LoR Mulligan Scenario Series Part 3: Lee Sin Aphelios, Lucian Azir, and TF Fizz

The LoR Mulligan Scenario Series: Part 3

The stage is set, the crowd is ready, the fishes are burbling. I’m your host Jordan “WhatAmI” Abronson and it’s time for the mulligan show!

For any first-time viewers out there I’ve included a description of what we’re up to below.

If you’re an experienced Mulligan Show contestant then feel free to skip down to Scenario #1 and I’ll meet you there in just a moment.

For each stage, I’m going to give you your hand at the opening of a game, describe the situation we’re up against and ask you what you think you should do and why.

Then when you’ve got your answer ready to go, go ahead and scroll below the spoiler underneath each setup and we can walk through my decision and thought process together.

These situations are set up to be intentionally at least a little bit tricky, so don’t just go with your first guess.

Try to really think it through before you hit that spoiler button. Alright, ready?

Let’s meet our first contestant.

Mulligan Scenario # 1: Lee Sin Aphelios vs Matron Watcher

The matchup is your Lee Sin Aphelios against your opponent’s Matron Watcher deck.

Two brutal combo/control decks enter, only one leaves.

You draw your first four cards and are greeted with Zenith Blade, Aphelios, Guiding Touch, and Deny. Who stays and who goes? You decide.

SPOILERS

More than anything, this mulligan decision comes down to having a deep understanding of what your key cards are.

In this matchup, the biggest deal is going to be Lee himself, followed closely by our Veiled Temples. Zenith Blade might look shiny, as it’s part of our one-turn kill to make Lee gigantic, but it’s the least important part, and we definitely don’t want it early, so we’ll be shipping it back.

Deny also sounds sweet because we do need to be on the lookout for enemy Vengeance stopping us in our tracks, but with two to three Deny, two Bastion, and three Deep Meditation in our deck we can look to draw our Vengeance-Stoppers later, we need our Lee and Temple as soon as possible, back it goes.

Next, we have Aphelios and an easy Nightfall trigger, sounds like a match made in heaven, right?

Well, maybe in other places, but here it’s not quite so impressive.

First of all Aphelios without the help of a Veiled Temple is extremely easy to lose to an Avalanche or Blighted Ravine.

Secondly, if we are mulliganing three cards we are going to see a total of six new cards before our turn three, if we keep the Aphelios we are quite likely to find a way to trigger him in time.

What all of that means is that mulliganing the guiding touch here is effectively the same as casting it for zero mana on our turn one to dig us a card deeper to finding our Lee/Temple and I will take that deal any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

So out of those four promising and interesting cards, the only one that gets to stick around is our Champion.

Mulligan Scenario # 2: Lucian Azir vs Aphelios TF

Let’s get Shuriman for this one, shall we?

There’s been an unfortunate dearth of our sandy overlords in the vastness of their desert, but one deck, in particular, has impressed me playing both with and against it the few times I’ve seen it wander on by.

We’re on Lucian Azir facing down a pile of random nonsense headed up by an Aphelios and a Twisted Fate.

We’ve got the attack token and our opening four offer up Grizzled Ranger, Emperor’s Dais, Lucian, and Sharpsight.

What’s the call?

SPOILERS

What you do with this hand is entirely dependent on what kind of deck you’ve decided you are.

If we’re an aggro deck that’s not attacking on turn four and doesn’t have a one-drop then we probably need to go find one.

We’d be throwing back Grizzled Ranger, Sharpsight, and maybe even the Dais to make sure that we hit the all-important early curve.

Maybe looking for a Dune Keeper to go for that one mana Decimate power play.

But what if we’re not an aggro deck?

What if we’re a combo deck that occasionally looks like one?

Well in that case what we want to do is collect our combo pieces and then protect them, right?

We might not have an Azir yet, but from that perspective, the Dais and the Sharpsight look like pretty great tools to help Lucian do his thing, possibly even in the face of an onrushing Boxtopus.

Given that we’re not desperately throwing everything away praying for one drops, Grizzled Ranger looks pretty alright here too as our turn four doesn’t he?

If we haven’t needed to use that Sharpsight to protect Lucian then Ranger set’s up a pretty nice open scout attack for our turn five before we play whatever other goodies we’ve drawn into by then.

This might sound a tad controversial, but I would go ahead and keep all four of these and even be reasonably happy about it.

Mulligan Scenario # 3: TF Fizz vs TF Fizz

Once more into the breach my friends.

You really can’t reasonably talk about this format without touching on the Burbles that wait around every corner.

Today we’re going to take a quick peek into that most dreaded of all occasions, the Burblefish mirror match.

You look down at your opener and it presents Iterative Improvement, Get Excited!, Zap Sprayfin, and Mind Meld.

What do you sacrifice to the mulligan gods?

SPOILERS

So let’s start by looking at the Mind Meld.

A lot of these matches end up getting decided by who can Meld effectively first, putting the opponent on the back foot from a bunch of chump blocks, and snowballing the rest of the game.

That said, we draw a LOT of cards in this deck, and we need to get our engines running pronto, so while it might seem analogous to the Fiora/Shen mirror mulligan of last week, it’s not quite the same, and Mind Meld is headed back into our deck.

We’d really like to see a Ballistic Bot, as that card synergizes with almost literally every other tool in our deck.

However we don’t have one, and we’re not guaranteed to get one off our mulligan.

Luckily we can keep the Iterative here and if our opponent bots it up, then we’ll get to as well. If not, then we can both brick out together and that’s fine too.

Get Excited isn’t what we really want to see in our opening hand, but it’s unfortunately imperative that we make sure we have some way to answer a Twisted Fate from our Opponent.

Throwing that back would be impressively greedy and could lead to us simply losing the game come turn four or five.

This time around it’s going to have to stay.

Finally, we look at Zap.

While he is a good card advantage, and he can do some good work on blocking duty, he’s not Twisted Fate, he’s not Ballistic Bot, and he’s definitely not Pick a Card.

Compared to those three while Zap is doing his best, it’s just not going to be enough for him to get to stay in the opener when we’re missing our other pieces, back into the depths of the deck he goes.

So how did your plays and thought process match up at the end of the day?

Think that Mr. WhatAmI is making some absolutely terrible plays and want to help him improve?

I’m always open to thoughts and constructive criticisms either on my stream below or on Twitter @xxwhatamixx.

Hope to hear from you there and see you next time I’m around to host The Mulligan Show.

LFM

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Thanks for reading! If you have any questions, feel free to ask WhatAmI during his streams (around 10AM PST basically every day).

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