How to Counter TF Go Hard

How to Counter TF Go Hard

Hey everyone, it’s Kuvira and Precipic here to talk about the ways to counter the new big deck around. Twisted Fate Go Hard.

This deck is an incredibly powerful deck with several ways of winning games that are all very difficult to attack.

These include the ability to create an unbeatable end game with Pack Your Bags, the ability to swarm the board with a bunch of cheap units, and the ability to burn the opponent out with Doombeast and Pack Your Bags. So let’s get into how to counter these strategies.

If you want to learn more about how this deck works from the perspective of playing it, check out our TF Go Hard guide.

Deck Code: CECAEAYFAYIAMAQGAQERUHJGHIAQGBQIAEAQKMIBAMAQKAJQGUBQCAYFBAAQEBRAAIAQKDZB

[See TF Go Hard deck details]

Understand its gameplan

Go Hard

Go Hard is a very difficult card to interact with in general. If the deck successfully casts one Go Hard early it will be casting Go Hard for the rest of the game. Then eventually you will cast Pack Your Bags and just autowin most matchups. There are four ways to effectively deal with this.

The first is to make Go Hard an actively bad card to cast. The only deck that really does this is Tahm Kench Soraka. Damaging your opponent’s creatures in that deck helps Soraka level up and gives progress to Star Spring and the units become so big that casting a Pack Your Bags often isn’t even good.

The second way to effectively deal with Go Hard is by using Nopeify. Nopeify is cheap enough that you can stop them from being able to cast the first Go Hard ever. Then, once you’ve denied them from casting the first Go Hard it will be incredibly difficult for them to ever cast a second one.

The third, albeit less effective way, to deal with Go Hard is with Puffcaps. To get to Pack You Bags, this deck needs to draw a ton of cards. It is not rare that this deck draws 3-4 cards a turn after turn 4. If you have any number of Puffcaps in the opponent’s deck they will draw a large number of them and take a ton of damage.

As such, a card like Chump Wump is incredibly effective against this deck and you should often just cast the mushrooms as early as possible against this deck.

The Fourth is to try to kill them before Pack your Bags Matters. There aren’t a ton of aggro decks that don’t care about both the small units that Go Hard plays and the sheer number of 1 damage spells it plays, however the ones that do have a pretty great matchup into this deck because you just try to kill them while they are getting their Pack your Bags set up.

Swarm

One of the biggest plans of the TF Go Hard is its ability to swarm the board with various units that all generate value or are just incredibly efficient.

This starts with Elise who can just snowball out of control with her spiders if you don’t have a good answer to her. This swarm is great because against aggressive decks you have the ability to block all of their attackers and against control decks, you have super resilient pressure tools.

In general, cheap board clears are super effective against this strategy. The most notable of these is Avalanche which is able to completely negate your early swarm of units. Twisted Fate backed up by a Keg is another really great option at dealing with this sort of board.

Another option is just making it so that your board can’t even block. This would be by using giant overwhelm units or by using fearsome units to just overpower this form of defense.

Burn

A big portion of the power of TF Go Hard is the ability to burn the opponent out from very high life totals using a combination of Doom Beast and Pack Your Bag.

This is basically the only way they have to win once you’ve answered their board and once their deck becomes too full of Go Hard it becomes their only possible gameplan. As such, a very real plan is just running enough healing that they can’t actually kill you.
The most obnoxious card of these is Withering Wail because it negates both your board and heals the opponent out of range of your burn. Broadback Protector is also an incredible card in the deck because it puts you out of range of any sort of burn plan.

Choose the right decks

Fearsome

Deck Code: CIBQCAYJEMDQCBIOCAPCOMJVHACAGBIDAQDA2AICAECQGFQA

[See Kalista Elise deck details]

TF Go Hard is a deck that plays a lot of cheap units with 3 or less attack, Doombeast and Gankplank are the only units capable to deal block Fearsome units, but with the Fearsome decks running Frenzied Skitterer to nullify the Doombeast block, TF Go Hard becomes a deck with no Fearsome blockers at all.

The Fearsome deck also runs the Harrowing, which represents a huge threat to the TF Go Hard deck that can only be answerable with Ruination. Pale Cascade is also very impactful in this matchup, it protects your units from Go Hard + Keg on one of the Mistwraiths, for example, and pushes damage while drawing more units.

