Theme, Strengths and Weaknesses

This is a super fun deck focusing on balancing site destruction with pressure from charge minions. It plays the strongest when minion support flows along side the site destruction and a bit weaker to certain responses (sphere of animosity etc). Because a very large chunk of this deck is focused on site destruction, other responsive cards such as infiltrate and dispels aren't in here. Currently it has 8 destruction auras, two blightstones, three destruction spells, and three minions that can destroy sites if they want. Sphere, vindicative nation, and order of the sacred oak are probably the three strongest counters to this deck. I will typically play through a vindicative nation but sacred oak can be a bit more fiddly so it's sometimes better to switch to general site attacks to maintain pressure that way.

Strategy

The most important lesson I've learned from playing Realm-Eater is that you are extremely unlikely to completely lock out your opponent's minions unless they are only drawing very expensive stuff. Even if you opponent is on one site at end of your turn, any of the towers gets them to three mana and there are plenty of two for three minions in the post-gothic meta. Pushing too early on site destruction can be a mistake because it is difficult to maintain and leaves you exposed to follow up attacks.

The second important lesson is to consider different strategies for building your sites, which ones you destroy and when. The more sites that you destroy, the fewer choices you have for attacks and the easier it is for them to block an attack with one minion. A tactical destruction in the middle of their field creates openings for you to drop poisoned well or beacon. Typically opponent is unlikely to play a site under your avatar because you would just destroy it again. One option is to destroy sites in their back row to maximise your chances to still attack their bordering sites with your charge minions. You also have the option of destroying forward, playing a site directly under you and then destroying forward to box their site development in. A tactical sinkhole or salt the earth can quickly force them into narrow options for mana recovery. Once you start comboing realm eater's ability with other destruction for two sites a turn, it can be difficult to come back from.

I've found that the deck works best with movement minions. e.g. Warhorse attacks site while carrying realm-eater and then realm-eater destroys it. Seige giant is great for this but a little slow without charge and it's best not to advertise what you are going to destroy before you do.

In early variants of this deck, I tried more avatar movement, and water for the untapping potential. I found that I could destroy many many sites but would eventually lose very consistently. Blink, teleport, flanking maneuver etc all make it possible to eat many sites but it's difficult to convert that into a win at one damage per turn. More damage spells is a great way to combat this and blightstones can easily be dropped for trinkets to boost damage.

Opening Hand

Deck is built around (F), (F), (F), (A), (A) so we are targeting double fire with one air for initial threshold. Powerful sites like sinkhole or wuthering are great but ensure that you have threshold first as you don't want to get stalled and not be able to summon minions.

Matchup Advice

One of the cool things about this deck is that you need to play it quite differently against different avatars. For interrogator you often need to get off your start square to avoid the minion pincer attacks. Necromancer has tons of potential blocks so it's best to clear then strike. It's a bit stronger against savior because of the extra cost of ward and if you do match up against habinger you need to build your sites to avoid their cheap summons. The mana pressure works very well against most avatars (enchantress, battlemage, pathfinder etc etc), it's often critical to pay attention to what you are destroying and try to lock opponent's to one affinity. In a mono match up, early pressure can give you an advantage as opponent's are often running powerful expensive cards.

Summary

A very cool deck that is a lot of fun to play. Probably not going to top a completely meta event but should give your opponents plenty to worry about. This playstyle is one to watch as more minions with the ability to carry an avatar could make this an absolute powerhouse.

Pacman the Ravenous Leviathan

@Quicksilver 169