The State of Sandscour: Azalea's Alter Ego

The past month has been good to Azalea. The long-suffering hero of Arcane Rising has had her victories in the past, but nothing like the spotlight cast upon her by Brodie Spurlock's Calling: Phuket win. Brodie's brand of Azalea is a red-focused Death Dealer build, pushing aggressive playlines and gaining incidental advantage from the on-hit disruption that comes with the package. It's a seat-of-your-pants playstyle that relies on well-considered bets with the odds deckbuilt in your favor. You can learn more about it directly from Brodie himself here.

Brodie's success - along with the success of a number of other Azalea players - has caused the meta to take notice. You may have noticed people teching Warmonger's Diplomacy back into their decks lately, and content creators have been placing her in the upper rungs of their tier lists. As Azalea is a fairly easy hero to target with hate cards, I don't expect her reign at the top of the meta to last long without significant adaptation.

One such adaptation is an entirely different build.

Sandscour Azalea has been a niche build within the diehard Azalea community for over a year now. It found success with a build by the Card Advantage team last year, and I extensively analyzed the deck and the concepts behind it in an article last June (like all archived articles, Rathe Times subscribers can read that piece here). But beyond that, information on Sandscour builds is incredibly scarce, and most players haven't run into one in a competitive setting.

The main advantage Sandscour builds offer is incredibly consistent access to and recursion of key arrows. It's not unusual to loop Red in the Ledger 5 or 6 times into a Ninja, or to keep Kayo from playing a full turn out by maintaining disruptive effects across the entire game. Once you learn to identify the arrow with the greatest potential for disruption in each matchup, the deck is built to assist you in finding and hitting with that arrow consistently.

The play pattern for a Sandscour deck begins by identifying if we've got a dominate available to us or not. If so, we only need to play enough buffs to ensure our arrow hits; in general, we prefer to end a turn with a buff in arsenal, to make sure we don't misfire on the following turn. If you activate Sandscour and find a good arrow on top, load from hand and use Azalea to flip that arrow into arsenal for dominate + aim. If you don't have an arrow in hand, you can pick up a free card by loading an arrow from the top of the deck; and if you can't get an arrow to the top of your deck, you can repurpose a leftover card in arsenal to flip into a buff, which is usually just as valuable.

Another advantage Sandscour offers into the current meta is misidentification. 100% of opponents will see your hero and sideboard for an aggro Death Dealer strategy; and while there's overlap enough that you'll still get tripped by a few of their cards, SSGB is divergent enough that you'll catch your opponent misplaying and making wrong guesses for the first half of the game - which is where the match is usually won or lost for us.

I ran Sandscour Azalea in my local Pro Quest, and was fortunate to make it on stream for my 3rd round. You can catch the replay here - I won't spoil anything until below the embedded link.

So unfortunately that match concluded with a loss - you can't help when they put you on stream - but it gives a real clear sense of what Sandscour gameplay looks like. As you can see, the aim is to lock the opponent out of their preferred gameplay during the first half of the game; then by a combination of general disruption and conservative blocking (the latter being where I went wrong -  always respect the Blacktek Whisperers!), slowly but steadily close out the game. 

The key is learning just how tall you need to go to clear your opponent's blocking potential. A single +3 lands your 1-cost arrows at 8, and with dominate that's enough to overwhelm heroes without significant armor or defense reactions; it takes 11 with dominate to guarantee a hit on a more defensive Warriors, standard Guardians, or dense Mechanologist; and into Fatigue Guardians, you may not get there (I haven't solved that matchup yet).

Since the last time I wrote about it, we've only picked up a few new cards for Azalea. But we've also shed Oldhim and Dromai, who both consumed large portions of our sideboard. With that added breathing room comes space for new and experimental tech. Here's the list I ran in the video above.

We've streamlined the equipment, shedding Dreadbore and Crow's Nest entirely. Beyond that, the arrows have been reconfigured and we've taken out a few fatigue-related precautions - while I've identified fatigue as a difficult matchup for us, it remains much less prevalent than Oldhim was, so we're taking a calculated risk there (one that didn't pay off at my PQ, when I was paired into a rogue Fatigue Bravo during a round 5 that may have been win-and-in for me).

Judge, Jury, and Executioner performs at a much higher level here than it does in other Azalea lists because we have incredibly consistent access to aim counters. In fact, it's not uncommon for this to be the first arrow I tutor for; once it's in the graveyard, Memorial Ground can prep it for an aim + dominate flip from Azalea 3 more times. JJE is as potent as Red in the Ledger, and universally disruptive across every matchup.

Because we often know what's on top of our deck, Codex of Inertia is a viable option for Azalea, and lets us balloon our Codex count to 5. That said, a face-down card in arsenal is only half as useful as a face-up card, and if we need resources to play out our turn from there, we have to account for those before the discard hits us. One thing to keep in mind is that Azalea can trade out that card in arsenal for the top card of your deck, which will land face up and may even get aim and dominate. Sometimes the value is simply in having a card there.

Feign Death is a meme card no more! In this age of Zealous Beltings and Enlightened Strikes from Guardians and Luminaris' 3rd incarnation, a simple Tunic counter can completely block out that 2nd hit. Feign Death can also save you from a Kano kill turn, if you can find the right window to play it out.

Currently, I'm testing Seek Horizon in blue as another way to control the top of our deck. Often you'll draw into the arrow that you want to play, but from hand we can't give it aim or dominate. Seek Horizon lets us set up that arrow for an Azalea flip, while also acting as a soft attack that defies our typical tall attack pattern. At blue, they pitch well when you have no need for the card's topdeck-adjusting abilities. Early testing has shown promise - I dropped 2 Codex of Inertia and a blue Sleep Dart to get them into the deck's core.

The matchup spread for Sandscour Azalea is fairly different from Death Dealer Azalea, which is one of the reasons it merits consideration - especially if you've found your local scene to be hostile to your efforts to go redline with the OG Ranger. I'll briefly touch on some key differences here.

Azalea has long benefited from being off-meta. But with Death Dealer going mainstream, a player has to turn to alternative builds to recapture that advantage with Azalea. Sandscour Greatbow offers an incredibly consistent game plan that most opponents haven't seen before. Compared to Death Dealer, it's much less reliant on luck, and makes full use of Azalea's ability. I've been addicted to this deck for over a year, and I truly believe it has potential once you've put in the reps required to learn it.