Wayfarers

Wayfarers (Spirit / Cunning) is a faction of travelers that work together to get to the other side of the battlefield using multiple tricks resulting in a hyper-aggressive assassin faction.
They pressure the opponent by clogging their gates and threatening the opponent’s summoner with their high mobility and trickery. 
Wayfarers feel more comfortable "away from home", playing on the opponent's side of the battlefield.
Wayfarers are the masters of speed and trickery, their biggest strength is their capability to go wherever they want to go.
The deck is mostly composed of units with mobility or reach tricks and events that help with such things. They have a single card focused on economy, with the goal to give Wayfarers more gas to keep the pressure but it will not be enough to keep up with other decks that have more tools for a battle of attrition.

And this is their weakness, they generally go down in a battle of attrition against other factions. Wayfarers need to capitalize on their speed and tricks to force the opponent into bad positions early and hopefully unable to keep up with this early pressure. They must keep the opponent stumbling, unstable and unable to keep up, because if the opponent can stabilize and stand their ground, the result is unlikely to favor the Wayfarers.

Wayfarers depend on their multiple tricks to take the best spots and poke the opponent’s summoner to threaten for a final run that finishes them off.
In order to achieve that you need to be aggressive with your hand, using it fast, quickly deploying units and aggressively attacking and taking prime board positions.
Celeste
Celeste is a combat summoner, after all she is ultimately just health and strength. She needs units on the other side of the field to reach her potential but the whole faction is designed to achieve this, and remember that she herself counts as a unit on the other side for her own ability.
Celeste has a key role in the deck as the main source of damage. In general Wayfarers trade mobility and trickery for low damage potential so they rely on Celeste to do the heavy lifting for damage output. Her 6 strength potential is essential to tear down the high life units the opponent will use to try to slow down the advance and is a great amount of strength to destroy 5 life gates, which is one of the main ways Wayfarers apply pressure.

In addition to doing the heavy lifting when it comes to damage, the deck relies on her to threaten the opponent’s summoner. Her 6 strength will often be the way to assassinate, as two shots from Celeste means 12 dice,  which can kill some summoners by itself. Thanks to their events Slip By, Astral Waypoint and Coordinate, it can be alarmingly easy to get Celeste in range of the opponent’s summoner. Boldo and Gem Dancers can also do great work to make it hard for the opponent to punish Celeste.

So you need to use Celeste a lot, and the opponent will try to poke her down to remove her as an option for you, be careful to only expose her when her 6 strength is really needed, otherwise let the work be done by her units as much as possible.
Boldo
Boldo is a core component of the Wayfarers faction. Celeste and Boldo seem like an inseparable duo and the core power of the deck. When they are together on the field, it is when the Wayfarers are at their strongest. In other words, most of the time you should summon Boldo. Boldo’s high mobility is helpful to the Wayfarers’ plans, but it is his “move after attack” ability that creates that special synergy with Celeste.

The most important aspect is that Celeste and Boldo can work together in many ways where they both attack the same target or Boldo can just protect Celeste after she performs an attack. Like Eager Adventurer, there is an incredible expanse of strategy to be explored with this unit.
Eager Adventurer

A unit that represents the Wayfarers very well. Fast and with several tricks, this unit is the “damage” of the Wayfarers with its 3 strength. Sadly, it doesn’t have the survivability to do more than that most of the time. However, what it doesn’t have in combat stats, it does in the multiple tricks that fit the Wayfarers’ plan.

Seeing their reach is easy as they can virtually move 4 spaces. They also allow you to make the most of your summoning points as you can summon one Eager Adventurer, immediately use their ability, and summon another unit in that spot.

One key use is to take important spots. They are great to kill a unit and then immediately move where the unit was, which makes them very annoying for the opponent that values its summoning spots.

Finally, a niche but important use is that while they can only move forward with their ability, since Wayfarers spread all over the board, they can get involved in situations where Celeste can attack a target and then move forward to cover Celeste. You can also kill a unit that was protecting the enemy summoner, then use the Eager Adventurer’s ability to take that spot and attack the enemy summoner with the Adventurer.

Because its ability can be used “anytime,” there are a lot of tricks to pull with them and much to be explored in the strategies with this unit
Gem Dancer
The Gem Dancer is the tank of the team, the position holder and the core way to take summoning spots. Be ready to summon most of them as they are usually crucial in taking the opponent's key spots.

Their ability makes it very easy for them to take whatever spot they want, most commonly this will be opponent summoning spots in front of a gate, and their high health then makes it very hard for the opponent to remove them.

