Another series! Madness!

Well it’s mainly a case of rambling in bite-size chunks. If I go through all of the resource work in one go, it will make for heavy reading and will invariably put you off actually understanding the material, so I think it is a lot more appetising to get a taste of a variety of activities that make Duelyst a fun game with plenty of depth.

A while back I posted a few Economy decks for this patch – Economy Class trips to Diamond 1.63, and in there I chose to include decks that allow the use of faction-specific strengths as a way of understanding the strategies built in to them (backstab and buffs, dervish synergy, midrange play for Lyonar and Magmar, total avoidance of mechs etc) – but when building a stronger deck one invariably needs to go deeper. This deck-building exercise will bring some of the key principles out, while achieving a real purpose of making a better list.

The list we will look at is the Midrange Kara build –

The driving factors for this simple build are to utilise the single target spell kit of Vanar with minions that provide a secondary tempo-grabbing effect and also benefit from Kara’s Bloodborn spell. There is the ‘fun’ element of semi-reliable combos such as two procs of Kinetic Surge turning a Rock Pulveriser into a Primus Shieldmaster, and the popular mega Ash Mephyt play. If you infiltrate successfully, a single Surge results in a 5/4 Crystal Cloaker, easily acquired as early as the 4 mana turn as Player 1 by playing Cryogenesis and then Surging.

However, when building a deck that you want to test the highest levels with, the ‘fun’ combos are not as relevant or useful as the ones with a high probability of success. This is not to say that you cannot make a successful deck with ideas and combos you find fun, but is related to the fact that usually the fun combos are the more inconsistent flashy ones. Let’s transform this one into a better beast!

Efficiency – Some cards are better than others. This is the unfortunate fact of every Card Farm. Every card has a resource cost. Mana is the most obvious one, followed by the immediate loss of card advantage. Some cards then also use your own health total as a resource, and finally some cards require losing board presence to play. Your task as a deck builder is to find the cards that provide the most in return for these costs.

Expected value – can be understood as the base value of a card in the absence of any supporting synergy. Chakri Avatar, for example, is a 1/2 body for 2 mana and nothing else, on top of which we are not running any buffs but hard and soft removal spells, so it will be a slow process if it somehow survived for multiple turns. It is a terrible card for us even if we had the option to use it. More realistically, Rust Crawler is a 2/3 and Healing Mystic is a 2/3, however the expected value of Mystic is almost always higher than that of Rust, so unless you are in a meta that requires artifact hate you will choose to run Mystic.

Win Condition – this is an essay in and of itself, but I will compress it here into three ideas – stabilising, turn of initial threat and reach. Stabilising is essentially the action of surviving until you can play the card or cards that comprise your win condition. Turn of initial threat, as it suggests, is when you first get enough mana to play the minion or spell that will turn the game in your favour. Reach is the total health that the enemy general needs to be at for you to win out-of-hand. As you can imagine, stabilising is a lot more difficult if your win condition is an expensive card, and longer still if that card needs to combine with another. Conversely, if your initial threat is an early turn, the opponent has to spend resources to remove or nullify it. On the matter of Reach, I will say the name of one spell and you should understand – Spiral Technique.

Let’s take a look at our spells. Cryogenesis will provide a minion clear of up to 4hp AND definitely replace itself with a 1 cost or 2 cost Vespyr minion in the early game which is when we need both those things the most. Chromatic Cold is a global range dispel which is invaluable against many different threats. These two spells are straight up value.

Aspect of the Fox is not nearly as clear cut. It leaves the opponent with a 3/3 minion they can use, so ideally you want to rid them of this extra minion before they can utilise it well. It is however extremely strong against any targetable high cost minion, such as Lyonar’s in-faction provokes, Pandoras, Hamon Bladeseekers and Aymara Healers. As such we can decide that its benefit outweighs the cost of holding it in the deck.

Hailstone Prison is the most debatable choice so far. It is a pure tempo play – that is, we need to take advantage of the window of opportunity afforded to us by using the 2 mana this turn. Sometimes this is very strong indeed, as we can return to hand a buffed minion. On the other hand, when faced with an Aymara from an enemy with 4 cards in hand, Hailstone will provide you with a 4 mana window to do something. If you are able to only play a Snowchaser this turn, the opponent will just play the Aymara down again and hack at the Snowchaser with his general. The board and the hand state is exactly the same as the turn before, only you have one less card in your hand. As such, a high tempo play like this needs to be in a high tempo focused deck. Since our aim is ‘Midrange Kara’ it is fair to say that we probably will not be deriving enough value from this card.

Similarly, when it comes to minions we have to prune and rearrange some more. A growing Rock Pulveriser is a cute concept, but it is not a maximally useful minion for our deck. If we are running three Chromatic Colds, Crossbones is going to be a needless redundancy – it is originally there because I prefer taking that route – but in all likelihood the situations in which you need a Crossbones, a Cold or an Aspect Fox will suffice. Finally, Ash Mephyt is a subpar 5 mana play on curve, and while the synergy is clearly strong it is not an immediate impact play. Three 4/5 vanilla minions are intimidating, but not exerting an inevitable win condition. Being placed randomly also does not inspire confidence.

Stalling the game and winning with a heavily Surged Sabrespine Tiger or two is a playable win con. It is however, rather inconsistent. Adding more win cons is good, especially if the potential win con cards can generate threat on their own. In this instance, we remember the power of Razorback. Without any Surges at all, Razorback is a solid minion with a strong impact on entry. With Surges it is also a menacing body. And if you have played any Vanar in the last few months, where there is mention of Razorback, there is the presence of Jax Truesight. Jax again is a strong initial threat by itself – failing to answer it is a continuing game-losing situation every turn. Razorback turns that up to eleven.

A ‘meta’ deck is incomplete without being able to deal with most of the current meta threats. You cannot build a successful deck if it is weak to the decks dominant at the current time. So you might consider healing to outlast aggro decks, some area-of-effect to rid yourself of wraithlings or a way of punishing frequent summons and a provoke or two to allow yourself to stabilise.

So now we have turned into this baseline 40 with the options to add in Lightbender, Venom Toth, Frostbone Naga, Zen’Rui the Blightspawned, Repulsor Beast and Bonereaper as our answer cards. Remember that usually the best decks concentrate on mostly providing their own threats and answering the highest value enemy threats, rather than mindlessly answering everything from turn one and then running out of steam. ‘Inevitability’ and ‘patient play’ will be addressed another time. Well, let’s look at our finished all-purpose deck –

Is this a world-beater? Dunno. Is this an egg-beater? Dunno that, either. Why? Because the proof of any deck-building pudding lies in play-testing. I (and you) can test this exercise build out and see how we get on. What cards are under-performing? Is there something you always feel like replacing? Does a certain type of deck beat you all the time? Can we do something about it? Playtest. A lot.

A final word on the matter – sometimes the best laid plans of mice and Zyx can fail. Knowing when you are trying to resuscitate a dead horse is also a skill. A lot of great sounding ideas based on synergies and three-card combos do not materialise into playable and successful decks. We learn by doing, but the ones that learn more also learn what to do better by doing badly. Sometimes you might have the right idea but lack the right method. Give it time, do something else and come back to it. You might find the right minion for the job on your return! (hint: It is always Whistling Blade.)