12/22/2025

Merry Christmas, to anyone that is following the progress of this deck! Played my first real event with it this weekend, which gave me some great information on what some problems with the list were and the central game plan it is pursuing.

Firstly, the deck is most assuredly viable. The plan it is executing feels competitive and powerful, and decks that are fundamentally unprepared to radically alter their game plan will struggle against this list. Aggressive decks are forced to choose whether or not to deploy minions in the back line to defend or up front to attack, but our minions are so hyper-mobile that they can often pull double duty. Additionally, strategically placing minions in the void that can defend a site or your avatar to circumvent removal of any sort came up more than once, as well as moving units back into the void to force an awkward site placement if the opponent wants to interact with them. The deck feels less like a turbo-ramp package and more like a midrange deck that is prepared to grind with the best of them. More testing required on that last point, but with the limited number of games that I have played thus far, hands with numerous early setup plays feel better than ones with one fatty to ramp into.

One facet of the list that worried me was the randomness inherent in the strategy with all of the Haunts, and yes, that certainly came to fruition in every single game. In fact, my luck was so abhorrent with every one of those minions that I had opponents in stitches as my Haunts were once again banished to square 20, or just one location away from getting a single strike on a site. That being said, I still won those games. In many instances, those minions existing on the fringes of the realm protected them until I found the Kythera Mechanism, at which point they become your most valuable minions on the field due to their extreme mobility. While I know I have emphasized it with previous additions to this primer, Kythera Mechanism is, without a doubt, the most important card in this deck, and almost every Highland Princess tutor should be going to that.

As for the combo, I was pleasantly surprised. A strategy I knew would be powerful was building to one of your Harbinger portals to allow your value minions, such as Grandmaster or Stargazer, to be deployed at a discount. This caused the realm to develop in strange ways, which tickled me as the eldritch influence of the esoteric knowledge the avatar pursues tangibly altered the battlefield, which was a central tenet of my motivation to build this deck. These strange pathways encourage your avatar to move naturally if you see a combo piece, so in the event of the game ending that way, you will be prepared to chase down the opponent. Initial estimates I and others made showed the combo being a "free" win about 10 percent of the time, but I think it is more than that. Every single game I found Kythera Mechanism one way or another, and with the mainboard Swaps, getting our hands on a Ring is easier than most decks will find it. I am confident in asserting that this should be a part of the deck, as it felt very powerful in both of the games that it won.

As for actual changes, I swapped out a few cards to solve some problems I overlooked in deckbuilding, a common occurrence for a deck just getting its wings. Den of Evil felt subpar; the playset of Forsaken Crypts and two Ghouls in the collection helps iron out the threshold, which I struggled a bit with, and compliments the midrange plan a bit more. Every game I wanted a defensive site of some sort, and Crypt almost acts as one of those in a lot of ways. Additionally, getting absolutely hosed by a Root Spider made me realize that I was not truly accounting for that card when constructing the deck; Atlantean Fate felt like too much of a hail Mary, so I added one mainboard Geyser to find off a Browse and take out any pesky burrowing minions. The magic side of this deck is spread a little thin to account for the critical mass of minions the deck wants to execute its game plan, but I think having a competent toolbox will be the best thing while the deck is still in the experimental phase to determine what the deck consistently wants every single game. That being said, if anyone has any suggestions, I am super interested in cracking this deck open and figuring out how high it can go! Discord is leviv; feel free to reach out, although I scarcely open the app I will try to be more responsive. Let me know if you build this deck as well; I am loving the playstyle and I hope you all do too!

12/12/2025

A few notable cards have made their way back into the list, including the combo package. Again, I am not convinced that this package is correct, but it may well be, and that requires some further testing.

NOTE: Highland Princess tutors should almost always go to Kythera Mechanism over Ring. Not only does it have a significant amount of realized utility in the deck and up the value of Chaoswish individually without Ring, as a Swap deck, opponents are much more likely to play Ring than another combo piece, and with Browse and Blink to dig for Swaps (maybe should be a 3-of, card is busted), you want your opponent to drop that expensive piece of jewelry.

