Lazy Louisville
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A week and a half ago a lazy group of WoW TCG hopefuls descended upon Heroes Comics and Gaming in Louisville, Kentucky to throw down with the weakest cards from throughout the history of the game. This is their story.
Lazy Peon The Format
Lazy Peon was an unusual request from some of the players committed to attending the first US Reborn Circuit event on the 2020 calendar. Someone brought the format up and everyone wondered if it could be interactive, competitive, and fun like other beloved WoW TCG formats or if Murlocs would prove too good and the field would just be a bunch of Rawrbrgle mirrors. At first we kinda laughed off the request and acted too cool for the format. But man we were wrong - Lazy Peon is amazing! For the uninitiated, Lazy Peon just means every Common and Uncommon rarity card is legal and nothing else.
Lazy Peon has, among other things, the following to offer:
Lazy Peon is a powerful format. Although we cut out the “stronger” rarities of the game and this does tone down the power level of the field, having access to every single black-bordered common and uncommon from throughout the history of the game still leaves us with a very large card pool. Couple that with some powerful cycles like Drums of War’s common rarity dual-class abilities or Aftermath Block’s uncommon Empower cards / common bottles and you have the foundation of a format that can rival or even surpass most Core formats in terms of power level. Bloody Ritual, Grumdak, Herald of the Hunt, Bottled Light - ever hear of those cards? A lot of roleplayers from Classic are legal as well like Spell Suppression, Tuskarr Kite, Wavestorm Totem, Carnage, the list goes on. While the allies aren’t perfect, a lot of two-for-one allies are still available and when you start poking around, a lot of surprisingly powerful cards will jump out at you. Which leads us to our next offering.
Lazy Peon is a brewer’s paradise. In everyone’s testing for the event, in our exploration of the card pool, and in what we brought to the table on game day, one thing was clear: Lazy Peon rewards creative deck construction. Almost every time we tried to find a concrete way to think about the format, we would find something that suddenly made our assumptions come untrue. You have to play allies! Let me show you my mill deck. Equipment doesn’t matter! Let me show you my strikeout Warrior list. Murlocs are the uncontested best deck! I’ll curve Poach, Junkboxes Needed, Poison the Well, and a threat into Carnage. Yikes!
When you remove the top half of cards from the game, it does really weird and interesting things to the power level of the remaining cards. Suddenly you have to reevaluate everything you know to be unplayable. Suddenly the borderline cards can be solid and the formerly playable cards are bombs. It starts by noticing that Fel Blaze is legal, then you see Warbringer Arix’amal’s an uncommon, then the Warlock staples Banish to the Nether and Sardok. Or maybe you realized that Talents are completely out of the format. Now you’re looking up Traitor Hero Required cards and Monster Dual-Class heroes. If you enjoy deckbuilding, you’ll probably enjoy this format.
Thirdly, Lazy Peon is competitive. By this I mean it rewards skill a great deal, maybe even more so than some of WoW TCG’s other constructed formats. We ran our event Bo1 (the only surviving info on the format we could find listed it as such), but it was harder to feel cheated than other Bo1 formats like Core or Contemporary. Sure, if two very proactive decks smash into one another it can feel like a toss-up, but the interactive cards in the format are powerful enough that a lot of games saw a solid back-and-forth volley that was close and competitive.
So overall it seemed like everyone enjoyed changing things up a bit. It’s always nice to try to new things whether you like them or not, this one just happened to be a hit.
The Swiss Rounds
We had a small enough turnout but great variety in deck choices. Eight players showed up with a full eight different decks. In fact, no two decks were even remotely similar and this made for an unpredictable event. After five rounds of battle, the dust settled with the following standings:
Woodrow Hood (Mojo Discard / Midrange)
Phil Stacy (Olvek Burn / Midrange)
Nathan Cole (Zombie Go)
Patrick Broadway (Blue Pally Reanimator)
Ben Lang (Mogdar Mill)
Chris Waits (Hottelet Strikeout)
Frank Adams (Rawrbrgle)
Josh Wilson (Strongbark Tokens)
Exactly what you expected right? Probably not, and that’s what we’ve found to be the beauty of Lazy Peon. Few people draw the same conclusions.
In this event, both of the go-wide decks seemed to struggle a bit. This is probably because everyone was gunning for Rawrbrgle specifically but Gwon Strongbark was collateral damage. Then both of the little-to-no-ally win condition decks in mill and strikeout lost some close games to slide in just under the cut. And at the bottom of the Top 4 we had the heavy synergy midrange decks and then the pure, unadulterated, midrange decks taking the top couple of spots. It was a good day to do some midranging.
