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"(This is gonna be destroyed and probably removed, heck I might be banned.)" this ain't Facebook or China, bad opinions like yours are not banned or removed, just laughed at.
Yes, economy, the doom of all, where people who start equal and work their way up with hard work, time dedication and a tad of luck are the scum of the game. Please, do us a favor and stop posting these, you clearly just want a whole new game, so go find it (or make it, see how many people enjoy that soulless piece of garbage) and leave us alone.
Actually managed to make some nice fire/nature and fire/frost decks with 6cards in t1 and 3 in t3:
(Still need upgrades and charges though)
What do you mean by "they don't do well with all the must have cards"?
And I'm not a big fan of bandits but I might try it out one day
Fire has a pretty strong t1 so I love to play it long if I can, and if you're opponent goes t2 and you're not in a disadvantage you can easily rush him, so I don't want to cut out to many cards on t1 - otherwise I think I should always play pure fire to allow myself that big t1.
Your post looks extremely detailed, thanks, I will defiantly read it later. I read their faction overview and realy liked it, agreed with the most and learned alot, I even found out the fire/frost deck I made was almost exactly as their fire/frost deck, I just replaced firesworn with sunderer. In most cases you will face in t1 shadow or fire and sunderer is realy helpful in t1 rushing against them. And firesworn is a pretty useless card imo, not only he cost alot of power for what he does, he dies very fast. Is just better to use other counters -> in t1 for example against sunderer you can use scavanger to bodyblock and sunstriders at same cost(110), and in t2 you can use t2 cards, which are much stronger, like enforcer and gladiatrix for example.
However the fire/nature was'nt the same, they did'nt put thugs which imo can give you a disadvantage in some t1 fights. Also as much as scythe fiends is a strong card I found it unnecessary as a S counter, because you have hurricane and ghostspears which are pretty strong and they can even killed buffed commandos or defenders, and if that's not enough you can even use mauler. Also because you can only use 1 brannoc at a time I would replace scythefiends with virtuoso, which is not only strong against buildings it has very high dps against L units as well.
About wrecker I agree is not always necessary, but beside fire/nature is realy helpful against scavengers and is also nice to pop out a sunderer and rush, his ability costs only 20 and lasts for 30 seconds, which is kinda insane imo. Still had to take him out though.
About the t3 if you take virtuoso, giant slayer and brannoc is pretty decent, I wish the twilight units will get buffed one day so they won't be that weak, would also be cool if the transformation was realy worth it.
About 2vs2, I agree but in some maps is a split 1vs1 so you can't always count on your teammate and you could use the help of thugs for example.
Thanks for the reply! will defiantly check your guide later, and btw keep with the videos, they're very helpful and fun to watch.
Big up to @Hirooo & @RadicalX who post those PvP decks in the first place.
Thanks @MephistoRoss, @Pritstift for all those data on PvE maps, time, replays...
This is the simplest deck to build because there really are no options. Let’s continue the outline of picking out units based on role.
· Small
o Scythe Fiends—yep, this is your only t2 S counter. Thugs could do in a pinch if you really want a S/S, but otherwise you’re stuck with scythe fiends. That makes these essential. These are really good though, and the swift is nice as well.
o Fire Dancer—well, it does have S knockback…although you should really be using it for something else.
o Viridya—hey! She does S damage, right? Not a ton though, and she’s pretty much a worse M/S than scythe fiends. No, if she goes in this deck it will not be primarily for her S counter.
o Fire Stalker—this is just a worse fire dancer. Don’t use.
· Medium
o Enforcer—because of charge, this beats any other t2 M/M in the game. It’s a great unit, often used to kill non-M units just because it does so much damage, and is highly spammable. Essential.
o Rageclaws—your only S/M counter, but that isn’t really needed because we’ve already discussed that enforcer beats any other M/M counter. They take a long time to build up rage and are extremely susceptible to knockback or cc, which is already a weak point in pure fire’s deck. They are also good well-droppers, but since you have fire dancers . . . need I say they’re redundant?
o Skyfire Drake—a very strong M counter, and good for its aerial properties. This fulfills any needs of ranged M attack.
o Rogan Kayle—these are great stats! Much better than Moon or Viridya. Unfortunately, most M/M units have great stats. He will lose to nightcrawler or enforcer in a heartbeat, and he cost much more than them. On the upside, he makes units deal more damage (a plus with an aggressive faction like pure fire). He also has a cc—although it’s not that good, it’s the only cc you can get. Still, he’s not that useful except for his abilities because we already have 2 of the 3 best M counters with enforcers and skyfire drake.
