Azalea's New Arsenal: Why Sandscour is a Great Bow

Ever since the debut of Lexi in Tales of Aria, the Azalea faithful have had to ask themselves an uncomfortable question: why play Azalea over Lexi? Talents brought the question to the table for players of all classes, but when you're commonly considered 'the worst hero', it's especially pronounced. As Lexi began to find sporadic success in the meta, concern arose that anything done to improve Azalea would stand to benefit Lexi as well, and keep her in second position as a loyalty pick and nothing more.

Concurrently, Azalea had a history of rejecting new weapon options that makes it hard for meaningful change to occur within the class. In Flesh and Blood, weapons are a common means of changing strategies- but Death Dealer was already perfect, giving Azalea card advantage in the form of extreme pitch efficiency. It was going to take something incredibly special to move Azalea to pick up a different bow.

So it was with a fair amount of skepticism that the Ranger community received the Sandscour Greatbow and its accompanying Aim-empowered arrows. But as you're about to read, it was just the revitalization Azalea needed - and it may just put her on track as a truly viable hero.

I come at this topic with a longstanding devotion to Azalea and the Ranger class; but in addition, I've been focusing on controlling Azalea's topdeck as my primary strategy since Everfest. It stuck out to me as the strategic advantage Azalea had not only over Lexi, but over every other hero in the game. Apparently, LSS agreed, because that's exactly the advantage they're pushing with Sandscour Greatbow.

The Sandscour Greatbow has a different procedure for loading arrows than every other bow in the game- and that difference is the reason why it can stand alongside Death Dealer where all other bows have failed. Whereas Death Dealer asks you to load an arrow from hand before drawing a card, Sandscour lets you look at that top card of your deck, and then choose whether to load an arrow from hand or from the top of your deck. The implications?

1. You can play from a 1-card hand, whereas Death Dealer requires 2.
2. You have more cards to choose from as you load your bow.
3. If you spy a good arrow on top, you can load from hand and Azalea into it.
4. Your bow doesn't compete with your topdeck knowledge, only enhances it.

The other half of Greatbow's ability - adding an Aim counter when you load from the top of the deck - doesn't have inherent value. Instead, it creates synergy with an entirely new card pool. At first glance, this feels like one more hoop for Ranger players to jump through before unlocking the full potential of the class (something Ranger players are all too familiar with), but there's unexpected synergy available in its nonspecific language: namely, that Azalea's ability, which also arsenals a card from the top of the deck, will place an Aim counter too.

This paints the card pool in an entirely new light. A card like Dead Eye - already unusually potent as a Ranger non-attack action buff with 3 defense and a +3 in yellow - gains its Aim-based bonus when the Greatbow or Azalea loads an arrow; and if it's the latter, that arrow's coming in with dominate too. A top-decked Hemorrhage Bore (Y) from Azalea now represents 7 damage with dominate, destroys the arsenal, and discards a card of your choice from the opponent's hand (that you've now seen).

All of this offers an unrivaled level of control to the Azalea player. If you build your deck to maximize your topdeck control, you can deliver the most devastating arrows for the hero you're facing, guarantee they'll hit (thanks to dominate), and seriously impede your opponent's retaliation.

Under the Death Dealer play pattern, you were encouraged to run a healthy mix of arrows and generic attacks to make the most of the 5 cards you'd see every turn cycle. A typical play pattern saw you pitching a card to load an arrow from hand, and hoping the card Death Dealer drew for you was playable before you fired that arrow - Azalea isn't known for her go again, so multiple attacks were usually the result of a generic like Ravenous Rabble or Scar for a Scar coming in ahead of an arrow.

When you factor in a propensity for non-attack action buffs that block for 2, this earned Azalea a reputation as a hero who blocks poorly. But every single arrow in the Ranger card pool blocks for 3, and with Sandscour Greatbow, we can lean into them more confidently.

Arrows are also the attacks we truly want to be making. They come with incredibly potent on-hit effects and synergize with all the cards and effects in our deck. More arrows mean less misfires when we're forced to use Azalea blindly (a situation that Sandscour nearly entirely avoids), and it means less hands with arrow-specific buffs and no arrows in hand. In short, we're playing Ranger with its card pool now.

Because the Greatbow only needs 1 card to mount an offensive (you could even run a turn off a Tunic counter, if your topdeck came up with a zero-cost arrow), you're free to spend more cards on blocking. And because the bow is only 'drawing' a 5th card when we need it, we don't fatigue ourselves as quickly either. Because blocking in this game is control, and control is what we're trying to exert with our disruptive arrow attacks, the net outcome is a deck that's better at doing what it's trying to do.

With more control over our cards, we can also afford to run a few more defense reactions - and their effects matter more. Take Fate Foreseen, a card that - with Death Dealer - required an arrow in arsenal from your last turn to maximize the value of its Opt. Now, that card we spy on the top of the deck will stay there as we load an arrow- or we can clear it in advance of our next turn, in hopes of a better come-up when we activate Sandscour.

This conversation wouldn't be complete without discussing the new suite of aim-enhanced arrows. These are some of the most universally destructive effects in the card pool - from equipment damage to action restrictions to arsenal destruction to hand disruption. Aim counters empower these cards, and you get them by maximizing your topdeck game.

Heat Seeker deserves special mention as an enabler, because like Azalea, the end-of-turn card from the top of your deck will pick up an aim counter due to its direct flight from deck to arsenal. If Snatch is valued even without go again for a free card to arsenal, Heat Seeker is twice the card Snatch is for this deck.

A deck like this makes extensive use of its sideboard to omit arrows with meaningless effects for the given matchup. What's left is 60ish cards with punishing on-hits specifically tailored to the opposition. An opponent unfamiliar with what Sandscour Azalea can do will call it luck when you find all 3 of your Red in the Ledgers during the game (and fire it 5-6 times, thanks to Memorial Ground); but in a few games, you'll see how consistently you can lock opponents behind the arrow of their nightmares.

Azalea is still a long ways from the top of the meta, but she has a place in it now - a unique niche she can truly call her own. Players shouldn't expect to pick her up and start winning, but those committed to learning her play patterns and her outs will be rewarded. Always the underdog, Azalea's ready to surprise people once again with untapped potential and a new strategic path.