How to Play Gatalyst Jhin
Gatalyst is one of the newer cards in Legends of Runeterra that hasn’t seen much experimentation, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t fun decks to be played with it! This includes Jhin!
Jhin has unique deck building due to being a Runeterra champion which allows you to play a variety of cards that have skills on them. Many of these skills do direct damage to the Nexus itself including Jhin himself. Gatalyst capitalizes well off this.
There are multiple ways to play this deck, including a slower version of the deck with Funsmith. Funsmith will have a buff soon, so that might make her even better in this deck in the future.
This deck primarily focuses on burning out your opponent quickly and efficiently, so if that’s a playstyle you enjoy this deck might be for you!
To explore more new decks head to our community Deck Library. Or, head to the Deck Builder to make your own creation.
Deck Code: CEEQCAQGHQAQCAZIAMAQICBUGYAQGBAFAECQCBQBAMCQMAIGAQQQCBQDB4AQMDACAEBACBA7E4BQCAQDAQAQMAYNAEAQIDI
[See Gatalyst Jhin deck details]
Deck Overview
This deck is an aggro combo Jhin deck that capitalizes on the frequency of skills that do damage. It is one of the few Jhin decks that use Manasoul Student as this card is a slower tempo card, but in this deck, it is able to get the value from it as with Gatalyst it deals 2 damage to Nexus rather than 1.
On top of this, the plethora of skills make it easy to get Jhin to snipe the Nexus and in some games even level and finish off the game by attacking for 4 plus direct damage.
This deck relies on being incredibly efficient with your resources and not to miss out on any damage as it can make the difference between beating your opponent or not.
To see just how fast and efficient this deck can be, check out my video playing it:
Game Plan
As I mentioned earlier, it’s important that you are efficient with all your damage in this deck as it can easily make a difference between winning and losing. Throughout the entire game, you need to be keeping track of your mana and spell mana as you don’t want to play a Ballistic Bot when you aren’t able to have one mana to spend on the Ignition.
You also have to be extremely careful with what you put your Gatalyst on. You will want to do this when you can ensure that you are able to get the damage down. You aren’t able to protect your Gatalyst with this deck so the big thing is to play it on either units that are bench sitters such as Manasoul Student and Ballistic Bot or are lower value.
You want to try your best to get the most damage from Gatalyst possible and whenever your opponent does deal with it, it isn’t too hard on you. Using Gatalyst at the correct time can easily make or break your games and this changes drastically depending on what deck you are playing against.
Generally, you don’t want to play Jhin on the board unless you are completely running out of resources or that your Jhin is leveled up and you can get an attack in with him. Of course, there are cases where you don’t have another option and have to play Jhin before these cases, but that is not ideal.
Mulligan Strategy
The good news about this deck is that the deck plays very linearly which means you don’t care about your opponent’s deck when it comes to mulligan. Your game plan is the same – to burn out your opponent.
This means your mulligan is the same almost every game.
Of course, Jhin is the star of the show so you always want to mulligan for him. You miss out on so much damage without him that I’d argue you are supposed to hard mulligan and find him. You don’t want two though, so if you have 2 in your starting hand make sure to pitch the extra!
The other cards you are looking for are Crackshot Corsair, Legion Saboteur, Boomcrew Rookie and sometimes Teemo as he does a great job of activating Crackshot Corsair and getting chip damage in against the opponent. Tusk Speaker is also okay to start with, but I generally wouldn’t keep this in my starting hand when given the option.
Against slower decks, I am more likely to keep Ballistic Bot or Manasoul Student, but you can’t really go wrong mulliganing for Jhin plus early drops that have skills on them.
Match-Ups
I had the best luck against midrange decks that couldn’t handle the damage to my deck output. Surprisingly, I even did decently against Ionia and Shadow Isles and I expected their natural healing and disruption to cause issues for me, but generally, that wasn’t the case.
I’d assume this deck has a harder time against slower, value-based control decks such as Targon that can continuously heal and keep units on the board.
Tech Choices
Funsmith: If you want to make the deck a bit slower but better against slow, value-based control decks than this would be the card for you to add!
Progress Day: I’ve seen some versions of this deck run Progress Day due to running out of cards. This is a way to help with that.
Additional Spellslinger: This is to slow down your opponent a bit more if you are playing against opponents that have tall threats rather than wide threats.
Conclusion
Generally, this deck is a for fun deck that I wouldn’t recommend for ranked and isn’t optimized for it, but due to it being a Jhin deck a lot of it builds itself. There are only a limited number of tech choices in this deck for that reason.
I hope you have a fun time with this deck if you try it out as I know several have already! Good luck!
Thanks for reading! If you have any questions, feel free to ask Silverfuse during her streams (usually daily from 2-6PM CST).
Catch Silverfuse live at www.twitch.tv/silverfuse