· Large
o Fire Stalker—yes, it does to L damage. Its real use is elsewhere though, and it’s best used as a jack-of-all-trades. Since pure fire has the master at everything fire stalker dabbles at, it’s unneeded.
o Gladiatrix—a fantasic L counter; the range makes good for kiting and keeping her alive despite her low health. She is also good against flying units for obvious reasons.
o Firesworn—works well with his ability, but he’s very susceptible to cc or just being killed before his shot goes off. Still good for a t1 unit, and it says a lot that I’m even mentioning him. You typically want to spawn a firesworn first to provoke a cc, and then you can make the gladies.
o Moon—she’s just subpar with her stats and high cost. Additionally, you can’t make more than one of her, which is a huge negative when you want a card to kill a stronger card. However, due to pure fire’s debilitating weakness to L units, you may want to take her if you have the deck space. Unfortunately, she is just another M/L like gladiatrix or firesworn, and her only advantage over them is her better health.
o Skyfire Drake—not technically an L counter, but it does very high damage anyway, and can’t be hit by most L units. If you’re using it to counter L units it’s basically a glady, but more useful after the L unit has died
· X-Large
o Gladiatrix—yeah, fire struggles quite a bit here. Your real strategy is to just not let your opponent pop an XL on you while you’re still t2. Gladiatrix has your highest ranged damage per power, but still dies easily. The disenchant is still useful.
o Skyfire Drake—same as the glady, but useful for attacking as well.
o Enforcer—just because it has really good stats.
o Rogan Kayle—great because of his cc. It doesn’t prevent the XL from stomping on people, but that doesn’t do near as much damage as the alternative. Your defensive gladies will also benefit from Rogan’s buff because of their high dps, but they will probably be spread too far to do much benefit. He’s sort of a last-ditch effort, but let me reiterate that pure fire deserves to lose if you’ve let your opponent drop an XL on you while you’re still t2.
o Mortar Tower—great dps, but you can’t support it with cc. This means you have a harder time against XL’s than other factions (although wildfire does work well).
· Siege
o Fire Dancer—the whole reason you are playing pure fire. These are hands down the best siege units in the game. Their pros should be so obvious that I’m not going to waste your time detailing them. Essential.
o Fire Stalker—a worse fire dancer. It’s just redundant.
o Rageclaws—high damage, but suffers greatly because of cc susceptibility. It’s definitely uncommon in a pure fire deck, but I’ve seen them more than once.
o Termite hill—does great damage against wells and orbs, but the card is hard to use. It’s basically the building version of fire dancer, so you don’t need it, especially when you consider how hard it will be to go up.
· Specialty
o Rogan Kayle—his damage buff and cc can both be very useful. He’s a consideration if you have room in your deck.
o Viridya—her passive heal is a bit wasted on pure fire because of how low all your units’ health is.
o Skyfire Drake—useful because it flies
o Warlock—it has an interesting ability, but it’s really weak. The general consensus is, “Why bother to spend power buffing my fire dancer slightly when I could just make 2 of them?”
Now let’s take a look at buildings. In general, buildings are bad because they bind power and are immobile.
· Rallying Banner—super essential for pure fire. Your units all have low health, so they really benefit from being summoned un-dazed.
· Mortar—only really useful for defense, and even then not so much. Fire dancers make their offensive use redundant.
· Termite Hill—same as mortar, but without an defensive abilities
· Rocket Tower/Pyromaniac—very good stats, but defensive buildings are inherently not useful. Don’t use these.
You also have some quite useful spells. Listed in order of necessity…
· Eruption—absolutely essential for anti-air. It also helps against wells below 300 health.
· Wildfire—your spammy spell. It does ridiculous damage and can be used as a cc in the right place.
