Last time we spoke about the basics of Resources and Tempo

– in this article here.



A more serious examination of resources actually involves many related topics: deck speed, inevitability and knowing your role. Looking at each in turn, we will form a better image of what exactly goes on behind the scenes of any single game of Duelyst.

Deck Speed

For anyone who has dabbled with constructed/ranked/ladder modes in almost any card game of note (including Duelyst), you might have noticed a propensity for aggro decks to dominate the numbers aspect. Speed kills, and quite consistently sometimes!

All promising deck builders I think go through phases – first they try and make big fat value decks, then flashy combo decks – realise that they are not winning regularly with either, get disappointed and then decide to drop the cute ideas and go ‘face’. This realisation takes you to the next level of deck building – playing and building with the final goal in mind, total depletion of the enemy health pool at all costs.

Going through the aggro phase is actually quite critical in understanding strengths and weaknesses of all strategies. If you stack your deck with heavy cost cards, you will find yourself on the backfoot early and never recover from even simple aggressive starts such as Flameblood Warlock turn 1. So we learn the importance of turn 1 plays – to get a high likelihood of a turn 1 play we add 6 to 9 1 or 2 cost minions in our decks to contest the early game.

Eventually, this phase is also outdated – once you experience games where you run out of steam due to the deck not having enough draw, you add card draw, then you find certain minions totally blocking your strategy so you add displacement and then finally, through experiencing aggro, we become the better deck builders that we always wanted to be.

Deck speed does not simply refer to aggro though – offence-focused speed is far more common and also far easier to utilise, but defence-focused speed is quite important. Repulsor Beast pushing away a Magmar player’s Araki Headhunter is pretty good – they were ready to get it buffed next turn but now must play another minion while slowly repositioning the Araki. The Repulsor probably earned two whole turns worth of time to stabilise. Duelyst is still a young game so it is not fully possible to consistently win with a high-defensive low-offensive speed deck, but a working knowledge of the balance of power between them is critical to becoming a better player and deck builder.

(Some of my readers find this explanatory phase unnecessary – let me assure you, there is such a thing as natural talent and some gifted players don’t necessarily think about the inner workings of the game trusting their instinct and experience instead. Somewhat grudgingly though, we must accept that by and large, most of us could improve with conscious reflection on these matters!)

Inevitability

Another term borrowed from older card games, ‘inevitability’ refers, in a way, to your deck’s ‘final form’ – the action your deck threatens the opponent with if they let the game go on for long enough. A simple example is Silithar Elder – give it even two turns and you have let the Magmar player set up an exponentially growing army of 8/8 minions that do not die completely on just being dealt 8 damage. It takes a while to get going and can be stopped in the first turn, but after that your best bet is to push damage on the Magmar general since controlling his board is not an option any more.

If your deck is the one with inevitability, you will be seeking to survive the early and mid game even without pushing damage on the opponent. If your opponent has inevitability though, then you need to be proactive and get the job done before it is too late. Shadow Nova decks in Nov/Dec last year were typically of this form – I would go down to under 10 hp frequently, but then my deck would kick in and then the last few hp were a few too many as Nova won it from there. Nova based decks are returning to that form again with many Cassyva decks building tempo-oriented early mid game to go with the strong inevitability.

Defensive speed is important in a deck that chooses to go with inevitability. If the Magmar player goes second, answers opponent turn 1 play with Natural Selection, plays a Veteran Silithar turn 2 and Plasma Storms the board taking away two bodies from the opposition without taking damage, he is almost completely stabilised. However, defence-focused reactive decks suffer from a lack of impact plays in the early game and can be overrun if the offensive speed is favoured with good draws.

Linear Strategies

Duelyst at its core is actually a game built more on achieving your strategy rather than winning purely by disrupting your opponent’s win conditions. Linear strategies focus on ‘what can I do to win here’ as the driving force and build around winning with one sustained push. Rush minions, attack buffs and unblockable damage all often contribute to such a strategy working. Linear decks usually are consistent but have a card draw problem. Some good examples are Aggro Magmar (which tries to fix card draw with Starhorn’s Bloodborn spell, Blaze Hound, Spelljammer etc), Lilithe’s Fast Swarm (a version that runs Soulshatter Pact, Deathfire Crescendo and Spectral Revenant as a finisher but does not run 5 drops or Reavers), Aggro Zirix, Aggro Faie and even Aggro Argeon to an extent. These decks do not care for what their opponent is trying to achieve, they just focus in on what they need to get done. In general, ladder play is dominated by linear strategies. Bringing us neatly to another important concept.

