Beyond the Bandlewood LoR Card Impressions: Sion

Beyond the Bandlewood LoR Spoilers Day 11

As the final rounds of the seasonal rage the spoiler season continues heating up right alongside them.

I’m Jordan “WhatAmI” Abronson and I’ve got some crazy engines and spicy new synergies for you today.

Our champion reveal combo continues with Sion as the 6th revealed champion in a row!

Let’s see what the latest reveals have in store:

• Sion (Noxus level 1)
• Roar of the Slayer (Noxus spell and Sion’s champion spell)
• Ancient Warmonger (Noxus follower)
• Fallen Reckoner (Noxus follower)
• Fallen Rider (Noxus follower)
• Lost Soul (Noxus follower)
• Noble Rebel (Noxus follower)
• Reborn Grenadier (Noxus follower)
• Salt and Stitches (Noxus spell)
• Grave Physician (Noxus follower)
• Weapon of the Lost (Noxus spell)

To follow along with past and future Bandlewood card reveals, just click here.

Sion

• Sion (level 1)
  • 7 mana 3|6
  • Overwhelm
  • Text – When I’m discarded, grant your strongest ally Overhwlem and place me in your deck. I have +1|+0 for each card you’ve discarded this game (Max +7|+0).
  • Level up – You’ve discard or summoned 35+ Power.

• Sion (level 2)
  • 7 mana 10|6 champion
  • Overwhelm
  • Text – Last Breath: Summon Sion Returned. When I’m discarded, grant your strongest ally Overwhelm and place me into your deck.

• Sion Returned
  • 7 mana 10|4 champion
  • Overwhelm, Ephemeral
  • Text – When I’m summoned, Rally.

Can I just start by saying I absolutely love the flavor on this one. If you try to kill him by discarding him, he comes back.

If your opponent tries to kill the leveled up version, he comes back. All the while he gets bigger and angrier.

Draven and Jinx have a new best friend and it’ll be very interesting to see how that deck gets put together.

Discard decks have always had a lot of mid and sometimes even late game staying power.

Sion showing up as an actual finisher may take this archetype in extremely new directions and I can’t wait to see it.

Roar of the Slayer

• Roar of the Slayer 
  • 3 mana Fast spell
  • Text – To play, discard a card. Kill the weakest enemy.

Three mana and a discard is a lot for this effect so we’ll probably only see it in decks where the discard is an advantage.

If you can get the synergy rolling though then suddenly this is cheap and powerful tempo.

Roaring death to Eye of the Dragon anybody?

Ancient Warmonger

• Ancient Warmonger 
  • 5 mana 5|5 follower
  • Overwhelm
  • Text – When I’m discarded, grant your strongest ally +2|+0.

Nasty combat trick/small bit of extra damage and a beefy overwhelming body rolled into one?

That sounds pretty good from where I’m sitting.

Freljord/Noxus overwhelm was big for a while and perhaps this card and cards like it have a chance to revitalize that archetype as well as building their own.

Fallen Reckoner

• Fallen Reckoner 
  • 5 mana 4|3 follower
  • Overwhelm
  • Text – When I’m summoned, grant Can’t block to the weakest enemy. Last Breach: Create a Risen Reckoner in hand.

• Risen Reckoner
  • 3 mana 6|3 follower
  • Overwhelm, Ephemeral
  • Text – When I’m summoned, grant Can’t block to the weakest enemy.

So we took an Iron ballista, and we added two mana.

What did we get for that? Well if we’re an aggro deck and all we care about is killing our opponent, we got almost a full removal spell, as well as a second full removal spell and huge burst of damage if our opponent kills it.

That’s not a bad deal.

As an aggro player, I am looking at this as the next coming of Ruin Runner, a very hard to answer finisher that will push through countless lethals.

As a control player, this card has me quaking in my boots and reaching for my hushes to comfort me.

Fallen Rider

• Fallen Rider
  • 2 mana 3|1
  • Fearsome
  • Text – When I’m discarded, create a Risen Riser in hand.

• Risen Rider
  • 2 mana 4|2
  • Fearsome

Wow, Precious Pet has a big brother and he has not come to mess around.

This little friend will push some crazy damage early, and if you have discard synergy then it’ll shrug off Withering Wails and keep on trucking.