Other notable additions are Hauntless Heads and Maiden, Mother, Crone. MMC is pretty self-explanatory; I think most water decks should probably be on this card, but I remain unconvinced on Hauntless Heads. The main philosophy on their inclusion over something like Croll Morlocks or Aethermoeba is as follows:

Goes down free on a portal turn one, allowing us to get off to aggressive starts that distract opponents from beatdown, propelling us into the late game. Inconsistent, but still pressure, nonetheless.
Cheap in general. One of my biggest critiques of the combo is under-utilization of Ring, and these give us some inexpensive fodder late game if we think we will need to chain some Ring activations to break through.
Spellcaster. This is the big one. In the event that assembling the combo is a real possibility, serves as a hyper-mobile and difficult to interact with spellcaster to hold your Ring; just stick it in a corner, and teleport to the opponent on your turn for the finishing blow.
Leans into Dormant Monstrosity. With Mechanism, the teleporting spirits are incredibly strong, and being able to move all of them into an adjacent to corner square could hypothetically power out a turn three or four Monstrosity with the perfect hand.

Again, I am not sure how much it really matters; the last few minion slots seem pretty flexible, and leaning a bit more into Kythera Mechanism, they felt like a decent direction to move in. Notably, I do not think Vril Revenant is going to be viable, or they would likely be in the deck; almost every collection I have seen is running at least one Murder of Crows (including ours) and with Necromancer being one of the stronger avatars out of Gothic and anticipating it seeing some play at lease, I would stay away from one power minions in general. That card is currently terrible against this deck, and my mindset is wanting to keep it that way, as it is a very strong effect in the game as it is. That being said, if there is a reasonable chance of it living in your meta, I do think Revenant is a great card, as there will often be excess mana with all of our ramp.

Also, Falling Star is out for now. Despite being very potent and terribly thematic, it is pretty slow; at the point that the Star would trigger, the deck will likely be deploying unspeakable monstrosities anyway. Like most of my ideas, needs some testing, but I went with my gut on that one.

12/11/2025

The primary goal of this deck is to survive the early game, utilizing low costed Voidwalk threats further reduced by Harbinger's ability and defensive sites to ramp to 7 or 8 mana, at which point the Lovecraftian horrors are deployed. A central philosophy and assumption that this deck is operating under is that your late game will be more potent than your opponents; if that at any point feels like an incorrect statement, the Void minions should be relatively competitively costed due to Harbinger's portals to allow for more of a midrange plan.

Toolbox collection package will vary by meta, but I believe this to be a decent configuration. I may seek to add a decently costed threat like Shoggoth for lulls in card quality, but it is meant to be tinkered with and adapted for each deck.

The number one problem of this deck is card advantage. With an optimal draw, Harbinger can deploy extremely quickly, but should your opponent weather that storm, coming back will be difficult. I have some ideas to remedy this; Mother, Maiden, Crone may be exactly what the deck needs, but it is a little early to tell, and every minion added to the deck without Voidwalk falls under the greatest scrutiny. As the list currently sits (31 minions as of the writing of this primer), I believe that density needs to go up. The last 3-5 minions are going to be of the lower quality stock and will likely operate as pseudo-flex slots for each decks game plan. More aggro variants will look for Hauntless Heads and Vril Revenants, while the dedicated ramp may go for Shoggoths or The Ninth Legion, but I think these choices ae highly contextual upon each individual vision of where this deck wants to end up.

One notable mention needs to go to the combo: Chaoswish + Ring + Kythera Mechanism = infinite pings next to your opponent. As of the writing of this primer, the combo is out, with the philosophy that Ring does not pull its weight in this deck outside of the combo as it would in an averagely curving deck, leading to two "dead" cards instead of one. With card draw as difficult to come by as it is in this list, drawing Chaoswish with no meaningful ability to build to the combo seems like a death sentence, and Ring is likely the same. That being said, as we are already a Kythera Mechanism deck and, in the colors, it may well be correct to be on it. That being said, building this deck with the combo package, I would consider 3 main deck Blink and 1 in the collection for avatar mobility (also, just a good card in general), and could be supplemented by Riptides or Geysers. I would stay away from anything that does not cantrip. Void spellcasters would be second on the list; if there are any not too far below par that the deck could reasonably run them without sacrificing card quality too much, put them in. A central tenet of my deck building is to maximize the value of every single card, and combos inherently lower the value of the entire deck, hence its exclusion. However, some amount of time it will just win you the game out of nowhere, and I think that the cost-to-benefit ratio needs more experimentation before I confidently assert one way or another.

Cassilda's Song

@CrabMaster