The Problem

So, I've started playing pirates recently and they're really fun. They kinda feel like old warriors, which I used to love. I still want warriors to return, but they're too powercrept and what's left of them is propped up by Eist.

However, pirates (and before them, warriors) have a problem when it comes to dealing with defender. The problem is that they are very damage oriented, yet they don't often deal enough damage to OHKO a defender. You can easily get stuck in a situation where you damage the defender in a piecemeal fashion. By the time the defender is gone, they have multiple engines established and you've likely lost control of the round–and the game.

What I call the "Skellige Defender Problem" is this: How can a damage-oriented Skellige deck cleanly answer a defender in a single turn? For the sake of simplicity, we will exclude the SY defender from our considerations. He's not usually a problem for SK anyway.

Note also that there is an implied premise to this question: When a damage-oriented deck fails to cut through a defender, the attacker is assumed to be at fault and they deserve to lose the round. More succinctly, every damage-oriented deck should have an answer to a defender. This includes not only SK warrior/pirates but also unitless ST and SY bounty.

Let's look at the options:

• Heatwave: Sure, but it breaks devotion.

• Champions Charge: You're playing Patricidal Fury? 2019 called, they want their deck back.

• Terror of the Sea: Works well if you're running Onslaught AND you have it in hand early on. But what about a turn 1 Cave Troll or Donimir, followed by Ciri Dash or Foltest? Ew.

• Hjalmar An Craite: Works decently well, but you have to run greatswords. Greatswords, hah, more like mediocreswords, am I right? And 10 damage only answers Figgis and Covenant of Steel. Cave Troll survives with 1 hp. Again, not a turn 1 answer either.

• Gremist: Sure, but it's not very flavorful. He belongs in a shrooms deck. Also, he can't be tutored by Blood Eagle and has no synergies with either the Pirate or the Warrior Package. He's the best devotion answer, though.

• Hammod: Better than nothing. The recent buffs to pirates make him playable, at least. But this only protects you against row locked cards.

• Junod: This is really the best answer here. Works great with Reckless Flurry. Other leaders will struggle to get maximum use out of him, though.

Looking at the above, there really are quite a few answers. But there's no one-size-fits-all solution. You're not going to run all of these, and in fact you might not run any of them.

Breaking down everything by leader, we see the following:

• Patricidal Fury has Champion's Charge.

• Onslaught has Terror of the Seas (at least sometimes)

• Reckless Flurry has Junod

• Battle Trance has Gremist

• Ursine Ritual has heatwave, because it doesn't run devotion.

• Rage of the Sea has nothing, except maybe Gremist

• Blaze of Glory has… Blaze of Glory.

The Plot Thickens

Before I propose some solutions, let's take a quick look at the other factions and see their answers:

• NG has Yenvo and VVM. Cleanest answers in the game. Cupbearer and poison also work for them.

• SY has Kalkstein, Poison, and Phillipa. All of which are very clean. Plus there's also Moreelse, Graden, and Kurt

• NR has duels. They're more solitaire, so the need for killing a defender is far lower.

• MO has Imlerith's Wrath, Feast of Blood, and Queen of the Night. Again, solitaire.

• ST has Movement and devotion purifies. The damage-oriented ST decks aren't devotion, so they have no problem running heatwave.

Now that we see all of these, I think it's clear that SK really does have a slight deficit here. Even Monsters has better answers, and they're the greed faction. It's not a huge problem, because most of the Skellige leaders have some sort of answer. But it is a problem.

Solutions

So what do I propose? Here's a couple ideas.

• A unit like VVM that allows you to destroy an armored unit. Not every faction runs armor, though.

• Allow Tyrggvi to purify an enemy unit. Purify AND rupture is a lot, though, for a card that's already decently balanced. How about melee: rupture ranged: purify. Seems fair.

• Buff Stunning Blow to do 7 damage to armored units again. This is a halfway answer but better than none at all.

• Create a gold raid card that just deals a flat 7-10 damage, ignoring armor. It really feels like this card should already exist.

What do you guys think?