BUILD WITH A HANDICAP

DECKS THAT HOLD TO A RULE

Strength and popularity are the questions a player asks once. The narrower one gets asked for years — what is the best deck I can build without the Legendaries I do not own, under three elixir, with one win condition — and it usually gets answered with somebody's hand-picked list.

Each rule below is a filter over the decks the live meta genuinely plays, not a deck built to satisfy the constraint. A rule with a short list means few real decks hold to it, which is itself the answer.

No LegendaryEight cards, not one of them Legendary or Champion.Champions are excluded alongside Legendaries on purpose. A new or free account can field neither, so a "no Legendary" list carrying a Champion answers a question nobody asked.
Free to playCommons and Rares only. No Epic, no Legendary, no Champion.The constraint is really about card levels, not rarity snobbery: Commons and Rares are the cards a free account can push to a competitive level, and an under-levelled Legendary loses games a levelled Common wins.
No ChampionNo Champion card, so no Champion ability button.A Champion is an extra card and an extra ability, and giving that up is a real cost. These are the decks that pay it and still hold their place in the meta.
Cheap cycleUnder 3.0 elixir on average across all eight cards.Cheap is not a style, it is a clock: a deck under three elixir sees its win condition again while the answer to the last one is still on the field.
Heavy4.0 elixir or more on average across all eight cards.A heavy deck trades every cycle advantage for a push that has to be answered outright. There are far fewer of these in a live meta than of cycle decks, which is exactly why the ones that survive are worth naming.
One win conditionExactly one card in the list carries the win-condition role.One win condition means the deck cannot open a second front: if the opponent solves that card, the deck has no other plan. The lists here are the ones whose other seven cards make that a fair trade.
No spellsEight cards, none of them a spell.Nearly every real deck runs at least one small spell, because a swarm behind a tank has to be answered somehow. A deck that skips them entirely is answering that another way, and the originality score on each one says how unusual the shape is.