I have been trying out this incredible deck by CQCQ: [https://x.com/cqcq\_sv/status/1949238384121258366](https://x.com/cqcq_sv/status/1949238384121258366)

These are my results with it so far. In these 51 games, I haven't dropped to Sapphire even once and it's what got me over the 50% Diamond milestone. For reference, once you reach AA1 or above, you seem to have the same matchmaking queue as Master players, as approximately half of my opponents were Diamond Master.

Overall impression: a lot of my wins come from "stealing" the game with the surprising amount of lethal reach this deck has. A lot of the time I manage to pull out more out of hand damage than my opponent expects for a surprise win and that carries it pretty hard, but you need to understand the deck well for that to work.

My impressions with matchups:

Spellboost rune and hybrid rune - as CQCQ says in his post, I feel strongly favoured. This is reflected by the 80% winrate I have against rune, and most of those games were against spellboost. I just try to push damage and win by turn 8-9 like a slightly slower but more persistent aggro deck, and that seems to do the job. The turn 10+ grind is possible, but this deck doesn't really do well with it. 

Pure dirt rune - I only had a couple games against it, not enough data to form a strong conclusion even though I think I won both of them.

Sword - this is a difficult matchup. Stabilising above 12 HP by the time Albert comes out is key. Don't let their shit stick if you can. Overall I didn't find any solution to this matchup that made it feel much better than a coinflip.

Aggro abyss - I have literally 0% winrate in this matchup, even against Ruby players in lobby games (which I haven't included in the statistic in the image - I only included actual ranked games there). I think that matchup is literally unwinnable with this deck unless they brick hard. An inclusion of Apollo might help with that, but I wanted to try the deck as presented by CQCQ for a bunch of games before making any tweaks.

Midrange abyss - I won almost all games in this matchup, but idk if this is due to the differences in piloting or lists.

Portal - both puppet and artifact feel borderline impossible to lose against. You have easier lethal reach setups, you have the heal and removal to mitigate their threats, and you can put scarier threats on the board. Whenever I queue into portal, I feel relieved that I'll get a free win that will help stave off dropping into sapphire. I just clear their shit, put my shit down, and watch them struggle to deal with it. Then, once I see an opportunity, I "steal" the game with a surprise lethal.

Haven't encountered other decks enough to form a strong impression on them.

51 AA2-AA3 Diamond games with CQCQ's Midrange Abyss list