For the past two weeks you have been sharing your awesome ideas for the decks with us and now it is time to conclude what ideas are the best. However, before we jump into the results let's look closely at Tale of the Old Turtle, the card that contestants had to build a deck around.

Tale of the Old Turtle — Card Analysis

Tale is a card that gives you a massive amount of cards for a low cost — in the best case scenario when you draw 3 creatures with it it effectively costs zero faeria. However, it does have a few considerable drawbacks:

• In order to get full value from this card you have to build your deck without any events or structures. Otherwise you basically lose 2 faeria for each non-creature card you draw with this spell. This is a very severe limitation for a deck.
• Tale of the Old Turtle has a 6 faeria threshold. It means that this is not a card that you want to play when you are behind. It can only be good when you've already established a board control, otherwise it is a dead card in your hand.
• When you play this spell you spend 6 faeria and get basically nothing for it. You will have to play additional faeria to play 3 cards that you've drawn to get this 6 faeria back, in most situations you will be able to do that a few turns later. It means that Tale is an antitempo card — by spending a lot of faeria without having immidiate effect you risk to lose board control even though you may get a big payoff later.

So these are the main downsides of Tale of the Old Turtle and it explains why this card doesn't see competitive play. However, in the right hands and deck it can shine. Let's see what do we need in order to make it work:

• We want a lot of low-cost creatures, preferably 2-3 faeria cost, so that when we play Tale we will most likely end up with a few 0-1 cost creatures that we can play immideately. By building our deck this way we compensate for Tale's antitempo nature, this way we will be able to get our 6 faeria back as soon as possible.
• Not only low-cost creatures are good for Tale because we can play them immideately after playing it but Tale is a very good card in a deck with a lot of cheap creatures. When you have a lot of low-cost cards in your deck you will naturally end up with zero cards in you hand and some extra faeria. Card draw effects are a must in this kind of decks and Tale is perfect for this task.
• Now if you think about a deck with a lot of cheap creatures one of the first decks which you may think of is a sacrifice deck. If you ever played GY Sac you probably know that you always end up low on cards, VERY low on cards I'd even say. This is partially because GY Sac needs 6 lands for Soul Eaters, partially because it has a lot of low-cost cards and finally because sacrifice mechanic is naturally card-consuming. Although it doesn't apply to Demon Wrangler and Oath to Oblivion, sacrifice mechanic is a mechanic that requires you to play one card for the cost of two. Death Walker, Shaytan Assassin and Lord of the Wastes require two creature cards in order to play only one. So if you want to build a good sacrifice deck you need either massive value from your sacrifces (Soul Eaters in GY Sac), Annoying Gnat for an infininte creature to sacrifice or card draw mechanic. Don't you think Tale of the Old Turtle is the perfect answer?
• Creatures-only deck is hard to build because you still need some tools to deal with threats, and most of these tools are events: removals (Flame Burst, Siefers Wrath, Soul Drain), hard removals (Frogify, Last Nightmare), buffs (Elderwood Embrace, Gift of Steel) and others. Every deck has to have some tools to get some valuable trades and establish board control, and in a creature-only deck you could and should include some creatures with strong gift effects that may help you. Here are a few good and versatile examples: Royal Judge, Triton Chef, Mirror Phatasm (you may also use it as a hard removal), Tiki Caretaker, Wind Soldier, Flame Spitter and many others.
• And finally Tale of the Old Turtle discounts can be used to buff Illusion of Grandeur. You may get a bunch of 0-1 cost creatures that when played buff all Illusions in your deck and hand.

Metashaker #2 results

GYBsac

This deck made by onnig90 utilizes Tale's card draw effect in a sacrifice deck. This is a GY Sac deck that thanks to Tale of the Old Turtle doesn't have an issue of running low on cards. Although it goes very high on land requerements, you only need 1 forest to start running and Wood Elementals will help you to reach this 3 forest threshold later. Very well done, onnig90! For this awesome idea he recieves 5000 gold!

B/G Tale of the Wandering Monk

This deck made by Shagric uses Tales and Lore Thiefs to buff Wandering Monks. Not only that, this decks has tools to keep them alive and make valuable trades: Tiki Caretakers and Pipers for buffing, Sagami Grovecaller and Syland Horsemaster for mobility, Deepwood Stalker for removal and Mirror Phatasm for transforming your little creature but it also serves as a removal for big enemy creatures. For this fun yet solid deck Shagric recieves 2500 gold, great job!

Tale of Grandeur

This deck made by Sulphur uses Tale of the Old Turtle discounts in order to buff Illusions of Grandeur. Although it is pretty straight-forward Illusion deck, it has a lot of consistent ways to buff Illusion and also you could manage to play Spring Mochi into Ancient Herald into Tale to get a 7 cost creature dicounted to 0 which is pretty cool. For this fun approach Sulphur gets 1000 gold, nicely done!

Honorable mentions

We have recieved a ton of decks for the contest and it was very hard to pick the winners. Thank you everyone for submitting your cool ideas and here are a couple of decks that unfortunately didn't make it into the top 3 but nevertheless made a good expression on the judges. It is good to see a Blue 7s list made by Arrizen with Tale, although it's not fine tuned enough. Konsl's BR list combines Underground Brigand and Underground Boss faeria engine with Tale's draw engine, which is a very unique approach. BR Tales of the Flood Song made by Shagric uses Tale to flood the board with a lot of cheap higher attack than health creatures in order to buff Firebringers.

That's it!

Thank you everyone for sharing your awesome ideas! Watch Luuu90's Metashaker #2 deck submissions review to take a look at some other submissions as well and to know what he thinks about them.

See you later! Check the news on the Hub or offical Faeria discord #tournaments channel for Metashaker deckbuilding contest #3!