· Disenchant—someone once argued that it wasn’t necessary for pure fire, but I very much disagree. One of the perpetual BF debates concerns whether the green or purple disenchant is better. On one hand, the green is more useful in t3 for popping up a jugger and stampeding without being inhibited by cc. On the other hand, the purples is useful for preventing superbuffed Lost Reavers or Bandit cards, both of which pure fire can struggle against. You also have gladiatrix’s disenchant, although since the gladiatrix will usually be for defense, the purple gladiatrix has the more useful disenchant. This seems all well and good; the purple glady disenchant for defense and the green manual disenchant for offense or for the save if you don’t have a ready glady. On the other hand, the green glady is better because of swift, so maybe you ought to take green glady and rely on purple to do all the real disenchanting? Or perhaps you ought to go green and green, to maintain your ability to avoid cc on a juggernaut—after all, can’t you just double disenchant if your opponent double buffs? In my opinion, the green-purple debate is not as important as everyone makes it out to be. I think the swift on the green glady is the most important, and a purple disenchant is fine to make sure you don’t lose to bandits. There are only a few decks that can double cc a juggernaut, and even then I don’t think an extra 15-20 seconds is enough to warrant a possible loss to some combinations of buffs.
· Ravage—you have a good healing spell, use it. Enough said.
· Lavafield—I used to think that lavafield was just a worse wildfire, but that’s because I was using it wrong. Lavafield is for taking out a mass of units in a wide area; wildfire is for taking out a few powerful units grouped together.
· Mine—this spell does immense damage and works like a subpar cc, but it can be microed around.
· Scorched Earth—same use as in t1, and you probably have the deck slots to use it. Pure Fire is also strong with it because fire dancers drop structures like crazy.
· Global Warming—this card is a hard counter to pure frost or fire-frost. Unfortunately, pure frost still has a great matchup against pure fire and global warming does very little to mitigate this.
· Girl Power—it can be slightly useful on a gladiatrix or fire dancer, but pretty much everyone treats it like a joke. Which it is.
T3 Cards Overview:
Pure fire t3 is also pretty simple: Juggernaut is so overpowered that it basically justifies your whole deck. In theory you want offensive, defensive, and spammy cards—so I will list them like a normal deck—but juggernaut is so strong that you don’t really have to worry about anything else. Basically the juggernaut kills the enemy faster than the enemy can kill you, so you should be fine just neglecting your own defense to concentrate everything on attack. As an added plus, all your orbs are the same, so you’ll never “skip” a tier. When I played fire-nature-shadow, I had to be paranoid about losing my fire or nature orb because I would essentially drop to t1 (or worse) if I lost either of those. It’s not unheard of for someone to play fire-fire-shadow (because bandits have probably the best t3 in the game) but taking that route requires more t3 cards. Most players prefer the “efficiency” of going fire all 3 orbs and taking a light—but still very strong—t3, saving room for a larger t1. If you don’t want to read the explanations below (and I don’t blame you because I don’t want to write it either), all you really need for fire t3 is Juggernaut and Giant Slayer, for the above reasons. That said, let’s get on with the whole breakdown.
· Offensive cards
o Backlash—deals a lot of damage, but it’s rarely used because it only does half damage against structures.
o Brannoc—extremely powerful. The biggest problem with him is what happens when you rely on him but your opponent pulls him first. You really don’t need him though because jugger is just a better Brannoc. You’ll think he’s super lame though when your jugger loses to a healed or buffed Brannoc, because other factions can do those sorts of things.
o Curse well—very slow. If you use this card, you need to play a mostly defensive t3 and bleed your opponent dry. Using this card immediately awards you the title “lamer.” Nothing about this card synergizes with pure fire.
o Giantslayer—when raged up, they deal a ton of damage (1000 per charge). They are especially susceptible to cc’s though. In one of the great ironies of the game, it is better to defend giantslayers with t2 cards than t3 cards. Don’t use this card if you rush t3 while your opponent stays t2, unless you also have a power advantage. The biggest plus of this card is that it’s difficult to cost-effectively defend against, making it very spammable.
