Fury Chaos Annie Dark Child Deck Guide
The Fury Chaos Annie Dark Child is a Proving Grounds Legend that consistently shows up in tournaments and occasionally breaks into top cuts, even taking home wins. While Annie doesn’t quite stand on the same level as Master Yi or Kai’Sa, she remains a powerful Legend that thrives on spell-heavy gameplay to control the board.
Success with this deck hinges on understanding its capabilities and planning ahead. Much of its strength comes from responding to your opponent’s actions, casting spells during their turn to disrupt their attempts at conquering a battlefield and maintaining control of the game’s flow.
Leader
Red Purple Annie readies 2 of your Runes at the end of your turn. This allows you to freely spend Runes to develop units or cast spells on your own turn, while still keeping at least 2 Runes available for the opponent’s turn. To maximize this advantage, the deck should include plenty of spells that can be used reactively (Action and Reaction spells). Annie’s ability makes this strategy smoother by giving you additional ready Runes without weakening your own plays, ensuring you can make meaningful plays while keeping the threat of your spells during defensive turns.
Decklist
Annie, Dark Child
1
0
Fury Rune
7
0
Chaos Rune
5
0
Obelisk of Power
1
0
The Dreaming Tree
1
0
Zaun Warrens
1
0
Cleave
3
1
Gust
2
1
Hextech Ray
1
1
Stacked Deck
3
1
Fight or Flight
2
2
Flash
2
2
Incinerate
2
2
Legion Rearguard
3
2
Ride the Wind
3
2
Traveling Merchant
3
2
Vi, Destructive
3
2
Sneaky Deckhand
3
3
Void Seeker
3
3
Annie, Stubborn
1
4
Kai'Sa, Survivor
3
4
Darius, Trifarian
3
5
How to Play
The Annie Dark Child deck wants to go for an aggressive early game, trying to conquer Battlefields and score points while having defensive and damage spells to help you keep some board presence in the mid-game. The deck has multiple cards to return units to base or to the opponent’s hand, basically slowing down their aggression and buying enough time until you hit 6 Points.
Once you’re at 6 points, you can start planning your combo win condition with Vi + Ride the Wind, playing Vi and moving her to a battlefield to conquer it than attacking the other battlefield through her Ganking keyword to conquer it and win the game.
Champion
Annie Stubborn is a 4-cost Champion with 3 Might. She’s not the scariest unit to play, but we’re usually going for her ability to return a spell from the trash to our hand. The spell we choose to return, we’ll be dependent on the state of the game, but if we have the Runes to play it, we’ll usually go for the strong removal plays like Void Seeker.
Battlefields
Since we’re trying to win games quickly, Obelisk of Power works great here, giving us 1 Point at the start of our Beginning Phase, making it easier for us to get to 8 Points.
The Dreaming Tree synergizes with spells that target your own units, like Gust or Ride the Wind, letting you draw a card to add resources to your hand.
When you Zaun Warrens, you can discard 1 card to draw 1, basically filtering your hand for better options.
Early Units
Legion Rearguard is a 2 Might low-cost unit you can play early in the game. He does have the Accelerate keyword, meaning we can pay additional Energy and 1 Fury Rune to have Legion Rearguard enter Ready, going for an immediate attack to score us a Point.
As for Traveling Merchant, he’s more of an early play that creates value when he moves, letting us discard a card from hand to draw a card in its place, filtering for better cards. We can move Traveling Merchant the old-fashioned way, or use spells to move him and trigger his ability.
Another unit that can play aggressively is Sneaky Deckhand, capable of being played on an open battlefield immediately to score you a point. Skipping the Base phase and going straight to an open battlefield means your opponent will have fewer counter plays to make to stop Sneak Deckhand, and the point you gain will accelerate your game plan tremendously, as you’re trying to hit 6 Points as early as possible.
Aggression Boost
Cleave is an Action Spell that gives one of your units Assault 3 keyword, meaning when they’re on the attack, they’ll gain +3 Might. This makes them more of a threat when they go for the attack, and can be exceptionally useful when played on a low Might unit to turn it into an attacker capable of conquering a battlefield.
Damage Spells
We have multiple damage spells that help us kill an opponent’s units or damage them enough for our attacker/defender to finish them off.
For 1 Energy and a Power cost, Hextech Ray deals 3 damage to an opponent’s unit on a battlefield, potentially killing it or weakening it enough for your units to finish off. Incinerate is a weaker play that deals 2 damage to a unit on the battlefield, but at least you’re not paying a Power cost for it.
As for Void Seeker, it deals 4 damage to the opponent’s unit on the battlefield and draws you a card. So you get to kill higher Might units, and at the same time, you’re not long on card draw thanks to the draw ability.
All of these spells are Action cards, so you can play them during your opponent’s turn. Keep in mind that you can only target units that are on a battlefield with these three spells.
Control Spells
The 1-cost Gust returns a 3 Might or less unit at a battlefield to the player’s hand. Often, we’ll use Gust to return an opponent’s unit before they get to score the point, slowing down their pace and weakening the board state. It can also be used to remove a unit when they go for an attack, weakening their overall offensive power, especially if they’re attacking with multiple units, and it could mean losing the showdown without the unit we just returned.
As for Fight or Flight, we can either play it from hand or hide it at a battlefield we’re holding for later turns. Fight or Flight returns one of the opponent’s units to base, perfect to play when they’re initiating an attack and we want to weaken it, making it harder for them to conquer a battlefield, and potentially losing units to your defenders.
