Re-Constructed Deck - The Messengers of Tranquility

Welcome back, Ashes players, to another installment of Re-Constructed. Grab a blanket, brew some cocoa, pull up a carpet square and pillow; we’re about to get unreasonably comfy with some wooly friends.

Hopefully, you’re already aware of the deck building restrictions we’re working with; if not, read the last Re-Con article (or any of the previous ones). For all the time Phoenixborn, we’re also assuming you have The Breaker of Fates, as time dice will obviously be required to play them. Today, Orrick is showing us the art of meditating and looking inward…and surrounding ourselves with an unhealthy amount of sheep.

The Messengers of Tranquility (Re-Orrick)

5x Charm Dice, 5x Time Dice

3x Summon Ash Spirit

2x Summon Ruby Cobra

3x Concentration

1x Foresight

2x Royal Charm

3x Amplify

1x Generosity

1x Recollect

3x Rile the Meek

1x Beast Tamer

2x Flock Shepherd

3x Sunshield Sentry

1x Backtrack

1x Fate Reflection

1x Outmatch

2x Redirect

Charm-based decks are always invested in different versions of “the long game.” Saria’s mission is burning through your opponent’s entire deck, Leo’s strategy is waiting for you to make poor attacks into him, Jessa attempts to drain your life 1 point at a time, Maeoni wants to feed a single unit so big it can nearly kill you in one attack, Astrea wants to force your hand through struggle, and Fiona is trying to assemble bizarre and complex unblockable combos. Orrick is no exception, though his take is rather interesting in combination with time magic, a dice type geared around adjusting and controlling the pace of a match. For us to get anywhere, we need to start with Orrick’s unique card, Concentration.

Concentration is the name of the game, a unique Ready Spell that basically does a little bit of everything. For effectively 1 die and a flexible action, you get 1 card draw and 1 power die of your choice, even one you’ve used exhausted. More unusually, you also get a status token on your Phoenixborn, with the promise of a big payout in the future. All you need is uh, check my notes here…SEVEN? Seven status tokens. Oh, and a second copy of Concentration. Sure, no sweat. Easy peasy. Actually if you don’t mind I’m gonna go take a lie down in the sheep pile for a minute.

Alright, yes, the Concentration win condition is the stuff of nightmares; charm magic decks like to take their time, but 7 rounds is a bit of an ask in a game where the outcome can be ascertained as early as round 3. Still, there’s no need to pull the wool over our eyes this early, and if the other charm magic Phoenixborn can get results, then darn it so can we. So before we talk about what’s different with the re-con, let’s break down what Orrick’s laying out in the grass. And, true to form for charm, looks like it’s all defense and board control.

Ash Spirit is the unit that powers most of the deck. Drawing cards for all players gets us closer to Concentrations quicker while also whittling down our opponent’s deck slowly, and having a unit that always trades with whatever unit defeats it is hyper efficient. Sunshield Sentry is also perhaps one of the game’s most annoying blockers, always drawing multiple attackers’ worth of attacks every round. On the weirder end of the spectrum, we round out our defensive line with Flock Shepherd, a rather pointed unit designed to bellwether charm magic’s wide array of 0-power units by giving them spell protection and counterattack power. Can’t have sheep without a shepherd. On the spell side, in case Flock Shepherd wasn’t enough, Fate Reflection covers nasty natural magic that likes to nuke our key units, and Rile the Meek gives us a very charm-centric way to swing back. We also have some outwardly unassuming but secretly spicy tools in the form of Generosity and Recollect. Recollect is intended to get back ready spells we may have lost, making it a solid tool against other charm decks, but its real strength is as a combo tool for cheap activation Ready Spells that you already have. Meanwhile, Generosity is a yarn of theme and mechanics interwoven into a patchwork quilt of decisions, all of whom’s selections are catered excellently around Orrick’s aspirations. We’ll be talking in detail about those two spells later.

