Premium Budget Deck: Shadow Paladin (Claret)

So it's been a while....

We're Still Here

For those unfamiliar with me, I'm Inferno, a new addition to the writing team of Budgetfight Vanguard. Nice to meet you all! I've been playing the game since 2013, and met the Budgetfight members on Discord thereafter. Recently, I thought it'd be cool to try and write an article. There hasn't been too much to discuss in terms of standard format as the limited card pool makes deck-building fairly straightforward. In Premium, though, we have a much larger cardpool to work with, and plenty to talk about as a result. 

Anyway, I thought it'd be nice just to say, "hey we're not dead" and also start to get back to showcasing decks. All of us here look forward to creating more articles as the game develops, and we thank all of you for your continued support. 

So anyway, how is deck-building in premium going?

Budget Deck: Shadow Paladin (Raging)

You Mad?

With Divine Dragon Caper we got Reprints. And among those reprints was Raging Form Dragon. Who is now $3-4.

Yep. Today's post is Ragings. I can finally call Raging a budget deck.

Raging Form is a really powerful deck,  one of the meta Shadow Paladin decks actually (although they are getting beaten out by Diablo at the moment). They're really powerful and really fun. He even got some support in the last booster set.

Before we start, I should talk about Rapt. A bunch of people were disappointed with it. A bunch. And it wasn't hard to see why, with a huge cost of Retire 2 and Discard 2 Abyss Dragon Grade 3s. But! I found that it was actually really easy to get three or even four attacks with Rapt given the right build.  And three to four vanguard attacks usually ends games, if I remember correctly. Rapt is a solid card.  And he's $6-7. Cheap. Effective. Deadly. Perfect

Budget Deck: Shadow Paladins (Ildona)

...ahem...

Well, G NEXT era has been here for about a month or two and it's about time I start writing for the new era!

We now have a new squadmate for Chrono in the name of Kazuma Shouji.

He uses the new Luard unit and Ritual deck, which makes a pretty great budget deck if I do say so myself, but that's not what we're talking about today. Today we're talking about probably the best rare retrain of an old unit that Bushi's ever printed. I'm talking about Enticing Mage, Ildona.

Ildona's a fan favorite Shadow Paladin unit from back when and it's great to see him back in the limelight.

First off, he's the Ritual Liddy clone, searching out Ritual units from the top 5 cards of the deck. Pretty standard, but what makes him amazing is his Ritual skill. On-attack sack 2 units to draw a card? That's some really easy hand-to-field advantage right there. Really easy. And with the likes of David and Arsur? Oh he's just great. He also gets +3000, which makes 21k columns with 7k boosters easy. Easy advantage. Easy powerboosts. All in a Rare. Just a perfect budget unit. Add in some of that good generic Shadow Paladin support and bam! You got yourself a pretty great deck.

Budget Deck: Shadow Paladin ("Diablo")

WEAKNESS IS A SIN

With the Aurageyser reprint confirmed, it's time to talk about one of the best decks that utilizes Aurageyser. [Hint: It's not Claret]. "Diablo" has risen in the meta as one of the most consistent Shadow Paladin decks around. While it doesn't have the early game of the RFD/Abyss combo deck, Diablo decks have a powerful calling engine as well as field control once the stride game begins. Having access to Aurageyser, "Diablo", and Spectral "Diablo" is very deadly. And the best thing about all of this? Diablo decks are cheap, even cheaper if you purchased the Ren Legend deck because it'll only take a few upgrades to finish off that "Diablo" deck.

Update Deck: Claret

Weakness is a sin

So. Claret's got some new toys.

The support that Claret has gotten from GBT-06 is good. Really good. Claret finally gets a Glimmer Breath clone, along with a great new starter and dedicated unflipper. Shadows in general even have a great new Effect Stand Trigger. And hey, it's cheap as hell. 

I've found that a Claret deck can get HUGE amounts of card advantage and deck cycling when built right, even without Aurageyser. This helps make a budget Claret deck actually quite viable. Of course we'll be sacrificing a bit aggressive power, but the deck functions perfectly fine. Crit pressure with Claret and PBDiablo will make up for it.

Anyways, let's get on with the blog!

Budget Deck: Shadow Paladin (Claret)

WARNING: This deck sucks flat out and shouldn't exist, and this blog is here just for fun. You have been warned.

How does his head even
look like? Is that
Raging Form Dragon?

So, today, I'll be discussing about one of the new cards we got from the latest set. The name is--- Claret Sword Dragon! This is officially our Strider for Shadow Paladin. At first look, it seems preety typical, but people, I see a lot of potential with this guy.

What? No not the GB2. I mean that second skill that lets you call a Grade 1 for a CB. It is a straight up +1, but it's quality +1. That power boost of 2k gets really good. It doesn't seem like much - but it is.

Unfortunately Claret is a RRR, and a $10 card. Well... You can try to get one, then run 4 of his searcher and get away with it. Although there's no gurantee that it'll work well though.

Budget Deck: Shadow Paladin (Revengers)

Shadow Paladins is another meta clan that's expensive, with the same logic as Narukami. It's not Shadow Paladins that are expensive (Althought it's the clan that gets the most broken support) it's the main build of Shadow Paladins that are expensive. It's Phantom Blaster Abyss that's expensive, being about $40 or so. But hey, even if Abyss is expensive as hell and unfit for a budget deck, it doesn't mean that Revengers doesn't have a budget deck. In fact, thanks to Abyss everything aside from Abyss is cheap.

Grade 3 

What do you mean I'm a girl?

So firstly, this is the cornerstone of our Shadow Paladin build. It's... just amazing. Don't underestimate a consistent 30k 2 crit attack. I personally love everything about this card. And he's so underused and underestimated. It makes him cheap as hell. It's not even $1! I've never seen a more budget friendly key card in my life.

Although, the mate of this card is a bit more expensive than the Leader (Due to the fact that this can be used with Abyss) so I'd run 1-2 of the mate. It's more than enough. Trust me, I had a Revenger deck focused on this guy and it was amazing.