o Inferno—sure, it does a lot of damage. But you’re probably better off just using enlightenment and earthshaker for that much power.
o Shrine of War—a great card, but I doubt you’ll be able to make much use of it. That’s a lot of power to bind and the cooldown is long. The match will probably be over before it’s ready.
o Sun Reaver—used to be the fire equivalent of the ashbone pyro. Then it got nerfed to oblivion. It’s hardly worth using now. It takes so long to build up its flame that a giant slayer will kill the well faster. I would like to see this card get buffed so it deals regular damage against structures and slower damage against units. But until this happens, you have a large, slow giant slayer that can’t charge or hamstring. I’d also put the unnerfed one as defensive, but this is useless at killing units.
o Virtuoso—fairly good stats. The ability does a lot of damage to structures. Also a good L/L, although that’s a more defensive job.
o Vulcan—great attack, but low health. He dies a bit too easily for my taste, and there’s just something disappointing about a ranged unit that can’t hit air. Still, his graphics are awesome.
o Juggernaut—the reason to play t3 fire. Stampede is so good, and it’s a fairly cheap XL unit with amazing stats.
o Spitfire—a quite good (or lame) unit. The biggest problem with it is that it’s rather slow (i.e. not as good as jugger) and cost as much as a jugger. There’s probably not room for both cards in your deck, and the juggernaut is just better. I’ve seen this card much more in 2v2, and it is usable if you really want because you have the room to put it in your t3. This card is also pretty lame if your opponent doesn’t have a good t3 anti-air, but it dies super fast if he does (I think 2 magma hurlers win against it).
· Defensive cards
o Backlash, to kill attacking enemies. The problem is that backlash is expensive and has a large cooldown, making it inefficient against spammy t3 units.
o Giantslayer—I told you these cards were ironic, right? Despite their name, they’re not the best XL counters. They can do a good job, but you’d think that 240 power of giantslayers would beat 220 worth of a juggernaut, right? Especially since giantslayers counter XL, and juggers don’t? But giantslayers suffer from very low health, so most XL’s 2-shot them before they can get rage built up. If the gs is raged, a single one can take out an XL unit (if you support it with cc and heals and get the 1500 damage charge). But if they aren’t raged, they don’t do so well. I believe it takes 4 giant slayers to kill 1 juggernaut if they start from rest. Nasty surprises, lifeweaving, or wildfires defeat them easily. However, giantslayers are still very useful because of their hamstring effect. It slows enemies down to give you more time to prepare your defenses. It’s also good for defending spammy units, because giantslayers are just as cheap as them.
o Magma Hurler—not great stats, but it’s ranged and knocks back M units. They’re also nice anti-air. Air units are typically bad in t3, but every now and then you have that one guy who uses them and if you don’t have an answer, you start to rage and call him a lamer in the chatbox. Pointed out by @RadicalX: their biggest downside is that they take 4 seconds between shots, allowing your opponent to micro around them and kill the magma hurler without taking any damage. This isn’t that bad an issue, however, because nobody has time to micro one unit obsessively in t3 and 2 de-synced magma hurlers or a cc can prevent the dodging. Also, a magma hurler does not want to attack anything that also wants to attack it. I recommend him over the Virtuoso because of the ability to hit air.
o Magma Spore—good anti-air defenders. Not good at defending much else (actually, they can do a lot of damage to L units with their ability). Also good at spamming.
o Vulcan—can do massive damage with his ability and roots. Unfortunately, he cost a lot, so it doesn’t defend against cheap spammy cards well.
o Juggernaut—not the best defender because it can’t effectively deal with spammy cards, but it has great stats to protect one base. Its real use as a defender, however, is launching an offense instead. The best defense is a good offense, right?
· Spammy cards
o Giantslayer—cheap, does a TON of damage, and swift. Also can’t be knocked back. They are very susceptible to cc, however. And they lose to most t3 units 1on1. However, giantslayers should primarily be used to spam 1 to every base, forcing the enemy to waste at least 120 power at each one. This gives you a power advantage, and you push harder at the weakest one with your offensive unit. Spamming 1 to each base also negates the efficiency of cc.
o Magma Spore—cheap, and their ability is good. They’re also air units, which makes them especially good against any non-shadow faction (that has no ashbone pyro). The biggest problem with them is trying to micro them. They’re easy to forget about. If memory serves me, it takes 6 to drop a base of 2 wells and 1 orb.
