Deck of the Day: Veigar Viktor

A successful Veigar deck without Shadow Isles? Shane wants to believe!
  • Origins

Hello all, Shane here, your friendly Viktor enthusiast.

Following up on my previous Viktor Pranks deck that was highlighted in this article, this new Viktor build explores the various synergies that Bandle City has with my favorite champion from Piltover.

This deck idea stemmed from one simple question: ‘Can you build a successful Veigar deck without Shadow Isles?’ The main problem is that without Shadow Isles, we only have 2 ways to generate DarknessVeigar himself, and the Darkbulb Acolyte. Also, without Senna, we would not be able to change its speed.

So what could be done to compensate for it? Let’s dive into the reasons behind the build first, and after that, I’ll cover the gameplan.

  • Gameplan

First, I started looking for ways to greatly reduce the cost of your Darkness. Stilted Robemaker does this, but Viktor’s level 2 also reduces the cost of your created cards.

But the main card that makes this all come together, is actually Iterative Improvement. This spell brings you 2 main benefits – it creates more Stilted Robemakers to further reduce the cost of your Darkness, or it can create more Darkbulb Acolytes to compensate for our lack of Darkness generators.

The rest of the synergies fall into place quite neatly, as we already know that Piltover and Bandle City have a lot of versatility between them when combined. And also, Darkbulb Acolyte has Augment so this deck was practically meant to be!

At its core, this is a control deck. We are running a heavy amount of removal, including Darkness generators. As with most control decks, we want to stabilize our early board in order to build up to a particular win condition.

The first and most obvious win condition is to stick Viktor on the board and grow him to insane power with a lot of keywords. This is always a possibility with Viktor decks, but rarely a guarantee.

Our second option is fully focused on growing the power of our Darkness. You do this by keeping Veigar on the board and striking with the Twisted Catalyzer. This leads to leveling up Veigar and eventually nuking your opponent’s Nexus with a huge Darkness.

Mirror Mage helps top off both of these win conditions, by duplicating your created cards such as Darkness itself or Viktor’s Hex Core Upgrades. In order to stabilize this plan even further, we run some Pranks, additional cards that create other cards, and plenty of draw spells.

This deck is very reliant on its champions, so typically we want to keep them in our starting hands. Unfortunately, we can not afford to do this if we are going against a pure aggro deck, because both of our champions simply take too long to get going and don’t have solid enough stats to help defend.

Besides our champions, other units that you really want to keep in your starting hand are the Otterpus and any of our three 2-drops. I also typically will keep Thermogenic Beam and Mystic Shot in order to have key removal that is needed against most decks.

  • Verdict

Control decks are struggling a bit right now, and I will admit this is not the strongest one out there. Realistically, Darkness with Shadow Isles is a more straightforward and consistent game plan.

Where this deck does shine is in creativity and versatility. The creation mechanics really let your skill as a pilot shine as you will constantly have a multitude of options at your hands.

It is up to you to put those skills to your best possible use in any given situation to get the most value out of your cards and stall until Grand Overseer Veigar can lead you to a devastating victory!

Shane
Shane

Shane has played strategy card games since before he could read, thanks to his older brother teaching him how to memorize what each card did. Currently, he is the Host of the Twin Sunz Podcast, a Legends of Runeterra podcast and community with offerings for players of all levels of skill.

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