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Obviously discard is super strong, but its weaknesses are apparent (mostly lack of healing and face protection vs aggro and some combo) and will probably be exploited more in the next couple days. I spent a lot of time trying to make Armed work before the mini, and adding the Armed package makes for a deck that can hold off early aggression way better while building toward the finisher Armed lacked all along, with Laevateinn Dragon's new form giving the deck strong protection against pure discard weaknesses.

Strengths vs regular discard:

• You're actually dropping followers in the first few turns. Hammer Dragonnewt is the star, but Draconir's evolve can turn help turn around a board state, and while expensive, Lance Lizard is at least a rush to hold things off.
• Laevateinn's fanfare discards a Draconic Weapon in hand, which counts for all relevant purposes.
• Lots of easy discard fodder. While managing your weapons is something you'll have to do -- knowing when to use one to arm a neutral follower, keeping one for Laevateinn -- you'll usually end up with plenty for painless discarding, which is nice.
• Biggest of all: Laevateinn Dragon, Defense Form has different upsides than Victorious Blader but generally screws with enemy gameplans in a very similar manner. Even if they have the hard removal necessary to deal with him, it will usually eat up their turn from doing something more productive, and at that point you're moving into finishing the game anyway.

Weaknesses vs regular discard:

• A big one, the mirror is rough, especially since you don't really have room to tech in mirror cards like Gilnelise. You don't run as much ramp and they beat you on that alone. I'm already seeing a bit less on ladder than right after launch so hopefully this will stabilize.
• While the deck is still very consistent overall, regular Discard is basically completely brickproof. Typically you're mulliganing for your cheap armed followers, but even if they totally dodge you you usually instead have the ramp and discards you need to get that part of your deck operating instead.

I doubt this will be some big meta breaker, but I was very happy that my Armed list got improved despite no obvious support in the mini and thought I'd post in case anyone else wanted to play around with it. Cheers!