Building the Deck:
So let’s build our deck! Again, I’m going to start in t2 because this is the most important phase for beginners. This time I’m going to start with the essential cards; our choices are pretty easy because we don’t have a ton of options.
Obviously I’ll need Scythe Fiends, Enforcer, Skyfire Drake, Fire Dancer, Gladiatrix, and Rallying Banner. This puts me at open spots. To add the spells I consider nonnegotiable, we’ll have Eruption, Wildfire, Disenchant, Ravage, and Lavafield. 9 spots left. Look at that! I can take a full t1 (scavenger, eruption, sunstrider, thugs, firesworn, sunderer, mortar tower) and have just enough room for my juggernaut and giant slayer. But do I really need mortar tower if I have such a large t1? Would scorched earth be more useful?
So after much (translation: 34 ½ seconds) deliberation, I have decided to go with the following as my deck: Scavenger,Sunstriders,Eruption,Thugs,Firesworn_frost,Sunderer,Mine,Scorched-Earth_fire,Ravage,Wildfire,Lava-Field,Disenchant_nature,Rallying-Banner,Firedancer-promo,Enforcer,Skyfire-Drake,Scythe-Fiends,Gladiatrix_nature,Giant-Slayer,Juggernaut-promo
As you can see, it was a fairly easy call. There wasn’t a ton of options available. Sure I could have gone with a smaller t1 to accommodate a greater variety of t2 (maybe rogan, global warming or rageclaws could have been good candidates), but I felt that the larger t1 would be fine. Jugger can serve as an anti-air if you really need it. I chose to play both glady and disenchant as green because this way I can double disenchant a buff if I really need to—if I brought a purple disenchant I would be unable to double disenchant a cc if I needed it. Especially since I’m carrying a light t3, I would rather have that disenchant be a bit more useful in t3. I decided to forgo global warming because I figured that I’d still lose to pure frost even if I brought it, so why bother? The fire-frost matchup isn’t common enough to warrant it either, in my opinion.
The deck’s biggest problem will be against L units, but there’s not really anything we can do about that. We’ve taken all the reasonable L counters, although you could bring Moon if you really have a problem with L units. But you’re better off learning to deal with them, because L units are a standard weakness in every pure fire deck.
Reality Check:
Since all the puzzle pieces fit together so nicely, we’ve already filled out our t1 and t3. Still, let’s double check and see how our deck stands up against the following:
1. Defending walls
2. Defending t3 rushes (or harvester)
3. Defending cheap spams for spread-out agro
4. Performing cheap spams for spread-out agro
5. Defending a full-on attack at one place
6. Performing a full-on attack at one place
7. Preventing a large standing army
8. Building a large standing army
1. We can’t defend walling, but there’s nothing we can change to make it better. Wallbreaker could work if we’re desperate, but please. Git gud. Preventing walls from going up in the first place isn’t so bad. If they do go up, wildfire does a semi-decent job of killing those archers. If worse comes to worse, ignore your defense and respond with a more powerful offense. If you really need to kill the units on the wall, wildfire does a decent job.
2. You can defend a t3 rush by stopping it before it happens. Seriously, you’re pure fire. Fire dance him to death. If your opponent can let 300 power sit in his pool without using it, you deserve to lose. And you will, because anything XL will eat you. Gladiatrix and mortar and mine might kill something after it drops your well, but even that is iffy. Just don’t get in that situation; you have the tools to prevent it. If you notice, I made sure to include scorched earth in my deck just to make sure there will be no accidental t3 rushing.
3. Enforcers defend cheap spams very well. End of story, you win.
4. You don’t, however, launch cheap spams well. Or at all, actually. All of your units are highly specialized and therefore can’t perform the myriad of duties required to apply pressure alone.
5. Obviously you can’t defend as well as frost, but wildfire kills really fast. The combination of spells and enforcers means that it can be quite difficult to breach your defenses in one place. You struggle from lack of cc, however, so if your opponent gets an opening when you are low on power, you have no way of stalling.
