Part One: Battlemage is my Cornerstone Champion

9 July 2025

Sorcery Organised Play

The second half of 2025 is shaping up to be an exciting time for Sorcery. Dragonlord and Gothic are on the horizon. The recent announcement of the partnership between Erik’s Curiosa and Star City Games means that there are plenty of high-level events on the horizon. But I want to bring some focus to Cornerstone events.

Sorcery Organised Play is split over three tiers. The first tier, and the focus of this article, is Cornerstone events. To learn about Sorcery Organised play, click here:

https://sorcerytcg.com/organized-play?tab=overview

What is Cornerstone Season?

Cornerstone Season is August to December 2025, when the first wave of Cornerstone events will occur. These events are a chance for Sorcery players to challenge themselves and experience Sorcery in a more competitive tournament setting. I will be pushing myself to attend as many events as I can and then sharing my experience on the Bardsword blog.

Leading up to Cornerstone Season, in a series of articles, I will go over my preparation and planning. I will share deck building ideas, strategy tips for my favourite Avatar, and then tournament reports afterwards. This first article is about my preparation and goals leading up to the first event next month.

New Zealand has been lucky to get eight Cornerstone tournaments in the first wave. These are spread out all over the country, with the earliest scheduled for the 23rd of August and the latest on the 25th of October, creating an exciting two-month block of events. The biggest Cornerstone event will likely be hosted by FTW Event on the 5/6th of September in Auckland.

That gives me six weeks to prepare for the first event, and there’s plenty to do, so let’s dive in.

My Goals for Cornerstone Season

So, with that in mind, for the upcoming Cornerstone season, I have come up with some goals to challenge myself. Starting from easiest to achieve to most difficult:

1. Attend at least three events.
   I encourage everyone to attend Cornerstone events where possible. It can be daunting to make it to events and to put time and energy into preparation, but I think these events will be highly rewarding. I’d like to attend as many as I can, and three is a feasible number to aim for.
2. Attend at least one event in the South Island of New Zealand.
   Going to tournaments is a great opportunity to travel. It’s an exciting chance to meet people that you’ve talked to on Discord and to visit new stores. The South Island is a plane trip for me, and I will do my best to make the journey.
3. Make the top cut / make top eight.
   Making the top cut is always a great accomplishment. Cornerstone events are a great opportunity to tap into that competitive spirit and get a taste of what it’s all about. Even if you feel like you’re a casual player, this is a great chance to get a feel for a competitive environment. Perhaps you’ll find it highly rewarding and an encouragement to attend more Cornerstone events.
4. Win!
   Winning a Cornerstone event would be incredible. If I start practising now, I might be in with a chance. New Zealand has many incredible players, so I don’t make this goal lightly.
5. Bonus goal: Battlemage Rainbow Foil at a Crossroads Event.
   Crossroad events are the next tier up of organised play. I don’t expect to make a Crossroad event this year, as they are all overseas, so instead I am making this a community goal. I would love to see a Battlemage player place in the top four at one of these events and win a beautiful Rainbow Foil Battlemage. I will be watching the livestreams of these events eagerly and supporting any Battlemage players that make the top cut.

My Cornerstone Challenge and Champion

For this upcoming Cornerstone season, there is one other challenge I’m going to attempt. I’m only going to play Battlemage. There are a couple of reasons that I’m making this decision.

The first is to make it easier for myself. The week before a tournament, my brain jumps from idea to idea, trying to figure out a deck list that can beat any and all. The end result is I settle on something like an Elementalist control pile that tries to do everything and achieves nothing. To help prevent that, I have decided to champion Battlemage for the duration of the Cornerstone series and put that energy into honing my deck list and improving my strategy instead.

I think it’s important to state that experience piloting a deck and general game knowledge is the biggest advantage one can bring to a tournament. Practising with a deck and getting experience playing it against other strong decks is a far better use of time and energy than endlessly revising a deck list.

So why Battlemage? A big factor is that I hate mirror matches. Choosing a less popular Avatar facilitates that. The second reason is that I dislike playing proven meta high performers. Battlemage is a popular avatar and has won tournaments over the years, so it isn’t a complete underdog, but I still think he is sufficiently underrated for my purposes.

So why am I sharing my secrets so far out from the tournament? One part of me wants to jealously guard my secrets, but surprise factor only goes so far to win a tournament. I feel that by sharing my preparation, I can encourage players to get the most out of their own preparation time and get excited for upcoming events. I want people to start thinking about Cornerstone events as an opportunity to push themselves and to get involved in the community.

My Battlemage Backstory

Earlier this year, I had success with Battlemage, placing first on day one of Tūmatarau whakataetae o Aotearoa, and fourth overall after a top cut on day two, losing to our incredibly skilled resident Avatar of Air player, MattdogNZ. This was my list for day one:

https://curiosa.io/decks/cm6u4q40h007hkz036nzi3sc3

I piloted Water-Air Battlemage, with usual the suspects such as Shrink, Gyre Hippogriffs, and Screaming Skull, inspired by the works of Count Tolstoy. My innovation in that list was to use Grim Guisarme in an attempt to combat Archimago by being able to burst the opponent down to Death’s Door in a single turn. I managed to do just that in my first round match, and then dodged Archie for the rest of the event.

