Mulan on Reveal: A Guide to Turning Critters Sideways

Did you read the Merlin guide, nod politely, and think "that sounds like a lot of counting"? Do you prefer your card games to involve playing a creature, then another creature, then hitting the opponent with both of them? Have you ever looked at a 7/7 for 4 mana and felt something?

Good news. This one's for you. Enter Mulan.

Mulan on Reveal is a tempo deck. You curve out, you spend every point of mana every turn, you put more bodies on the board than your opponent can deal with, and you take two barriers before they've finished setting up. There's almost nothing to sequence and almost no spells to hold. What there is, is a lot of small decisions about which lane to pressure and which 2 drop to keep, and those decisions are the whole game.

Reflection, the spell Mulan hands you at game start, is 1 mana: Repeat the On Reveal abilities of allies played this round.

Two of everything, one Mulan, 25 cards. Twelve minions, one spell. The deck has a point of view and the point of view is "attack."

A Quick Rules Refresher (Skip If You've Played)

• Three lanes, three barriers at 20 health each. Kill two and you win. A dead barrier comes back at 40.
• Each lane is a location with a random effect, revealed one per turn from turn 1.
• Start with 4 cards and 2 mana, draw 1 and gain 1 mana each round, cap at 10. Mana doesn't carry over.
• Reveal order alternates every turn. First player resolves everything, then the second.
• Run out of cards and fatigue hits all your barriers for increasing damage.

Why There Are No Spells

The first thing you'll notice is that this deck runs one spell, and it's a cantrip that eats your own creature. That's on purpose.

We're an aggressive unit strategy, and we want every mana point converted into stats on the board. But it's also because some of our units come with the interaction built in. White Queen is a removal spell with a 3/3 attached. Boogeyman is a 7/7 that occasionally removes something, and yes, sometimes that something is yours. Mowgli is two bodies for the price of one. When your creatures do the job of spells, you don't need to spend card slots on spells, and you get to keep attacking.

The plan is simple. Set the pace of the game, spam units, and burst barriers as fast as possible. Boogeyman alone takes a barrier down in three unblocked hits. Everything else in the deck exists to make sure those hits connect.

The Opening Hand Decides the Game

How you play this deck is decided almost entirely by what your first four cards look like. It's a tempo deck. If you don't curve out, you don't have a plan, and a tempo deck without a plan is just a pile of small creatures.

The rule is blunt: if there's no 2 cost creature in the opening hand, mulligan all four. Not three. All four. A turn 1 with nothing to play is a turn 1 your opponent gets for free, and this deck can't afford to give those away. (I'll have a separate guide on deckbuilding and mulligan math soon, with the hypergeometric numbers on exactly how likely you are to find a 2 drop. Short version: with six of them in a 25 card deck, throwing back four cards is very much worth it.)

Beyond that, you want the first two or three turns already mapped out in your hand before the game starts. Mulligan anything that doesn't support that plan, even if it's a good card. Ellen Trechend is a great card. She is not a great card on turn 1, and she's taking up a slot where a 2 drop should be.

What Curving Out Looks Like

A few of the openings you'll see often, so you can recognise them when they show up:

Three Blind Mice into Golden Egg into Boogeyman. All in the same lane. Turn 3 Boogeyman reveals, kills the lowest power ally in that lane, which is the 0 power Egg, and the Egg dies into a 5/5 Golden Goose. You now have a 7/7, a 5/5 and the Mice sitting in one lane on turn 3, and if the Mice die later they spread into two more bodies. This is the opening you dream about.

Rumple into Mulan. Rumple on turn 1 gives you 4 mana on turn 2, which is exactly Mulan's cost. A turn 2 legendary with double attack is a nightmare for anyone trying to play a normal curve, and everything you play after her gets its On Reveal doubled.

Rumple into Golden Egg plus Trash for Treasure. Turn 2, 4 mana: Egg for 3, Trash for Treasure for 1, destroy the Egg. You get a 5/5 Goose on turn 2 and you draw two cards for the trouble. This is the cheapest 5/5 in the game and it's not close.

Not every hand gives you one of these, and that's fine. The goal is to have any coherent two to three turn sequence, and to spend all of your mana on every one of those turns. Efficiency is the whole deck. The only time you leave mana unspent is when a location effect makes spending it a bad idea.

