https://youtu.be/-cp-C-aXvt0?t=4046

On release people did not expect Ox to end up being powerful, but once folks figured out that there was an abundance of quality minions to fit the curve and that if you were willing to forgo spells entirely, or at least for the most part, the deck became very consistent, that mixed with a few interesting interactions lead to the deck being a real sleeper.

One of the decks biggest aces is the fact that Thunderhorn, and to a lesser extent Purgatos and similar, proc off of Oxs effect which can be quite devastating. This along side that luckily the ordering of effects is in our favor as Opening Gambits occur before anything else, so things Like Dagona, EMP, and Paragon will resolve before Oxs effect goes off helping control where you will get the Ox effect. You need to summon things from your action bar for the trial, but not the destiny, meaning Krons effect will not progress the trial, but will do damage once the destiny is online.

The biggest key to the deck is to simultaneously dig for the right card for the right match-up while also sculpting your hand to complete the trial. You very rarely want to play the same manacost twice if you can avoid it, and in general you want to avoid needing to use your BBs and instead look to curve out effectively, making kal the natural choice as your fine with not using his BBs but it also has good synergy with all the big bodies we run. As usual positioning is key, but this deck does take that to the next level as the majority of our cards, as well as Kals BBs, have a heavy positional focus. It will take a lot of practice to learn your matchups as they play pretty differently, sometimes you want to be very aggressive and win with tempo, other times you want to be super passive and just stall for your trial.

Another important thing to know is some various sequence tricks, the most obvious being if you have spare mana for minions on your Ox turn make sure you play ox before you play other things. Beyond simply curving out, your mana globe access can change things a bit as if you get a bigger drop early on that tends to mean you are able to double drop later on and or complete the trial with something cheaper and using the extra mana post Ox, the general rule is high early low later.

Then there is the general preferred order of units, which of course changes based on the match up, like Golden Mantela being the preferred three drop because it guarantees you to get both a one and a three drop, Purgatos being better early where as thunder is better post Ox, Kron being the safe pick but paragon being important depending on the match up, and painter being preferred to Zendo as its a better stalling tool but of course Zendo has various combos and match ups he is important for.

As usual the deck building phase for the deck is very important, but this one had a lot of unusual rules it needed to follow. You need to develop a perfect curve, avoid spells, avoid extra copies of the same mana cost, and rather then look for the usual synergistic songhai shenanigans instead you just want to play the best in slot mana cost units and or things that have synergy with Ox, while picking minions that double as answers to tricky situations rather then just raw power. Constructing the deck in this way not only makes Ox consistent, but it allows you to play a powerful midrange tempo oriented deck that is extremely proactive. You often do not even need your destiny to win, and often just the free body from Ox is all you need, but the destiny really secures the lategame even against things like Fault, Wanderer, or Xor.

There are a couple variants of the deck like the one that includes Mix/Jux as its only spells along side some of Songhais classic movement oriented units, or a mech variant, but I have yet to find a version of those that I feel as confident in as this one. The side deck helps cover certain matchups as well as are cards that may be considered should the meta shift.

The deck is complex both in the deck building phase and practice. But I think I have cracked it pretty well, it has really turned out to be a very powerful deck that has decent matchups across the board, and even favorable ones against some of the top decks.