Welcome to Sorcery's first 4 color Money Pile. The name of the game is play sweet unique knights as fast as you can building on the back row until you can just absolutely overwhelm the Realm with the full power of the Round Table and the artifacts in it's war chest.
***05/26/25 MAJOR UPDATE***
It's BACK! So after an extremely long 6 months of playing this as my side project pet deck in the predominantly Archimago Control /Druid Midrange/Sorcerer Aggro meta — I have made a LOT of changes. The following Chapel Perilous list can go toe-to-toe with most decks in the meta, but I won't lie to you, aggro is very hard. A good pilot knows it's a race, and they will win it every single time. I should probably find a way to shove in pebbled paths tbh. Maybe in another 6 months! Also you don't tend to encounter a ton of Bower of Bliss out there anymore — but boy howdy is it a wild time when you do lol.
Ok so we've had to substantially alter the magic and artifact package, and honestly should have been playing shatter strike and earthquake from the jump. They are very very good. But here it is:
OUT
-4 Cores (They were only relevant as early game ramp. We traded some of that explosiveness for spells that will give us a chance against the wider meta)
-2 Valor (this card is actually just bad)
-1 Dispel (making room for shatter strike)
-1 Sir Agravaine (never impacted the board in a powerful enough way)
-2 Rescue (amazing with a specific handful of knights and royalty but too much of a corner case card)
-1 Pendragon Legacy (this was largely in the deck to remove targets from deathspeaker have replaced with Feast of Crows for now)
IN
+2 Shatter Strike
+ 2 Earthquake
+2 Lightning Bolt
+3 Blink
+ 1 Feast of Crows
+ 1 Cave-In
And that's the update! I'm going to try to get back to getting some serious reps in with this deck and will update as I can. Your mulligan is still the most important choice you will make playing this deck. To make the threshold work, you HAVE to aggressively mull to try and hit a tournament ground or a 3/4 element site nothing has changed about that.
~ Hardhope
Previous Updates
leap attack and sir bors the younger removed and replaced with 3x war horse after it's showing at sorcerycon.
Swapping out 3x duel to try 2x leap attack, adding Ring of Morrigan. It's simple too powerful to not try.
Forgot to hit save the first time... so here goes again.
If you've played it, you already know that the deck is good. If you can stabilize and overwhelm the realm with knights, you will have the adv in most match ups. AoA and Battlemage are still very difficult match ups. Any kind of fast aggro is going to punish a midrange shell like this. That's just part of playing in a healthy meta. That said there are some cards that will HOSE this deck that are within our power to play around. So we have to evolve to combat them.
First up: The Green Knight is out, King of the Realm is in. We can only sustain one tripple threshold card and it has to be this one IMO. Many of you have asked, and after testing I can confirm that having all of your knights suddenly pledge fealty to an opposing king will make you want to vomit. Strategically, hold your KotR until it will put victory into your hands, or sandbag it if you think your opponent is likely to have one.
Ok. Next up is Duel. It's not the best, but with all the water stuff happening right now bury just doesn't feel good. If you have suggestions let me know in the comments — duel does not feel long for this decklist, but I haven't settled on it's replacement yet.
Next, some quick theory on flex slots. They are: Excalibur, The Round Table, Ruler of Thule, Sir Bedivere, and Sir Bors the Younger. If you want to run Ring of Morrigan, go for it. It probably should be an auto include in most decks. I'm just not ready to try it yet.
ok now for the really big changes.
Atlas Deck: Removing 1 Aquaduct, 1 Lighthouse, 1 Steppe, 1 Ruins. Adding 1 Pristine Paradise, 2 Crossroads, and most importantly, 1 Smokestack of Gnaak.
Digging for tournament grounds and whatever threshhold you need to it with crossroads is a game changer. Furthermore crossroads are going to dig for smokestacks a huge percentage of the time so let's break down why.
Smokestacks. THIS CARD. It turns off all the downsides to Pristine Paradise, Avalon, Colour out of Space, the back row tri elemental sites, ect. It also combats Roots, and even more importantly, Bower of Bliss, which every faire and druid deck are going to be running for the rest of the year. Smokestacks is vital to making this deck viable.
and last but not least...
Mulligans: Use all of your mull cards sculpting sites. You really don't want to keep a hand that doesn't have a 3 or 4 threshold site in it, or a tournament grounds, which is the card that makes the whole deck work.
Wedding hall will win you more games than you think. Wild I know.
*10/6/24 UPDATE: Removed Tom Thumb (not enough overall synergy.) Removed Lady Iseult (just trying stuff) and removed the two copies of Tactical Move in favor of trying out what things feel like running 4 copies of Duel since our knights are generally favorably positioned with higher toughness to win, and to see if it helps enable us to pick fights to get deathrite triggers when we want them. Sites currently feel balanced, but crossroads may be necessary to increase consistency.
Avalon is great, but it realllly sucks giving certain opposing Avatars the free threshold.