Images courtesy of Equinox
Hello everyone and welcome back to the penultimate Altered TCG starter deck review. Today I’ll be going over the reserve-focused Axiom faction’s starter, its hero Sierra, and offering an upgrade plan making use of the new Exhausted Resupply cards from Trial by Frost. So without further ado let’s get right into the deck list!
Axiom Starter Deck
Here’s the complete decklist for the Yzmir Starter Deck:
Hero
1x Sierra & Oddball
Characters
2x Axiom Scrambler (c)
1x Axiom Scrambler (r)
2x Foundry Mechanic (c)
1x Foundry Mechanic (r)
3x Axiom Salvager (c)
3x Kelon Elemental (c)
2x Jian, Assembly Overseer (c)
1x Jian, Assembly Overseer (r)
1x The Frog Prince (r, f)
3x Amelia Earhart (c)
2x Three Little Pigs (c)
1x Three Little Pigs (r)
3x Foundry Armorer (c)
Spells
3x Kelon Burst (c)
Landmarks
1x The Ouroboros, Lyra Bastion (r, f)
1x Kelonic Generator (r)
1x Brassbug Hive (r)
2x Brassbug Hive (c)
3x Brassbug Hub (c)
3x Axiom Reprocessor (c)
The Axiom starter is quite synergistic, albeit slightly slow in developing its game plan. The characters included have a good solid mix of early lane contesters, ways to power out Landmarks, and micro-synergies between Kelon Elemental and all the characters with abilities that trigger when entering from the reserve.
The cards that stands out to me as being totally out of place are the common and rare Axiom Scramblers. A four-mana Sabotage is well below rate for the norm, and the effect already exists in the faction at three in Tinker Bell, with the only difference being that it cares about entering from reserve. If you’re already including a set of Kelon Elementals to show off the reserve mechanics of the faction, why not also include Tinker Bell? Seems like an oversight to me as the Scrambler’s stats are pretty underwhelming too, at a measly 2/4/2.
The only other card that screams to me as an easy first cut when upgrading the starter is Three Little Pigs, which always requires two Landmarks to gain the boosts, with the rare only gaining an additional boost instead. The real meat in the characters are the ones with reserve abilities, with Foundry Mechanic being the key standout as a character that discounts the next Permanent played, meaning the powerful rare Brassbug Hive can be powered out a turn earlier and start working to the endgame.
The rare Jian is also a nice include, as a way to showcase the additional ways to continually generate value with the Permanents without committing an entire action to it, and leads a new player into a better direction for what cards to include.
I’m really just glossing over the characters, because Axiom shines the brightest when it comes to its Landmarks. The starter comes with a whopping 11 of them, and includes a range of Landmarks that show the variety of ways in which the faction utilizes them to generate card advantage.
Sierra, the hero included with the starter deck, pays you off for repeatedly playing Permanents with at least a hand-cost of three by exhausting herself to make a 2/2/2 Brassbug token in an expedition. In terms of a starting point, that already sets a lot of parameters for what the hero wants to be doing: find ways of passively generating card advantage and board presence so you can play removal and interaction without falling behind on tempo, while Sierra shores up the downside of spending a turn on developing each Permanent by at least providing some board presence like Kojo and Sigismar.
Perhaps the most powerful of them all is the rare Brassbug Hive, a six-mana Landmark that costs a lot upfront but starts pumping out 2/2/2 Brassbugs every Afternoon with a boost, allowing for so much room to breathe. It plays especially nicely with Sierra due to her ability and the Hive’s enters play ability both creating Brassbugs that can be boosted, making it essentially 6/6/6 worth of stats for six mana, allowing you to at least contest an expedition.
The best way to think about it is this: every turn you’ll get a 3/3/3 Brassbug thanks to the Hive’s boost, which demands a response from the opponent, otherwise you’ll just win that expedition for the day. They play a card, maybe a character to block your progression, and you follow up with Kelon Burst, the removal spell included in the starter deck. At three mana and only sending one character back to reserve, it feels more like a necessary evil to include in your deck due to the scenarios where single-target removal is needed, but is ostensibly a bad card for its rate at three. You play the Burst, sending their character back to reserve, and you’ve still got this 3/3/3 bug sitting there which the opponent needs to rededicate resources to stopping.
Having these passive ways of generating presence or card advantage lets you take some time to play these less mana-efficient removal spells or slightly underpowered characters, since you’re primarily a synergy deck, rather than relying on individual card quality.
