Every Deck Archetype in the Meta

"Everyone thinks they're playing their pantheon. They're playing an archetype — they just haven't noticed which one." — Malmodeus Abbadrax

An archetype is a deck's plan — the thing all thirteen cards are secretly working toward. Some plans live inside one pantheon; most reach across several. This guide names them.

The frame

Every deck is 13 cards. Build single-pantheon and you must run that pantheon's one legendary; build mixed and you draw freely from all ten pantheons with no mandatory legend. Either way you may add up to 3 Mythic wildcards on top — the cross-myth neutrals. That's the whole box you're building inside. If you're new to the board, read How to Play first, then come back here for the strategy layer.

The ten pantheon identities

Each pantheon is tuned to one core feel. Pick the one that matches how you like to win.

• Greek — tempo and punishment. Strike from turn one, answer everything they commit, never give them the turn they need to stabilise.
• Norse — sacrifice and recursion. Spend your own cards as fuel; what falls comes back for the next charge.
• Egyptian — control and death-loops. Nothing you remove stays gone — grind the board and outlast the game they can't end.
• Japanese — kami synergy and control. Value accumulates quietly turn after turn, then the whole network ignites at once.
• Celtic — wrath and transformation. Being cornered is the plan; take the hits and erupt in the final turns when everyone else is empty.
• Hindu — scaling and late game. Start small, surge past every limit, become the thing they cannot answer.
• Aztec — the sacrifice engine. Every death feeds the machine; spend bodies, fuel the sun, out-aggress anyone who hesitates.
• Abrahamic — ward and power. Shield the faithful, raise the fallen, and let the biggest bodies on the board arrive on your schedule.
• Buddhist — detachment and denial. You don't attack — you reflect. Fighting them harder only makes them harder to fight.
• Orixás — movement and disruption. You don't out-muscle a Location; you decide who gets to stand on it.

The nine cross-pantheon archetypes

These are the plans that ignore pantheon lines. Every one is a legal mixed deck today.

Blood Engine — sacrifice your own board for a bigger one. Feed your weakest card to a bigger effect, then cash in on how much has died. Front-loaded and violent — it wants the game over by turn 4–5. Signature cards: Xipe Totec, Huitzilopochtli, Odin. Beats slow value decks on raw early tempo; loses to anything that survives past turn 4, when its fuel runs dry.

Deathless — nothing you lose stays lost. The opposite trade: never sacrifice, just die and come back for free value each cycle. Grindy and low-curve, winning turns 5–6 by simply having more stuff left. Signature cards: Scarab, Isis, Osiris (with Ankh doubling every return). Beats the grind; loses hard to Exile, which banishes the dead so recursion has nothing to raise.

Ascension — start small, become unanswerable. SURGE bodies that do nothing early and become the biggest things on the board by turn 6. The whole early game is keeping them alive. Signature cards: Naga, Hanuman, Shiva. Loses to Still Waters, which makes "gain power" illegal, and to Fields that strip accumulated buffs.

Unbreakable — the board that will not die. Stack Ward on top of buffs and simply stop losing cards. The most pantheon-agnostic plan in the pool. Signature cards: Cherub, Ark of the Covenant, Krishna, Avalokiteshvara. Shrugs off a single alpha strike; loses to sustained multi-turn area damage, and to Open Roads, which evicts the Warded card instead of trying to kill it.

Anthem — five bodies, one buffed lane. Flood a Field with cheap bodies, then stack auras that buff "everything here" every turn. The purest go-wide plan. Signature cards: Samantabhadra, Ramesses II, Athena. A stacked lane is the best area-damage target in the game — so it folds to Scorched Earth.

Open Roads — win the war without fighting the battle. Field Control wins the game, so this deck denies it directly: evict the enemy's best card off the Location instead of out-powering it. Signature cards: Exu, Iemanjá, Poseidon. Beats stationary power piles; loses to rooted, un-moveable pieces and to Ward (moving a card doesn't strip its shield).

Scorched Earth — sweep the lane before it matters. Area damage to every enemy on a Location, punishing anyone who commits more than a body or two. Signature cards: Abaddon, Michael, Vajra. Eats Anthem and Legion alive; whiffs into Unbreakable (Ward eats the first hit) and Deathless (dead bodies are the plan, not a loss).

Legion — too many bodies to answer one at a time. Cheap tokens and self-replacing bodies flooded wide, then buffed by the same Anthem tools. The single most pantheon-scattered deck in the pool. Signature cards: Kappa, Legion, Momotaro, Brahma. It dodges "strongest enemy" removal — but a wall of 1-power tokens is Scorched Earth's dream target.

Still Waters — deny the engine, not the board. Don't race power; freeze it. "Enemies here can no longer gain power" hard-counters Ascension and Anthem by making their whole plan illegal, then wins on sturdy bodies and outright petrification. Signature cards: Nagarjuna, Perseus, Yama. Whiffs against Legion (nothing single-target to lock) and is soft to Blood Engine's turn 1–2 tempo.

Toolbox packages and Mythic wildcards

Some clusters are too thin to fill 13 cards but slot into almost any deck above as a 2–5 card upgrade:

• Exile — Banish removal (Van Helsing, Vlad) that skips the graveyard entirely. The dedicated answer to Deathless.
• Highway Robbery — zero-sum steal like Medusa's Gaze: a debuff and a buff in one action. A tempo swing that also feeds a buff stack.
• Oracle's Gambit — re-foretell or seal the shared Prophecy. Splash one as insurance in any deck.

Your 3 Mythic wildcards are cross-myth neutrals that fit anywhere the plan aligns: Frankenstein's Monster (+1 power per card in your graveyard) rewards Blood Engine and Deathless; The Werewolf (SURGE) is a clean Ascension body. They cost a deck slot, so bring them for the plan, not the novelty.

The read

It isn't strict rock-paper-scissors, but the tendencies are clear: Scorched Earth eats Legion and Anthem; Still Waters shuts down Ascension and Anthem but whiffs on Legion; Unbreakable answers a single sweep but loses to Open Roads; Exile is the hard counter to Deathless; Blood Engine beats slow value but dies to the long game. Nothing is unbeatable — so build the plan you enjoy, then learn the two matchups that hunt it. Head to the deck builder and start with whichever identity above sounded most like you.