6. At last, good news! You are the best faction at launching a full-scale attack on one place. Fire dancers from rallying banner, enforcers and skyfire drake to kill anything trying to kill the dancers, and gladiatrix or scythe fiends or spells to kill anything trying to kill your enforcer or skyfire drake. As long as your fire dancers stay alive and attacking, you can’t be stopped. You can also drop wildfire around the well to deal damage to the well and force defending units to walk around it, giving you even more time to attack.
7. You are also one of the best at preventing large standing armies. It would be a little better if you had cc to prevent the enemy from running away, but wildfire or your other spells kill so quickly that it hardly matters.
8. As far as building your own army, you’re . . . average. Maybe a bit below. Your units all have low health and they die easily. On the plus side, they’re quite cheap so you can create that large army on the fly, and rallying banner means it can appear wherever you want.
Matchups Check:
· Pure fire
o The other guy is carrying almost the exact same cards as you because there is so little variation possible. In every instance that you have the possibility of differentiating (scorched earth vs mortar or global warming, green disenchant/glady vs purple) helps your matchup against fire dittos. Even then, it’s only a minuscule difference. You might have trouble if your opponent brings spitfire, but juggernaut kills it very fast. If he runs away, just let the spitfire kill you at half the rate that your juggernaut will kill him. As a general rule, the first player to get a juggernaut up wins.
· Fire-nature
o Maps can make a big difference in the matchup. T2 tends to be very anticlimactic because neither of you can do much against the other faction. Fire-nat can cc or lavafield if your armies get too large, and your enforcers can take out all of their M units. The thing you need to worry about most is ghostspears because you don’t have the best counter to them. If someone wins in t2 it will be because that player managed to manipulate the power in such a way that he ended up with a lot of power while his opponent was at a low point (after a failed attack, for instance). You’ll almost definitely have a better t1, fire-nat will have a slight t2 edge because of ghostspears, and you’ll have the advantage in t3 because of juggernaut and the green disenchant.
· Fire-shadow
o Because you have neither the purple gladiatrix or disenchant, this matchup will be particularly hard for you. Nightcrawlers or skyfire drakes are good against fire dancers, especially if buffed. T3 can also go either way, depending on what he’s carrying. On the plus side, bandits has no form of defense whatsoever, so aggression can quickly spiral into a dropped well—it works against you too, though. Bandits is like the up-close and personal version of pure fire.
· Fire-frost
o Mountaineer will curb-stomp you. There are definitely ways around it (get in his feet to slow him, lay a couple wildfires, and hope he micros less than half as well as you), but he’s just tough to deal with. I have a hard time with them in fire-nature, and I have cc and mauler to assist. Ice shields are definitely a huge problem for you, and if this deck was more common I’d probably recommend taking global warming. As it is, try to beat your opponent in t1 or last until t3, where you have the advantage.
· Pure Shadow
o These matchups are always interesting. You’ve probably lost if you let a harvester get up, but you’ve got a slight edge before then. You can keep on the pressure from range and keep the shadow player’s power low. If it looks like he’s saving power, a quick attack with fire dancers will drop wells/orbs very quickly because of the lack of frost. If he’s proactive you’ll have much more trouble because shadow mages will dominate most of your cards. You have good spells to counter them though, as long as you keep enough power in reserve. You have trouble building a large attack because befallen’s curse really hurts. Undead army is also particularly difficult for you to handle, but that cost a lot of power and you can generally launch a counter-offensive to punish it.
· Shadow-frost
o Your biggest problems will be lost reaver or mountaineer. You should be fine against the staple of the lost souls deck, nightcrawler, though. Your high aggression tends to suffer because of the frost splash, but it’s quite possible for you to maintain the pressure long enough to crack your opponent’s defense. You need to be careful about allowing t3, however, because LS often brings a very large t3. If you can, try to rush t3 so that you can get a jugger out—if not, use scorched earth and spam to bring down a monument when your opponent goes t3.
· Shadow-nature
o This matchup is probably good for you. Your good M counter slams the door at nightcrawlers and burrowers. Shadow-nature also has no frost, so if you get an attack up and running, it will succeed. On the downside, you can get stopped by cc and a nasty or aura of corruption will take out your whole army pretty easily. Your t3 is better.
