LoR Deck Guide: TF Go Hard

How to Play TF Go Hard

TF Go Hard is another potent deck archetype that has entered the meta since the debut of the K/DA cards.

By combining the tools from Bilgewater and Shadow Isles, you can really enable Go Hard as a reliable win condition.

As you draw to find Pack Your Bags, you’ll also quickly fuel Twisted Fate’s level up condition.

In this guide, Precipic and Rattlingbones will cover the deck’s win conditions, mulligans, matchups, and more!

Deck code: CECAEAYFAYIAMAQGAQERUHJGHIAQGBQIAEAQKMIBAMAQKAJQGUBQCAYFBAAQEBRAAIAQKDZB

[See TF Go Hard deck details]

As always, if you have any questions or feedback regarding the deck, just leave us a comment below!

Win Conditions

The goal of the deck is to slowly chip away at your opponent’s Nexus in the early stages of the game while working towards leveling the “Go Hard” into “Pack your Bags”.

Once “Pack Your Bags” is in your hand, you try to develop a wide board before playing the card. This ensures that only one of your units gets blocked and allows for maximum damage output.

Typically, you’re able to close games out then and there. If all else fails, the deck has plenty of draw cards that allow you to get into a second round of “Pack Your Bags”.

The Mulligan Phase

In this deck, you generally want to mulligan looking for either strong early pressure or a way to get a really fast Go Hard into Pack Your Bags. For strong early pressure, you have cards like Elise, Jagged Butcher, and Cursed Keeper.

For enabling an early Pack your Bags you have cards like Go Hard and Zap Sprayfin. In general, you should basically always keep Twisted Fate because it’s an incredibly scary card from this deck.

Other than that, you should be looking to keep cards that are super powerful in your matchup, this would mean cards like Crumble and Ruination vs Tahm Kench Soraka, Glimpse Beyond vs Ezreal decks, or Ruination vs Ashe Sejuani or Leona Diana.

Key Cards and Synergies

Go Hard, Zap Sprayfin, and Glimpse Beyond

The key combo of this deck is setting up a wide board utilizing Pack Your Bags to lock your opponent out of playing units. The way this usually will play out is that you will have the attack token and a Pack Your Bags in hand.

You will play units until you have six units in play and your opponent will be forced to match you.

If they don’t, they will just take a ton of damage because of how wide you are, and if they do, they will lose to Pack. It is basically a checkmate situation. As such, the deck is built around setting up this board state and Zap Sprayfin is a huge part of that.

The fact that he finds your Go Hard a very high percentage of the time means that you can start shuffling Go Hards back into your deck which makes your odds of hitting Pack early huge.

Zap Sprayfin finding Glimpse Beyond is also an almost unfair combo for the deck too. Against any Ezreal deck, it is your best card in the matchup because you both deny an Ezreal level trigger and you get to draw 2 cards.

Just make sure that you are always reactive with your Glimpse Beyonds in matchups where your opponents have removal.

When sequencing with Go Hard, you should be thinking very very hard about whether or not your next draw is better as a Go Hard or as another spell. If I have zero card draw spells in hand, I basically never cast Go Hard if I can avoid it.

This is because you are making your future draws much worse every time you cast Go Hard because you will end up with no cards in hand but have a Pack Your Bags and likely lose that game.

However, if I have two to three card draw spells then I am casting Go Hard at the first reasonable opportunity I have because I know that I can reliably set up a Pack Your Bags without running out of steam. In general with this deck, think very hard about what you want your next draws to be before casting Go Hard.

Twisted Fate

This is easily the scariest card in the deck. This deck runs so much draw that you can reliably level TF over 2 turns and a flipped TF will win even the hardest games.

In general, you should be looking to Blue card in this deck as your default mode because of the threat of it leveling and because it helps dig you deeper to your Go Hards.

Another neat thing with Twisted Fate is that you run a good number of Kegs with cards like Dreadway Deckhand which can set up for a very powerful TF Red card to wipe most boards.

Elise

Elise happens to be one of the best 2 drop units in the game and fills a pretty neat role in the deck. There’s no other unit that’s able to consistently push damage on round 2 while generating tempo (summoning additional spiders) and enabling cards like Glimpse Beyond and Croaker.

All in all, the ability to push 3 damage and continue building a board off of 1 unit is exactly what this deck needs.

Doombeast

Doombeast is easily the best 3 mana unit in the game for this deck. There are a few key roles that it fills:

• It’s able to give you more reach with Pack Your Bags (getting you closer to lethal).
• It’s able to give you more sustain by healing 2 health on any given turn (super easy to activate).
• Last but not least, it’s a 3 attack unit that can block a Fearsome unit.

Crumble, Vengeance, and Ruination

Crumble is just a really well-rounded (and relatively cheap) removal card with a deck that has so many cheap utility units.

