Hey everyone, Reygon here again with a new build from set 7! We will be looking at Absence, Voice of the Void.

Deck list:

https://www.deckplanet.net/alpha_clash/deck/f4c4f394-7b8a-4ce2-ab5f-60ade0f41030

Absence drew my attention initially due to his built in card draw, ability to easily manipulate the portal, but most importantly getting to play the new 1 drop Absence, Shadow Incarnate!. I struggled at first figuring out how to build him. But have since settled on a 3 color variant that performs well.

The core of the deck uses the classic trio of Krung, Morac, and Trugg as our main game plan. These 3 cards have so much synergy. Morac searches up krungs, krungs buff all discarded, Truggs bring back the krungs that your opponents are removing. This package works well in this deck becuase the contender gets free portal activations simply by getting a trigger challenge which is easy in the game. This trio of cards, in my opinion, have proven to be powerful and consistent and hard not to play in black decks!

ASI was the other card I wanted to maximize because of his unique and powerful trigger attack ability. If your attack is higher than the attack of an opponents clash card, you get to banish it and add a +1/+1 counter permanently making future attacks easier to trigger. To help ensure we can get easy banishes, we can utilize the pestilence package of Pestilence, the Infectious and Pestilence, Mayhem maker. These cards alone are independently strong and “meta” on their own plus assisting with reducing the attack of our opponents clash cards.

The other strategy to boost ASI’s attack power is the contenders 3rd ability of Trigger Portal: Target Absence card gets +1/0 until end of turn. There is no limit to how many times you can activate this each turn. You can use this in your favor to buff ASI to ensure that trigger attack working. You can activate the portal using your contender ability, or just using resources to activate, or other cards that can trigger it. Getting mutiple triggers in the same turn can ensure the trigger attack or even just buff your contender to get in free damage every turn. Pestilence world degrader acts as a stronger defender but also lets you trigger the portal at the start of your turn every turn for free.

I got to thinking, what card can help me trigger the portal as many times as possible in one turn? Low earth orbit reduces the cost to activate the portal by 1, which means you can just pay 1 generic resource to activate it as many times as possible. This lets your ASI get an absurdly high attack at any point in the game or lets your contender get a high attack to get in free damage. If there is ever a non clashground card that gets printed that also reduces the cost to activate the portal by 1, will result in a infinite damage attacking contender!

We also added blue for a few key meta cards of Haven and Linn. Haven lets us ramp ASAP into late game. Absence gives us card advantage, we just need enough resources to take advantage and get ahead on board. Linn is just a powerhouse card that combines well with our pestilence and bombardment package to take out low threats and recur them back onto our team.

The main weaknesses ive seen so far come from the lower starting HP of absence at 25 with no defense and running 3 colors we can sometime run into inconsistencies with our resource base. We also dont take advantage of the 20 ability from absence, with only ASI having a void ability. But overall i’ve really enjoyed playing absence and gives a good midrange home to our discarded trio package.

Thanks for reading!

Reygon :)_