This could see serious play in the potential Sion Archetype, Spider Aggro, or even potentially Ezreal/Draven.

I think this is my favorite spoiler today so far because the design shows potential for a pocketful of different decks to brew with.

Lost Soul

• Lost Soul
  • 8 mana 5|4 follower
  • Text – When I’m summoned or discarded, create a Twinblade Revenant in hand.

• Twinblade Revenant
  • 4 mana 4|3
  • Challenger
  • Text – Last Breath: Create a Lost Soul in hand.

Ok, let me start by saying if you plan to cast this you are probably doing it wrong.

his card is looking to be discarded and gain value over and over as much as possible in the mid game.

That said, if the game goes long and both people are low on resources, you can cast it, which I think is a huge part of the power of this card.

Anything that grants incidental inevitability while helping a primary win condition is going to be a potentially extremely powerful finisher.

Noble Rebel

• Noble Rebel
  • 3 mana 3|2 follower
  • Overwhelm
  • Text – Grant me +2|+1 once you’ve discarded 3+ cards this game.

Another Iron Ballista Comparison.

My instincts on this one say that sticking to the Ballista is likely to be more correct here as it will almost never be active on turn three and that’s really when you want to play this type of card.

Maybe I’m missing something but for now this rebel is missing me.

Reborn Grenadier

• Reborn Grenadier
  • 1 mana 3|2 follower
  • Ephemeral
  • Text – To play, discard a card. When I’m discarded, summon an exact copy of me.

This one is really interesting. I think it is probably the discard synergy that I have liked least so far that I have seen, but maybe it’s an important part of the Sion package that will push powerful early damage and I am not giving it enough credit.

Mostly I am worried that if we put too many cards like this one into our deck we will run out of cards to throw away before we get our engines online to actually kill our opponent.

That said this does level up Sion unreasonably quickly and is a pretty big punch in the face when combined with Poro Canon or any other low mana discard for value spell.

It gets a solid “Needs Testing” from me.

Salt and Stitches

• Salt and Stitches
  • 2 mana Focus spell
  • Text – To play, discard a card. Summon a Reborn Grenadier and give it +2|+0 this round.

Wow, then again that is scary. Imagine a turn that goes Salt and Stitches discarding Reborn Grenadier.

Burst speed eight power over two attackers?

That sounds like an absolute nightmare to try to prepare for and a great time from an aggro deck perspective. Scary stuff.

Grave Physician

• Grave Physician 
  • 2 mana 2|2 follower
  • Text – Play: Discard a card to draw a unit.

I always love semi-random tutor effects and this one does not disappoint.

In the right shell, it is a solid piece of card advantage that sticks to the board well and does everything a card like this wants to do.

Huge role player in its archetypes with some small potential to help unit-based combo decks elsewhere, I absolutely love it.

Weapon of the Lost

• Weapons of the Lost
  • 8 mana Slow spell
  • Text – Deal 3 to a unit and summon a Trifarian Swordbreaker.

No, that’s not two cards, it’s just the oft-forgotten 5 mana 6/5 Fearsome now with a removal spell stapled on.

This really does just feel kind of clunky though.

Maybe if it was able to also target the nexus? But honestly probably not even then.

Eight mana slow speed has an awfully large hill to climb and I don’t think this one manages to get over the rise.

Bonus Deck: Sion SMASH

Deck code: CEBQIAIDA4GCGJYCAUBQMDIDAECA2JZNAQAQGBASAIAQIAJIAICQGAIEAEAQGFABAECQGCI

[See Sion SMASH deck details]

Is this better than just jamming Discard Aggro and trying to roll people over? Honestly, I have no idea.

What I do know is that adding inevitability, 4/2 Fearsomes, and giant zombies into this concept seems like an awful lot of fun.

The other cool thing is that this deck gets to effectively run nine champions thanks to Draven’s Biggest Fan, which means that throwing your Sion’s back into your deck until you need them later becomes a perfectly viable option.

Having only two Jinx is a little scary, but she doesn’t need to end games on her own any more.

Even Lost Soul gets to peek in at the top end and add in some discard fodder and removal spells in the form of the 4/3 challenger he drops onto the field. Sounds like a good answer to Eye of the Dragon to me.

We’re revealing the new Beyond the Bandlewood cards every day at our spoiler page. To build decks with the new cards, head to our Deck Builder.