At this point, everyone's heard of Alice, Wonderland Explorer. A powerful, 3-cost neutral follower that places a "Fable Counter" on itself, but can move it to any other Fable card on your field or EX area. When it evolves, it has the ability to look top 4 cards of your deck and put up to 2 Fable cards into the EX zone. Then, you can use Alice's effect to put a Fable Counter on one of them. Neat, huh?

But what about the rest of the cards and archetype? This article breaks it down.

Every Fable deck can use these cards:

First thing's first, the Neutral Package:

As mentioned previously, Alice is your main consistency engine. Any deck investing heavily into the Fable engine will need to run 3 copies. Actress Feria is also an easy 3-of, due to her strong 1-cost statline, and ability to put a Fable Counter onto another Fable follower on your field.

One of your primary win conditions and board clear options is Humpty Dumpty. It's a 3-cost follower that can evolve for 0 play points, self-destructing itself to deal damage to every other follower on the board and three damage to the enemy leader. Its downside is that it discards your entire hand to do so, but because the EX Zone acts as a secondary hand, this disadvantage can be mitigated. It also has its own support card and finisher, Eggsplosion, which deals AOE damage to the enemy field and leader for each Eggsplosion or Humpty Dumpty in your cemetary, plus one.

Last, the gold card Rapunzel is an overstatted, 3-cost 4/5 ward, with the downside that it can't attack without a Fable Counter. However, this downside can be easily mitigated via cards like Alice, Wonderland Explorer and Actress Feria.

Egg Haven

The deck that uses Humpty Dumpty and Eggsplosion the most efficiently is Egg Haven. Arguably the most Fable-like deck in the entire set, it utilises cards like Alice, Wonderland Explorer, Pinion Prince and Alice's Adventure to set up the Humpty Dumpty/Eggsplosion combo, in such a way that they can continue to play on following turns even with no hand!

The cemetary acts as a secondary deck, as it has cards like Pinion Prince and March Hare's Teatime that can interact with it. The deck also utilises strong tempo tools such as Princess Snow White and Tin Soldier to whittle down the opponent's health before going in for the kill. This deck remains strong for a number of future sets and is considered a good investment.

Forestcraft

Forest is interesting, because it has two main ways of utilising the Fable package. The first is rather boring, it's where players splash in Flower Princess, Tweedle Dum and Actress Feria simply because they have good stats and are efficient for the mid range strategy.

However, the second, more exciting deck type is the Beauty and the Beast list.

Beauty and the Beast is a powerful 6-cost follower with Rush and Aura. It gains a Fable counter when it's put into play, and if it was played from anywhere other than your hand, it gains storm. In addition, you can pay 1 mana to remove any number of Fable counters on the card to buff it by +1/1 for each counter removed. This makes the card a powerful finisher when played from the EX Zone.

The deck utilises cards like Alice, Wonderland Explorer and Woodland Band to put Beauty and the Beast into the EX Zone, setting up for an eventual lethal combination. Woodland Bard is a 1-cost amulet that searches the top 4 cards of your deck follower, which is itself therefore searchable by Tweedle Dum, Tweedle Dee's effect to search the top of the deck for 1-cost cards.

To top the package off are Flower Princess and Magical Fairy Lilac, both of which have effects that allow them to expend their Fable counters to destroy enemy followers. It's worth noting that Elf Twins' Assault, despite not being a Fable card, works very well with this deck.

Swordcraft

The Fable package in Sword is mid-range in nature and focuses on controlling the board. Most of the cards rely on having another Fable follower on the field to get bonus effects, such as Maisy, Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Rabbit Ear Attendant, and Young Ogrehunter Momo.

You can also use cards like Alice, Wonderland Explorer, Kiss of the Princess and Actress Feria to add Fable counters to your followers. The main gameplan is to gradually take control over the board, before using Cinderella to attack the enemy leader for 5 and then bring forth another follower that costs 5 play points or less.

Hypothetically, with a Leonidas' resolve active, you could do 20 damage in a single turn by attacking with Cinderella (with a Fable counter pre-set in EX Zone due to Alice), then summon an Albert and evolve him...

Dragoncraft

For the most part, there's no real Fabled synergies outside of the main neutral package.

The only three cards are Red Ragewyrm, a generic beatstick, Tilting at Windmills, a 6-cost amulet that allows you to cheat out high-cost followers for a single turn for 3pp, and Jabberwock, everyone's favourite gambler.

In other words, it's only really Alice that synergises with these cards, and even then, they don't inherently have anything to do with Fable counters.

Abysscraft

Similar to Dragoncraft, there aren't really any real Fabled synergies outside of the main neutral package.

Furtive Fangs, Odile, Black Swan, and Dark Alice are all Fabled cards, but they don't rely on Fable Counters at all, and are essentially standalone cards.

Runecraft

Runecraft finishes off the trio with no real Fable synergies, despite having three cards with the trait.

Gingerbread House, Witch of Sweets, and Wizardess of Oz are all Fable Cards, but notably, you'll notice that they're mostly synergies with Earth Rite cards, and don't have much to do with the overall Fable package.

Closing thoughts

Overall, three classes can utilise the Fable Engine effectively in BP03. Egg Haven is one of the most effective Fable decks, remaining strong for multiple future sets. If you want to use Beauty and the Beast Forest, Egg Haven or Cinderella Sword, you'll want to pick up your Alices today!

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