Danger: High Voltage

More than half the cards in this tournament winning deck piloted by Mouche are Power sources. "I heard Alessi is still free to grow" raises the question: When is too much Power just enough?

Power to those who seek it

Eternal card game requires a minimum of 25 Power Cards in order for your deck to be valid. Decks that may be especially Power-hungry will commonly include a few extras, sometimes up to a total of 28. Maybe 30 if you really want to push it.

But at the Eternal Tournament Series recent S3W3 event, Mouche took first-place piloting a deck that includes no less than 32 Power Cards.

Overall there is a grand total of 39 Power sources when you include Find the Way and Auralian Merchant.

That means over half of the cards in this Van de Graaf generator of a deck are Power sources. For most lists, that would be a recipe for a disastrous flood.

But as the first-place finish demonstrates, it somehow works in this case.

The first step: Innovation

With all that Power you might expect to see some high-cost finishers such Sword of the Sky King or maybe even a Novaquake Titan.

But nope, the curve for Mouche's deck tops out at four. Hmm...okay. Maybe the deck has a lot of high Influence requirements then?

That's not it either. None of the cards require triple Influence. And the steepest Influence cost to play any card in the entire deck is for Sword of Unity.

If not greedy Power costs or Influence requirements then, what is all that Power for exactly?

After a closer look, it becomes clear that there are a specific combination of reasons why an overload of Power works for this deck in particular.

Take this

On the most obvious level, Power does here what you might expect it to by ensuring that impacful 1- and 2-drops can be played on time. Although Teacher of Humility, Awakened Student and Alessi, Combrei Archmage are all low-cost units in terms of Power, they each have Influence requirements that are a little trickier.

Unlike an Aggro deck that plays low-cost single Influence units such as Oni Ronin or Crownwatch Paladin, Mouche's deck needs to work a bit harder to meet or in the early stages.

The pay-off is that each of these units might quickly run away with a game. Any one of them can lead to a strong start. And a quick glance at the Power Odds table shows that Mouche has a very favorable chance of being able to play all of them on curve.

Mind over body

Speaking of Awakened Student, the 2-cost Combrei mystic can be very useful when it comes to converting your Power into a bigger board presence. The mechanic is called Empower for a reason.

With one or more of these guys in play, your Power cards essentially become zero-cost spells that might as well read "Give your Awakened Students +1/+1."

It is also worth mentioning that (in addition to being a fifth pull for Crownwatch Press-gang), Wandering Wisp can become a very powerful threat that quickly snowballs after . This helps to explain why the deck includes a shocking ten Time Sigils.

Standard tactics

Perhaps most importantly of all however, the Power base for this list takes full advantage of a new type Power card that was introduced with the Fall of Argenport.

In the early game, Temple Standard and Crownwatch Standard both provide you with Depleted power when you need it.

However - once you reach a Maximum Power of five - these sources conveniently Transmute into efficient, low-cost spells: the Tactics.

Mouche calitalizes on the potential of these new cards by including a full contingent: all eight of the Standards that are available to Combrei can be found in this list.

Finding a way

Crownwatch Tactic and Temple Tactic are useful on their own. But they are even more valuable when they become fuel for Alessi, who grows with each spell played.

So much so that the pilot of this deck will often want to hold on to the Standards and play Undepleted power sources instead, even if it means leaving one Power on the table at the end of their turn. It is one of the most important reasons why this deck manages to avoid flooding.

In a similiar fashion, Find the Way serves as both a power source and a buff to Alessi and Awakened Student. It's always nice to draw an extra Power and get an extra card thanks to Echo. But when those cards are also spells that grow your units, you are getting twice the value.

Free to grow

When you take into consideration that 11 of the 39 Power sources in this deck also double as low-cost fuel for growing your board, all that extra Power starts to seem much more reasonable.

The most successful deck-builders are those who find ways to make the abilities of their cards work in more ways than one. "I heard Alessi is still free to grow" demonstrates that this can be just as true for your **Power **base as it is for your units, spells, weapons, relics and curses.

You can learn more about the background and evolution of this deck in this video presented by Mouche's teammate ManuS at the Eternal Titan's website.