LoR Homebrews: A Pile of Trash
A brief guide to Teemo Ziggs Gnar Katarina, aka Treasured Trash
Hi, I’m Nihilist, known as friendlynihilist in-game.
I’m a semi-competitive player with a rather major addiction to Noxus. I made top 32 of the Curious Journey Seasonal Tournament, and I’m a Porofessor in the main (ex-official) LoR Discord Server.
I’ll be writing today about the latest iteration of my Bandle Noxus pile, affectionately nicknamed Pile of Trash:
You can find the decklist [HERE]
About the Deck
This Pile of Trash is the current iteration of the Bandle Noxus pile I’ve been playing ever since the release of Gnar back in February, and that I took all the way to the top 32 of the Curious Journey Seasonal Tournament. Since the latest expansion, it also makes great use of the new tools brought with Annie to improve what was already a very fun and spicy spin on tempo Bandle City Noxus.
Treasured Trash is a very funny card, but perhaps the funniest thing is that it’s also an incredibly strong card. One of the historic weaknesses of the slower Noxus playstyle is that while true, your interaction is incredibly efficient at dealing with threats, it’s also incredibly efficient at making your hand empty. Thus, running out of cards as you get to the later stages of the game has always been an issue.
But now Treasured Trash turns this into somewhat more of a positive, being able to come down on round 7 or round 8 and refill your hand with options galore, which normally creates a big tempo push with some solid units to refill your board (not to mention any potential high rolls) from which you can win the game.
Beyond our very splashy and exciting choice of finisher, however, the deck is still doing a lot of very strong things.
It’s no secret that Pokey Stick, Lecturing Yordle and Gnar are all great friends with the classic Noxus control tools. and leveraging those great synergies with the naturally good swarming potential of Bandle City Noxus gives a very efficient package for getting through early damage and early disruption (all of which puts us in great positions to unleash a lethal Treasured Trash).
And now Ravenbloom Conservatory and its resident fire demon Tybaulk is also another great payoff to that natural swarminess, as well of course all of our dinky spells.
Ratio'd
I suppose there is one other question that probably needs to be addressed, that being the matter of the champions.
You’ve heard of 3/3 ratios, more recently you’ve started to hear about 3/2/1 ratios, but what in the world is going on with 2/2/1/1?
And you’re right, I do have some explaining to do here.
Ultimately, the most important thing to note with our deck is that the champs are not essential for the gameplan, they’re pretty much glorified followers. Which is normally fine, they’re still very strong followers, but they have one drawback: they can be a little awkward to double draw when the primary focus is tempo.
Most of the time I don’t want their champ spell available to me, and I would much rather have another unit to play out and keep the pressure high. To that end, what we’ve done here is to cut down on the number of copies of each champion, reducing the likelihood of double drawing any of them, and instead running a wider variety of champions as just rather strong followers.
Mulligan
Now down to some more specific advice.
We’ll start with the mulligan, which is fairly straightforward. Our ideal early game is to swarm the board and get the chip damage ball rolling, so cards like House Spider, Legion Saboteur or Conchologist for early bodies on the board are good keeps.
With how cheap they are, the champions are also all pretty good keeps (with perhaps the one exception being Gnar, as the most expensive), and finding an early Ravenbloom Conservatory is also good to get it rolling for a timely Tybaulk.
However, we ideally want a little bit of interaction as well, so Pokey Stick, Ravenous Flock and Blade’s Edge should often be kept (although what removal you should keep will vary from matchup to matchup).
Gameplan
Finally, onto the broad strokes of the actual gameplay.
As I’ve mentioned, early game is about swarming and getting some solid hits on the opponent’s nexus, although where appropriate try to keep mana up to keep our opposition off their core pieces.
Not only do we want to be wider than our foe we also want to stay wider than them, so taking chances to pick off units with a Pokey Stick or a Death’s Hand is always a solid idea, and even potentially using Arachnoid Sentry quite aggressively to set up those big swings in the early game (although obviously bear in mind that you may need it as a Ravenous Flock enabler later down the line).
As we move into the midgame, we still try to keep pushing for whatever incremental damage we can take, but our focus is now a little less on making our own board big.
Instead, we want to keep the opponent’s board in check so that when we get to rounds 7 and turn 8 our big Treasured Trash can catapult us ahead.
Essentially, it’s a mix of trying to stretch the impact of our early swarm as far as it can go, trying both to squeeze out as much damage as we can out of it as well as setting up big Scorched Earths and Disintegrates to keep us as level with the opponent as we can be, for then going into the big Trash turns.
Taking out the Trash
Now we get to what I’m sure we’re all here for — we finally get to slam 10 mana on the table and have a lot of fun!
The most important thing to remember at this stage is to plan in advance when your Trash turn is going to be – not only to bank sufficient mana for Treasured Trash, but also so you can set up to have your hand be as empty as you can feasibly manage, in order to maximise the value and odds of hitting really solid cards — which, admittedly, can sometimes be a tall order when going for the round 7 Trash: it's not always easy to ditch as many cards as you can from hand while also making sure you have 3 spell mana still available for that Treasured Trash next turn.
Firing off a five-card Trash is not ideal, so if that’s all you’re getting, it would likely be better to wait and set up for a bigger one on the next round.
When you do cast your Trash, what you’re ideally looking for are solid units to slam on your board and eek out a win with. Nothing too fancy, really, although cards that will add permanent value to your hand via either draw or card generation are also very good — as we’ve discussed, you’re going to run short on cards and the card draw/generation can help you stay in the game should your first Trash not put you in a position to win very shortly afterwards.
Concluding Thoughts
And now you know how to play this Pile of Trash!
The deck is just a bundle of fun and has given me some of my most memorable games ever, and I just hope that it can give you some equally outrageous memories.
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