Eternal Karma Sett Deck Guide

Hello everyone and welcome to another guide for another deck write by your buy Yangzera! Today we’ll be covering the Shadow Isles version of Karma and Sett, as well as going over its strengths, weaknesses and how you can improve your decision making when playing this particularly hard deck.

The Current Version

Regions

Ionia
25 cards

Shadow Isles
15 cards

Rarities

34 300

6

9

15

10

eternal

Mana cost

0

0

4

1

12

2

2

3

6

4

14

5

2

6

0

7+

Champions

6

5

Karma

3

5

Sett

3

Landmarks

2

3

Opulent Foyer

2

Followers

10

1

Vastayan Disciple

2

2

Ceaseless Sentry

2

2

Eye of the Dragon

3

5

Scattered Pod

3

Spells

22

1

Go Hard

2

2

Soul Harvest

2

2

Tag Out!

2

2

Vile Feast

3

4

Concussive Palm

3

4

Deny

1

4

The Box

2

5

Deep Meditation

2

5

Place Your Bets

3

6

Vengeance

2

This is my current version of the list and what worked for me to grab top 4 in the recent Runeterra Saturday Scrambles tournament and win a nice prize on the weekend. I believe there is still room for a lot of improvement in the list and there’s definitely big questions to be answered, but I don’t know if they will be properly answered by the time the Runeterra Open comes up, since there’s a million strong decks in the meta and people are refining what they enjoy playing the most. I will invest some more time into Karma Sett during the weekend and might even bring it to the Mastering Runeterra Open that’s coming up!

What Eternal Brings to the Table

Scattered Pod is a game changer. It may look like a silly card at first and it might seem that it’s only there to tutor out Go Hard, but don’t be fooled, Pod’s you also want to be using Pod to draw a burst spell because that’s one easy way to tutor a Place Your Bets out, making it so you have more chances of hitting Karma plus Place Your Bets on round ten. Of course, that on top of already being a tutor for Go Hard.

Karma decks have evolved to the point where they don’t really need to go that long past round 10 and their ability to refill the hand is insane, so Eye of the Dragon can slot in as a flexible unit that spits out some value when you need her to, especially going into a defensive round with the extra blocker and you don’t feel bad for blocking with her – at least not as bad as you used to before.

Vile Feast is a banger card, what a good card. It solves a lot of problems this version of Karma has, including but not limited to working very well against 1-health unit spam from swarm decks and efficiently popping Spellshield from decks that rely on only one unit.

Sett’s Foyer

Getting to kill big things with Sett without actually needing to generate his token for it is amazing. In a field where big guys and health buffs are all over the place, Opulent Foyer acts as not only infinite value and a win condition, but also as a way of making sure Sett will contest the board against anything, due to his text on both levels 1 and 2.

Generally, this deck wants to always drop Opulent Foyer on a defensive round because the first 2/1 band never really matters offensively, but getting a free blocker is huge – and you’re not losing out on any Hallowed stacks by delaying your foyer by one round.

Questions to be Answered

The deck’s build is on its first stage and I’ve been iterating on it since. The version I shared earlier is its most recent form as of writing the article, but there are still questions to be answered, both about the deck and about the format, such as:

• 1) Can we remove Soul Harvest from the deck to guarantee the Go Hard tutor? Current answer: no
• 2) Can we remove Deep Meditation from the deck to guarantee the Deep Meditation tutor? Current answer: Maybe
• Question 2 leaves us with another issue: should we add more card draw options into the deck if Deep Meditation is cut?
• 3) Do we need more copies of Deny?
• 4) Do we need a third Vengeance?
• 5) Are there any replacements for The Box?

Questions 3, 4 and 5 are answered personally by each pilot, depending on the way they build the deck and what they want to be facing, be it in ladder or tournaments. I personally want to be able to deal with a multitude of decks while still playing relatively reactively, and ignoring combo oriented Ezreal shenanigans as I’m mostly banning these with my current lineup.

Some adjustments you can make to the list as you see fit could be:

• Adding one or two copies of Withering Wail
• Third copies of Vastayan Disciple and Ceaseless Sentry, especially if you decide to cut Deep Meditation
• Adding third Vengeance
• Fitting in The Ruination (although I think the format really doesn’t support Ruination)
• Having more units in the deck, Smooth Mixologist is the first that comes to mind and a strong candidate for replacing both copies of Deep Meditation on my current build

And some questions we can already answer:

• Quietus can’t fit in our list because we would have too big of a slow speed spell pool, but in case we ever see ourselves cutting Soul Harvest, there is the consideration of having Quietus in its place.
• Twin Disciplines and Wuju Style, although good defensive spells, can’t be afforded on our deck list because we really want the consistency of grabbing a refill spell off of Scattered Pod’s burst spell draw.

Karma Gameplay

It’s hard to not repeat myself, especially after writing so many Karma guides, but I have to emphasize that our goal with this deck is reach the point where we can slam a leveled up Karma and win the game with Place Your Bets and Coins. Once Karma is online on the board we can start looking into doubling Go Hards and really digging for them with either draw spells or tutor them out with Scattered Pod.

It’s very hard to drop an uncontested Karma and not win on the same round if you’ve got one Place Your Bets in hand, so look for ways to close out the game – while playing around your opponent’s cards, of course.

Counting Go Hards For Karma

Leveled up Karma will cast 2 copies of Go Hard, and once you cast the third one, all copies of it will become Pack Your Bags. This means that if you cast the third Go Hard and it gets duplicated by Karma, the fourth one that’s on the stack will transform into Pack Your Bags and deal the 5 damage on the opposing board and nexus without you having to spend the 5 mana for it.

With this in mind, it’s important to time your Go Hard casts before you drop leveled Karma on the board in order to avoid spending the full 5 mana for a board wipe. I like to count in my head that you always want to have Karma down for an “odd cast” of Go Hard, which means the first and third casts. In other words, you want to drop Karma before casting the first or after casting the second Go Hard, this way you’ll never have to spend the 5 mana for Pack Your Bags.

In Conclusion

It’s always a blast to build Shadow Isles Karma and in my opinion Sett fits the deck perfectly as a side win condition that doesn’t require Karma to be on the board or leveled at all to hold the game and put yourself in a favorable position! I hope you enjoyed today’s tips, thank you so much if you’ve made it this far and I’ll see you all very, very soon.