At some point in your Gem Blending journey, you will graduate from starter decks to deck lists entirely built by you! Whether it be adding Silas to the Hive Swarm Starter deck, or high level blends to Joy Holiday, realizing the potential of deck building brings Gem Blenders to its peak. However, the leap from making a quick card substitution up to a building a deck from the ground up can be intimidating. While the Gemlandian has some essential deck building tips, I also wanted to bring you a collection of decks you can build that show off the full span of Gem Blenders gameplay! This article will highlight the LV5 blend Blood Reaper, and discuss what cards play to its strengths and cover its weaknesses.
Blood Reaper is a LV5 blend in the Fowl school. Once placed on a LV5 hero with an Aqua, Terra, Pyro, Nocturna, and Aerogems, it can begin building a strong attack to shred through some opponents, all while having solid defense.
Blood Reaper’s ability allows it to attack multiple times every turn, but only after having “Doomed Tributes” attached to them. Specifically, you can attach a blend from your hand once every turn, and perform an additional attack for each attached blend, max 3. After 3 turns of sacrifice, the Blood Reaper can attack 4 times in one turn, up to 8 damage total!
Strengths
Once the Blood Reaper is down, you can immediately attach a blend to it. You can also attach blends before attacking, so the 8 damage max is around the corner and can be a huge threat early-mid game. Also, since the damage is distributed over 4 attacks, only one attack can be negated with deblend-to-block, a common weakness of other hard-hitters.
Weaknesses
Blood Reaper has some glaring weaknesses, however, due to their building effect. First, attached blends are not invincible, but rather the opposite. If the Blood Reaper is deblended at any time, or if its ability is deactivated for even a moment, all attached blends are discarded, which resets the progress towards big damage. Second, the multiple hits of the Blood Reaper is very weak against defense, which reduces the damage of each individual attack. This makes an opposite lane hero with just 2 defense resistant to all damage. Even a hero with 1 defense will turn 2×4 damage to 1×4 damage. Watch for opponents that can move your heroes or their heroes easily, as they can quickly defend against a threatening Blood Reaper. Since we already can’t afford to lose our Blood Reaper, I will only be including one copy of it in this deck, since I don’t plan to ever use it to deblend-to-block, and we likely won’t have enough cards to play a second copy.
When exploring cards for a Blood Reaper deck, we want to identify cards that bolster Blood Reaper’s strengths or cover its weaknesses.
Sub-Blends
The tree of sub-blends for Blood Reaper is smaller than some other LV5 blends, but has some key blends that can take it to the next level.
For LV4 blends, there aren’t too many appealing options. Cannon Boomer doesn’t relate to the objectives of the Blood Reaper, and Gloom Miser is even worse. Shadow Sneaker, however, appears to be a perfect match with their ability to break defenses, specifically in the lane with a Blood Reaper. I will grab one of them for the deck, but more wouldn’t hurt as a deck variant.
For LV3 blends, we begin to see some options to help the Blood Reaper with other weaknesses like returns, movement, and effect blockers. Fever Virus and Drip Fowl both have ways to stop enemy effects, which can stop deblending (like Silent Usher or Torrent Crasher) and forced movement (like Flurry Shifter, Venom Fowl, Royal Buzzer). I’ll opt in for Fever over Drip in this case, so we won’t need extra aqua gems later. Venom Fowl can also work in our favor for moving defense out of the way, but I will opt out of that strategy for this deck list. Fungus Usher and Burn Fowl don’t have abilities to directly assist the Blood Reaper, which leaves Steam Ushers to throw in for increased deck mobility.
LV2 and LV3 blends naturally are advantageous to the blood reaper, as they can be searched for more easily than LV4 blends, so they make for great tributes to the Blood Reaper’s ability. Many LV2 blends in the tree can help accelerate the Blood Reaper by helping search for the Blood Reaper in your deck, or accumulating gems to get the Blood Reaper down ASAP. Fowls, Mages, and Ushers can be used very early for rapid gem placement. Rockets and Viruses wouldn’t hurt either, but Gulls and Hornets would not suit a Blood Reaper deck.
