Yeah, this is going to be tough. Looking over the vault, the most glaring weakness is the lack of cc (except aflatoxin, but that is way too slow and will backfire on your very soon anyways). You have a rush option in Elite Fireflies, SoB and Turquoise Nymphs/Phase Salvagers, but a rush is not the best idea. Darkness has all the tools to shut down such a fragile rush, with vagger, nm and devs perhaps complemented with cc. There's actually no darkness deck it'll consistently beat. Air's suite of fog/wings/tstorm/shockwave makes this deck of 2/4 hp critters VERY risky, but it does have a chance vs BNymph Duo, RT Splash, Catatitans and slow starts from other decks.
Darkness's decks are a problem, especially since our lack of cc makes their mono very safe. So we just need to conjure up some cc! Sounds like a paradox? You're damn right:
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4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 5fu 5fu 6uq 6uq 6uq 6uq 6uq 6uq 786 786 786 7ee 7ee 7ee 8poThis deck is VERY versatile, which is a good thing as darkness will be tricky. You have a few options:
1. If facing a rushy deck (dragon/gargoyle mono, grabbow) get a Shard Golem with paradox out fast. You want to have exactly three SoSe in hand and less than 3 of the other shards, so try to set your hand up like that! It is right to not play pillars and force discard of a 4th SoSe if it is stuck in your hand. In case of extra SoBs, just play them. Fast. Once you have set up the cc golem, you have a very strong advantage. Keep the pressure on him and try to win before he can come back with nm or dusk shenanigans.
2. If facing one of the stally decks (Siphonary, Entropy Stall) you need to play a more careful game. Use SoSe for card advantage, and try to play cards so that you are one step ahead of their answers. Hold onto your SoBs as you don't want to hasten your own demise, and play them with SoI as your strongest threat.
3. If you have a god draw with a couple of pillars and a hand full of shards, then you should ignore the above and just get out that shard golem to finish him. Even vs RT actually, because the chances of you winning the slow game is pretty slim.
The
SoI Wiki Page is a good thing to reference while playing.
Alright, we have scraped up a decent deck vs Darkness, but that has removed our only decent rush. That's still alright though, because having a 60% winrate deck is better than scraping out two 40% win rate decks. I'm not joking. 60% winrate means 68.256% chance to win the match, but if you have two 40% winrate decks the chance of you winning at least one match is only 53.411%. Even if you counted 2 wins as twice the value of 1 win, you have 0.6348 wins vs 0.6826+ wins. So now we find a decent deck for air without the cards already place in the above.
SoB-less rushes will be weak though, due to a much slower gameplan. With SoB, you could punish your opponent for having high cost cards like BNymphs and Dragons and slow cards like cata. But if both decks play linearly as normal, the vulnerability to cc is very glaring. I'll just say that it is too risky due to cc and wings.
Ok then, what do we have that resists cc and wings? Well, the one and only:
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55k 55k 55k 55k 55k 55k 55k 55k 568 568 576 576 576 5uu 5uu 5uu 5uu 5uu 744 744 744 744 744 744 748 748 748 748 748 75m 8ptLS Dragons boasts a very strong answer to both Wyrms and BNymphs due to pseudo lobotomy, and can challenge air's duos with a great quanta draw thanks to BNymph. You hold a strong chance vs general rushes thanks to vampire dragons being very strong hitters. Just hope you draw the quanta as needed!
