Wild Vomit has not seen much competitive play lately. It’s no surprise—the deck is capable of great power, but it’s too inconsistent. As the metagame shifted to favor decks that were strong in the mid-game, Wild Vomit lost the uniqueness of its strong turns. The deck was written off as a dead archetype by many players, and that seemed to be all she wrote for the purple dream.

Until today.

Jon Klimas played an interesting version of the deck in Columbus. Here is what he competed with:

John Klimas’s Bastion Vomit

17 Wild Sentinel
16 Sentinel Mark IV
4 Longshot
4 Bastion 

3 Cover Fire
3 Ka-Boom!
3 Press the Attack
3 Reconstruction Program
3 Combat Protocols 

4 Underground Sentinel Base
 

Previous revamps of Wild Vomit toyed with a few concepts. Thinking Outside the Box was a popular addition because of Longshot’s tendency to miss, and some of the new Sentinel-proprietary cards in Web of Spider-Man were often subbed in to make the deck more resilient. 

This deck goes in another direction. In order to overcome the fact that Wild Vomit used to top out on turn 6 and then plateau, Klimas ran four copies of Bastion. He then added three copies of Ka-Boom! to the deck’s normal spread of plot twists to keep the game locked once Bastion hits the table. It’s a pretty smart move. 

Most metagames have seen a lot less Flame Traps in the past six to eight weeks than they had previously, so in many places, Flame Trap wouldn’t be too worthy of fear from this deck. Unfortunately, the Columbus metagame was rich in Common Enemy, Doom variants, and Brave and the Bold, so Flame Trap was an issue. Still, the deck is worthy of some interest.

The choice to run only three copies of Ka-Boom! and no Foiled may not be the best that Klimas could have made—it works very nicely against Titans but does nothing against Curve Sentinel, so the balance of resource suppression might have been a failed gambit. That said, however, the deck is easy to tweak around to fit in a 2/2 split of Ka-Boom!/Foiled, or even a 3/2 split in either direction.

Press the Attack is quite nice. It seems incongruous at first, but it’s great for reinforcing in a pinch when you really need to prevent breakthrough, and it naturally makes anyone pumped by Bastion a nice candidate for multiple high-powered attacks each turn.

It’s an interesting deck, and though it doesn’t seem like a solid final build for the concept, the strategy itself definitely has some merit. Jon Klimas stepped out and went in a direction that was far less common for Wild Vomit variant players. The academics behind the deck may warrant further testing, and it’s quite possible that Wild Vomit will make a comeback in the near future.