Skeleton Archer Archetype Review

[HonchKing]

The skeleton archer deck is powerful archetype and knowing how to utilize it as well as how to counter it will help you in your game play in ECB.

The main goal of the deck is to stall with the skeleton archer, since it can’t be killed till the 12 second mark, until your portal cards activate, providing back up, all the while using damage spells to whittle down your opponents creatures.

Which damage spells you choose to run it up to you. The most popular versions tends to use assassination, hellfire, or blizzard. Low budget players or beginners can substitute these with cards such as staggering blow, stone thrower, poison rain, or pit trap. Players with larger budgets may use cards such as shadowbolts, chain lightning, or ritual of doom.

Cards such as heals, attack buffs, or sabotage shouldn’t typically be used as they don’t provide much to the overall strategy of the deck.

The deck has a few, but exploitable counters:

The first is eleven fairy, because the skeleton archer deck has low non-spell damage output, she will absorb all the spell damage then kill all your opponents creatures.

The second and most popular counter is courpse explosion. When you kill a skeleton archer before it’s recast timer ends, course explosion will activate preventing skeleton archer from being revived. It’s the best and most effective way to counter this deck, however, because of this you maybe see some skeleton archer decks run trap detection to counter this.

Some other counters are kobold, sabotage, or spell vortex. All of these counters aim to prevent your opponent from using their spells, so it takes away the fundamental strategy of the deck.

Know that you know how to counter this archetype, the last remaining topic is where to expect to see it. From my experiences, this archetype is most common in hardcore mode. Due to its large amount of power and being hard to remove it’s a popular choice in hardcore. Expect to see it as the second or third deck. In pro mode it more rare to see it being played, simply because it’s so easily countered when you can expect it. In classic it sees and average amount of play, maybe consider adding in an course explosion every now and then.