4Game

Like many of you, I was a little underwhelmed when Rience was revealed. He seems clunky and expensive for two main reasons:

1. His Deploy ability requires you to discard a card that exactly equals the strength of the unit you wanna target, and

2. His Order ability obviously requires him to live for a turn, which is difficult to ensure given that he's only 5 strength.

Point 1 can be solved (mostly) by playing him with Rico in a hyperthin deck. There may be rare cases your opponent can continually buff their cards after hitting the board to keep their power offset from Rico's, but usually you'll get a target at some point. Point 2 can be helped by playing Ffion, but the standard Tibor/Yen/Triss hyperthin deck doesn't really wanna play a Defender. Not many NG decks at all play Defender. And even if you could protect it, you're still spending a ton of provisions for a tall punish when most NG decks already do a fine job of that.

But what NG deck thins extensively, plays a Defender, and usually doesn't run tall punish? That's right, Cloggers.

Here's what that might look like. Shupe, SK Storm, Epidemic, and Undying Thirst are representing each of the new NG cards. I based it on this popular Cloggers deck. Note that it thins to 0, just like the current Cloggers deck. I think it likely has more points and better proactivity, with the downside of a non-deterministic Vigo (75% chance to hit a Mentor), worse mulligans, and a little less flexibility without Menno and Roderick.

I know a lot of this subreddit hates Cloggers, and it's not my favorite NG archetype either. But it really feels like the best chance for Rience. If you disagree, I'd love to hear why.