Finally, rounding out the mix are Ruby Cobra, Orrick’s only truly offensive option that quickly proves surprisingly annoying, and Captivate, a stalling ready spell designed to disrupt swarm style attack strategies (especially things that function with Group Tactics). These are also the only cards in the deck that synergize directly with Concentration’s amazing dice fixing ability. All the cards in Orrick’s deck serve a purpose towards helping him achieve his (honestly lethargic) late game victory setup, but for the re-con we’re looking to focus on some currently underutilized strengths, and hopefully get our Phoenixborn to wake up earlier than expected.

Outside of trimming down excess copies of cards (we’re not THAT generous) and cutting a few entirely, we are adding some brand new goodies in the deck. The big one is Royal Charm, a card that takes our charm power dice and doubles up their effects, an outcome that’s all but guaranteed thanks to Concentrate’s ability to pump out power symbols. Speaking of power symbols, we’re also putting in some much needed reaction spells to help deal with a wider variety of problems (many of which we’ll see thanks to our impressive amount of draw). Sheep are good but they can’t stop everything, unless you Redirect an attack into them.

Foresight is making a comeback after having been brutally cut from Jericho’s re-con. Between the ability to filter Concentrations and the extra non-conditional draw, Foresight actually gets a lot of mileage here. Part of the reason we’re cutting Captivate is also because we’re now at Orrick’s 5-spellboard cap, and I found it to be the least helpful option. While we have several other additions, one I wanted to highlight is Amplify, a surprisingly powerful tool when combined with Ruby Cobra. Thanks to the order of effects, Amplify actually brings our snakey boy up to a startling 4 attack, big enough to take out almost any unit in the game including powerful knights!

Now that we’ve established what we’re playing with, how do we actually win? Not quite by counting sheep but rather by counting down your “clock”, or how many rounds you need to win. Once you hit The Awakened State, you should be able to win the game on that round, or early on the following round. Our opening clock is 7, since it takes 7 rounds of concentrating to get us to The Awakened State. In practice, the clock we’re aiming for is probably closer to 4 rounds, as each additional Concentration we activate reduces the count by 1. The absolute earliest you can get there with this deck is round 2, but that’s more a forlorn dream than a reliable reality.

Orrick is a really tricky Phoenixborn because you have to find a way to balance out his Concentrate counting with the fact that the game is still happening, and you really need to not die before you get there. Most of your opponents will have a faster clock than you, so to win you’ll need to slow them down. We want to spend our early game establishing a healthy defensive line, summoning our Ash Spirits, playing Sunshield Sentries, and having a strong reaction or two in the pocket when possible. If we’re feeling comfortable, we can throw an attack or two with a Ruby Cobra, but our initial goal is survival first and foremost. I’ll be talking a little more about round 1 in the First Five section, so for now let’s talk about Orrick’s primary strength, and the methods that will allow you to shave off unneeded rounds. 

Our biggest strength with this deck is our sheer draw power, as well as our “shear” draw power. We’re looking to get downright cozy by covering ourselves head to toe with cards, an easy task thanks to Summon Ash Spirit, Concentrate, Generosity (we always choose the draw 3), Foresight, and especially Orrick’s ability. We’re hoping to channel this absolute deluge of draw into a variety of powerful spellboard options – Royal Charms, summon books, and especially more Concentrations – as well as one-time spells designed to either help accelerate our clock or slow down our opponent. We’re largely building up Concentration as a passive activity on most turns, but if there’s an opportunity to hit the Awakened State on the current round without dying in the process, it’s immediately worth it. In order to tell if the Awakened State  is available to you, you simply need to count the number of Concentrations you can still activate this turn, and then see if you have a Recollect in hand. Each Concentration counts you down by 1, then Recollect counts down 1 extra for each focused Concentration you have; just use the Concentrates first, then meditate all but one of them and use Recollect to get them back to hand, replay them, and accelerate by that much extra. Recollect can even be used after you’ve hit the Awakened State to further push your available damage in the same way. Using these methods, hitting the Awakened State on round 4 is pretty realistic, and even round 3 is very doable if you’re lucky.