The Top 4
Decklists for the Top 4 are posted here along with Chris’s sweet strikeout deck.
The semi’s saw a rematch from Swiss with Patrick sporting Durin Battleheim versus Woodrow piloting Mojo Mender Ja’nah at table one. Woodrow started off strong answering Patrick’s plays while emptying his hand. But Patrick was able to steer the match back in his favor off the back of a couple of Bottled Lights and a Hammer Fist Frenzy. These draws coupled with a lack of pressure from Woodrow’s side of the board gave Patrick the tools he needed to advance to the finals.
At the other table, Phil ran High Magus Olvek against Nathan on Delronn the Controller in a bizarre game that saw Phil lock down all of Nathan’s important cards like Phylactery of the Nameless Lich with the full four Spell Suppressions. One thing that Phil’s deck had in abundance was packets of five damage, so when Nathan dropped down to just 15 health against a healthy grip of cards that read “deal five damage”, Phil was able to seal the deal.
In the finals, Patrick came out aggressive in game one with early allies. He followed them up with multiple Bottled Lights which invalidated removal and combat trades and led to him to an mid game victory. Game two saw a very interactive draw from the Mage answer allies on the first couple of turns and a timely Nether Fracture slam the door shut on Bottled Light. From there Phil was able to establish a board and force a game three. In the final game of the match, Phil and Patrick traded resources, Buck Ehn swings, and settled in for a long drawn-out slugfest. Eventually Patrick dropped into that 15-20 health range, however, and Phil began pointing everything at Durin’s bearded face and finished him off with The Taste of Arcana for exactly lethal in true Mage fashion.
Congratulations to Phil Stacy for winning the first event on the 2020 US Reborn Circuit and securing himself a playset of Archives Foil Commons and Uncommons!
Bonus Decklist
We’ll probably write a bit more on the format at some point, but since it’s relatively new and unexplored, we wanted to offer another deck from the event that was just a few tiebreakers away from sneaking into the cut.
5th-8th - Ben Lang
Hero: Mogdar the Frozen Heart
Ability-Allies (4):
4 Wavestorm Totem
Abilities (26):
4 Festering Disease
4 Tribulation
4 Bloodsucking Bloodroses
4 Mind Trauma
4 Will From Beyond
3 Chain Purge
2 Celerity
1 Ghost Wolf
Equipment (11):
2 Girdle of the Queen’s Champion
2 Mask of Death
2 Bulwark of the Primordial Mound
1 Hide of the Wild
1 Wentletrap Vest
1 Greaves of the Martyr
1 Bonefist Gauntlets
1 Bracers of Defiled Earth
Resources (19):
4 Path of the Damned
4 A Rare Bean
4 One Draenei’s Junk…
4 Zapped Giants
3 Eye of the Storm
Ben attacked the format… by not attacking at all. Instead he built a pillow fort and hid there while infecting his opponents with every disease in the book. Style points for playing Ghost Wolf!
The Afterparty
We checked out a newer taco spot in Louisville called Taco Luchador. As of my writing this, everyone is marked SAFE from Taco Luchador. While the tacos were tasty at the time of consumption, nobody had a pleasant day after. Following tacos, it was right back to the shop for a cube draft and then multiple games of Chaos before running into the 2AM closing time at the shop. I have to admit I achieved my version of angry (which isn’t angry at all) during the cube draft. I opened a pretty crummy pack one where I took Goldrinn to leave myself completely open. Pack one pick two was chock full of Horde allies including Garrosh, Son of Grom which I took over Pandaren Brewmaster. My reasoning was that Horde appeared currently (though too early to tell) open and that filling out the rest of the deck while having an aggressive top end like that would make for a solid deck. Pack one pick three was barren and I took Blackrock Spire hoping it was just an oddball pack. I grab pack one pick four and at the front of the stack was Weldon Barov staring me in the face. I didn’t pivot and pack three I saw Archdruid Fandral Staghelm around the same pick. What a beating. Still “mad”. :)
Chaos was indeed chaotic. I played Big Chungus pictured right. The first game we table scooped a few turns after Josh slammed a turn four Alexstrasza the Life-Binder out of Dark Lady Sylvanas Windrunner. Gross! The next game which didn’t finish before closing time was a lot closer. It seemed that Deathwing the Destroyer was about to take over, but we didn’t get to find out.
We have to say, the venue for this event, Heroes Comics and Gaming, was a great local spot with lots of tidy space, a lively environment, and great food options. Overall Reborn Louisville was a success and we look forward to the next event!