Deck of the Day: Unitless Howling Abyss

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Unitless Howling Abyss created by Dragonguy • last updated 2 years ago

Regions

Types

Rarities

Mana Cost

landmarks (6)

Spells (34)

Hello everyone, my name is Dragon and I welcome you all to another Deck of the Day!

What is ‘Deck of the Day’?

The goal of these short write-ups is to regularly introduce you to the new exciting decks and archetypes that are popping up constantly in the revitalized meta of Patch 2.11.

Each day, we’ll be showcasing one list that we think is worth your time. We’ll then follow it up with a commentary to cover the deck’s origin, its gameplan, and, in the end, we’ll be giving it a preliminary verdict.

We hope you’ll find the decks we share entertaining, and let us know what you think about this new format!

For today’s deck, I wanted to showcase a list with an interesting premise. We’ve seen championless decks in Legends of Runeterra in the past, but this brew raises the stakes even higher. Welcome to the Unitless Howling Abyss!

Origins

I stumbled upon this list on Reddit – it was originally discovered and posted by the user thelolhounds, who was saying in the headline that the deck registered a 60% win rate after over 50 games played. This was definitely intriguing, and something I decided to look into.

Gameplan

This deck’s plan is quite simple: stop your opponent from having any units of their own on the board, and use The Howling Abyss to generate enough value to win the game.

With Abyss now at 6 mana, it is a win-con that can come online sooner than many other control conditions.

As for every other single card in this deck, the goal is to simply stall, stall, and stall. You have pings to kill off small units, sweepers to deal with wide boards, Vengeance and The Ruination for larger units, and freezes to help sustain HP.

The only card in the deck that doesn’t kill opposing units besides Howling Abyss is the Catalyst of Aeons, which lets you set up your Abyss a turn earlier.

When playing this deck, you should always mulligan for Abyss, as it is essentially your only win condition.

Verdict: 5.0 out of 10

The fact that this deck has no other win condition than The Howling Abyss can be seen as the problem. You literally have no way to kill the opponent without it, except by having them mill out. This makes the deck susceptible to landmark removal.

Another thing about this list is that it has no draw, which makes it inconsistent in regards to finding its Abyss on time. With a full mulligan, there is roughly a 75% chance for you to find an Abyss by turn 6 – in other words, you will fail to timely find your only win-con in a quarter of all games with the deck!

Finally, without units, you can’t make any proactive plays until Abyss, which makes the deck awkward in some matchups.

Despite these flaws, the deck can still feel powerful. The plethora of removal and healing tools allows it to easily stall out the game long enough for its Abyss win condition to come online. Level 2 champions are premium units and have powerful abilities that will allow you to wrest control of the game from your opponent.

I do believe that The Howling Abyss could act as a solid finisher for an SI/FR control style deck, but I do think this list needs more work and tuning.

The deck can definitely be fun to play and it helps you to get a good grasp of a control style of play in LoR. However, if you are looking to climb ranks, then this might not be the best deck to use right now.

Thank you all for reading, and I hope I’ve given you all a bit of insight into what happens when you peer too far into the abyss.