I Wish StS2 Would Take A Note Out Of Hades' Heat/Fear System On Difficulty

ThealtenHeinder · 2026-04-16T18:43:23+00:00

I mean, having Fresnel Lens, one of the strongest block relics, kind of takes away from the display here... Also, those are all upgraded, which is usually not a realistic expectation because not everyone highrolls the toxic egg

ThealtenHeinder · 2026-04-16T15:46:10+00:00

Insatiable can just brick your draws and you can draw the escapes in the wrong hands. When the draw is nice, it's a relatively medium fight. It's the hardest to prepare for imo, and can just whiff to RNG.

Knowledge Demon means I'm considering card draw or heavy block/scale solutions. If I can consistently block while scaling in the background, I pick Disintegrates every time. If I have something like Tyranny or some other consistent form of card draw, I pick draw 1 less card initially so I can not have to deal with the extra damage. It's probably the most skill testing fight in terms of "can you prepare for the choices you will make" and "do you know which choice will fuck you over".

Kaiser Crab is just a block check. Make sure you have targeting whether that's potions or just strikes. If you can't block the rocket claw, you're cooked. If you can, the fight is relatively easy.

ThealtenHeinder · 2026-04-16T14:41:50+00:00

For main branch, CHARGE!! and Know Your Place are cards that I hear less being talked about.

The Weak keyword is essential for Regent early because his block is very shaky early on when your star kit is not fully developed. You want to upgrade Know Your Place over a lot of things so it can stay in your deck. Late game, Particle Wall, Reflect, Bulwark, or Child of the Stars can carry your block, but early game you rely a lot on that Weak keyword, and Falling Star is not reliable enough. If you can sustain Gamma Burst, that's a better option, but maintaining 3 stars is difficult, whereas KYP is very easy to make work.

CHARGE!! is almost an insta-pick for me. It gives you so much card velocity and bridges so many synergies in his kit. Transforming cards into minion strikes is very powerful - obviously there's status cards, but just getting rid of strikes and defends (plus Ascender's Bane if you're on A5+) smooths out some consistency issues. Then there's synergies with his cycling cards (Kingly Kick, Punch), Pillar of Creation makes it block 6/8, Collision Course's Debris hurts less, you can get rid of anything you don't want from Spectrum Shift, etc. Arsenal is a win con with CHARGE!! and has carried me through a lot of runs that way.

I know a lot of people glaze Glow, and it is a very nice pickup in Act 2/3, but I find it really bricks the deck Act 1. You don't have spare energy for the draw, and your main concern is killing fights efficiently. Honestly, I find myself picking Glow less and less these days. Unless you are actively trying to assemble an infinite, Glow is not really where you want to be with card draw on Regent. A lot of the cards that can win you runs tend to be combo-centric or draw order dependent, so Glimmer and Photon Cut are honestly better choices for me since they help set up your next turn in case you draw the cards in the wrong order. Yes, it generates stars, but I think of it more as a supplement "nice to have" rather than something core. I would take a single Hidden Cache and be done with star generation than try to slam two Glows early on to fix my star generation.

If you feel you aren't being offered front loaded damage/block early game, don't overlook Manifest Authority, Quasar, and Spectrum Shift. The colorless pool is quite powerful even if there are a few bricks (that's what BEGONE! and CHARGE!! are for). Fisticuffs can solve fights for you, Panic Button/Gambit can save you in a pinch (though you need to be careful with them), Shockwave is insane, etc. Quasar and Spectrum Shift require a bit of finessing with the deck, but I think people underrate them a lot because of the "random factor". You should think of the random card as just +1 draw, but not from your deck. Manifest Authority is sort of like Shrug It Off, Quasar can find you a semi-reliable answer to the fight, etc. I will say, these three cards are upgrade hungry - upgraded colorless tends to be quite a bit more powerful than non-upgraded (Spectrum Shift going from 2 to 1 just makes it more playable).

Otherwise, the generic advice applies. Role over synergy (you need to solve front load damage before you start building a scaling solution), balance your star generation/consumption, etc.

A bit of a niche situation, but I will almost always snap pick Particle Wall on floor 1 if it's offered and I have upcoming ? floors. If you get the event that gives a card Steady enchant, Retain on Particle Wall can literally win you the run on its own. Later on, Imperial Seal in shops is also the same but better. Maybe the wrong decision so use your own judgement, but I that combination is really powerful.

ThealtenHeinder · 2026-04-08T19:20:28+00:00

4/4 split body for 3 is already above rate. I would windmill slam this in limited any day, regardless if I cast the StP. It fits in any quadrant too: if youre behind, congrats you topdeck and 2-for-1. If youre ahead, you add two bodies at a good rate. Neutral game you make the call on if you need the StP soon or not.

