Aggro decks with giant spells are a thing now—thanks, Spiteful Summoner

As the Kobolds and Catacombs meta continues to develop, one card is leading to some of the most unique deckbuilding seen so far—Spiteful Summoner.

The six mana 4/4 reveals a spell from your deck, and summons a random minion that costs the same onto the battlefield. When this card was revealed, most people looked at existing spell heavy decks for potential inclusions.

As it turns out, the best way to play this card is to jam it into decks where it doesn’t necessarily belong.

This was on full display at this weekend’s Seat Story Cup 8. Champion Sebastian “Xixo” Bentert had three Summoner decks in his lineup for the final—and two of them were aggressive decks.

Priest was one of the first decks to get the Summoner treatment, with Grand Archivist also included. Xixo’s list is simple—it’s a standard Dragon Priest list for the most part, with this package added in. In addition to the three related minions the deck plays four big spells—two copies each of Mind Control and Free From Amber. That ensures some massive swing turns with Summoner, and then the Archivist can come down and summon them. With Free From Amber the effect is pretty much the same as with Summoner, and you can time it to make the Mind Control effective.

One of the reasons Archivist in particular is strong is the design of it. If your opponent doesn’t have a Mind Control target, it won’t be played—just as if you had the card in your hand and it wouldn’t be an option to you. It never misses like that, and that’s pretty important. If you are out of Ambers and your opponent has no targets, the Archivist won’t go off. If your opponent isn’t up on this tech, they might think you have no Mind Controls either.

Perhaps the best example of this somewhat brute force approach is Xixo’s Paladin. It’s just a standard Aggro Murloc Paladin—except it plays two Spiteful Summoners and two copies of Dinosize. Purely so you can summon a eight mana minion on turn six. Then you can use the spell itself to make a big minion on turn eight, and you are presenting a ton of big threats for removal.

Hunter has the same philosophy, just with Call of the Wild instead of Dinosize.

These decks might look really weird on paper, with Corridor Creeper also upping the curve. But in reality these decks have hugely powerful tempo swings, and could dominate the meta before long.