Today I’m doing battle with Samira Pantheon. This is our third video of the 4.4 patch, the balance patch for the Glory of Novori. We’re really getting our grind on and getting a good feel for this format. In the previous video, we took a look at some of the cards affected by the balance changes. We played Shyvana and Pantheon in a deck really centered on taking advantage of the Wounded White Flame. I really liked a lot that the deck had going for it. It felt like Pantheon was quite strong. We won six games in the video and it felt like Pantheon just outright won the game for us in about four of them.
So I wanted to explore this Pantheon in another package. We tried the upgrade to the Retired Reckoner, but I wasn’t particularly impressed with it. I just felt like we never needed it. It was never able to grow in size. I feel like if you’re playing that Reckoner, you need to be playing a deck based on Riven.
The one that we’re hoping does give us a little bit of thunder is going to be the rework to Cygnus. He costs one less mana now and he’s got permanent Elusive. Then he can grant Elusive to another ally. So if for whatever reason our Pantheon doesn’t pick up Elusive, we have a way to pass that on to him. We also tried the Targonian Tellstones. I’m still playing two copies here. It’s been growing on me a little bit. I still don’t think this is the most spectacular card in the game, but this is a pretty decent format to play cards like Hush.
Now that we’re moving over into playing Samira, having access to these spells that generate spells really helps level up your Samira or help you activate those rallies. We also get access to the Darkin Ballista which is fantastic on a lot of these early game plays. Everyone is quite familiar with loading up Samira with the four attack bonus. But the early game package that we’ve been playing with Cosmic Youngling and Lunari Cultist are both excellent targets for a Darkin Ballista as well.
We also get access to a different set of removals. Brutal Skirmish is not nearly as good as Single Combat and Cataclysm, but it does do quite a bit of work in this format. Destroying equipment and then having the strike abilities quite strong. We also get access to Samira, the namesake of the deck. She is of course quite strong still in my opinion. She dodged nerfs in the recent patch notes.
So that’s the deck we’re ready for battle. Let’s go ahead and jump on in and see if we can’t get ourselves up to Masters on this one. Wish me luck!