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stuart wright

Welcome to Crown of the Heavens preview time. Today, I'll be showing you a Hunter card that goes against the norm for the class. Rather than focusing on the aggressive nature theme seen with current Core Constructed Hunter decks, which use power cards like Aspect of the Wild to win games fast, this new pet encourages a different strategy.

Rather than focusing on quick wins, this pet encourages the belief that slow and steady wins the race. With that obvious hint in your mind, take a look at the monstrous Turtle that Hunters will soon have access to.

My first thought is that Yertle is a very nice thematic fit for a turtle. It protects you, and then after it dies, you make its shell into armor to protect you even more. Turtles also live a very long time, reflected in the Eternal keyword and how it grows tougher the older it gets. So it makes sense, but is it good? Well, yes! It seems very good. Yertle has good ATK/health ratio for the cost and a number of useful effects, all at a very reasonable cost. So then the question becomes this: what do we do with this card?

Yertle has a lot of different effects with the focus being on preventing damage, something it does very well. The turn you play it, you have to be absurdly far behind before you even take any damage that turn. For example, you play it on turn 4 and they have two 4/4 allies in play. In this case you trade off with one ally and prevent all the damage from the other, and this is pretty much the worst case scenario. In later turns it can hold off pretty much any on-curve ally. People have in the past played solo decks with armors that prevent equal to their cost, often with very minor benefits. Getting a huge ally before you even get your big armor is a pretty major benefit.

The fact that Yertle is a pet can even be a good thing when it has such a powerful effect for dying. Any extra copies you draw at the very least are more armor, and you can keep the new Yertle you play out while destroying the other, which effectively readies and heals your turtle. Hunter decks in the past could have a problem with drawing too many pets and this does a lot to mitigate this issue. Now you can afford to play lots of cards that interact with your own pets without having to fill your deck with cards that are useless in multiples.

Eternal gives a few benefits too which is pretty good as you are effectively getting it for free. Yertle is pretty powerful, so when it dies you want it back in your deck so that you can redraw it. Given how Yertle functions, it is going to die a lot, so this will come up more than normal.

So what sort of deck would want Yertle? The current popular aggressive hunter decks aren't best suited for this type of controlling card. This means we need to look at a more controlling style of deck. For this we have two options. First up is a heavy pets based deck. There are a number of cards that work well with lots of pets such as Bestial Revival, and as I already mentioned, Yertle reduces some of the problems with this strategy. The other option is to build around weapons and use Yertle to prevent you from taking too much damage while you gain control.

For Limited, all you really have to do is work out which turn you are best off playing him on. Most of the time you will just want to play him out as soon as possible but there is the potential for waiting a few turns as he is better than normal as a below curve play. While you can't control a Draft deck as much as Constructed deck, Yertle does go much better in a more controlling deck. This is because the armor buys you time to win with even bigger cards. As it also has Eternal, you might be able to grind out a long game by replaying it and eventually decking them. It is, of course, still fine in an aggressive deck as a 4/4 protector.

Hopefully I've given you a few ideas for how to best use this card. If you're attending one of the Sneak Preview events, then good luck.

-Stuart

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