Shadow Elves

Shadow Elves, with their Light / Dark symbol pairing, is a faction that sacrifices life to power-up the ability to move units between the battlefield and the hand, specifically their combat units come to the battlefield, do their job and then return to the hand with Selundar’s Return to Shadow.

One could say Shadow Elves units come in and out of the shadows.

This is a deck about setting up complicated plans and doing assassination plays.

This guide may go a little more in depth than usual as Shadow Elves are so tricky and complex that they deserve the extra paragraphs even if this is just an introductory guide.

The deck packs three commons with good summon effects that you want to play and replay.  True Seeker, Sage Ranger and Shadow Knight. Lastly a common that serves as the core combat unit and also helps support the Shadow Elves engines by drawing cards and helping Selundar to gather boosts, the Shadow Mage.

Selundar’s ability is powerful and versatile, you want to generate boosts very regularly on Selundar as they are necessary for the economic poke potential of this faction and necessary to execute their more powerful assassination plays.

Selundar generates boosts when you damage your own cards within his range, and the deck has many tools to do that, the most common and efficient one being the Shadow Mage. But even attacking your own cards with a 1-strength True Seeker can work well.

Because the Shadow Elves commons are very powerful the turn they are summoned, just returning them to hand has value on its own. But returning units to the hand always has value, economically it means you “gain 1 magic” and deny the possibility for the opponent to spend 1 attack to gain 1 magic.
Also, when the opponent spends resources / attacks to wound your unit, but doesn't kill it and that unit is returned to your hand, the work your opponent did goes mostly to waste.

Returning your own units can also serve well to create two attacks on a single flank, as you can just attack with a unit, return it to your hand and then attack with a ranged unit that was behind.

Shadow Elves is a highly complex deck with a lot of tricks and as with other “bag of tricks decks”, it’s very versatile in its strategies, but all of their strategies rely on the power of Selundar’s Return to Shadow ability and his own high attack strength.

The usual flow of the game for Shadow Elves is a start with ranged poking and generating boost quickly on Selundar while trying to set up big plays. In general a play that results in a lot of pressure on the opponent summoner or their gates.
But sometimes their start can be very explosive using their tough units + movement to push fast and threaten the opponent’s gates from the start. All Shadow Elves commons have properties that make them very good at pressuring enemy gates.

Shadow Elves is a faction about striking and hiding, while setting up a big strike or push for the near future. It requires finesse but also being very bold and aggressive at the right moments.
This is a faction hard to grasp at first with several unconnected cogs that, once a player knows how to connect them, will seem very hard to deal with for the opponent, but super satisfying for the player that is piloting them.

If you like to plan and develop a complex assassination strategy, building the proper hand, setting up the combos and resources, meanwhile doing surgical strikes and hit and run tactics, Shadow Elves are the right faction for you.