Deck Tech: Turning Xicx's Budget Aggro Deck into an "Easy Wins" Deck!
When Xicx hit me up to improve his Champions aggro deck, I knew we were in for a fun brewing session.
His deck was aggressive and featured some unusual (and potentially strong) cards, like Nebulith and Ghoulhowl. However, he was struggling with consistency, finding that some games the deck would just run out of cards too fast and fail to establish a strong aggressive board.
Here’s Xicx’s original decklist. Below, I explain some of the issues with this list and what I did to improve it.
Xicx’s Original Decklist:
1 Mana: 1x Floki, 2x Fuku
2 Mana: 2x Astraling, 1x Blazebark, 2x Jyoti, 1x Nibbles, 2x Pukey, Sprout, 2x Stubby, 2x Timberfawn
3 Mana: 2x Bofa Tinkertime, 2x Crugg, 1x Feleton, 1x Pixi, 2x Strawbash
4 Mana: 2x Booger, 1x Nebulith, 1x Quakka, 1x Slobba
5 Mana: 1x Sangur
6 Mana: 1x Ghoulhowl, 1x Gulpyre
8 Mana: 1x Ancientle
9 Mana: 1x Xaramath
Flux’s Feedback: This deck runs a lot of “1x” cards with only a single copy. That’s an immediate red flag for me. In Champions, we want to run 2x of most cards so we have as consistent a deck as possible. Many of my decks are 17 “2x” cards and then only a single "1x" card to fill out the 35 card requirement. Not every deck needs to be all “2x”, but mostly we want to avoid too many single copies for consistency.
Another problem is a lack of one clear strategy. This deck runs a lot of cheap minions for aggro and a few defensive cards (like Sangur), but it’s not really focused around any one thing. Looking at the 2-drops - What do Sprout, Nibbles, Pukey, and Astraling have in common? Not much synergy there.
I decided to cut out a bunch of the extra stuff and 1x cards, focusing the deck around a new strategy of using the “bless” mechanic to repeatedly buff our own attack stats. By playing a lot of creatures early and “going wide,” we can then use Bless to press our advantage by boosting attack for effective value trades and big face damage.
I also tuned up the defensive options, adding a second copy of Sangur and swapping out Xaramath for a playset of the much more effective Cyclonius.
As I try to do with deck tech, we retained as much of the original deck’s character as possible — so I left in some “flavor” cards like Blazebark, Nebulith, Crugg, and Ghoulhowl, all of which feel useful and playable in the context of the focused Bless Aggro strategy.
Here’s the final list:
Flux’s Improved Version - Budget Blessed Aggro
1 Mana: 2x Bookworm, 2x Fuku
2 Mana: 2x Astraling, 2x Blazebark, 2x Jyoti, 2x Mirri, 2x Pukey, 2x Timberfawn, 1x Stubby
3 Mana: 2x Bofa Tinkertime, 1x Crugg, 2x Strawbash,
4 Mana: 1x Booger, 1x Nebulith, 1x Quakka, 1x Slobba,
5 Mana: 2x Jyotesh, 2x Mystifruit, 2x Sangur
6 Mana: 1x Ghoulhowl
9 Mana: 2x Cyclonius
This is a massive improvement over the original list, getting more tempo in the early game and having more ways to push through and get lethal in the later game.
I could see myself making a few more adjustments in the future. This list still has more "1x" cards than I'd like. I'm not positive about including Mystifruit either, I might consider subbing that out for another aggressive card.
Overall though this is a great budget aggro list and for any new players looking to get started with a modest collection, I recommend trying this list or as close to it as possible and see if it fits your playstyle. Thanks to Xicx for submitting his deck for this week's deck tech and I'll see you all soon for more strategy guides.
Cheers,
Flux
P.S. You can see a video version of this, with featured matches of both the "before" and "after" list, over on the qFlux888 YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/cnQeg0STmV4?si=Ti4xYNh4umvWB80J