Armory Deck: Gravy Bones Tutorial

Gravy Bones is a Pirate Necromancer with an insatiable lust for treasure. He sails the High Seas with a loyal crew of the undead at his command! In this tutorial you will learn how to play the Gravy Bones Armory Deck, as well as key tips to take with you on your expedition!

Before you board the ship it’s important to know a few things:

• The symbol with an arrow in it means “tap”. To tap something, you rotate it sideways to indicate the ability has been used. All of your cards will “untap” (return to normal) at the end of your turn. You cannot tap a card if it is already tapped.

• When cards mention colors like blue and yellow, they are referring to the color strip located at the top of the card. This indicates how many resources the card gives when pitched. Red cards pitch for 1, yellow cards pitch for 2, and blue cards pitch for 3.

• If you want to make changes to your deck, remember that Gravy Bones can play Pirate cards, Necromancer cards, and generic cards. Note that all of the Necromancer cards in your deck except for Graven Justaucorpse are also Pirate cards.

Now... let's set sail!

Gravy Bones commands a sunken crew of zombie allies who rise from the graveyard to fight for you. These allies have a life value located in the bottom right corner that indicates how much damage needs to be dealt to them in order to kill them. Note that this life value doesn’t mean anything while the allies are still in your hand. You can’t defend with them from your hand like you can with other cards.

Typically the best way to summon an ally is firstly to get it into your graveyard using effects that allow you to discard from your hand or destroy the top card of your deck. Gravy Bones’ hero ability is a great way to do this. Once you have an ally in your graveyard, the next step is to get a blue card into your graveyard. You can do this with the effects we just mentioned, but usually it’s easiest just to play a blue card with go again from your hand, because once it resolves it will go to your graveyard naturally.

Now you can play an ally from your graveyard by paying its resource cost in the top right corner. Note that it uses up an action point to play an ally, but your Compass of Sunken Depths gives it go again, so you can then attack with it or play another action. Compass only gives go again to the first card played from your graveyard each turn, so unless you have a way to get more action points, be careful about playing a second ally in the same turn and then not being able to attack!

Once your ally is played, they stick around in the arena and you can tap them to attack with them or use their other abilities. Your opponent will need to decide if they are going to attack the ally to remove it, or ignore it and attack you. Both outcomes can be good for you, because if they attack the ally, you might get to play more cards, and if they attack you, you’ll be able to use your ally again next turn!

All of the allies in your deck have the keyword Watery Grave. This is what allows you to play them from your graveyard with go again using the abilities of Gravy Bones and the Compass. Any cards with watery grave are automatically turned face-down when they go to the graveyard from the arena. Note that this does not apply if they are sent to the graveyard from anywhere else, such as your hand and deck. So when you discard an ally or destroy it while it’s on the top of your deck, it will go to your graveyard face-up, but once you summon it to the arena and it is killed in battle, it will go back to the graveyard face-down.

Face-down cards in your graveyard cannot be played, removed, or flipped face-up, and your opponent cannot look at them. Once your ally has fallen in combat it is gone for the rest of the game, so make sure to chart a course to victory before you run out of bodies.

Blue cards are very important for Gravy Bones as they not only pay for the cost to play and attack with allies, they also facilitate his ability to play them from the graveyard. There are a variety of blue cards in your deck that you will want to focus on playing, pitching, and defending with, while the allies are all yellow and should be sent to the graveyard. A handy way to remember is “If it’s a yellow it’s a fellow, if it’s a blue it’s for you.”

Another key feature of your blues is how they enable cards with High Tide. When the blues swell up in your pitch zone, the wind really picks up in Gravy Bones’ sails. Note that you can only pitch a card when you are paying for something, you can’t just pitch cards for no reason. When you pay a cost, you keep pitching until you have enough, so it’s easy to get high tide working on cards that cost more than 3 like Battalion Barque - because you’ll have to naturally pitch more than one blue to play them. For other high tide cards that cost 3 or less, you’ll need to get a little creative.

Gold is a fantastic way to spend your excess blues. Most of the time you’ll want to keep some Gold spare for Gravy Bones’ ability, but you should never overlook the opportunity to use the Gold for its own ability. When you use a Gold, pitching a blue to pay two resources and drawing a card, you are essentially replacing the card you pitched, but the difference is you still have the third resource floating. This is a great way to turn small hands into big hands, pay for plays that you would otherwise be one resource short for, or even just to dig through your deck to get a better hand.

When you’re deciding what blues to play and pitch, try to think ahead. Later in the game when you’re drawing the cards you pitched earlier, you want to play useful blues with go again. A card like Avast Ye! is really good later on when you have multiple allies in your graveyard but not a lot of blues left, whereas Jittery Bones without any watery grave cards in your hand or deck will leave you marooned.