On the other hand, Flash lets us move 2 of our units to base, perfect defensive play to protect our units from the opponent’s attackers, and leaves them on the board for another swing to regain control.
Champion Aggression
Kai’Sa Survivor is one of your strongest aggressors. She’s a 4-cost Champion unit with 4 Might, capable of drawing you a card if she conquers a battlefield. This means we prioritize attacking and conquering a battlefield with her for the additional card draw, giving us the resources we need for a stronger late game.
You can pay 5 Energy and 1 Fury Power to play Kai’Sa Survivor with Accelerate, allowing you to attack with her on the turn she’s played. This is perfect for an aggressive turn that makes it harder for the opposing player to have a counterplay to answer your attack.
Since Kai’Sa is drawing us a card whenever she conquers, we often will return her to base once we hold a Battlefield so we can later attack with her and trigger her conquer ability a second time. Flash is also perfect here to protect her from an opponent’s attack and have her attack another time when we’re confident we can conquer a battlefield.
Darius Trifarian is another aggressor, readying himself and +2 Might when you play two cards in one turn. You want to play him when you can play a second card alongside him, turning him into a 7 Might unit that can immediately go for the attack and conquer a battlefield. The deck has multiple low-cost cards to play, so often, we’re able to go for the Darius play if we have 6 Runes available.
You can reactivate Darius’s effect on future turns, so we can move him to base, trigger his Legion to ready him, and gain +2 Might for the turn and go for an attack on another battlefield to conquer it.
Combo Win Condition
Vi is our strongest play in the late game, gaining +1 Might every time you recycle a card from your trash. You can activate this effect as many times as you want in a turn, as long as you have cards in the trash to recycle. We can only activate this effect during our turn, so we’ll boost her Might when she’s in base and then go for the attack to conquer a battlefield. We need to identify how much Might is out of the opponent’s range to deal with, and if it’s a game-winning play, we can recycle all cards in the trash to close out the game.
Waiting a full turn for Vi to be ready can be tough since we don’t want to boost her Might unless we can attack with her and conquer a battlefield. Giving the opposing player a full turn to answer her will completely shut down our win condition, and this is why we heavily rely on Vi + Ride the Wind combo play to set up a winning turn.
The combo play with Vi happens when we’re at 6 Points, needing 2 Points to win the game. We’ll play Vi in base and boost her Might through her ability, and then go for the Ride the Wind spell to move her to a battlefield and Ready her. This forces a showdown, and we can kill opponents’ units to conquer the battlefield and gain 1 Point to hit 7 total Points.
Since Ride the Wind moved an exhausted Vi from base to battlefield and Ready’d it, we can use Vi’s Ganking keyword to attack the second battlefield and conquer it, scoring the final point and conquering both battlefields all in one turn to win the game.
General Tips
- Play aggressively. We want to score early points and get to 6 as early as possible for the combo play, so get your early points with low-cost units.
- Keep track of the Runes you need. Since a lot of our spells can be played during the opponent’s turn, we can anticipate the opponent’s upcoming plays and bank the Energy we need to make counterplays. Legend Annie is giving us 2 Runes, but in some turns, we might need to bank an additional Rune to play cards like Void Seeker.
- Don’t play multiple spells at once if not needed. We want to order our spells correctly and make sure the opposing player doesn’t gain too much value from countering our plays. For example, instead of playing 2 damage spells at once and getting shut down by Unyielding Spirit, we can play one after the other and wait to see the opposing player’s reaction.
Mulligan Tips
Early units like Legion Rearguard, Traveling Merchant, or Sneaky Deckhand to score points on the first couple of turns. Kai’Sa is one of your strongest mid-game plays, so we want to have her in hand.
Other Cards to Include – Sideboard
- Rebuke returns a unit to the owner’s hand, perfect when you want to remove one of the opponent’s units from the equation, weakening their board presence.
- Fading Memories is basically a removal play, giving one of the opponent’s Units or Gear the Temporary keyword, which means they’ll get killed at the start of the opponent’s Beginning Phase.
- Draven Showboat is a late-game win condition, gaining additional Might depending on the Points you have.
- Falling Star is an extremely strong damage spell that deals 3 damage to a unit, and it can be cast twice. You can kill two low-might units or target a higher-might unit twice.
- Invert Timelines is a resource spell, discarding the hand of both players and drawing each player 4 cards. Ideally, we want to play it when we’re low on cards, and we could, at the same time, force the opposing player to discard key cards from their hand.
- Shakedown is one of the strongest spells when it comes to the damage output, paying 2 Energy to deal 6 damage to the opponent’s unit, regardless of where it is on the board. However, your opponent can choose to dodge the damage and instead have you draw 2 cards. So, it’s not a reliable removal option as your opponent will most likely have you draw the 2 cards instead of the damage going through. You’re still adding resources to your hand, but not controlling the board for the turn.
- Pouty Poro is an early aggressor to score us a point and can be annoying for the opposing player to deal with him through a spell, thanks to the Deflect keyword.
Closing Words
This Fury Chaos Annie deck plays aggressively while also having control tools to remove key units from the opponent’s side to shut down certain attacks. It’s trying to get early points as quickly as possible, and from there, if your opponent doesn’t have an answer to your combo play, you can seal the deal to close out the game.
