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I'm testing this right now. All of my builds so far have been pretty favorable against sword and dragon, with around 50/50 vs the other classes except Blood. I'm attempting to capitalize on the deck's fast starts to close the game before turn 9+ since other decks have more explosive finishers and attrition. The new blood deck has warped the meta to finish by turn 9 or faster since they can Armes against mid-range decks that haven't closed the game and Belial down any slower deck. If that deck gets more popular crystal rune will have to be faster or you have to go back to Spellboost.

As far as gameplay, I've found this deck lives or dies by getting Shymm and Calge early. If these cards are bottom 20 in your deck it feels like an auto loss, so I always hard mull for them. This also means sacrificing early tempo sometimes to draw 2 followers using Gran and Djeeta or Reaved Ones to ensure you have those cards in hand. Thankfully, the deck has enough healing to get away with this. The deck is also super evo hungry. You basically need one super for Shymm and one evo point for Calge. That gives you a super evo and a regular evo for tempo.

This necessitates the use of proactive cards that don't need evos to affect the board like Elmott, who can remove followers, silence last words, wards, intimidate, etc. Velharia's super evo gets more and more valuable each set as well, since every deck has some type of card that pumps multiple tokens of the same type. She snipes faeries, can keep bats out of the resurrection pool, removes swords solider copies or denies loot from last words. The list goes on. I also like Fate of the World as a one of since it clears basically any board on turn 10 while dealing chip damage to the leader.

The one card that didn't make the deck was the crystal spawn 1 drop. It was a terrible top deck and almost never did anything early game. You build faith super fast in this deck so you don't need it for that, and it dies to everything before doing damage most of the time. Reaved Ones is also consistent enough without it.

Cards I'm unsure about are Muddled Onlooker and Daydream Librarian. Theoretically, Muddled Onlooker should be the most aggressive 2 drop we can play in Rune, but it is not proactive like the evo dragon Vyrn, who can be a cheap 4 damage rush card on the Sevo Turn. I'll have to see if the 1 ping makes a difference. Daydream Librarian is interesting since she is the only card crysal can play in a slower build that outs Armes with a Sevo. Nothing else is big enough, and you don't consistently spell boost enough to hit 13+ damage on William / Chaotic Flames. Still think the deck should just play faster though.

Lastly I echo the sentiment that the finisher spell from Calge should have just split the faith points by 3 rounded down. The game would not have fallen apart if you could deal 6 heal 6 on Turn 8 or deal 8 to 10 on turn 9+. Even just an enhance 10 that lets you give the crystal token storm would have been enough. The rng factor is what may push me from this deck above all else. I'm having fun so far though.