The other Landmarks included are more to do with card advantage in the form of Resupply or card draw, with the faction-shifted Ouroboros from Lyra giving you double the card selection with each instance of Resupply. In showcasing what the faction does, this starter deck has very few misses. It’s probably the one starter deck that has the most cohesive lineup of rares and actually benefits from playing up the curve with a reasonable top-end in the Hive.
Putting all discussion of Axiom and Sierra’s competitive place aside, this is a fantastic starter product that gets you introduced to card advantage in Altered, as well as how one of the more unique factions plays.
Upgrade Path for the Axiom Starter Deck
The game plan of our upgraded deck is very simple: churn through the deck until we find our Brassbug Hive via a ton of Resupplying, and then chain together cards that discard themselves from reserve to repeat a Permanent’s enters play ability to spew out a ton of Brassbugs with boosts each turn.
To achieve this, the deck will consist of characters that have the reserve ability to retrigger a Permanent or to reduce the cost by one mana, and ways to Resupply on entering in order to dig for the Hive. The spells will aim to interact with the opponent and to continue this chain of Resupply, and the Landmarks will either generate board presence as a long-game win condition or provide value in tandem with Sierra’s ability when played.
Characters
3x Foundry Mechanic (c)
3x Axiom Salvager (c)
3x Gibil (c)
3x Daring Porter (r)
3x Dr. Frankenstein (c)
These characters all serve the various ways in which the deck generates card advantage, with the Porter and Salvager providing early sources of Resupply, the Mechanic to cost reduce our Hives, and the Gibil as a fantastic new card to retrigger the Brassbug creation of the Hive, something that was normally reserved for rares in Beyond the Gates.
Spells
3x Frozen Delivery (c)
3x Mechanical Training (c)
3x Avalanche (c)
3x Kelon Burst (c)
In a similar vein to the character lineup, the spells here all try to provide value in the opportune moments, Avalanche being one of the new cards that can act as more than a one-for-one like Kelon Burst. The nice thing about such a situational lineup of spells that all shine in their specific moments is that it does make for an easy card to put into mana if the board state doesn’t call for it.
Again, I’ve really glossed over the non-Landmark cards in this deck upgrade because they all aim to facilitate the main game plan of getting to the Hive. The synergy-driven nature of Axiom means that a lot of your characters and spells are usually pound for pound worse than the opponent’s, and with the faction-shifted Haven currently suspended, there’s just no way you’ll be able to contest on raw stats alone.
Landmarks
3x Brassbug Hive (r)
3x The Nilam, Withered Tree (r, f)
3x Brassbug Hub (c)
3x Armored Jammer (c)
The real strength of the deck, all of these Landmarks trigger Sierra’s ability – with the exception of Armored Jammer, though that is a necessary evil to play as a cheap piece of interaction.
While the Brassbug Hives are the true endgame, and having two in play is hard for any opponent to overcome, the faction-shifted Nilam from Yzmir does a lot to bridge the gap until we can assemble the endgame pieces. As it also has the ability to Exhaust a card in reserve upon entering, any of those cards that retrigger a Permanent (Mechanical Training, Gibil, Dr. Frankenstein) can turn into disruptive pieces in a pinch that also generate a 2/2/2 Mana Moth the first time every turn. The way that Exhausted Resupply and Cooldown are worded means that they both go to the reserve and then are Exhausted, meaning the Nilam will see them be Exhausted in reserve and trigger in subsequent turns to make the Mana Moth.
Just be very careful to not overflow your reserve, as there is functionally no way to get rid of Exhausted cards outside of discarding down at the end of a day.
Similarly, the Brassbug Hubs are a cheap way to generate bodies every turn for a small mana investment and can contest in the early game while still leaving up enough mana to let us dig for the Hives. Again, all those effects that retrigger a permanent can prolong a Hub by putting three more counters on it to continue the stream of bugs until we can hit that marquee Hive.
Conclusion
Weirdly enough, I was very apprehensive about reviewing this starter deck and providing an upgrade path before the release of Trial by Frost since there was very little besides Hive turbo. There just wasn’t enough in the card pool to actually help you survive before getting to the Hive, and chances were the opposing deck would just run you over with double advancements. Now that there are these Characters and Landmarks that can generate board presence for cheaper costs and more reasonable stats, Axiom feels fun and interactive in a way that was once tedious and, dare I say, boring, having to find ways to get cards into reserve before anything exciting happened.
Next article, I’ll be finishing my starter deck review and upgrade series with Lyra. I hope you’ll stick around for it, as it is sure to be a challenge to improve such a flawed faction.
Check out our other Altered TCG starter deck upgrade guides here: Yzmir, Bravos, Ordis, Muna.
