Clash of the Battle Goats adds a lot of cool new content to the world of Gruff. This week I wanted to highlight a new type of deck that would not have been possible prior to Clash. It is going to have a significant impact on the meta-game of Gruff. So here it is the Hyper-agro Stovell deck! Special thanks to Mitchell Breinholt for finding the deck and testing it with me. This team has a very unusual composition of 2 early game aggressive gruffs and 1 aggressive off-tank style Fat gruff. None of the Gruffs on the team are good resource generators at all. That is where Stovell comes in. Over 4 turns Stovell can generate 8 Crazy (though it is pretty easy to disrupt that number and get it down to 6 or 4). This deck is composed entirely of cards like Reckless Slash that provide early game aggression and have a cost of 6 Crazy or less. This deck starts with an incredible amount of pressure and can maintain that pressure through much of the mid-game. A key part of the success of the deck comes from the least aggressive gruff in the line-up Gaptooth. While he doesn't grow any of his stats by default he definitely has the right toolkit for this deck. He has a great starting Fat Score that can ensure that your opponent cannot put you on the defensive on turn one. He brings clutch tempo cards like protect and block that will allow you to turn the tables on your opponent's aggression. And he brings this amazing card that can result in the strongest turn one attack in the game. Altogether the massive amount of early game damage from this deck will consistently destroy hybrid aggression/control decks (like the demo decks from gruff), as well as combo decks, but struggles against tempo/control decks. I am excited for you to get Clash so you can try this deck out too!
The first copy of Gruff is off the press and has been expressed shipped to me and is in my happy hands right now! Or was... I am typing right now... The quality on the game looks fantastic our friends in China really did a fantastic job. Take a look! So this is a shot with all components removed. The cardboard spacer is removable so if you decide to sleeve your cards there will be room in the box. Sleeving may be a very good idea if you are playing Clash with the first print run of Gruff since that version had an error on the back side of the cards which caused them to be printed brighter and mover saturated. In Clash we fixed the problem. If you mix the two together sleeves will keep your versions uniform. All manufacturing will be complete in about 1 week! With that being said I want to throw out a word of caution. Manufacturing is almost complete but we are still about 2 months from fulfillment which I know sounds ridiculous. Let me break it down a bit more. After manufacturing we have the "Long boat ride from China" which takes 6 weeks. Your copies of Clash will be floating over the Pacific Ocean, through the Panama Canal, then up the Atlantic coast before arriving in our warehouse on the East Coast of the US. From there 2-4 weeks will be spent getting the inventory through customs and then packaged for fulfillment, then games will finally start to get delivered. We are still on track and ahead of schedule. Assuming no disruptions we will begin fulfillment toward the end of October. I am super excited about it.
An exciting outcome of the world championship at GenCon is that we had not one but 2 Champions of 2016! Its time to break down Steven Lutz winning deck an intriguing hybrid deck with some explosive end-game potential. Let's take a look. So this deck is doing several very atypical things. It brings 2 very tanky gruffs. Skullheim effectively locks down a single position until the very end game. Darby brings enough mobility on his own to keep himself ramped up and on the offense during the early game. Bubbles is a combo deck's best friend with early control, resource generation and strong card draw options. Grimwood is also the right choice for this line up. Skullheim can use Rigor Mortis to quickly drop him below his threshold, getting an early game resource advantage. You are going to need that early Crazy to reach this deck's win condition Flying Leap and Deep Secrets. Flying Leap is your primary damage dealer in this deck, but it is most effective when your opponent doesn't see it coming, or has to deal with smaller threats. Make sure that you drain your enemy of potential counters like Bewilder and Gobble before closing in for the kill with this deck. The best way to do that is to bring Darby's Glory, Grouchy and Intimidate to distract your opponent from the real threat. One thing to pay close attention to is Bubble's passive stat gain. Most of the time you are going to want to power up her Weird score to get you to that 20 Crazy as quickly as possible. All three gruffs on this team bring Protect (which is arguably the most aggressively costed cards in the entire game) use it to regain tempo and deflect aggression and rely on Bubbles for resource generation.
That basically sums up the core idea of this team. Deflect early aggression and then drop the unavoidable damage for the win. A devastating but fragile strategy. Which do you think would win? |
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