A Story of Rare Occurrences: Angry Angry Abominations

Today, we do a little story time, and cover a deck that I spontaneously cooked up, which resulted in this spontaneous article too.

A rather curious thing happened today. I made a deck. Or more specifically, a deck that didn't pilot like jank, which is what usually happens. Now, before I go on about what the deck actually entails, a brief history about a certain card.

A long time ago, way back in Secrets of Solis, Contagion Lord was released. People were excited; Abomination tribal got a huge boost, and lording over your opponents with Abominations seemed to be a brilliant and fun proposition. Alas, a fiend had to ruin it all.

Yeah, that one. The 36 card deck was too inconsistent, and eventually everyone breathed a collective sigh as they moved on to Broodqueen, forgotten in Solforge's history as what could have been.

And then this one line of text changed it all: 'Now only Solbinds 1 copy of Contagion Fiend'

At that very moment, the Lord dusted himself and walked (crawled? slid?) up to you and shook your hand, armed with Progeny and Abyssal Maw in hand, nothing could possibly hold a candle to it and its glory.

Except, there were only a handful of Abominations even worth playing: Progeny, Direhound, Abyssal Maw and the Lord himself. Now, that is a robust shell and all, but you and I know 12 cards don't make a deck.

Have I tried to make a Abomination deck? Heck, the entire Battlebranded team's first deck on patch day was Abominations. Instinctively, all of us gravitated to Contagion Lord, but all of us went UN and none of it was quite too good; we all agreed that the shell had potential, but we just had no clue what to play it with.

Fast forward to yesterday, where after a failed brew revolving around Blobby and Zarox, I decided to take Zarox and toss him into a Rage shell.

It was in that moment the spark of ingenuity struck me. The Rage shell had around 11 cards. A playset of Zarox is 3 cards. The Abomination shell has 12 cards. Toss in a Howl of Xith and a few Leyline Demons..

11 + 1 + 3 + 12 + 3 = 30.

Could it be? The mythical answer that we have been searching for a week? There was only one way to find out, and I took that first step.

3 Contagion Lord
3 Xithian Direhound
3 Progeny of Xith
3 Abyssal Maw
1 Howl of Xith
3 Leyline Demon
3 Zarox, the Raging
3 Borean Windweaver
3 Frostmane Dragon
2 Brimstone Tyrant
3 Rage of Kadras

So what do you do with newborn decks? Toss them into the heat of combat and see how they play out, obviously. Unfortunately, no one dared take up the Angry Angry Abominations deck in the team chat, so I headed to the ladder.

And I won. 5 times in a row in fact, even managed to pull off a pretty convincing victory against Varna, who I consider a proficient player. And now I'm here typing away, trying to sell you on an idea that seems ludicrous at a glance. How in the world would Angry Angry Abominations work?

It begins with the keyword 'Free'. Its not the first time we seen Free abused, from Flamesculptors with Rage, Tracker with Sharbound Invokers, and Ironmind Acolytes. But when you get to blow up a random Progeny that's lying around to go Frostmane, Windweaver into Rage, leaving you a 4-0 board, without missing out on levelling cards either, you know that's raw power right there. The blowouts continue when Zarox, which you can grow using Contagion Lord activates and clear blockers with Direhounds and Abyssal Maws, grows and murders another one of your guys. In fact, since Zarox demands your opponent to block it, you can often get an easy Rage, once Zarox has more than 2 attack, and then murder whatever's left; it's surprising how effective it is, given how Grimgaunt Devourer, a fairly similar card, flounders in the modern metagame.

But that doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of the tricks you can pull with the deck, the deck is quite flexible, often there are hands with many viable lines, but you have to figure the best one. That's actually why I enjoyed my experience with it thus far, it has its blowout moments, but yet requires thought to execute.

Is this the next best deck? Probably not, but if this ends up being a tier one deck, I wouldn't be fazed in the slightest. I might do a video on this particular deck at some point, which will be put up on the YouTube channel. Until then, have fun lording over your opponents with a sea of Progenies and the fury of Kadras!