the defender, missing Akshan early in the game is the start of a very uphill battle against any opponent capable of pressuring us before turn 5. The main roadblock I had to face was how the deck can feel almost powerless when Akshan isn’t in our starting hand. On a general level, I felt like the idea was on point and most of the basic deck building rules were respected, as I said previously, the deck’s concept is easy to understand and transitions well from one phase to another. Considering Udyr is heavily struggling to fit its place in the current metagame, I believe pairing him with a simply strong champion rather than looking for synergies is a smart move. While Akshan doesn’t necessarily fit the mold in terms of immediate synergy alongside Udyr, it is hard to deny the simple great versatile power of the Shurimian 2 mana champion. Renekton because he benefits a lot from the Stances and Ziggs in order to help level Udyr more reliably. Renekton and Ziggs mostly looked like good partners for Udyr.
When looking for other similar decks online, I found a lot of different pairing, with Udyr using Shurima as the second region. Overall, I very much enjoyed the way this deck was built when playing it, and the transition from the Akshan, tempo-based phase of the game towards the heavier, value-oriented late game of the deck was smooth in most of the games I played.
Most of the time, Udyr will be the enforcer in this part of the game, and alongside some striking spells (Grappling Hook, Siphoning Strike), we can rapidly generate enough Stance Swaps to have a Pantheon deck kind of threat on the board. The 5+ mana cards in the deck represent this second part of our game plan as they all contribute to generating value of some sort, either growing our champions, like Herald of the Magus or Siphoning Strike, or offering alternate win conditions the way The Howling Abyss does. Because we already need to invest our mana in the Stances Swaps and other tempo tools, Akshan drawing us cards is a great way to not run out of resources while not actively spending mana on drawing cards. Once Akshan levels up, we can start abusing its Warlord’s Hoard in order to find our late game and grow our threats in order to push for lethal. I quickly felt like it was mandatory to hard mulligan in order to find him early on, as every card becomes so much better once he is on the board. The 2 mana champion is key to the deck’s success, as Akshan really is the enabler to most of our early game. Up until the 3 mana cost, we are in Akshan’s territory, as most of the cards will be looking to help us with immediate tempo and board control early in the game. While I agree the deck can be summed up to this very simple take, after playing a few games with it, I realized it was a bit more complicated than this.Īs we look at the curve of this deck, we can see that we actually are playing 2 separate packages which merge into a complete 40 cards list. Akshan and Udyr are the value machines, and the followers help us accomplish that.” Drboleta submission was rather a simple one, and to use their own words here: “I think the build is pretty self-explanatory here.
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