Hi Everyone! (Primer in Progress)

This is a newer deck, so I'm excited to see how wrong I am in a year about some of these predictions.

Like all of us, I have been a theroycrafting fiend with the injection of so many cards, and 13 new avatars, it has been a bit disorienting. I have started and trashed more decks than I can count already, as finding a real foothold in synergy, originality, and fun hadn't quite landed yet. That was, unitl I decided to anser the question "What would post-Gothic, Post Druid nerf Hot Springs look like?" I in no way am going to claim "Necromancer Solved" as I did back in the day with Druid, as the avatar and the mass of new cards mean there are seemingly endless ways to build this avatar.

When deciding which avatar would dethrone Druid, I looked at the content of Hot Springs and tried to get a sense of the common threads, and ultimatley realized that the real power of Hot Springs was always having access to stuff. Ultimately, material matters. This is where the theroycrafting begins to snowball. The other thing I noticed was that many of the powerful cards surviving the cuts were Mortals. I had naturally begun to cut some of the previous cards from Alpha Beta and AL, as there were more powerful ones with the Gothic release, but I noticed that my remaining beats were too sparse to justify running Pond anymore, which was painful, as Pond was the card that spawned the interest in the Water Fire Druid ~12 months ago. These beasts have been usurped by a mass of evil units, mainly demons. With the introduction of a critical mass of Evil units, I wanted to explore what synergy I could find between Evil and Mortals in Water Fire. That led me to this deck after dooing some thought experiments and light play testing with the card Sinister Pond, which would quickly become the namesake of the deck, with a tip of the hat to its Hot Spring ancestor.

The dust has yet to settle on the crypts, and even then, this deck has thoroughly impressed me. There are so many fun and powerful interactions in this deck, even more so than Hotsprings. I think I need to establish, this is not a carbon copy of how Hot Springs played, as there have been a lot of things that have resulted in that deck probably not being as viable. Furslty, we had a huge infulx of strong, mindrange leaning minions. Secondly, Druid's removal from the deck meant that some cards just weren't viable anymore (Pack with the Devil). And finally, the removal of early beasts that come down and try to end the game quickly. This ends up playing as more of a Midrange Deck (a lot slower than Hot Springs, more akin to @Ismarkthelessers Big Springs) but with an extremely high ceiling for large minions quickly, or an alpha strike from the numerous Skeletons summoned throughout the game. I know I have said it before, but Water Fire has some of the most impactful cards in the game. That reality means, in my humble opinion, we should expect to see itterations of a Water Fire deck in every meta.

Remember, most of the theme of this deck is "Material Matters," Just meaning the cards scale substantially as long as you have any amassed of units in play. Luckily, this is easy with Necromancer, as that is all he does. The ability to make a guy every time with your spare change rapidly means your multiplicity effects, such as Boudicca, Sir Agravaine, and more.

Sinister Spings

@Duo