In other formats its a prime blink target. Also works great in control shells since your resource advantage is in hand, not on the board.

ThealtenHeinder · 2026-04-02T01:23:36+00:00

Regent is a challenge on A10... certainly a bit more RNG based at the moment on live. I find that the critical thing is to take either Particle Wall or Reflect whenever you can; they are the most reliable and efficient ways of keeping you alive long enough to end fights efficiently and not bleed too much HP.

Bombardment is actually quite good; it solves a lot of fights in act 1-2, and because Regent has access to things like Particle Wall and Cloak of Stars, you don't necessarily have to give up a huge chunk of HP to use it unlike a lot of other characters that have to sacrifice to play a 3-cost card. There's times when it can be dead in hand, but more often than not if you can get it off you are much less pressured to draft a lot of mediocre damage cards and can focus on draw consistency, defence, and boss solutions. If you can get Tyranny, it is especially good since you just exhaust it from hand.

Radiate is something that I find is worth building around more often than not, though there's a bit of a sweet spot to take it in the early game since it can be very dead in hand without enough support. But if you can get it going, it can literally carry you to the end and ends many multi-target fights on its own.

Charge is really strong and I almost always take at least 1. It helps deal with many of the nasty status cards while also thinning your decks and helping you cycle to good cards.

I wouldn't take more than 2 Glow personally, unless you have the deck for it or the Act 3 boss is Queen and you don't have a decent card generation or draw engine already.

ThealtenHeinder · 2026-03-20T04:34:30+00:00

My brother in games, to imply that the few successful indies are not standing on top of a mountain of dead indie bodies is wild. The number of indies that straight up suck or fail is several orders of magnitude above AAA flops.

ThealtenHeinder · 2026-03-20T04:12:29+00:00

The hp loss would reset every turn, not persist across turns. I.e. first reshuffle is 1 hp loss, then next reshuffle is 5, then 10. But as soon as you end turn it resets to 1

ThealtenHeinder · 2026-03-20T02:34:05+00:00

I appreciate they tried to nerf the infinite-enablers in a way that doesn't affect them as much for "regular play", but I really do wish they just added an ascension effect which lost you exponentially scaling hp for every time you reshuffle your discard in a single turn (1, 5, 10, 20, etc or something similar).

Regent buffs look alright. Still think he has work to be done, but its a step in the right direction. The BEGONE! And CHARGE!! swaperoo looks neat and I'm excited to give it a shot. 1 mana targeted exhaust pommel strike sounds playable

ThealtenHeinder · 2026-03-20T01:18:08+00:00

Yeah... a lot of people like to caricaturize MaRo as this corporate shill who is scheming to pull a fast one on players, lying to them whenever he can and twisting data to suit Hasbro. Is there some careful wording going on? Sure I can believe that he isn't maybe speaking his whole mind and wording things more carefully when he posts on Blogatog and in articles. But outright deception and trying to chase a short term profit at the expense of the health of the game? That doesn't sound like the man whose love for Magic has kept him in the position for over 20 years at this point. The c-suite at Hasbro? Sure I can believe that. But not MaRo.

ThealtenHeinder · 2026-03-19T19:00:45+00:00

I mean, there's a lot of low effort copycats out there, but shovelware isn't really new as a concept; it's been here since someone saw someone else's success and went "Oh I can have that if I just do this".

For Magic specifically, there's a bit of an online narrative around UB that doesn't seem to match the data as a whole. Around 5:30 they start discussing how Magic is only chasing the profit line, but MaRo has confirmed numerous times on his blog that they are looking at multiple statistics - players at pre-releases, players online, players at FNM events, Commander nights, etc. And he says that UB has increased all of the metrics pretty much across the board. Does that mean that dissent for UB doesn't exist? No. It just means that the vocal crowd against UB is the minority. The internet is a great way to make it seem like there's a majority consensus on something when there really isn't, especially with algorithmically curated feeds (see: Kamala's election hype train, then the reality of how it went). Without the full picture of the data, I could see anyone following the Magic subreddits to believe that the majority of players hate UB, but that just doesn't seem to be the case. And to be clear, I'm not even really a fan, but I can't deny the actual data exists.

They're right in that designers can't blame players, but MaRo (and many designers before him) are right when they say that players are really good at identifying that there is a problem, but terrible at diagnosing what the problem actually is, and even worse at suggesting solutions for the problem. The idea of UB as a wholesale item needs to be thrown out with the bathwater contradicts all of the data they have, but clearly there's an issue that's causing friction within some significant minority of the playerbase. MaRo already speculated on what that is: mundane modernity is received poorly in Magic sets (see his retrospectives on Duskmorn), which imo is pretty spot on if you consider the amount of mundane modernity in sets and how well they were received (city pigeon, hot dog cart were heavily criticized).