Role

Your role in any single game of Duelyst depends on the speed of both decks, the inevitability factor and the linear strategies, if any, that are available. For example, against the aforementioned Control Magmar with Elders and removal spells, near enough every deck in the game must assume the role of the ‘aggressor’ (the beatdown, if you will). However, this decision is not nearly as easy to make when the majority of your opponent decks and your own deck are on similar speed, as is often the case on ladder.

For example, imagine a standard Aggro build for Faie and Zirix. Zirix goes first, plays a central Ethereal Obelysk. Faie plays Flameblood on orb and Flameblood in front. Now Zirix has to take stock of the situation – if he clears both Flamebloods (one with dervish, one with face) he now has lost 9 hp in the first three half-turns of the game. So the right way to go is to avoid taking more damage, right?

Probably not, actually. Faie’s Bloodborn spell now possesses inevitability over him. He needs to find board presence quickly or replace to find out-of-hand damage. If he has any way of utilising 3 mana and another from an orb he needs to do so now, while searching for all manner of Scion’s Wishes. So really, the onus is on Zirix to prove that he can win before he dies to more steady damage and Warbird. He cannot play the waiting game.

Let us take a different play-through of the same matchup. Zirix turn 1 central Ethereal Obelysk. Faie turn 1 Spelljammer out of attack range of any possible dervish spawn. On his turn, Zirix moves near a mana orb, plays Dunecaster 1 on it to make his dervish a 4/4, moves the dervish close to another mana orb, plays Dunecaster 2 to make his earlier Dunecaster 4/3 and then casts First Wish on Dunecaster 2 to make it 3/2. He also draws 2 cards at end of turn basically negating most of the card loss. Faie concedes.

Wow. What happened here? Faie erroneously thought that she was the aggressor, and assuming that role she played a card draw engine on the board to assist her aggression. She also played it very safely, because if she is going to play aggressively she needs the card fuel. Instead it misfired horribly because actually Zirix turns out to be the aggressor in this matchup again, despite Faie building quite aggressively!

Misreading your role can be game-ending. Some matchups may appear to be over when looked at in this method. However, you can build your deck to be more flexible in this circumstance. This is partly where the effectiveness of midrange deck building shines. You can put in choice counters and removal for the things that trouble you most, while still maintaining a strong approach against slower decks. Often this results in playing more than one moderate win condition over a strong single focused one. With practice and experience you can start mastering what I think are the most difficult current deck styles – the spell-heavy ones such as Spell Songhai. This type of deck has spell damage, soft and hard removal, inbuilt card draw, movement abilities and attack buffs. When you have everything, though, you must properly evaluate what you need to do every passing turn.

You can test out these concepts yourself against a friend or on the ladder (if you don’t mind a few losses here and there) with a (learning) deck like this one:

Purposely ultra cheap cost so you can build it with no investment. There is a lot of damage in here, and plenty of threats to create with one and two card combos. Faie’s own bloodborn spell adds to this clock and there are four relatively versatile defensive speed cards – Chromatic Cold, Repulsor Beast, Frostbone Naga and Primus Shieldmaster. Piloting this requires you to manage your health pool as a resource too. I assure you that even despite how one-track this deck looks, it is actually a good tool to learn from!

So to summarise-

Deck Speed relates to how fast your deck can set up its finisher or win condition. Simpler strategies are faster > Combinations are slower > Reactive late game winners are the slowest.

Inevitability is the measure of likelihood to win as time passes on in a given game. Defensive speed and availability of counter cards is crucial if you identify your deck as the one with inevitability, since survival to late game is equal to winning.

Knowing your Role as aggressor or defender is essential to determining a working plan for every game. Your deck can have added flexibility to help switching roles if necessary.

There’s a lot of material here, so I will stop for the time being. Catch y’all later!