Images courtesy of Equinox

Hello everyone, and welcome back to my ongoing series of reviewing and upgrading each of the six starter decks in Altered TCG. With Trial by Frost releasing a whole new disruptive mechanic, the spell-based faction of Yzmir got a huge boost to its card pool. So let’s dive right into the starter deck!

Yzmir Starter Deck

Here’s the complete decklist for the Yzmir Starter Deck:

Hero

Akesha & Taru

Characters

3x Studious Disciple (c)

3x Yzmir Stargazer (c)

3x Lady of the Lake (c)

2x Baba Yaga (c)

1x Baba Yaga (r)

2x Alice (c)

1x Alice (r)

1x Tooth Fairy (r)

1x Monolith Archivist (r, f)

2x Kadigiran Alchemist (c)

1x Kadigiran Alchemist (r)

2x Dorothy Gale (c)

1x Dorothy Gale (r)

2x Sakarabru (c)

1x Sakarabru (r)

Spells

1x Beauty Sleep (r, f)

3x Off You Go! (c)

3x Spy Craft (c)

3x Banishing Gate (c)

3x Kraken’s Wrath (c)

If I could distill Yzmir’s identity as a faction into one word, it would be: spells. Two out of the three Yzmir heroes play naturally into spell-based strategies, with Afanas actively wanting you to play cheap spells, and Akesha being more inclined to lean into a control playstyle that sees a lot of higher cost spells that can two-for-one the opponent. It plays less to the board in the form of flooding the expeditions with bodies and relies more on removal spells and a single character to win lanes and progress.

Akesha, the hero featured in the starter deck, plays extremely well in slower decks that seek to win a long game and to grind out an opponent by trading multiple characters in a single exchange for one removal spell. After You cannot be understated in how strong it is in Altered where decks are cramming in as many one-drops as possible as a way to pass priority and maintain tempo. Being able to freely do that as an action when you’re going first essentially ensures that you at least will always be making your first move with some face-up information from the opponent. This lets you strategically pick expeditions to contest and to force more cards out of the opponent before committing to a play.

The starter deck does a good enough job of having both the hero’s playstyle and faction identity show through its choice of characters and the slew of removal spells. There’s plenty of Sabotage and ways to push characters back to reserve either stapled onto bodies like Dorothy Gale or on the ever-powerful Off You Go! Banishing Gate is one of the game’s few pieces of true unconditional removal, and being priced at four mana really showcases how tempo-focused the game is. Anyone who has played even a few games of Altered can attest to how painful it feels to take the whole turn off to remove a single character or landmark and essentially allow a free double advance.

Kraken’s Wrath is also a sweet inclusion here as essentially one of the few sweepers in Beyond the Gates, though gating it by both amount of characters and combined hand cost makes it less effective against token-heavy strategies like Ordis. Spy Craft is a great way to crawl ahead by attaching resupply to compensate for a lack of stats that a character would provide and the faction-shifted Beauty Sleep showcases some of the cheap removal that a more aggressive strategy like Afanas can benefit from. 

My biggest issue with this starter deck is, as you may have guessed, in the characters. Much like the Bravos starter, there’s this expectation that you’re meant to tap out along the curve, which in practice just leaves you open to be advanced on in the other expedition. Cards like Sakarabru and Dorothy are a step in the right direction, and Kadigiran Alchemist is perfectly designed to at least advance when played from hand and being a cheap way to pass priority from reserve. My issue is with this seemingly random spread of two-drops that feel much less focused around this idea of control or even tempo and more just about playing cards for the sake of playing cards.

Like the Muna review, I’ll provide two different upgrade paths, one that focuses more on the hard control aspects, and another that will utilize a lot more of the Exhaust mechanic in Trial by Frost and its build-around landmark, The Nilam.

Yzmir Spells

It’s only fitting we start in the spell suite, as that’s what makes Yzmir truly shine. Both builds of this deck can make use of this removal package, as it tries to cover as many bases as possible and is all common, freeing up some of those precious rare slots.