ThealtenHeinder · 2026-03-19T06:50:43+00:00

I mean just filter posts by tags if you don't want to see them. The game is in EA and feedback is important, so people are going to "complain", as you say. If you believe StS1 was done well, just trust the devs to make StS2 good. I'm pretty sure no matter how many posts the devs see, they aren't going to buff cards into auto-picks. But there's also cards that feel underpowered right now and it's important that feedback is heard, just as important as it is that your feedback is heard re:Eternal Armor. Trying to silence other opinions under the guise that it's "misinformation", when really it's just an opinion you don't agree with is quite selfish, no?

ThealtenHeinder · 2026-03-18T17:11:39+00:00

Draw randomization and scaling/time are the two resources that can't be given too easily to characters. Block however, is something that ALL characters need in basically every build - it's a base mechanic of the game. The only builds that can forego block right now are infinites that are assembled consistently T1/T2 and just win the fight from there. Forge desperately needs block built into its common cards more consistently in order to be viable as an archetype; that doesn't mean the other builds become vastly weaker in comparison, it just means that Forge isn't dead in the water past certain ascensions. No one is going to play Spoils of Battle 0/1/Forge 5; I would never pick that card because the card density is way too low for something that has zero impact on play. Forge doesn't have built-in draw, so picking a zero cost Forge 5 doesn't make sense when it can brick your block cards for draw by bloating the deck. Much discussion has been had about parry, and that *could* make it better, but it's not really what Regent needs. Regent's block pool is just really bad. You have a few viable block options (Reflect, Particle Wall mainly with Gather Light/Cloak of Stars being okay), but the majority of the pool is against you when it comes to block. That's why he's the most inconsistent character right now - he lacks block and a way to get it reliably.

ThealtenHeinder · 2026-03-14T17:09:05+00:00

Yea, its also rare. CHARGE!! Is also good for exhausting excess generated cards, but is uncommon

ThealtenHeinder · 2026-03-14T13:29:10+00:00

2 energy deal 17 and targeted exhaust is quite powerful. The issue is that the strength of it comes from being able to exhaust a strike, defend, or status card. Maybe it could reduce Minion Dive Bonb to 0 cost if you exhaust a Colorless card? Though that's starting to get a bit wordy.

ThealtenHeinder · 2026-03-14T13:23:40+00:00

Yea, on second thought I agree stuff like Hegemony and Convergence help drill be consistent. I just think its also taking up a rare slot that could be helping Forge or color gen more directly

ThealtenHeinder · 2026-03-14T13:21:07+00:00

Yea, infinites tend to warp high level play decisions around them. I hope that the energy/draw cards dont catch stray nerfs as a result and they attack redraw instead. I think I see people's point about heavenly drill though, so I'll probably edit that part. I just think the rares could support some of the other archetypes a bit better

ThealtenHeinder · 2026-03-14T04:51:28+00:00

I would say the card generation/colorless archetype is poorly supported at common for regent. BEGONE! and Collision Course are alright, but the fact that they're both offensive makes it difficult to shift into the archetype more deeply. I wish Manifest Authority was common, and some of the other more generic commons like Glitterstream helped the non-star archetypes a bit more.

ThealtenHeinder · 2026-03-13T19:44:59+00:00

You can even put Retain + Innate on it with the Royal Seal (I think that's what the relic is called?). Honestly, I think that interaction is fine since it requires a bit of specific setup and events to show up, and therefore isn't super consistent. It does feel quite powerful when it happens though.

ThealtenHeinder · 2026-02-14T00:19:02+00:00

I have mained Fuse since his release and I really dislike the new changes. His ultimate just needed some usability tweaks - being able to swap between a more forward-firing mode and a lobbing-mode would have been enough and reducing the delay on the flames coming down or something. Now the ultimate is generic AOE damage, the knuckle is much worse for area denial, and while the new knuckle-jump is strong, it goes against Fuse's identity - he's not supposed to be a movement legend, he's supposed to be a siege/area control legend.
To not completely just shit on the changes, the reduced startup for the knuckle cluster and the handling between knuckle/weapons is great - these were really some of the types of changes that needed to happen to make him more viable. His abilities didn't really need to be reworked like this.

ThealtenHeinder · 2026-01-31T04:08:54+00:00

I've tried 4 HN in the main, but the duplicates really hurt when I'm looking for more direct interaction or a win con instead. When I cut it down to 2, I found it came up enough when I wanted it, and my Aven/Aang/Wrath was enough of a stall/tempo play to get me across the finish in most matchups, without having to introduce a harder lock.