It is important to note that – much like how Roots of Yggdrassil wasn’t popular amongst Kiwis in the late Beta meta – players in Auckland seem to prefer to not play Archimago for various reasons. This does result in a unique playing field compared to other events held around the world.

Flavours of Battlemage

Battlemage can be built in a myriad of different ways, in different combinations of the four elements. I think there are many viable builds, and part of my preparation for Cornerstone Season is to decide on which build I want to pilot.

I have five different Battlemage decks to choose from, currently ranked in order of my personal preference. I will go over one deck list in this article, and the rest in later articles in this series, so stay tuned for more. Here are my top five Battlemage flavours currently:

1. Fire-Air, featuring Hamlet’s Ablaze and Updraft Ridge to use site placement and destruction to my advantage.
2. Water-Air – similar to my above deck list, but adapted below…
3. Earth-Fire anti-aggro – featuring Pebbled Paths and beast synergies.
4. Fire-Water-Air – all the toys with the greediest threshold requirements.
5. Earth-Air – inspired by Anger Worm’s recent success at the Battle of Elverson Fields.

Option one: Water-Air Battlemage:

So, here is the first of my five deck lists. This is currently my second-ranked list in preference, but it is probably the most meta-popular of my five, so serves as a good springboard.
This is my current version of Water-Air Battlemage:
https://curiosa.io/decks/cm6phuex9002pl703lu4ccv1t?tab=view

This list is a bit different to my previous Water-Air list, preferring Airborne minions over other strong minions like Phase Assassin and Blue Knight. This allows me to unlock the potential of Updraft Ridge.

The strengths of this deck is that it has explosive power, being able to cheat the curve with cards like the Ordinary Tower sites and Mix Aer. Pond and Lugbog Cat is another common combo to get a powerful minion early. Hounds of Ondaros are also increasing in popularity because they’re a strong resilient threat.

A major weakness of many Battlemage decks is that they have greedy threshold requirements. My definition of ‘greedy’ is a deck that requires hitting exact combinations of sites in the early stages of the game to properly execute its plan. This deck wants four or five sites providing at least two water and three air threshold. It’s important to note that Floodplain can provide two water threshold by itself through flooding your own site. Sinkhole is a powerful card and can be essential in overcoming problematic sites like Perilous Bridge and Gnome Hollows, but it does put strain on the threshold requirements of the deck. An important part of testing will be to see how many games I lose because I missed critical threshold points.

I think the power of Air is obvious for Battlemage. Grapple Shot, Gyre Hippogriff, Daperyll Vampire are just excellent. But whilst Water has a handful of great cards, it feels less vital. Water brings to the table cards such as Pollimorph, Atlantean Fate, and Ruler of Thul, but their double threshold can be massively prohibitive. In my opinion, the strongest reason for including Water is to protect your minions from bury effects, such as Earthquake and Bury. Playing a Daperyll Vampire to a Water site so they’re protected through the opponent’s turn from bury effects can be the difference between winning and losing a game.

Sisters of Avalon is a card I’m currently testing. It has many perks. Firstly, it’s a cheap spellcaster. This means that it can cast Shrink and Pollimorph and provide more board coverage. Secondly, it’s good against Maddening Bells, which Kiwis seem to love playing, by extending the effective range of your Disenchants. If you’re playing Magic Missile over Lightning Bolt, they can also help with creating effective angles of attack. Thirdly, they are a compromise to having a toolbox of answers in the deck. In this list, there are two Disenchant, two Geyser, two Screaming Skull, which each can be the strongest card in a particular moment or absolutely useless. Sisters of Avalon can help you effectively mulligan these cards and draw you to the cards you need.

Merlin is a contentious one. I enjoy the push-your-luck aspect of his design. Sometimes he can string together an unbelievable series of magic spells off the top. More often, he’ll do nothing. Merlin is one of those cards where good players would say they don’t enjoy luck and would rather have a weaker but more consistent card and rely on their personal skill to win the day. For me, I like rolling the dice. And in many ways, Battlemage as an Avatar choice is all about high risk, high reward.

Updraft Ridge I think is an incredibly underplayed card. Airborne minions are already incredibly strong, and this site gives them such a power boost. This deck leverages Airborne minions to win the tempo race and get around the opponent’s problematic sites. The additional movement is something opponents can overlook, and I’ve won games where my opponent forgot to take it into consideration.

Overall, looking at this list, there are definitely some things I’m not confident about. Trading consistency for power is the most critical factor to consider here. Testing will help reveal this line

Start Your Engines for Cornerstone!

Now is the time to start thinking and practising for these fantastic Cornerstone events. It might be worth organising events at your local store so you can earn Dust and test at the same time.

Stay tuned to the Bardsword blog in the following weeks for the four other Battlemage deck lists and to hear how my testing is going. In part two of this series, I will also give more general Battlemage strategy tips that can help you play or play against Battlemage.