Most of the units in the deck are able to generate card advantage, such as Pool Shark, Twisted Fate, Elise into spiders, Deckhand, and so on.

Any and all of these units are able to be sacrificed for Crumble. Last but not least, the most important factor for why Crumble is included in the deck is its ability to destroy Landmarks.

Vengeance is an interesting choice and really, it’s being played to address some of the win cons of other decks. Cards like Fiora and Trundle can really help our opponents speed-up their win cons and this deck doesn’t have an easy way of dealing with them.

To that end, having a hard removal like Vengeance is really useful. Last but not least, Vengeance is able to punish open attacks which in turn allows us to play to our win conditions with Ruination and/or Pack Your Bags.

The Ruination is a win condition on its own. Be it vs Ashe/Sej, Tahm Kench, Shen/Fiora, and/or Feel the Rush, Ruination always finds ways of getting insane value.

After all, we’re playing a ton of units that are able to tutor other cards and/or draw cards so we’re always able to refill the board and our hand.

Good Matchups

Ashe Sejuani

Deck code:  CEBAMAIBA4FRMJRJGABQCAYED4QQIAYBAEAQGKQBAMAQEAIBAM2QCAQBAIAQCAIDGM

• The fact that this deck has an insanely high win rate into Ashe/Sej is a testament to the deck’s strength.
• There aren’t many decks that can boast an 80%+ win rate into Ashe/Sej (Discard Aggro doesn’t count!)
• All in all, this is one of the easier matchups because Pack Your Bags will be able to clear most boards.
• The deck also has a whole lot of Juice (tempo play) while maintaining card advantage. Meaning we have all the chump blockers we need to allow us to get into Pack Your Bags and/or Ruination.
• Once you play Pack Your Bags and/or Ruination, you simply win by out-resourcing your opponent

Discard Aggro

Deck code: CEBQCAYECIDACBAMBUOCOKBNAQAQGBYJE43QEAQBAMKCGAIBAQAQCAIBAQEA

• Discard Aggro relies on getting a wide board quickly. It does so by flooding the board cheaply.
• Unfortunately for Discard Aggro, Go Hard/Pack Your Bags, Twisted Fate, Elise, and Doom Beast make it impossible to build good boards and/or do enough damage for the Jinx to actually matter.
• We’re always looking for the early Go Hard and Elise type hands as they’re able to consistently deal with our opponent’s early pressure while building our own. If we’re then able to play into our Zaps or Twisted Fates, we’re essentially sealing the game.
• Most of the board based Demacia aggro decks (Scouts and/or Elites)
• These matchups are also good for us for the reasons mentioned above
• Pack Your Bags and Ruination get too much value and we’re able to typically outpace or outsource our opponents.

Bad Matchups

Tahm Soraka

Deck code: CEBAIAYGAQDQQDYHAMER2IZNGM2DOPABAMBQSEY3KUAQCAYJMI

• This deck is incredibly obnoxious to deal with for this deck. All of its units are unkillable even by a Pack Your Bags.
• It’s basically impossible to pressure them and very difficult to level your Twisted Fate. Eventually, they have a combo kill off Star Spring that you can’t interact with.
• If you want to win this matchup you basically need Ruination, Vengeance, and Crumble. This is the only effective way to kill off their value engines like Star Spring, Tahm Kench, Soraka, and even Broadbacked Protector.

SI/Freljord

Deck code: CEBQGAIFAEOSQBQBAEAQYFBBE4ZAEAYBAYLAEAIBAUMQCAIBFIBACAYBAQBACBIPEE

• SI Ramp has tons of removals & heals which are able to typically sustain and/or prevent the early chip damage altogether.
• The Overwhelm units are also really hard to deal with because we can’t effectively chump block.
• In order to win, we really need to dodge and/or have good value going into an Avalanche, have removals for the Trundle, and push as much damage as we possibly can in the early/mid-game.
• We then try and end the game the same way we do in any other matchup. Play Pack Your Bags with a wide board and attack :).

Tech Choices

Vengeance

• This card is great in matchups where you really need to kill big units

The Ruination

• This card is great if there are wide boards of big units that you need to kill.

Crumble

• This card is great at killing Landmarks and big units.

Gangplank

• This is a nice piece of over the top if you need extra late game power

Commander Ledros

• This card gives you a chance to win against late game decks with infinite healing.

Vile Feast

• This card should only be included if you are facing nothing but aggro.

Cursed Keeper

• This card is great at helping deal with Avalanche, Fearsomes, and control decks but it is worse into aggro unless you high roll with Fortune Croaker.

Petty Officer

• This card is great if there aren’t a ton of 1 damage pings running around.

Thanks for reading! If you have any questions, feel free to ask Rattlingbones during his streams (every weeknight @9PM EST).

Bones streams at twitch.tv/rattlingbones_ every weeknight @9PM EST