Gems
A standard starting deck has 20 gems, which is a good starting point for most decks based around 5 gem types. We can determine how many we need with some considerations and quick math:
♦ How many blends use each gem?
♦ How many heroes do we want gemmed? What gems? If we want all three frontline heroes with a gem type, we need at least 3 (check out that quick math)
♦ Do any effects need a specific type of gem?
Blood Reaper will focus on one or two heroes getting most gems, and no blend or hero effects need a specific type of gem. This leaves the distribution of gems over the different blends to be the main driver:
Blend cards that want a(n):
Aqua gem: 7
Terra gem: 4
Pyro gem: 10
Nocturna gem: 16 (All)
Aero gem: 5
Total Gems Required: 42
Proportionally, we will want:
7 / 42 x 20 = 3 Aqua Gems
4 / 42 x 20 = 2 Terra Gems
10 / 42 x 20 = 5 Pyro Gems
16 / 42 x 20 = 7 Nocturna Gems
5 / 42 x 20 = 3 Aero Gems
Practically, we won’t need more than 5 gems of a type just for fulfilling blends. This allows us to bump up the number of other gems, especially ones that we want to grab for important blends like Shadow Sneaker. Finally, I also like to have more of the physical and transcendental gems, so I can mentally note them as more “general” and the other gems as “specific”. Tuning your gem proportions is also best done through some trials with your play style, but here’s where I ended up:
Actions
Actions are a great way to round out any deck and fill decks with abilities that aren’t in the blend tree. Reviewing the starred actions, no 3-star actions stand out as crucial to a Blood Reaper deck. Amass and Protect would work if you wanted a power move, though.
The 2-star actions have a few appealing options, but with only 5 total stars allowed in a deck, I’m only going to grab a Blend Call to easily gain Blood Reaper tributes and extra utility (3 Steam Ushers, Fowls, Mages, Ushers).
3 remaining stars leaves just enough space for 2 Super Blend Searches and 1 Super Cancel. The Super Blend Searches increase the chance of tracking down the Blood Reaper and Shadow Sneaker, while the Super Cancel can stop Drains, Dissolves, and Locks from shutting down our setup.
The remaining actions space for 0-star actions is a great starting place for personal changes to this standard deck. I am going to add in gem searches, blend searches, and cancels for a standard consistent deck, as well as breaches to break through defenses when shadow sneaker is not available.
Heroes
Finally, to finish the deck, we need the cornerstones: 4 heroes with effects and levels that allow our plans to line up. Heroes are one of the most important decisions in a deck, since they offer abilities that are guaranteed from the start, no luck-of-the-draw required. With this in mind, I immediately thought of Kula, which can further our Breach and Search goals by converting gems into actions. Combined with a mage, it offers lots of deck flexibility.
I also was looking for a consistent mover to allow the Blood Reaper to hit opponent heroes with no defense. Many of these heroes are pretty low level, however, whereas I was hoping to have this mover also be the hero to later blend into Shadow Sneaker. Enter Maria, who can increase the level of other heroes. Now Kula can be level 3, Lester can be a consistent mover and a level 4, and we can have our Blood Reaper be a written level 4 of choice. This hero will have the Blood Reaper down as soon as it can, so a hero with an early-game effect would suit, like Carter, Quinn, or my choice, Judith (Be careful, every hero has an activation gem)!
The Decklist
With 20 gems, 16 blends, and 14 actions, I present the deck built to maximize value for the one and only BLOOD REAPER:
This deck is very direct, with many blends and actions simply scooping up as many resources as possible and throwing them all on one win condition. I think that’s beautiful. I also think it’s a very fitting start to an exploration into the many diverse decks we will see with each LV5 blend, and gives lots of opportunity for growth. For example, in my research, adding a sixth gem didn’t appear to bring in any blends that would revolutionize the Blood Reaper, with maybe one exception: Adding in Lucio gems would allow the blending of Skyward Commander and Garden Sprout, both which increase the damage of other blends, which the Blood Reaper would receive 4-fold. If you make such a wild deck, please post it in the Discord! Thanks for reading, and enjoy the Blood Reaper Summoning!