By now, some of the new Gods Unchained Welcome Set cards made it to actual competitive decks. This is great news, because it shows that these cards are not only an entry point to new players. Some of them can also be used all the way up to the top. I am curious to see how many players will give them a try over the course of this weekends Ranked event. Today we focus on the magic starter deck.
Spotlight: Magic
For me, Magic was always tempting to play, because it has tons of removals and it feels very powerful to simply destroy every single creature of your opponent, especially in combination with the Blastwave God Power. However, you also need some kind of finishing move, be it strong creatures or face damage spells. The new starter fails in this regard, because the strongest creatures are at best mediocre and there are almost no face damage spells. Of course the removals in this deck aren't top notch either. In a way, this starter deck might be the easiest to optimize, because you can always just include some stronger versions of the cards presently used.
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Most of the new Magic cards are trying to give you multiple options, so you can react in every situation accordingly. However, for balancing reasons, these effects are worse than from a single-use card. This usually isn't a worthy tradeoff, because you always have multiple of these spells at hand and careful deck balancing can give you the same choice of better effects from multiple single-use cards. As an example, I picked Mind Jolt. It is an okayish card, but for dealing damage, Wyrmbreath is cheaper and can do face damage. For drawing cards, Rune Viper Tincture is the better option, because you can draw three instead of only two cards.
The other card I want to present, Lambasting Wand, might actually come in handy in some face damage decks. 6 Damage total over the course of three turns is actually quite powerful and might decide the match.
The easiest way to optimize you deck...
...is by starting with a bad one! Sure, you will most probably lose at the beginning, but you can learn a lot for future decks by increasing this one step by step. To significantly improve it, there are no Genesis cards necessary, so if you are new to Gods Unchained or so far have only used pre-built decks, this might be the best way to get into deck-building.