Deck of the Day: Discard Aggro

Discard Aggro is not as straightwforward as you might think and can easily switch gears to adapt to an unfavorable meta.
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Trading discard created by den • last updated 2 years ago
Standard
Discard Aggro
  • Origins

In my opinion, Discard Aggro has been the number one aggressive deck for a while. Discard always finds a way to be competitive – just like another iconic deck that pairs Noxus with PnZ, Ezreal Draven.

This season, Discard started off strong, immediately appearing as a solid answer to the early dominance of Lee Sin decks. However, once the environment switched towards other board-centric archetypes, the deck started struggling.

Now with Demacia back in the mix, and with almost every Ionia deck packing several copies of Spirit’s Refuge, Discard looks like it just can’t race most of the current meta opponents.

Being a big fan of the Discard Aggro myself, I decided to work on it in order to make it feel better in the current environment. Focusing on protecting your important pieces and not relying on the usual board-flood gameplan, this particular build of the archetype might be what allows the archetype to stay relevant in the metagame.

  • Gameplan

If possible, you obviously want to pressure the opponent and get some important damage in early on. But this deck can afford to just build the board while not necessarily pushing for tons of damage in the first few turns.

The important idea here is to protect our ‘Three Musketeers’: Draven, Jinx, and Crowd Favorite, who will be responsible for most of the damage during the game.

It’s an environment that promotes constant trading – that is why we are running three copies of Survival Skills and two Draven’s Biggest Fans. Survival Skills are being used as pseudo-Barrier of sorts for our most important units so that we could protect them from the Vulnerable/Challengers and block against aggro.

The other interesting inclusion is the Ballistic Bot, which replaces what usually is an Arena Battlecaster, a unit that is looking mediocre in the current environment. The bot synergizes greatly with Draven and his Spinning Axes, and grows to be a threat the enemy has to deal with. In matchups that go long, the continuous damage from Ignitions also enables a potential burn plan, helped by Super Mega Death Rocket! and Get Excited!

Overall, the focus in this version has shifted from the pure number of units we can develop to how well we can protect and pressure the opponent with our most important units.

  • Verdict

Discard Aggro isn’t in the best shape currently, it is a good middle-of-the-pack deck that doesn’t look like it has any particular appeal compared to other archetypes.

Even more so with the return of Demacia Ionia lists lately (Fiora Shen, Zed Lulu, Jarvan Shen), a board-centric deck looks like a bad idea to run into these builds.

But when we look closer, Discard still is that deck that keeps finding ways to be relevant in almost any metagame, and because Draven is such an incredibly good champion, there is a lot of merit in building around him. And what Discard allows us to do is to be flexible, something that doesn’t happen so often with other aggressive archetypes.


If you’ve enjoyed this deck, or just want to share your own decks with the community, you can find other fellow RuneterraCCG readers on Discord

Have questions about this specific build? Feel free to send your questions to my Twitter or book some coaching here, or just tag me to share your achievements with the list!

den
den

Den has been in love with strategy games for as long as he can remember, starting with the Heroes of Might and Magic series as a kid. Card games came around the middle school - Yugioh and then Magic. Hearthstone has been his real breakthrough and he has been a coach, writer, and caster on the French scene for many years now. Although it took him a bit to get into Legends or Runeterra, his EU Seasonal Tournament win was the perfect start to get involved in the community. He now coaches aspiring pro players and writes various articles on the game. Find him on Twitter at @den_CCG!

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