Card by Card

Rumple (2 mana, 2/2)

The best turn 1 play in the deck. A 2/2 body plus a mana on turn 2 is what lets you play a 4 drop before your opponent can, and with Mulan on board he's +2 mana next round instead of +1. Keep him in every opening hand.

Three Blind Mice (2 mana, 1/1)

A 1/1 that turns into two 1/1s elsewhere when it dies. That's three bodies for two mana, spread across lanes, which is exactly what a deck full of Beasts and Galahads wants. It also happens to be a perfect Boogeyman sacrifice, and a perfect Trash for Treasure target, since killing it is almost an upgrade.

Huck Finn (2 mana, 3/2)

No text, just stats. Three power on turn 1 is real damage, and you need six 2 drops so you can mulligan to them. Don't overthink Huck. Play him, attack with him, move on.

Bagheera (1 mana, 1/1)

A 2/2 for 1 if you put him in a middle space. Your filler 1 drop for the turns where you have exactly 1 mana left over and a Beast on board that wants to see an ally played. Keep him in the middle and he pulls his weight.

Golden Egg (3 mana, 0/1)

The Egg does nothing. The Goose is a 5/5. Your job is to get from one to the other as fast as possible, and the deck gives you three ways to do it: Boogeyman, Trash for Treasure, and just letting your opponent kill it for you. Opponents who know the deck will refuse to touch the Egg, which is fine, because then you're the one deciding when the Goose shows up.

Beast (3 mana, 2/3)

Gets +1/+1 every time you play an ally. In a deck that plays two or three creatures a turn and gets free Mice, Geese and Baloos on top, Beast grows fast. Put him down early in a lane you're planning to keep pressuring and he's a 6/7 before your opponent has decided whether he's a threat.

White Queen (4 mana, 3/3)

Our removal. Bounce any character back to its owner's hand, which against a 6 or 7 drop is a full tempo swing. With Mulan on board she bounces two. With Reflection she bounces three. There are turns where White Queen clears an entire lane and leaves a 3/3 behind, and those turns tend to end the game. She's also a fine answer to the one big thing your opponent invested their turn in, since re-casting it costs them another full turn.

Boogeyman (4 mana, 7/7)

Seven power for four mana kills a barrier in three hits. He has a drawback, and the drawback is that he eats the weakest ally in his lane. Point him at a lane with a Golden Egg and the drawback becomes an upside. Point him at an empty lane and he eats himself, so don't do that. Point him at a lane with only Beast in it and you've made a very bad trade.

One more warning about Boogeyman and Mulan, below.

Mulan (4 mana, 2/4, Legendary)

Two things make Mulan good. First, she's the only creature in the deck with double attack, so an early Mulan clears one of your opponent's 2 drops and hits the barrier in the same turn. That alone is a great tempo play. Second, every ally On Reveal that happens while she's on board happens twice. Galahad gives +2/+2. White Queen bounces two. Mowgli summons two Baloos. Rumple gives +2 mana. Ellen gets +6/+6 per enemy card. This is why the deck is called Mulan on Reveal and not, say, Boogeyman Beatdown.

She's also the best buff target in the deck, because double attack means every point of power you give her counts twice. Galahad onto Mulan is +2 power, which is +4 damage per turn.

The Reflection she adds at game start is 1 mana to repeat every On Reveal from allies you played this round, which effectively means one more Mulan trigger on the turn you need it most. Usually that turn involves Ellen.

Sir Galahad (5 mana, 4/3)

Every other ally gets +1/+1, or +2/+2 with Mulan. On a wide board this is a lot of stats, and the timing you want is the turn after Mulan comes down, on a turn where you reveal first, so that Mulan gets out of Axe Throw range before anyone can target her.

Mowgli (6 mana, 2/2)

A 2/2 that puts a 6/6 in another lane. With Mulan, two 6/6s in two other lanes. That's 14 power across the board for 6 mana, and it lets you threaten the lane you weren't already pressuring.

Ellen Trechend (8 mana, 3/3)

The finisher. Trample means excess damage goes through to the barrier, and she gets +3/+3 for every enemy card in her lane on reveal. Put her into a lane your opponent has committed three cards to and she's a 12/12 before Mulan does anything. With Mulan she's a 21/21. With Mulan and Reflection she's a 30/30, and a 30 power trampler into a full lane clears the lane and takes most of a barrier in a single attack. Certain locations make her even sillier. She's the card that pushes you over the last few points of barrier health when the opponent has finally stabilised, and she's the reason they can't stabilise.

