The Resurgence of Frozen Thralls – Everything You Need To Know!

Introduction

Hey there, Raphterra here! Today, I’m bringing to you a supplementary article to our deck guide for Frozen Thralls.

After a short period of inactivity from Patch 3.10, the deck is now back to top form with a 56% winrate across the board. The deck is positioned to be a dominating ladder deck in the next days, as it has favored matchups against popular decks like Annie Twisted Fate, Twisted Fate Nami, and Aphelios Winding Light. I personally used this deck to climb to Top 6 Masters at 76% winrate ( 36 Wins, 11 Losses ).

If you want to see the deck in action after reading this article, check out my detailed video guide!

How Does The Deck Work?

To give you an idea of the deck build and the play pattern, please watch the following deck trailer for Lissandra Taliyah Thralls.

Lissandra Taliyah is a combo/control deck that wants to summon as many Frostguard Thralls as possible and win through big Overwhelm damage. The gameplan of the deck is pretty straighforward: summon Frozen Thralls, then stall the game while accelerating their countdowns with advance cards ( Clockwork Curator, Time in a Bottle, Draklorn Inquisitor, Imagined Possibilities ).

Lissandra levels up once you’ve summoned 2 Frostguard Thralls. Level 2 Lissandra can start controlling the board with her Ice Shards, while also protecting your Nexus by giving it Tough.

If you can’t finish off your opponent by attacking with Frostguard Thralls, the burn damage from Ice Shard and Blighted Ravine can win games for you as well.

The deck’s second champion, Taliyah, can duplicate Frozen Thralls to setup powerful combos. Sometimes, she can be your alternate win condition if she levels up.

The New Build For Frozen Thralls

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Lissandra Taliyah Thralls created by Raphterra • last updated 8 months ago

Standard

Combo

Control

Regions

24

16

Types

6

12

16

6

0

Rarities

6

7

12

15

Mana Cost

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7+

Champions (6)

3

Lissandra

3

5

Taliyah

3

landmarks (6)

1

Frozen Thrall

3

4

Blighted Ravine

3

followers (12)

2

Clockwork Curator

3

2

Harbinger of Thralls

3

3

Kindly Tavernkeeper

3

5

Draklorn Inquisitor

3

Spells (16)

1

Imagined Possibilities

2

1

Three Sisters

3

2

Time in a Bottle

3

4

Rite of Negation

2

5

Harsh Winds

1

6

Sands of Time

3

9

Buried in Ice

2

While this deck received its fair share of nerfs in Patch 3.10, the archetype has adapted its build and is now back on top. The most significant nerf to the archetype is the cost increase to Promising Future from 4 to 6.

The previous iteration of Frozen Thralls uses an all-in combo-heavy style gameplay with Promising Future and Taliyah. With the nerf, Promising Future is now too expensive to play efficiently. The new versions of Thralls lean more towards a stall / control play style.

The deck now focuses on using Draklorn Inquisitor to count down multiple Frozen Thralls in the mid game. Some deck lists prior to Patch 3.10 completely cut Draklorn Inquisitor, while now some builds even incorporate Ancient Hourglass to protect this Thrall accelerator.

The deck has slowed down a bit and now incorporates Buried In Ice and Harsh Winds as heavy control tools. These control tools combined with Sands of Time allows the deck to punish both open attacks and heavy developments.

General Mulligan

For the mulligan, you’re always going to keep your early Thrall generators: Frozen Thrall, Harbinger of Thralls, and Lissandra. If you don’t have any of these, you need to mulligan away everything and look for one of them.

Once you already have at least 1 Thrall generator, you want to look for and keep two combo pieces: Draklorn Inquisitor and Taliyah.

If you already have at least 1 Thrall generator and either Taliyah or Draklorn Inquisitor, you can also keep minor combo cards like Time in a Bottle or Sands of Time.

Depending on what you’re facing, you can also keep tech cards IF you already have an early Frozen Thrall generator:

• Kindly Tavernkeeper and Blighted Ravine are good to keep against aggressive burn decks e.g. Annie Jhin, Annie Gnar.
• Sands of Time and Buried in Ice are useful against midrange decks with explosive turns (e.g. Aphelios Winding Light, Nami Twisted Fate).
• You can keep Three Sisters and Harsh Winds against combo decks (e.g. Fizz Riven, Frozen Thralls Mirror).

Incorporating the Slower Control Mindset to a Combo Deck

• Focus on summoning more Thralls slowly over fewer Thralls quickly.
  Going turbo and using all your advance cards on one single Frozen Thrall will not lead to winning games. You want to spread out your advance cards,  summon multiple Thralls, and go for explosive attacks in the mid game.
  
• Incorporate the control mindset.
  If you already have Frozen Thralls counting down on board, you can start passing and playing reactively. Representing mana for your control spells will make your opponent think twice about their plays. Attacking can be punished with Sands of Time or Harsh Winds, while developing can be punished with Buried in Ice.

Planning Ahead and Deck Combos

The combos that you can execute in games usually revolve around Draklorn Inquisitor or Taliyah.

• If you have Draklorn Inquisitor, the game plan is to countdown multiple Frozen Thralls to 4 by Turn 5 or Turn 6. To make things simpler, you need to remember the following timings:
  
  • A Frozen Thrall that you play on Turn 1 will count down to 4 naturally by Turn 5. They will already be eligible for Draklorn Inquisitor’s effect without having to use any advance cards on them.
  • Following this logic, a Thrall played on Turn 2 will count down to 5 naturally by Turn 5. You might want to use Imagined Possibilities if you want to activate them with Draklorn Inquisitor on Turn 5.
  • With the same logic again, a Thrall played on Turn 3 would count down to 6 naturally by Turn 5. A Clockwork Curator or Time in a Bottle will make it eligible for Draklorn Inquisitor‘s effect on Turn 5.

• If you have Taliyah instead of Draklorn Inquisitor, your gameplan slightly changes. In this case, you want to focus advance cards on a single Frozen Thrall, then duplicate it with Taliyah.
  
  For example, a Turn 1 Frozen Thrall will naturally count down to 4 by Turn 5. If you use Imagined possibilities and Time in a Bottle on that Thrall, it will now count down to 1 by Turn 5. You can use Taliyah to duplicate it right before it summons a Frostguard Thrall on Turn 6.
  
  Remember to plan ahead and be careful not to over advance a landmark that you’re planning to duplicate with Taliyah.

Closing Words

After Patch 3.10, I thought Frozen Thralls would be dead due to the big nerf to Promising Future. After seeing players succeed with the deck, I decided to give it a try and it really worked well! I recommended that you start learning the deck if the play style looks fun to you!

Hope you enjoy playing this deck! If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me on YouTube, Discord, or Twitter!