Re-Constructed Decks - Odette

Welcome back, Ashes players, to another installment of Re-Constructed. Leave your weapons at the door, you don’t want to break the rules or anything.

By this point, you should already know the deck building restrictions we’re working with, though we need to make an amendment regarding expansions. Every one of the future decks will assume you at least have both Rise of the Phoenixborn as well as Law of Lions or Song of Soaksend, depending on which dice types we’re covering. I know it’s a bit much, but them's the rules, and when it comes to Odette rules are made to be followed.

The Decree of Lions (Re-Odette)

Re-Constructed by Andrew DiLullo

10 Divine // Needed Sets: The Spirits of Memoria, The King of Titans

1x Summon Emperor Lion

2x Summon Winged Lioness

3x Law of Grace

1x Law of Assurance

2x Law of Domination

1x Law of Sight

2x Chained Creations

2x Mass Heal

2x Meteor

3x Sword of Virtue

3x Holy Knight

2x Shield Mage

2x Shepherd of Lost Souls

3x Power Through

1x Angelic Rescue

Odette introduces us to divine magic, and with it the establishment of “order”. When you play divine, everything happens as it’s meant to; there’s no need to stray from the beaten path because that’s the path where we beat our opponents. In this sense, divine magic tends to play a very steady, methodical game of certainties and eventualities. Odette’s precon largely accomplishes this with extremely powerful and threatening units: Emperor Lion is one of the game’s overall chunkiest conjurations, Winged Lioness is a reliable unit hunter, and both Holy Knight and Shield Mage are all around solid with some particularly annoying protection abilities. Given the crazy Attack and Life values of your units, cards like Heal and Sword of Virtue make it extraordinarily challenging to wear our board down, while Power Through gives us a way to punch through any type of defense given enough time. And of course, there are ‘laws’, a spellboard variant unique to divine magic that creates new temporary rules for both players. In some ways, playing divine magic is like playing the hall monitor: if anyone looks like they want to have fun, just say no. Don’t attack my shielded units, don’t guard my Lioness, don’t target my knight, don’t play reaction spells.

Unfortunately like many hall monitors, you can’t always account for the naughtiest of children. Divine’s biggest issue is a general lack of flexibility; while Odette’s precon is powerful, it’s also very easy to steer around in circles with clever placement of spells, abilities and especially reactions. We won’t be able to completely escape that weakness in today’s re-con (namely because we’re stuck with mono-divine), but with a few swaps here and there, we can at least give the deck a wider breadth of options to enforce our terms.

We start with some basic number tweaking: Lions of all types are fairly pricey, so we don’t really need more than one book for either of them, and we can afford to cut the third copy of some of our more niche tools like Shield Mage and Meteor (it’s a great card, but this deck has a harder time using it effectively). In their place, we’ve added a whole swath of cards that expand our ability to play different matchups. Chained Creations is a solid kill card that also lets us control the speed of the match, a useful trait since mono-divine tends to only go at one speed. Shepherd of Lost Souls gives us the option of being more aggressive with our Holy Knights, knowing we actually have a way to recover them. Finally, the single copy of Angelic Rescue can be surprisingly useful against natural-magic opponents looking to finish off one of our bigger units at a crucial moment.

But the biggest inclusion is that of new laws. Whereas Emperor Lion was a fairly solid unit in the precon, here he’s a total swiss army knife. Sight and Assurance are fairly decent laws, but there’s far better ones for this deck and that’s where we’ve loaded up. Law of Domination gives us a terrifically powerful removal option since Emperor Lion can usually kill whatever the opponent selects. Similarly to Seaside Raven, we can use Law of Domination as a way to get our lion killed intentionally in order to summon another, in turn fetching even more laws. Still, the crazy synergy card is Law of Grace since we can use it to heal Odette while also reducing the damage she takes from Enter the Fray (the damage Odette takes from the unit is dealt directly from Odette’s ability). This means that each Law of Grace will heal one wound AND prevent at least 1 damage guaranteed, giving it the same effective value as Heal.

First Five:

Lions are the core of your game, so you should always pack both books in your opening hand. The rest of the hand is fairly insular, with Power Through making a sufficiently ferocious Lioness while Shield Mage protects her, and Sword of Virtue to give you a means to either double up on Lioness or remove a particularly nasty threat. While you do have enough dice to play everything in your opening hand, you shouldn’t necessarily expect to do so as Emperor Lion’s ability to fetch any law from your deck may change the way you play the round. Some laws in the opening round can really set your opponent back: Law of Sight can ruin any swarm strategy that relies on Sleeping Widows, Law of Domination can kill basically any unit via the lion while also crunching through Armored and other damage reduction strategies, and Law of Assurance can be a serious thorn in the side of Victoria decks or heavy dice manipulation strategies. I wouldn’t change the first five very often, though I can see Power Through coming out for Meteor against lots of smaller units or even Holy Knight against heavy removal. The reason I don’t swap very often is because whatever options you need to cover, Emperor Lion can help you find them with its Law fetch. This is a microcosm of how you should expect to play Emperor Lion for the entire game: not just as a beater, but also a toolbox.

Addendums and Necessary Clauses

Spirits of Memoria is just a little too important for this deck, as you’ll notice a bulk of our unique cards come from it. Law of Grace feels so perfectly tuned for Odette’s ability, and cards like Angelic Rescue, Chained Creations, and even Shepherd give us much needed tools for controlling the tempo and diversifying our options. That being said, King of Titans is slightly less crucial this time around. Law of Domination is such a solid tool with Emperor Lion but it’s not absolutely essential, and while I prefer Mass Heal as a cheaper option, Heal is a perfectly fine substitute. You could replace Law of Domination with a third Meteor, second Law of Sight or possibly even Dispel to improve overall flexibility against “shenanigans”.

Taking it further:

So, the main reason I didn’t include literally every single law in this deck is because I didn’t want to pressure people into buying a whole ton of expansions. Also, because you don’t really need them. That being said, Law of Fear is fairly strong in a lot of defensive circumstances, and Echo’s deck also gives you Enlightenment which performs admirably with the overall size of your units. Finally, while I generally enjoy Shield Mage most of the time, I find Sun Sister a bit more productive against natural magic.

But as is usually the case, mono-anything is usually not as good as just splashing a second color. Sword of Virtue as a Refresh + Heal combo makes Odette a solid conduit for natural magic, giving you access to fairly dangerous units like Archasaurus Mount and Shining Hydra, the latter of which can be easily enabled through Enter the Fray (yes, you can target your own units). Natural magic also provides an amazing unit guard option with Butterfly Monk; Biter can also be fairly savage if combined with Law of Domination. I sometimes enjoy splashing a single ceremonial die since the dice power gives me a way to recycle allies later in the game, but also so I can run an often underappreciated tool: Regress. There are plenty of practical applications to reducing a unit by 3 attack for a round, but Odette can help guarantee maximum value through Lioness or Enter the Fray.

That’s all we’ve got for this article. Next time, things start getting a little heavier as Echo takes the reins with slick swordsman and some surprisingly fancy birds.

Andrew DiLullo is an animator, a game designer, and luckily also a writer. Having first discovered Ashes at the tail end of the first round of expansions in 2016, he’s been playing ever since and currently heads the Bay Area Ashes group in California. He was especially active in several community projects after Ashes was canceled the first time, and now puts his attention to Reborn as the game starts anew. He’s currently designing a board game in his spare time, and occasionally writes on his online journal: The Lighthouse Library.