Manipulating the graveyard is a core feature of the Necromancer class, and one of the key cards to enable Gravy Bones’ dastardly plans is Call to the Grave. This generic allows you to choose any card from your deck and send it straight to the graveyard, as well as putting a blue card there just from playing it!

Most of the time you will use this to find a specific ally, but there are also some other tricks you can do with it! Your deck contains one copy of Fiddler’s Green, which can be sent to the graveyard to gain life if you’re falling behind. There’s also Back Alley Breakline, which will generate an extra action point when sent to the graveyard, enabling you to play and/or attack with multiple allies in a turn!

Gaining action points is really powerful, because Gravy Bones doesn’t want to just play out allies, he wants to attack with them as well! If you’re not making use of your allies before they are sent to their watery grave then you may start to find yourself falling behind. Sawbones and Anka are exceptions because they both have abilities that can be used on the opponent’s turn.

Gravy Bones comes kitted out in true swashbuckling fashion. We’ve covered how the Compass works already, so let’s just go over some quick tips for the rest of the equipment that’s included in the deck.

Tricorn of Saltwater Death is your bailout if you draw a hand with too many allies, or don’t have any Gold and you have no other way to get the ally you want to play from your hand to the graveyard. It might be tempting to use this early on, but be warned, it’s usually best saved for stormy weather.

Graven Justaucorpse lets you get a little more utility out of your pitch. You can send an ally then pay for it with the resources you just made, or send a blue to turn on Gravy Bones’ ability without having to both play a blue card and also pitch a card.

Washed Up Wave is another way to recover from drawing too many allies, but the upside is you can also get the “free block” by destroying the top card of your deck instead of discarding from hand. The Compass works really well to enable this play!

Breakwater Undertow is best used when you need to push more damage at a critical point in the game. Be warned that it will destroy the ally you use it on, but if that ally is Oysten this might not necessarily be a bad thing!

Gravy Bones wins by either setting up an incredibly strong turn incorporating multiple attacks from hand and allies, or by pressuring the opponent into wasting their damage on allies, or by blocking efficiently and grinding them out with repeated ally swings over the course of the game. Your path to victory will depend on how the opponent decides to play the game so it’s very important to pay attention to what they are doing and adapt your plans to counter them.

Your allies and the blue cards required to play them are a finite resource, so you run the risk of fatiguing if you don’t have a good plan set up for the late game. Holding onto cards like Timesnap Potion, and pitching away your Back Alley Breakline to be used with Graven Justaucorpse in order to push a huge turn is often very rewarding.

Gold! Gold! Gold! It’s so important both for getting allies into graveyard with Gravy Bones’ ability, but also to fix awkward hands, or generate incremental resource advantage that allows you to grind out the opponent. Often it is worth taking a bit of extra damage to play something like Portside Exchange even though it doesn’t deal damage, because a lot of the time the life you lost is recovered when the opponent decides to attack an ally.

Sawbones has a very powerful ability that protects not only you - but your allies as well. If you can time it so that multiple Sawbones go out in the same 1-2 turns, your opponent might suddenly find it very difficult to remove them, or other allies with lower life totals, or deal damage to you.

Limpit is another ally that should be saved in the graveyard for key timing, because if you can get multiple out in a short timespan, it’s less likely your opponent can get rid of all of them before they’ve chipped in a tonne of damage. Two Limpits are especially nasty when combined with two Sawbones, because a single blue can pay for two Limpit attacks and a Sawbones attack, then Sawbones can make it incredibly hard for the opponent to remove anything.

As with any hero with a non-conventional gameplan, practice makes perfect. The more you play, the more you will start to get a feel for how Gravy Bones outplays his opponents, his strengths and shortcomings, and how you should respond to the opponent’s decisions.

Armory Deck: Gravy Bones is also compatible with Blitz format! Simply use the young hero card, take out all the cards with a “CC” icon, and you’re good to go. If you want to revert the deck back to Classic Constructed, just shuffle everything back in again. If you ever get stuck, there is a Decklist card included for both formats you can refer to.

The deck is ready to play out of the box, but there is also a whole open ocean of treasures you can add to increase its power. High Seas contains a wide range of Pirate and Necromancer cards to level up your game, or help with certain tough matchups.

A whole range of Pirate Necromancer allies with different abilities and attacks are just waiting to be recruited to your sunken crew, such as Chum, Friendly First Mate - who forces the opponent to attack him, potentially sinking their plans.

Dead Threads is the first Necromancer Legendary equipment, which allows you to siphon free resources from your fallen allies. This is a really powerful effect for grindy games, and will also be playable in future Necromancer heroes!

Conqueror of the High Seas is just one of many terrifying threats available to Pirate heroes. Not only does it force your opponent to block or lose their arsenal and give you more Gold, you can even follow it up with another attack!

Gravy Bones has discovered many ancient lost treasures in his expeditions. These one-of-a-kind amulets have a range of useful effects, and they have watery grave, which means you can also play them from your graveyard with go again!