Treasured Trash: Life Support — a Lulu Shen Deck Guide

Astrofeesh is back with a Barrier beatdown in this edition of Treasured Trash!

Aug 01, 2022

Hey, I’m Astrofeesh! You might know me as the creator of Cait Mill. You can find my Runeterra.AR account here, where I occasionally post fun decks I make.

I’ve been playing LoR consistently since the open beta. I don’t play ladder too competitively, but the highest I’ve ever gotten is Diamond. My favorite part of LoR is deckbuilding, so I always try to build my own decks for climbing with.

You can find the deck’s code [HERE]

Two Worlds, One Archetype

Back when Targon was released, one of the first decks I tried was Lulu/Taric Support. It was a fast tempo deck that tried to overpower opponents by chaining support units together. Unfortunately, it was very fragile.

Lulu/Shen Targon can be considered its spiritual successor; it takes advantage of the multitude of buffs and new support units that have come out since then, and adds Barrier synergy to soften the archetype’s fragility somewhat. As a result, it’s finally reached a point where it isn’t completely unplayable.

If you want a fast tempo deck that can take your opponent by surprise by turning a board of small units into massive ones out of nowhere, Lulu/Shen is worth giving a try.

Well, This Isn’t the Glade

The core gameplan of this deck is to set up for powerful attacks that are capable of winning the board or game on their own. To this end, there are three types of units in this deck:

Support units, such as Lulu and Shen, that buff up our units on attack.
Chain enders, which are our 1-drops and Kinkou Student, that don’t have Support but benefit from being supported.
Finishers, namely Mountain Sojourners and Trevor Snoozebottom, which are capable of closing out games with their powerful support effects.

Our spells are used to protect our units against removal, as well as to make sure they don’t die in combat. Since a lot of our units are understated when they’re not swinging, we might be forced into bad blocks when our opponent attacks. We can use our spells to make sure they don’t die unnecessarily.

As this deck is very tempo focused, we want to be playing units on curve as much as possible. We always want to have at least one support chain ender on board, and once you do, it’s better to prioritize developing support units instead of playing more.

The best possible curve is a 1-drop into a 2-drop support, since the subsequent attack is almost always very awkward to block. It’s a very consistent 4-6 damage hit on Round 2 that your opponent will feel pressured to chump block, and it only gets stronger if you can throw a Lulu or Fuzzy Caretaker into the mix.

Ideally, we want to avoid open attacks that aren’t lethal if we can develop more to the board, but because slow-rolling can be punished by stuns and slow speed removal, it might be better to take a weaker attack instead of risking having an entire attack turn disrupted by one card.

Because support as a mechanic is based around unit order, attack positioning is very important in this deck. As a baseline rule, you want to ensure every support unit is supporting something, and every chain ender is being supported.

Attack buffs like Lulu and Caretaker also benefit from targeting Elusives, and buffs from Shen and Young Witch that make units hard to block should be used to make your opponent’s blocks as difficult as possible for them.

Since our units aren’t very good on defense, Shen and Kinkou Student’s barriers are your best ways of stopping your opponent’s attacks. Dropping a Shen on off turns or keeping mana saved for a Moral Support or Spirit’s Refuge shores up the weakness of the archetype quite well, and if Shen flips, your barrier spells eventually turn into extra reach.

Sojourners should be played as soon as we have the ability to, because of how game winning its effect is. However, do be careful about playing into the opponent’s removal spells, because Sojourners dying can be game-losing.

When it’s out, you want to make sure every support unit is in the same chain to get the most value out of the buff, even if that means a chain ender goes unsupported. A permanent +2/+2 to the entire board is a backbreaking effect, especially as early as Round 5.

Lastly, for Trevor Snoozebottom, we want to drop him only after we have a lot of pressure on board. The elusive he generates adds a surprising amount of reach damage, and he should always support your highest attack unit. Note that because the elusive appears on the right, it acts as a chain ender: if you attack with a support unit as your rightmost unit, it’ll give its buff to the Mumblesprite.

Unenforced Equilibrium

Finally, one note about Ki Guardian: As of the current patch, the barrier in hand this card gives is bugged and counts as a barrier for Shen and Kinkou Student. As a result, the card is incredibly strong, and it can give a 2 mana burst speed Barrier to Student and turbo level Shen while also drawing another card.

I chose to include Ki Guardian in this deck because I don’t think it’s strong enough to be unfair or game-breaking. However, if you don’t want to abuse the bug (or once it’s fixed), switch this card for Pale Cascade. The deck still works fine without it.

Alternatively, if you want to go all in on a Barrier win condition, switch Trevor Snoozebottom for Sacred Protector. Do note that I haven’t tested Protector in this deck at all, so I can’t guarantee it’s effectiveness, but it is in a very strong spot right now.

Nothing a Good Mulligan Can’t Fix

For the mulligan, we want to hard mull for our 1 and 2 drops (aside from Kinkou Student), because of how big of a tempo swing early support attacks can be. Our cheap spells, Lulu, Student, and Fuzzy Caretaker are good keeps as well, but not quite as important. Everything else should be thrown back.

I’ve experimented with this deck a decent amount at lower ladder ranks, to pretty solid results. It struggles against decks that can disrupt its attacks like Jhin/Annie and Yasuo/Katarina, but it can beat down a surprising amount of other archetypes by snowballing the board.

The Balance Has Been Maintained

Overall, while I doubt this can ever be anywhere close to a tier 1 deck due to the inherent fragility of support as an archetype, this deck feels monumentally better than my original Targon/Ionia support deck.

While there have been other completely viable support decks (all of which included Demacia), to have the original region pairing finally have a playable deck has given me a nice sense of closure.