TF go Hard can survive against fearsome decks with some unique tech cards like Withering Wail when combined with Kegs, Petty Officer, and even Grasp of the Undying.

Overwhelm

Deck Code: CIBQIAYJENMFSXAHAEBQECILBUKCMNYBAIBQKAQBAEBQ6AIDBEOAA

[See Decisive Targon deck details]

Similar to the Fearsome matchup, TF Go Hard’s small units are very effective at chump blocking but lack a high health stat line that could block overwhelm damage.

Decks like Targon Noxus ( Draven Darius Targon) or Noxus Frejlord overwhelms are excellent picks against Tf Go Hard. This matchup is fairly one-sided. Pushing damage with units like Iron Balista, Alpha Wildclaw, Ancient Yeti, and Crescent Guardian becomes very easy.

The Overwhelm deck usually finishes off the game with either main decked Decimates or the ones that Captain Farron Generates. The lack of fast speed removal combat tricks or removal spells from Go Hard’s side makes cards like decisive maneuver very effective at closing out games.

Fiora Shen (Nopeify)

Deck Code: CICAGAICCMQCWBIBAAERUJJNGMAQEAABAIBQABQOAIBACARFGEAQGAQUAEAQCABU

[See Fiora Shen deck details]

This Matchup is usually even depending on the version that both players are running. The Fiora Shen deck can easily tech to be favored against TF Go Hard by simply adding in Nopeify!

It’s a 2 mana deny spell that stops Go Hard while also stopping its shuffling effect, leaving the Go Hard deck with a huge tempo loss. On top of having Deny to nullify Vengence, The Ruination or a potential Go Hard makes the matchup fairly comfortable for Shen Fiora.

Fiora level up is usually their win con, combined with Shen and protective spells like Riposte and Sharpsight allows Fiora to survive on the board very often. They also run multiple copies of Single Combat and Concerted strike which speeds up Fiora’s Level up.

Invoke decks

Deck Code: CIBACAIADIFQGCI2DQRTGNSMKRLVQYDEAEAQGCKVAIAQCAAHAEBQSFY

[See Leona Aurelion Sol deck details]

In the current meta, Invoke decks like Lux/Asol, Leona/Asol, and Diana/Leona are seeing a lot of play on ladder and in tournaments after the nerf to Warmother decks.

Invoke decks deal with the board very well, with the Daybreak units like Solari Soldier, and Solari Shieldbearer they can handle any kind of early aggression from TF Go Hard’s wide boards.

However the strength of Invoke decks in this matchup is mostly celestial cards, Starshaping heals your nexus for 5 and allows you to get one of the strong celestial units, The Great Beyond is very good in this matchup due to the lack of cheap spells to remove the spellshield + vengeance. The Immortal Fire also survives vengeance and represents a great finisher.

Draven Ez

Deck Code: CICAGAIDCQXDOAICAMEQOAIEAENR6JBGGQ5ACAYECEAQEAIDCYZQA

[See Draven Ez deck details]

This matchup is very skill-extensive, but when played correctly Draven/Ezreal should be winning pretty consistently.

Draven/Ezreal deck have multiple tools to deal with Tf Go Hard, The cheap units like House Spider, Sump Dredger, and Arachnoid Sentry combined with the cheap removal spells like Mystic Shot, Thermogenic Beam and Stattik Shock allow a fairly one-sided control of the board for Draven/Ezreal.

One of the other important cards would be Puffcap Peddler, since TF Go Hard is a deck with huge amounts of draw cards, Shuffling Mushroom Clouds into their deck will result in them taking around 3 damage for each Mushroom Cloud.

Captain Farron and Ezreal are how you generally finish off the game due to the lack of healing cards in TF go Hard.

Lee sin/Targon and Soraka Kench were favored against go Hard deck before they weren’t running Crumble, Vengeance, and The Ruination. But the addition of those cards made the matchup favorable for Tf Go Hard.

We hope that this article helped give you a better idea of how to beat TF Go Hard. It is certainly a very strong deck however there are a lot of tools that exist in the game to help beat it. Try your best, play well and you’ll never lose to a Pack Your Bags again.

Thanks for reading! If you have any questions, feel free to ask Kuvira during his streams. 

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