First Five:

I think the term first five is a bit misleading; our opening hand is actually a first eleven. I wasn’t exaggerating earlier about our “shear” power, we’re going to be drawing about six cards in the first round. Our first couple turns will be a tad on the sleepy side as we simply play out our spellboard cards and prepare to start dropping units. We’ll probably want to drop the Sunshield Sentry a little earlier to force our opponent to drop something that can deal with it (good luck). Your options may change throughout the round as you start drawing cards through Ash Spirit and your free meditate-draw, but the big play of round one is actually Generosity. Usually, you want to wait until your opponent has damaged you at least once or exhausted the majority of their dice, but once they do it’s time to kill them with kindness. You will always open with the “draw 3” option, and then your opponent has two subpar options available to them. Either they take away your heal for no benefit and you get to summon another Ash Spirit (or trigger another Concentration), or they get a refresh they might not be able to use and you get a free heal. No matter the choice, you’ll have a round one where you’ve seen over a third of your deck, making the odds of hitting spellboard cards very high. Your round 1 isn’t absurdly powerful, but it does wonders in setting up your hopeful round 4 victory while not leaving you completely in the lurch.

Against an opponent with savage single-target removal (Jessa, Xander), it may be prudent to swap Sunshield out for Fate Reflection or Foresight. It’s not the end of the world if your summons die, but your allies are a bit more valuable.

Scratching the Surface:

In the grand scheme of things, neither one of these expansions is exactly “crucial” to getting a good night’s sleep, but they pad out the deck with some much needed comfort picks. Royal Charm is so easy to use with Concentration and helps to stymie the onslaught of offense you’ll need to endure over the course of the game, and both Amplify and Beast Tamer make for solid tempo playmakers at various points in the match. Still, Royal Charm can come out for Captivate again without too much issue, and while Amplify is nutty with Ruby Cobra you can potentially get enough unit control with clever use of Transfer or Stasis, or additional copies of Outmatch.

Taking it further:

It’s possible to accelerate the clock on Orrick even faster than the deck I’m providing, but I’m not sure you can do it very safely without spreading into another color. Open Memories has the distinct advantage of guaranteeing a second copy of Concentration on round 1, and if played after going through tons of draw prior you could even get all three copies right off the bat. That being said, it’s a huge commitment of dice and cards in the crucial first round that I don’t think you can often afford in an aggressive environment. Still, if your local scene likes to play control, this approach could knock them out unexpectedly fast. Change Psyche is another very flexible card that can help control the battlefield a little better, though for my money I prefer Transfer since it gives us another way to open up Concentrations and early Awakenings. I think with the absurd levels of draw this deck is outputting I was fine leaving it out, but it’s still a solid choice. Rowan also offers a few decent cards like Knowledge Seeker and Excavate, both tools that can help us better find our Concentrations.

However, Orrick’s real strength isn’t the Concentration gameplan, it’s dice power consistency. Orrick has some of the strongest dice fixing in the game, thanks to a combination of Concentration and his free meditate, so he has the easiest time utilizing dice powers of any Phoenixborn in the game. For this re-con I chose to accentuate that with Royal Charm, but another strong choice is Reimagine. Going the Reimagine plus illusion magic route opens up the possibility of playing a reaction based control deck, where cards like Outmatch and Figures in the Fog let us control the pace of the game in a terrifying way. While you’re using the Illusion power anyway, you can easily throw Keepsakes into your 5-slot spellboard for added board control.

That’s all for this week. Next time, we’re going to war with a blessed army as Dimona charges into battle. Hope you all like Enlightenment tricks, we’ve got some nasty ones in store.

Andrew DiLullo is an animator, a game designer, and luckily also a writer. Having first discovered Ashes at the tail end of the first round of expansions in 2016, he’s been playing ever since and currently heads the Bay Area Ashes group in California. He was especially active in several community projects after Ashes was canceled the first time, and now puts his attention to Reborn as the game starts anew. He’s currently designing a board game in his spare time, and occasionally writes on his online journal: The Lighthouse Library.