[Order/Scholar] Pan/RI - Royal Blitz edition

[xatria]

Yes, boring and nothing new but it's useful for newcomer to know one of the popular combo decks. Since I already wrote it at Touch Arcade, may as well reposted here for documentation. I don't play it anymore because it's so straight forward, it's boring Combo is somewhat a misnomer because the deck itself can win with 2 x RI.. not necessarily RI with Pantheon.


Pantheon/RI - Royal Blitz

FINISHERS

5 x Royal Intervention, Blue, Action, cost 2/0 :
lose all your gold, for each gold lost, get +1 score at target region

2 x Pantheon, Blue, Site, cost 3/0, Infl 1 :
reset your score in this region to 0, whoever control this region wins

INCOME
3 x Plentiful Crop, Golden, Action, cost 0/+2

3 x Faux Pas, Blue, Action, cost 1/+1 :
Neutralize target memory costing 1 or less

5 x Knowledge is Power, Green, Action, cost 1/+1:
Draw a memory

5 x Forced Inheritance, Blue, Surprise, cost 2/+3

4 x Pilfer Supplies, Golden, Surprise, cost 3/0 :
regain all your gold

CARD DRAWERS

5 x Quick Study, Green, Action, cost 3/0 :
Search your sequence for a memory

4 x In-depth Analysis, Green, Action, cost 6/+1 :
Draw 3 memories

1 x Daring Experiment, Green, Action, cost 2/0 :
lose all your gold, for each 2 gold lost, draw a memory

CONTROL

4 x Court Order, Blue, Surprise, cost 4/+1 :
neutralize target launching memory

4 x Scientific Espionage, Green, Surprise, cost 4/0 :
neutralize target launching memory and put it in your hand

3 x History Glitch, Golden, Action, cost 5/0 :
reset all region scores to 0

2 x Monteriggioni, Golden, Site, cost 6/0, influence 0 :
All actions are surprises


TACTICS

INCOME BUILDING
Priority: 1) Faux Pas, 2) Plentiful Crop, 3) Forced Inheritance, 4) Knowledge is Power
- Faux Pas against opponent first memory which is likely income booster goes a long way toward outpacing them in terms of income
- If you have Forced Inheritance and Knowledge is Power, wait until you have 2 gold to launch Forced Inheritance, it's faster because it's surprise
- get to 12 gold ASAP (or ideally 15 gold for Pan/RI)

CONTROL AND FINISH
- Tutor and draw cards to get 2 x RI + Pilfer Supplies , 1 x RI and Pantheon
- Play them in rapid succession (RI, Pilfer, RI -or- Pan, RI) to leave smaller window to response
- Always play 1st RI on region with opponent least score
- You can use 13+ gold RI to wrest region control from opponent
- Watch for major threats and get ready to counter them (e.g. judgment day, opposing combos, big sites and agents)
- If necessary, reset scores using History Glitch which should buy you some time.
- If your opponent is (likely) playing counters, then you want to wait to have Monteriggioni so they can't counter your RI.. or you can just risk it and it's countered, just find more RIs and Pantheons.
- Against action-based combo decks, do not use Monteriggioni unless you're ahead of them to finish safely.. Use Scientific Espionage and Court Order against their finishers
- Before launching Pantheon, you want counter and enough extra gold to protect it

NOTES
This version is rush focused not control focus hence Blitz name.

Cards that I took out from earlier versions:
Lassitude, Royal Decree, Animus Reboot : nice agent and site control but History Glitch is enough to buy enough time to execute the finishers
Big Sites: can control 1 region and use just 1 RI on another but they slow down the deck and vulnerable to site removal/control
Big Agents: too many agent removal/control and slower

Possible Troubles:
- counters (duh!) but it can be mitigated with Monteriggioni, or simply shrugged off and try again. There are 5 copies of RI for a reason. Also I dont think it needs 5 Pantheons because they are useless without RI.
- super fast rush (e.g. with Political Patronage)
- discards.. counter them!

[crazygambit]

Interesting. I wonder if would still do well today since most decks have been tweaked to deal with this. Basically if you make a deck that auto loses to this, you're doing it wrong.

Other possible trouble comes from Thief + Borgia Tower, or noble Borgia Tower. Animus Reboot works much better against both, since they'll be pumping their agents to the point that history glitch will buy you less than a day. (And they do run counters nowadays).

