Hi everyone, today I wanted to speak a little about my experience of yesterday’s monthly cup, show you my decklists and explain the choices behind it.
But first, let start with some french general knowledge : Raymond Poulidor - Wikipedia
- Monthly decklists
This last monthly before release was actually a pretty unique one with a big balance patch only one week before. So it was also the first time having a team to practice was so impactful and even better with a Team of 6 players qualified (Arianelle, Kahilian, Kanthik, Maihem, Trec and myself).
What we identified pretty early during our testing/training session was how strong the altar had become. So we knew we would bring a deck with them and a deck to counter it (derelic tower being the best counter).
- 1 : Blue 7+ (splash Red)
My first pick was Blue 7 since we clearly identified it was still one of the strongest deck. I decided to bring back the red splash with garudan since it is really good in the mirror matchup and I also added 2 hellfires because Blue lacks ping effects and that could really help to counter altar’s deck with Helfire being just were it needs to be in a 7+ list.
Even if I managed to 3/0 with the deck on round 2 against XOIIOX, I think choosing this deck as a first pick was a bad decision from my part because this deck’s worst matchup are Rush decks (especially YRush) and if players were gonna bring Rush decks they would certainly play them as first decks. So this decision made me almost always behind in the BO5s and might have cost me the 1st place.
- 2 : RedMid
As I said in the intro, knowing how strong altar was, I was looking for a strong red deck with derelic towers and RedMid was definitely not the first thing I tried since I was pretty sure that the recent balance removed it from the tier 1 decklists. I tried some old burn lists, Lord Of Terror or even combat decks but eventually decided to give RedMid a try and realized that with some small changes it could be an awesome deck.
The main decision I had to make was which nerfed card I would keep or not.
- Hate seed seemed really too bad in some situations even with only two copy of it
- Shedim pest was having a bad time on board because one less life point made it unable to do double early trades as before and Kobold Warbeast is actually now a better Shedim pest in every scenario in that list
- Firebringer with minus 1/1 stats would still be a final big threat in some matchups and having two of them was enough to avoid bad hands
- With a lot less angry synergy in the deck (only the two firebringers) I was confident enough to put 3 groundshakers to improve even more the matchup against altar decks
This deck definitely carried me to the grand final with 3/0 on round 1 against Xologrim, round 3 against Strudl and round 4 against Kahilian.
- 3 : Y Event (with altar of course)
Last deck would of course be a yellow list with some altars in it. Since I promess my mom I would never play YRush on monthlyCups (and maybe also because I am a bad YRush player…) I didn’t bring a YRush list but I definitely took it into consideration. I also tried a lot a YG Sac with altar decklist but it seemed like even if the deck was good, it was worse than the previous sac decklist against Rush decks.
So I went for a YEvent list and since I knew the wort matchup would be against Red, I decided that I was ok to make the deck even worse against red by playing an archer version of it.
I didn’t had the chance to play a lot of games with the list (lost 1 game on round 1 and 1/1 on the grand final with a matchpoint won by Maihem mainly thanks to the splash garudan in its Blue 7 list 
) but I think the list is just average actually .
- Team FaeriaTales
As I said previously, being in a team for this cup was a huge thing and also a really fun and nice thing !
We never had so many players qualified in the monthly and so motivated to train so the week before the monthly was a daily dose of laught, chatting and testing.
Trec was definitely the one that helped us identify really quickly that altar was so strong and that a new YRush decklist would be around, so a big shoutout to him.
Even if we trained all together, a special thanks to my all time training partner Kanthik of course !
A big Congratulations for our Champion Maihem. He definitely deserves it and I think he is the best French player for at least two month and in Faeria top 5 for this long but was never really identified at a top contender, now he is !
And of course a big houray for all FaeriaTales members !
- Monthly feelings
Last but not least, just some words about how I lived yesterday’s cup.
Of course going all the way to the grand final is a great sensation since you can enjoy the full cup with some breaks when you can take a look a streams and chat with people. It was the second time for me so I already knew the feeling but with two consecutive round 1 elimination I was not feeling other confident for this one and starting with a 0/2 lead for Xologrim in round 1 made this monthly cup a real roller coaster to me.
As always a great cup management by Atmaz that people not participating to the cup cannot see but without him it would be a mess for players and especially casters.
Speaking of the devil, once again they did an awesome job casting the monthly. I think they are getting better and better (and they were already really good at the beginning !) and it is really important for the game and its popularity (monthly cup stream gather more than 500 people each time, which is HUGE)
And that will it, for you the reader who had the courage to go all the way down this post, a big thank you and for all the faeria community, YOU ARE AWESOME PEOPLE !
PS : It is mainly in french (but sometime the stream is in english) you can find me there :
