Mulligan Guide: Fiora Shen
Hey all, Precipic here to talk about mulligans for one of the top-tier decks in Runeterra right now, Fiora Shen Midrange.
We’ll take Swim’s decklist right here as a reference.
As with any of these mulligan guides, try to follow along with me and see if you can come up with your own answer.
If you’d like to practice the mulligan phase with your own decks, just hit the hand icon at the top right of any deck’s page.
Fiora Shen decklist
Deck Code: CEBQGAICCMQCWAYBAAERULICAMAAMDQFAEBQEFABAEBDCAIEAABAEAIAEUZQCAQAAEBQEAIABU2ACAYCBEAQCARF
[See Fiora Shen deck details]
Mulligan Situation #1
Let’s say that we’re against an aggressive strategy that looks to play fast cheap units and finish the game out with burn spells.
Something like Spider Aggro, Discard Aggro, or Pirate Aggro.
What do you think the mulligan for this hand would be?
The answer is that I would mulligan everything but Brightsteel Protector.
The reason why is because this deck doesn’t have a ton of early plays so you need to keep something that you can play early to trade with their early aggressive units.
However, there are cards that you really want to find in this matchup that aren’t currently in this hand.
Fiora, Tasty Faefolk, Greenglade Caretaker all do a ton in these matchups and would be huge if you drew even a single one.
By throwing away Rivershaper, 2nd Brightsteel, and Concerted Strike you are giving up cards that are only ok in the matchup for cards that are genuinely nuts in the matchup.
In general, it is important to mulligan looking for power cards as a replacement for merely average cards.
Mulligan Situation #2
Let’s look at another example where you are playing against some aggressive deck, like Pirate Aggro, Discard Aggro, or Spider Aggro, but with different mulligan choices.
On this hand, I would keep Brightsteel and Greenglade Caretaker always because it’s just the most powerful early game plan this deck has access to.
However, beyond that, it matters a lot whether the opponent is attacking on evens or odds.
If they are attacking on evens I would mulligan both Single Combat and Spirit’s Refuge away looking for Fiora, Tasty Faefolk, and even Shen with a hand as good as this.
However, if they’re attacking on odds I would keep Single Combat and mulligan Spirit’s Refuge.
I would mulligan Spirit’s Refuge because in this matchup that’s more a late-game card that looks to gain a large amount of life with massive units.
The reason that I would keep Single Combat is that I want to combo Single Combat and Brightsteel Protector on turn 3 to kill their powerful early game units, like Miss Fortune, Draven, or Elise.
I would plan to play Greenglade Caretaker turn 1, pass on turn 2, and then if they develop a unit on 3 which they are often forced to, I play Brightsteel Protector on Greenglade Caretaker and then use Single Combat to kill their turn 3 play.
The important thing to learn from this mulligan is that it’s important to keep in mind both your opponent’s attack token and your own attack token when deciding on mulligans and to actually think how the early turns play out with each hand.
Mulligan Situation #3
For this last mulligan let’s think about two of the bigger control decks in Runeterra right now, Lissandra Trundle Control and Aphelios Control.
For this mulligan, one thing is very certain which is that regardless of the control matchup you want to keep one copy of Fiora and one copy of Deny.
The reason for this is that you need to have a way of interacting with their big removal spells like Vengeance, Ruination, Comet, Supernova, and honestly even Aphelios Guns.
You always keep Fiora because you need to have some sort of threat to protect or you do not have a proactive plan and will just die because you do nothing.
From there, however, it becomes more nuanced.
Against Aphelios I would keep Nopeify! and mulligan away the second Deny.
The reason for this is that you need more ways of interacting with Aphelios’s guns however, you cannot keep too many of the Deny/Nopeify! effect or you will be unable to actually win combat.
Against Lissandra Trundle it’s basically the same idea however Deny is much better than Nopeify! in that matchup.
The main takeaway from this mulligan should be that while certain cards are super powerful in a given matchup having too many of the same effect can make it so that your deck isn’t able to function.
As always, think about how games play out and what tools you actually need to win these games.
Anyways that’s it for me. Thanks for joining me for this mulligan article series. I’ll see you next time.
LFM
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Thanks for reading! If you want to analyze whether you should keep or mulligan your opening hand for an archetype like Fiora Shen, check out our mulligan tool within our Meta Stats feature.
