Shadowfist Deck: Ugliness by Joshua Kronengold

Home > Decks > Decks: Ugliness (finalist at the GenCon 2005 dueling championship, winner at the GenCon 2007 dueling championship)
[posted 14 Sep 2005; updated 8 Jan 2008]

2005 version originally posted to the Shadowfist Forum on Yahoogroups on 9 Sep 2005 by Joshua Kronengold. Republished with permission. If you're a member of the group, you can read the original in the archive. 2007 version originally posted to the Shadowfist Forum on Yahoogroups on 18 Aug 2007 by Joshua Kronengold. Republished with permission. If you're a member of the group, you can read the original in the archive.

Joshua Kronengold took 2nd place at the GenCon 2005 dueling championships using this deck. He won the GenCon 2007 dueling championships using a retuned version (see below).
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Ugliness (GenCon 2005 version)
by Joshua Kronengold (50 Cards)

Mathemagician x 5
Purist Initiate x 5

Andrea Van de Graaf x 2
Dark Traveler x 4

Entropy Sphere x 3
Amulet of the Turtle x 2
Killing Rain x 4
Quantum Sorcery x 3
Glimpse of Brief Eternity x 5
Material Trancendence x 2
Curtain of Fullness x 5
Pocket Demon

Nexus Tower

City Square
Desolate Ridge
Market Square x 2
Mountain Fortress x 2
Turtle Beach
Whirlpool of Blood

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Ugliness (GenCon 2007 version)
by Joshua Kronengold (54 Cards)

Mathemagician x 5
Purist Initiate x 5

Andrea Van de Graaf x 2
Dark Traveller x 4

Entropy Sphere x 3
Amulet of the Turtle x 2
Killing Rain x 4
Quantum Sorcery x 3
Glimpse of Brief Eternity x 5
Material Trancendence
Whispers in the Dark
Curtain of Fullness x 5
Pocket Demon

Nexus Tower

City Square
Desolate Ridge
Four Sorrows Island
LaGrange Four
Market Square x 2
Mountain Fortress x 2
Roller Rink x 2
Turtle Beach
Whirlpool of Blood

Oh, if it's not obvious -- Ugliness is a dual-mode Purist control deck. Initially, it builds up power and forstalls opposing attacks using its large number of denial events, plus the occasional Killing Rain to blow up its own sites, while it drops the occasional Curtain of Fullness as fairly effective disruption.

If it can get a character lockdown in the early game, it may just go aggressive -- taking sites with weenies boosted up with Mountain Fortress. Otherwise, it eventually gets enough sites in its smoked pile to start playing 6+ fighting Dark Travellers, and goes on the offensive -- using the Roller Rinks, if necessary, to recycle the Ttravellers when they get killed.

If it really gets behind, it will try to drop multiple Killing Rains in a single turn -- getting a good number of sites in its smoked pile, hampering the opponent's power generation, and ideally burning (for victory) several of the opponents' sites right before it drops the final rain and destroys the remaining ones.

Finally, against a very small deck, or just in very long games where the plethora of denial stalls things out, it will rely on the ability to recycle Curtains to deck the opponent -- in that mode, the denial acts as disruption while the Curtains act as kill, rather than the usual case where the Curtains are the disruption.

I went bye/2/1/timeout in the 5 qualifying games (the timeout was a game where I'd just reached the "ok, mulitple sites in my smoked pile, opponent's mostly stalled out; time to turn the tables" point when the time went off -- the loss was my first non-bye game, against Julian, when my deck failed to draw any feng shui sites for the first 5 turns or so. (after which, I did a deck check and realized the deck, which had initially been built over-feng shuied (as befits a deck that frequently blows up its own sites as well as those of its opponent) had gone down to 10 sites in a 53 card deck -- and after checking for objections, added a couple of sites back in (including the amazing, for this deck, La Grange)).

In the semifinals, I managed to lock Julian down in two games, both a grind, particularly in that Julian has faced various incarnations of Ugliness before and knows how to play around it rather than helping it do its thing (ie, don't drop damage on sites you're not going to take, don't launch multiple non-taking attacks against Market Squares). The final games went to the bitter end -- with Braz losing in the first game as he worked out how the deck he was facing worked, winning in the second once he caught me without enough denial to stop two Big Bruisers putting on the boot, and in the third game, losing to a classic Ugliness comeback, as an initial 4-2 site advantage was ground down by denial and three sequential Killing Rains, ending with 4 feng shui sites in my smoked pile and some siezed or burned sites on my side -- at which point the Dark Travellers showed up to lock things up for me nicely (dragon Final Brawl decks without a lot of power generation left don't have that much to say about 10 fighting Dark Travellers except "uh-oh").

It's pretty nice to finally win this title.

The Man

[writeup by Joshua Kronengold]

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