Trash for Treasure (1 mana)

Destroy an ally, draw two. On Egg it's a 5/5 and two cards. On Mice it's two 1/1s and two cards. On anything else it's a bad idea. It's the only spell in the deck and it never reads as a spell, it reads as "turn my Egg into a Goose right now."

The Mulan Turn (Reveal Order, Again)

If you read the Merlin guide you know the drill. Reveal order alternates every turn, and the player revealing first resolves everything before the other player does anything.

Mulan wants to come down on a turn where your opponent reveals first. She lands after they've already used their removal for the turn, and next turn you flip to revealing first, which means your Galahad or White Queen resolves, doubled, before your opponent can touch her. Galahad gets her out of range of the common burn spells. White Queen strips two of their board and leaves them nothing to swing with. Either way Mulan survives, and a surviving Mulan doubles every On Reveal you play for the rest of the game.

Play Mulan on a reveal-first turn and you hand your opponent a full turn to Dark Omen her before she's doubled anything. Count the turns.

The Boogeyman Problem

Boogeyman and Mulan don't like each other. Boogeyman's On Reveal kills the weakest ally in his lane. Mulan repeats it. So with Mulan on board, Boogeyman kills your two weakest allies, and if the lane is thin, one of them is him.

The exception is when you have Golden Egg and Three Blind Mice together in one lane. Boogeyman kills both. The Egg becomes a Goose and the Mice become two Mice elsewhere, so you've traded two cards you wanted dead anyway for a 7/7, a 5/5 and two extra bodies. That's a great turn. Anything short of that and you're feeding your own board to your own creature. If Mulan is on the board and the lane isn't set up for it, hold Boogeyman or play him to a lane where the only ally is something you can afford to lose.

Pick Two Lanes

You can't take all three barriers and you only need two. So pick two and pour everything into them. Splitting across three lanes is how tempo decks lose: you end up with three medium boards instead of two overwhelming ones, and a single removal spell in each lane leaves you with nothing.

The exceptions are the usual ones. If your opponent is about to take one of your barriers, defend it. If they've played a threat that demands an answer, answer it. Otherwise, barrier damage comes before everything, including trades that look good on paper. A 3/2 hitting a barrier for 3 is doing more for you than a 3/2 killing a 2/2.

Location effects change the math, so read them as they flip. A lane that buffs your creatures is a lane you commit to. A lane that punishes wide boards is a lane you skip, even if you had a nice Egg sitting there.

Flex Slots

There's a decent list of cards that can slot in depending on what you're seeing:

Frog Prince (3 mana, 2/2, Choose One On Reveal: +3 power or +3 health). More On Reveal for Mulan to double. A 8/2 or 2/8 for 3 mana with Mulan out is a lot of stats, and you pick which one you need.

Mary (3 mana, 1/1, On Reveal: add a 1/1 Little Lamb to hand; On Death: your Lambs get +3/+3 permanently). A card advantage engine in a deck that otherwise doesn't have one. Mulan doubles the Lamb. Worth trying if you're finding yourself running out of gas.

Black Knight (3 mana, 2/2, On Reveal: deal 2 damage to the enemy across from me). Removal on a body, and doubled by Mulan it's 4 damage, which kills most early creatures. Good if your local meta is full of small stuff.

Bigfoot (5 mana, 6/4, Trample). No tricks, just trample damage. If you want a second Ellen that comes down three turns earlier, here she is.

Common Mistakes

• Keeping a hand with no 2 drop because it has Mulan in it. Throw it back. You can't cast Mulan on turn 2 without Rumple anyway.
• Ending a turn with mana unspent. Unless a location is telling you to, this is a mistake every time.
• Playing Boogeyman into a lane with Mulan out and no Egg or Mice to feed him.
• Spreading across three lanes. Pick two.
• Trading creatures for creatures when you could be hitting a barrier.
• Playing Ellen into an empty lane. She's a 3/3 there. Put her where the enemies are.

Closing

Mulan on Reveal is not a deck with a secret. The secret is that there's no secret. Find a 2 drop, curve out, spend your mana, pick two lanes, double your On Reveals, and let Ellen clean up. It's fast, it's punishing, and it makes people who like to sit back and set up very unhappy.

Let's turn these critters sideways.