One of their major roles in the deck is to remove high health enemy commons by trading places with them, after softening them up, and then letting Celeste finish them off. Celeste can often do it safely as the Gem Dancer will be in a position to protect her.
Spirit Voyager
The ultimate reach unit, Spirit Voyager combines very high mobility with a respectable strength range attack. Spirit Voyagers allow the Wayfarers to threaten a lot of the board. They are not very combat efficient but in exchange they are a cheap unit with arguably the highest reach in the game at the time of release.
Wayward Rogue
Wayfarers need to apply a lot of pressure fast, and often it is hard to keep up with the bodies on the board to keep the gates pressured and the threat high. A 0-cost unit helps tremendously with this. 
The diagonal attack of the Wayward Rogue allows the Wayfarers to put a lot of pressure on, even in clogged board states, as well as allowing you to bypass several types of defensive abilities.
Astral Waypoint
Astral Waypoint has a lot of uses:
It allows Wayfarers to have their units wherever they want as this card allows your other units to create a point for yet more friendly units to join.
They are a virtual spot for your high threat units to exist, like Celeste and Boldo, and for the purpose of considering threats now your opponent needs to not only consider their current place but the Astral Waypoint as a potential place they can instantly be, forcing your opponent to have to deal with a threat from multiple, hard to predict angles.
In addition it is an escape route for Celeste, if she gets in a bad position she can use Astral Waypoint to flee.
It’s also another “blocking” tool, used to block opponent summoning spots and/or movement paths.
Finally, Astral Waypoint can often be used as a shield, to protect a side of a unit that just advanced.
Coordinate
Coordinate allows Wayfarers to put a lot of damage exactly where they want which is a recurrent theme with the deck as it’s what ultimately the faction does. This card is a true Epic Event since not only it allows you to improve your position on the board and attack key targets, but it simultaneously increases the damage of your units, creating highly damaging turns. Coordinate really does a lot for a single 0-cost event so you should try to play both copies in each game as Wayfarers. You do not need to get maximum value to still get good worth.  It is always going to do a lot for just one card.
Slip By
A Summoner event, its major strength is to make Celeste the ultimate summoner killer. It makes it very hard for a summoner to guard from Celeste, and forces the opponent to spend a lot of gates and units just to completely surround their summoner in the hope it is enough to prevent Celeste from reaching it. That’s why it’s important to poke opponent’s summoners, because once they are low enough life, they will be forced to spend a lot of resources, time and effort to protect their summoner against the looming threat of this card, which Wayfarers can capitalize on to get an economic lead with better trades.  Just the threat of Slip By existing is the real power here.

In a pinch it can also be used to escape a bad situation, allowing Celeste to safely target a high value target like an opponent champion or just be able to use Celeste's strength a bit more freely and safely. It can also be used to quickly advance Celeste to a position to build a gate or an Astral Waypoint offensively. 
However, the card and its magic cost make it situational for those uses as the Wayfarers' economy takes a decent hit in exchange for those actions and while that economic hit is irrelevant if your opponent’s summoner is dead, it is quite relevant in all other scenarios.
Seek The Horizon
This event offers a quest to reward you for doing what you already want to do - be on the other side. A good benefit is that you can auto-play it, something very useful for a faction that wants to avoid hand clogging. You can just play it and wait to accomplish the quest. 
Generally at least one Seek The Horizon is easy to play as you will probably complete the quest once per game without much effort, the second copy however may need to be discarded for magic, maybe the first one you draw as you may need that magic to do something next turn. Remember that while the event is sitting there it is doing nothing for you, and sometimes you can’t afford that early game. 
While the event is definitely a powerful economic tool, if the cost of achieving it is “sacrificing” a unit in a suicidal mission, it may not be worth it, so don’t play a quest with the goal of sending a unit to die on the horizon with no other objective than completing this quest. Let it be a quest you complete pretty much doing what you already want to do, in the natural flow of playing the faction optimally.
Gusto
Cheap and giving a lot of movement, Gusto is the secret plan of the Wayfarers, even in games where Wayfarers are struggling to travel wherever they want, Gusto adds an extra, unlimited range speed boost that will make the difference, often allowing unexpected assassinations. In addition to that, Gusto brings a decent body for his cost, making it a great summon in most games, but especially good when you need that extra speed or extra movement as Gusto's ability can be your virtual 4th movement.
Tess
Arguably the most niche of the champions, Tess has some neat tricks that just need the right moment. Since it is hard to play her because of her cost and the need of Wayfarers to use their hand relatively fast, often she is discarded for more affordable options. But she can be the “safer” way to bring a gate to the front when Celeste can’t risk herself. Especially your initial 10 life gate.

Also, if you have several gates on the battlefield already, she can be used to move them around in your favor.
After looking at all of the cards the picture is clear: Wayfarers is a deck fully invested in speed, reach and aggressively taking positions that best suit them. They have this power to the detriment of almost everything else. To exploit your strengths and not let the opponent exploit your weaknesses, Wayfarers need to hit fast and repeatedly, not letting the opponent stabilize.

Where other factions do hit and run, Wayfarers do run and hit, hitting again and again until they take the opponent’s summoner down. However they require a lot of tactical maneuvers, understanding what are the best positions to take and the best targets to attack, so despite that their strategy is relatively simple, their tactics are not.

If you want a faction that is about getting in, striking non-stop before opponents can develop their own plan and you enjoy doing that with trickery and speed, then Wayfarers are the ultimate faction for such and you will have a lot of fun playing them.
Copyrights for the Summoner Wars logo and art belong to Plaid Hat Games, used herein with their express permission.
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