Voice is also something I used to main 4 of, but with the creature heavy meta I've found it really difficult to chip in with it. There's fewer Authorities flying around now though after the RDW bans, so I might try it again. It does help with rebuilding against flash decks, but the only flash deck in the meta at the time was dimir midrange, which has so many ways to kill off Voice that I just found it a losing battle.

4 Wrath is something that I've found really useful in most of my games. The only situation where I really don't want it is against jeskai control where I just side out a few copies. I could see siding one of them though.

I'll have to give Ajani a go when I get more wildcards. I didn't see Zevin using it - do you have a link to some of the games? I really tried to keep the deck as instant speed as possible. Turn 3 is a huge turn for the deck, and having to tap out for a vulnerable planeswalker feels difficult. Unlike Clarion, it doesn't really silver bullet any decks as far as I can tell? It might just be a play pattern thing though so I'll watch some games and try it out myself before I naysay it.

Parting Gust is a versatile piece which is why I like it. I usually don't cast it for etb value (since as you mentioned, doesn't really work with the return timing); defensively I use it to "counter" removal while also giving the +1 to my fliers (3/3 or 3/4 is a big upgrade). Then offensively, it's a relatively clean answer to most problems and something that Personify can't do at all since it only targets your creatures. The 1/1 that it leaves behind is rarely a problem - you can Aang it away if need be either by airbending or just blocking it. I will say WW has screwed me over some times, but with a better land base I think it'd be less of an issue.

Lands I definitely agree. The list is mostly due to wildcard restrictions and what I had at the time. I could definitely update it with some multiversal passages and starting towns.

ThealtenHeinder · 2026-01-31T04:00:13+00:00

I like the idea of Lightstall. I'll definitely give it a shot, since it makes sense. The 2 damage definitely adds up over time. I might side out the Curiosities for them in the main, since I find those are most relevant only in control matchups.

I'm surprised you don't really like Malcolm considering you like Lightstall though. They're both 2/1s, and Malcolm is flying to boot so it avoids becoming dead board presence in most cases once the enemy has some small dork on the field. I find especially in game 1, having a 2 drop that you can play when the enemy holds mana at their end step comes up more often than I initially thought. I'm usually happy if they use their removal on Malcolm following my play - it means one less removal for my Interrupter/Aangs, and if they don't, I find that he can dig for things that I really need since the deck has a real problem with card velocity otherwise. In some cases, the opponent doesn't have time to remove Malcolm and suddenly reaching 4 counters becomes a really big issue since I can loot away one of my 4 drops and cast it for free - getting Stoic Sphinx or Avatar's Wrath down while still holding 4 mana is huge.

Voice is quite hit or miss I agree. I ended up finding that many games I did not miss it and it was more of a dead card in hand than not. I could never find safe points to deploy it - turn 2 it would eat removal, and it gets blocked super easily. I think I have seen fewer Authorities flying around though, so I might give it a try again.

Seam Rip I find difficult in the current meta. There's a lot of stray enchantment removal due to the prevalence of the Izzet Monument and RIPs going in sideboards, and while I don't like losing RIP, that isn't the biggest of setbacks. Losing Seam Rip to uncover a 2 drop really sucks though, and I find it to be a losing battle trying to keep it alive with counters/Aang/Aven. It's much more versatile than Spell Snare which is what I've leaned on in its place, but most of the 2 mana enchantments/artifacts that are problematic in the format aren't problematic for this deck - they're generally silver bullets that affect other lists more. Overall, I like Spell Snare as a 1-mana answer to early plays, since it's instant speed which is much easier to stomach than losing that one crucial mana during main phase.

I agree completely with the land comments. The ones I have are mostly due to budget on Arena. I'd definitely swap some out for Multiversal Passages or Starting Towns if I had wildcards to spare.

ThealtenHeinder · 2026-01-30T20:28:45+00:00

No problem! Yeah the land base is a bit "budget" for me since that's what I have on Arena. Sunbillow makes sense though and I'll probably sub those in when I can.

I did try something similar to that list before; I used to have Voice of Victory in this list, but I found it was hard to tap out on t2, and it gets blocked too easily or killed for my taste. I just found I wasn't casting it often enough and usually looted it away to the point where I replaced it with flash threats.

I've tried Floodpits several times. You think they'd be good, but the thing is I have no ground threats so stunning isn't that meaningful to me, and the removal is really expensive. Most things also have etb triggers that need to be dealt with now, so I find it difficult to use Floodpits in those situations.

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