If you plan to play Alliance competitively, you need to test your brews, and test well. Thanks to The Crucible Online you can construct Alliance decks and pit them against each other, and as of June 2023 we have one tournament's worth of data from KeyForge Celebration in 2022.
In the table below, I've gathered the publicly available information on the decks which made the cut to top eight for the Alliance tournament (mostly reading the old KeyForging.com blog post, looking up each deck on the Master Vault, and organizing it all below). Using the Master Vault links and indicated house, you can import these decks into The Crucible Online and test your decks against what was proven to work.
See some of my analysis and takeaways below the table.
Takeaways: What did well at KFC?
Scrolling through the lists above, I made a few observations that anyone preparing to brew and Alliance deck for a Vault Tour should note:
- Literally every deck in the KFC top cut included a Logos pod. While you might be able to skip Logos in your own successful Alliance deck, you need the speed and - more importantly - the consistency to pull of your gameplan as often as possible. If you can include Logos, do. If you don't, make sure you're making up for the consistency and speed with your other houses.
- Two decks contained pods from a single Archon deck. It's possible to only use two decks and make the top cut. No doubt the decks with two Alliance-worthy pods are already quite good, but it's a sign that a strong Alliance brew may require fewer resources (whether decks or currency) than assumed.
- Both Age of Ascension decks are GENKA decks. Martian Generosity and Key Abduction is the classic AOA combo. If you're playing Alliance, make sure you know how to play against it - there's a very good chance you'll see it, and it might just be your ticket to the top cut.
- Have a plan for Mark of Dis, Etan's Jar, and Infurnace. These cards are the heavy hitters in Mass Mutation Dis and you'll get tired of seeing them by the end of the day. Does your deck survive a correct Etan's Jar call? Do you have cards you need to protect from Infurnace? Can your deck play around Mark of Dis?
What will Winds of Exchange bring to Alliance?
This is total guesswork, but here are my predictions for what to watch out for from Winds of Exchange in Alliance:
- Unfathomable pods stacked with Befuddle, Abyssal Sight, and Plunder. For some reason these all have pips, so that's fun. All of these cards can end a game. If you have a great Scrambler Storm or Stealth Mode list that survived the Restricted List update, that may be your best in this matchup.
- Cards providing the consistency that Winds of Exchange lacks. WoE decks can move quick due to creating token creatures, but the risk of an important card ending up as a token creature is real. Look for people running pods with Sandhopper, Transporter Platform, Future Booster (along with multiples of Grunt Work), and what I think could be a sleeper hit - Dragnet.
- Ghostform on Ether Spider, Byrozoarch, or Timoti the Damned. Ghostform enables some of the most powerful creature effects to stick around. Grab your bounce effects for the Ether Spider, and for Bryo... well, our old friend Mass Mutation Logos does pack Cyber-Clone. Bubbles and Tourist Trap provide options in other sets.
- Honorable mention: Token of Appreciation. While breaking this card in Alliance may be tough (or not), please note that Token of Appreciation does not purge itself like other modern key cheats. It may be easy to redraw with Ikwijĭ Outpost if you empty your deck and discard pile enough.
