Zarathur 1st place Colorado Regionals

Congratulations!

I love that this deck completely throws conventional (read Kingsley-based) Zarathur wisdom out of the window, eschewing ammo depots, and carrying all the big hitter cards. 

Did you come up against any good Kith or Eldorath players? Eyeballing this list, those warlords would spring to mind as potential troubles

There weren't any Eldorath players at the tournament (which i was surprised by), but he was certainly a big concern for me. I did end up in the final match playing against a really good kith player who every time he's played his deck in previous tournaments has gone undefeated.

Our game went down to the sixth planet before anyone even had a chance at a planet win and he was very effective at denying me cards. He had an Archon's palace out from turn one for the entire game so I typically only had 1-3 cards to work with during the turn. but I always worked to make sure I won command at two planets to guarantee that i would get at least something, and usually I would have enough resources available to play a big daemon or a couple of little units, and I slowly built my army turn after turn, until at the 6th planet I had a soul grinder, possesed, and a bloodletter moving to the planet with my warlord plus a flamer, snakebite thug, and a plaugebearer already sitting at the planet.

I also played against Urien a couple of times before the tournament and also once during, but I managed to pull off wins against him mostly due to the same slow build up of units over time even through the card/resource denial.

It seems that so long as I can keep at least one resource from the previous turn I stand a chance at getting units out. The biggest issue is knowing when to play a big daemon or play a number of smaller units instead. Also it seems like resource denial is far more painful than card denial is, even though normally I never pay more than 4 for any unit in the deck (in some games I payed 1 for a soul grinder which was beautiful)

I normally won't put that many high-cost units in my Zarathur deck, but I just might give this a try. However, if you're facing Eldorath and he Nullifies your Promise of Glory, it might end badly for you. 

nullify isn't as bad as a smart de or eldorath player keeping all his terrors for the win planet and sending 15 resources worth of dudes back to your HQ for 6 points.

That sucks...

There were 16 players at the tournament with the top 4 being:

Zarathur/Orks (me)

Kith/Eldar

Baharroth/DE

Zarathur/Orks

@Solaris

nullify on promise of glory did worry me a bit, and in fact it did happen to me in my game against Baharroth before the cut to final 4, but the Baharroth player was a friend of mine who knew what my deck was built around. I think in most other cases he would have saved it for the warpstorms that everyone assumes we have. Also you don't have to be wholly reliant on promise of glory for cheap daemon summoning since you can also summon them out rather reliably with the acolytes, which can't be nullified, or if you get xavies out using the cultists created by him.

@keebler

yeah that would have been a heart sinking moment if he could have thrown down 3 terrors in one turn. Thankfully the guy I played against never drew them, and needed his resources for units that turn since he only had 2 units out at planet 7 at the start of the turn, and Slaanesh's Temptation had gone out before he could deploy anything.

Overall I was quite pleased with this deck in all of the match ups even the two zara/zara mirror fights I had to do against the same player in the second round and then again in the top 4. I think there is a strong balance of smaller units to the bigger ones that give you options each turn, as well as enough stalling cards to inform you if you should play a daemon or a few smaller units that round. There were a few more instances where I felt I had to crawl my way back from falling behind, but in the end I think I almost always have an answer available to a given situation.

A deploy phase nullify would suit me fine: an exhausted Eldorath is one who isn't able to command snipe (though the exhaust ability helps) and is an Eldorath who we might actually get to bloody for once.

Eldorath I'm thinking is more troublesome in his ability to effectively mitigate the impact of Soul Grinder, Possessed and Vicious Bloodletters