[The Rancord]

As long as the bug exssist monteriggioni its just not nice to use it.

I like ure gold build up, allmost the same as mine, cept I dislike pliffer supplies.

I use 3 Cesare 3 Leonardo 3 Royal Intervention in my control deck, and allthought I cant rely on a single ally to win me the game, cause of sudden exhaust ultimate end, I get through allways.

But of course if enemies start using Pre-emptive strike and Courtorder its ending evil.

[crazygambit]

Jan 5, 2012 14:15:09 GMT -5 The Rancord said:

As long as the bug exssist monteriggioni its just not nice to use it.

I like ure gold build up, allmost the same as mine, cept I dislike pliffer supplies.

I use 3 Cesare 3 Leonardo 3 Royal Intervention in my control deck, and allthought I cant rely on a single ally to win me the game, cause of sudden exhaust ultimate end, I get through allways.

But of course if enemies start using Pre-emptive strike and Courtorder its ending evil.

What bug are you referring to?

[The Rancord]

i counter ure monteriggione, but then all my surprise actiions are no more surprise, and I cant counter ure Royal intervention anyway

[crazygambit]

Jan 5, 2012 14:19:11 GMT -5 The Rancord said:

i counter ure monteriggione, but then all my surprise actiions are no more surprise, and I cant counter ure Royal intervention anyway

Wow. That's a major one.

[Raphael Majere]

Wow, i read this before but was not thinking deep into it.

That bug needs to be fix. Otherwise, the Pan/RI deck will be unstoppable.

Heirloom (Surprise) can tutor Monteri too.

[xatria]

It's probably not that great now. I played this a lot before Christmas.

Pilfer Supplies is essential to pull off 2 x RI back to back with only 12 gold. Without it, it's just way too slow and the opponent can wrest control of the first RI region.

Against thieves and noble rush, I think I would rather use Lassitude which of course do not work against site rush. This deck isn't trying to control the board, just buy enough time to pull off RIs.

Launching other memories cost gold and time which has to be carefully considered.. If you can pull off the win before opponent.. who cares if they have 10 and 9 in other regions.

The perfect hand would be 3 x Forced Inheritance, 2 x RI and 1 x Pilfer Supplies.. It's all set to go off at the start of day 2.

[xatria]

If I were to take out Montegrionni, I think I would put Pick Your Poison instead, e.g. to remove counters. It's not really essential unless you face a deck with tons of counters.

When I play this, I get RI countered here and there but it can recover without Montegrionni. There was a time that RI got stolen and I stole it back.. That was funny.

PS. forgot to mention discard does work well against this. Updating the main post.

[Raphael Majere]

I honestly don't see a lot of Pan/RI now.

In fact, I've not seen anyone play it for past 3 days and I play around 20+ games a day.

IMO, i prefer my own deck. I am using it for grinding, so i am kinda apologetic to some of you here, facing you guys in the game. My guess is that I will get stuck around rank 40/30+ etc.

Pan/RI's a brainless deck(esp mine) as I've mentioned before as well.

My deck runs very very fast esp when I already have Pan/RI/Pilifier in my hand.

I am not proud to run it, so sometimes when I meet you guys in battle, I will switch to another deck after our game, just to prevent playing the same deck vs the same people in the next battle.

[xatria]

Like I said, it's boring to play However it's a strong deck and pretty fast. It would be interesting how it fares in real competitive settings vs just random matching we have now.

[Raphael Majere]

In a real competition, I would run a Blue/Green, 8 Counters/Reset/Cesare/RI deck (I don't have enough Forced Charity to run black)

[The Rancord]

In a real competition id play something with Media, The headstart u can get out of political patronage *or freewin * is ridiculous.

[Ringel]

The saving grace of Pan/RI is it is over quick. That and winning vs one is especially satisfying (though sadly rare with my card pool)

[crazygambit]

Jan 5, 2012 15:35:45 GMT -5 The Rancord said:

In a real competition id play something with Media, The headstart u can get out of political patronage *or freewin * is ridiculous.

True, but it's still a gamble. What if the fatty you dropped gets a Surprise Exhaustion cast on it. You've lost 2 cards for their 1 (more if it's Nichollo Machiavelly). Also while Political Patronage might very well be the best card you can have in your starting hand, it's pretty much dead weight in the mid/end game.