3 Off You Go! (c)

2 Spy Craft (c)

2 Banishing Gate (c)

2 Small Step, Giant Leap (c)

2 Magical Training (c) or (r)

These 11 spells will be a great starting point in any Akesha build, offering versatile removal, Sabotage, and card advantage. Small Step, Giant Leap is one of those cards that just feels amazing to win with, and is a great way to close out a game when it gets tight. I can see the Spy Crafts being cut eventually for better characters, but for now it’s a serviceable card that is also included in the starter.

Yzmir Characters

3 Tooth Fairy (c)

3 Baba Yaga (c) or (r)

3 Kadigiran Alchemist (c) or (r)

3 Studious Disciple (c)

3 Pamola (c)

From a starting point, these are the characters you should run. Most of these are already in the starter deck in some rarity, except for additional copies of Tooth Fairy (it should’ve been in the starter to begin with). I’d recommend rare copies of Kadigiran Alchemist and potentially Baba Yaga since the bump in stats is actively something you’re looking for when trying to advance an expedition with a single character. Pamola is from Trial by Frost, but as a two-drop with an attribute in three, it also functions as a good disruptive piece with its reserve ability that makes it flexible to be an auto-include.

Control

2x Grand Endeavour (r, f)

2x Kraken’s Wrath (r)

2x Blizzard (c)

3x Ordis Carrier (r, f)

3x Monolith Archivist (r, f)

1x Freeze (r)

This is not for the faint-hearted. Focused on absolute hard control that grinds wins out via sneaking in a Grand Endeavour when shields are down, this package is for long games, slow games, and enjoying every single second of it. Monolith Archivist is my favorite card here, as it holds the ground extremely well and trades upwards in terms of how many characters they’d need to commit to it. This ties in well with the Blizzards that can just annihilate an entire expedition – especially fun if they’ve just boosted all their characters or overcommitted.

Exhausting the cards in reserve also means they’re forced to discard a lot of cards at the end of turn, which is similar to forcing half a card’s worth of disadvantage on the opponent. I highly recommend the rare Kraken’s Wrath as it bumps up both the character and total hand cost limit, while still retaining the same hand cost, making it a strict upgrade and something that will save your life when need be.

FREEZE

3x The Nilam, Withered Tree (c)

3x Rime Frost (c)

2x Snowball Commando (r)

2x Belasanka (r)

1x Vaike, Energy Pioneer (r)

2x Daring Porter (r)

Trial by Frost brings with it the Exhaust mechanic, which in many cases can function better than Sabotage due to stalling out cards and forcing an overflowing reserve. This is best seen in The Nilam, Withered Tree, Yzmir’s new build-around landmark. The best part about this landmark is that it actually does something when it enters, and although the 2/2/2 Mana Moth it creates is not worth the four hand-cost, a minor speedbump and a body for a card that will continually churn out Moths over the course of the game is an amazing resource. Pair that with a bevy of characters that Exhaust on entering, and it’s like every minor piece of card advantage gained can snowball into more progressed expeditions, forcing more cards out to answer, and overflowing the reserve, almost like a painful cycle of forcing the opponent to keep up.

The advantage of Exhaust as a mechanic is also how it allows the cards to be more over-statted that on a card with Sabotage, and at times is functionally the same. Cards like Vaike and the Daring Porter both also help generate card advantage through resupplying that Yzmir normally doesn’t get, and also allows you to play through the Exhausted Resupply, churning through your reserve which is one of Yzmir’s biggest weaknesses.

Concluding Thoughts on the Yzmir Starter Deck

Unlike previous reviews and upgrades, I’m not going to leave you with a final recommended deck list; it really is up to your own personal preference and playstyle. The best part is that you can really mix and match between hard control and the Exhaust packages, and go as deep into triggering the Nilam every turn as you want by loading up on more cards that have the reserve action to exhaust a card. This is truly a faction that you can agonize over every single card and have each individual spell play a role. A brewer’s dream.

Join me next time, as I tackle the remaining two decks, and the dreaded task of upgrading the Lyra faction starter.

Don’t forget to check out the recent Suspended and Banned updates for Altered. And check out our guides for the other starter decks: Lyra, Axiom, Bravos, Ordis, Muna.