Yellow Rush - Aggro just kills the fun of the game

I’m sorry but this is seriously just killing the game for me.
I got into faeria because of how varied combo decks were, as this game has great potential synergy and strategy elements but recently the ladder is just filled with more and more yellow rush which is a pretty broken deck that really sucks out any fun I could ever have in faeria.
There is very little strategy involved in yellow rush as most of it went into the deck building.

I don’t know why this game is becoming like hearthstone but aggro doesn’t need to be dominant in every game and better yet shouldn’t be. There’s just far less strategic elements to this game when you force people into using faster cards and it’s destroying my drive to play.

This is a great guide to help deal with these rushes. I know it doesn’t fix the problem but it could well help handle them.

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Yellow (and other) rush decks are only easy to play, if their opponent doesn’t know what to do. For learning what to do, I refer to my above linked guide. :slight_smile:

In regards of combo decks being beaten by rush, I’m sorry, but that’s just rush’s job by nature, and a neccessity for the game’s health on top of it:

A combo (otk = one turn kill) deck’s strategy, by definition, is to draw for a big combo that wins you the game within one or two turns of actual play, without your opponent having any possible way to answer/prevent this (hence the tag “combo”). All they have to do is to enable their combo, which means drawing their combo pieces asap and storing up enough resources (faeria, colored lands) in order to play them all at once. In other words, they’re like a timebomb - if you can’t stop it soon, you probably can’t stop it at all. The “deep strategy”-element is rather one-sided, because most of its strategy comes from deck building and the plan for the combo to become inevitable. When going “all in”-combo, you aim for setting up the combo as fast as possible, fortfeiting anything that doesn’t serve this goal - for example competing for the board.

Due to that nature, the best general answer to these decks is to be faster. If you can neither interact with a combo deck’s gameplay, nor defend vs. their combo in any way, being faster is very often the only possible way to beat them. And being fast is just the definition of rush decks. If a rush deck can’t beat combo (because the combo being too fast and inevitable), usually no deck can. --> Necessary evil.


That said, I like playing vs both of them, but both have their own problems:

  • When facing combo, the first few times you’ll be caught by surprise, which often leads to some exciting subsequent games of figuring out how to deal with them in a defensive manner. Because, it seems like there must be a way to stop the combo and there probably was some mistake, which I have to prevent next time, right?
    However, if there actually isn’t a defensive way (because combo being too efficient in terms of abusing even the smallest of openings), the excitement eventually turns into frustration due to actually being powerless (having no option to interact). It’s like a really hard puzzle, which is exciting until you notice it’s impossible to solve with the tools you have currently at hand.

  • When facing rush, it’s basically the other way around. It’s frustrating early on, because I know exactly what hit me (no surprise). It feels cheap, unstrategic (which it actually isn’t) and quite often inevitable. It seems like you lost due to the opponent’s deck being op and you having no tools to deal with it. However, more often than not, you actually have the tools to beat it, but don’t know how to use them. Once you know how to do it, it’s not that impossible to defend and eventually strike back. The previously pressured gameplay may then lead to exciting moments. Besides, unlike with combo, the board’s strategic elements (faeria wells; importance of when and where to place which land) are actually used.

The biggest problem of rush decks is this burden of knowledge - you can’t tell whether it’s you or it’s being op (most people often feel the latter, though it’s not necessarily true!). Also, rush decks usually don’t create a feeling of “wait, what was that? Show me again, let’s see whether I can do anything about it”. This is not a balancing issue, but a teaching/learning issue. :confused:

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This is not the problem.
Nor was it much it anywhere near as much of an issue prior to them adding the annoying gnat into the game.
Currently yellow rush is overplayed and the deck is irritating to play against because the games outcome is purely determined by whether or not he has the answers to my plays.
If he does, he will win 99% of the time given that he has hard removal, light removal and a tonne of face damage. If that fails there’s still mobility mechanics that can kick in and potentially still win him the game.

All in all it’s just irritating.

I half-agree with you. I think it’s true that the average Yellow Rush is less strategic than your average Faeria deck, is currently all over the ladder, and can feel frustrating to play against. The biggest problem is that its success seems to be highly dependent on the opponent’s deck and initial draw. However, I disagree with you in that I personally think this is one of the most fun decks to play against (you’re not wrong, it’s just subjective) and I also don’t believe this deck is broken - it’s definitely beatable. To me, the ability to simply remove creatures (Last Nightmare, Choking Sand) while rushing is the most annoying thing about this deck.

Taiyodori’s guide is very good. It’s true that the presence of Annoying Gnat has warped some of the tactics that he mentions in the opening posts, such as Faeria denial and zones of protection becoming less reliable counters. Red burn decks still gut Yellow rushes pretty well, and if your deck contains lots of taunters and/or lots of midrange creatures (at least 4/4 but no more than 6f cost and preferably no more than 5f), you can usually handle Yellow rushes short of an unlucky early draw.

If you try these counters and you’re still getting frustrated, I highly recommend building a similar deck of your own and trying it out. If you can climb to the top of the ladder with it - then you’re right about it being overpowered. If you can’t - then you’ll at least gain some appreciation for the (small amount of) skill that the deck requires and you’ll also learn good ways to counter it along the way by observing how opponents beat your own Yellow rush. I did the same thing with Red burn and I learned a lot about it - I had thought this color was broken bull-dookie and now I simply think its tactics are low-skill but fair.

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