· Pure Frost
o Just cry. War eagles are like hungry teenagers that eat everything you own, even the pickle juice. All of your units are M and only the M/L glady hits air. The war eagle is just a better L/M than the glady is a M/L. You have some hope with skyfire drake. If you control the skies, you have a change. It’s just really hard to do that. Probably the biggest deterrent for people trying to play pure fire is how much it hurts to play the frost matchup. To be fair though, you have a large t1 which means you should get a t1 advantage 7 times out of 10.
· Frost-nature
o This is tough because of how defensive stonekin is. If you can get a t1 advantage (you should, since you’ll have either more t1 cards or t3 cards than them), you can potentially carry it over into t2. At worst, your t3 is stronger than stonekin. If stonekin manages to keep you t2, you’re done.
· Pure Nature
o You know how you cry when you play against frost? Nature cries when he plays against you. Parasite swarm is next to useless. Skyfire drake is the best energy parasite counter. Slow power manipulation doesn’t work because he’ll be dead by the time he sees void returns. You outrange his root shenanigans. If the match gets to an even t3 he’s lost. Timeshifter spirit and fathom lord might make a good defense against jugger, but giant slayers will take them out pretty fast. @Taker comments that I exaggerate fire’s advantage over nature; he believes the factions have an equal matchup because of Deep One, which fire has a very hard time combating. Shrine of Memory can also give nature a huge power advantage, and if he gets Brannoc up before you get a jugger things will go south really quickly.
Final Touches:
So yeah, you have the tools do deal with almost everything the other decks can throw at you. Which is good, because we used almost every tool in the small toolbox available to us. Nothing to change, but you already knew that. Pure fire is one the most popular decks and is highly competitive—it’s fun to play and does better than average against most decks, with the notable exception that it fails against pure frost. The demo deck we built was near enough to top players’ decks that we can skip that section. There’s nothing to change here.
Evolution of the Deck
Yeah no, there’s not really any evolution to speak of. I’ll just add a PM Taker sent me.
I played a big T1 with scorched earth.
Don’t think it’s necessary but I feel pretty confident with it cause I played a long T1 so I could stop my opponent going T2 and win the game by kicking his orb. I’m a pretty big fan of this card.
Mine isn’t good in pure fire cause you have wildfire in t2 and any good player can dodge mine.
Wrecker is good for lower ranked players with problems against nature and maybe frost t1 but I recommend learning to play without it and adding scorched earth instead. Same with global warming: Its good vs pure frost and fire/frost but useless in any other matchup. So if you have big problems with pure frost or fire frost you can add it otherwise take scorched earth.
I played big T1 and pretty small T3.
I’m a big fan of purple gladiatrix and green disenchant. I only used glady for defense against L units and harvester. So I had a cheap purple disenchant for their buffs. I don’t need speed when I’m defending so I have no disadvantage with the low speed.
I have green disenchant for my juggernaut which is necessary in my opinion cause any nature split has 2 cc´s maybe 3 cause of that is nearly useless to take purple disenchant.
Which is exactly the same as my deck except with mortar tower instead of mine, and the different affinity gladiatrix. As you can see, there’s not a ton you can do to be original with a pure fire deck.
Fire-Shadow:
This deck is deceptively difficult to make. In theory it seems like fire-shadow is just a combination of everything OP, but in practice it has a few debilitating holes. Trying to cover up those holes means you don’t quite get to use all the OP-ness at your disposal.
Additionally, t1 is more important for bandits than for almost any other deck. Bandits just has some really bad matchups and you’ll need to play a long t1 and early t3 to survive those. Note that when I say “long t1” I don’t mean staying t1 against t2 to accumulate a power advantage. If you do that you leave yourself very open to a rush when you do go t2 later—remember that you must defend proactively. Instead, stay t1 and apply continuous pressure so that neither of you can go t2 until you have a lot of power. Against frost splashes, an early t3 is especially useful early on.
I will now bring in guest speaker @LagOps to discuss some of the differences between shadow t1 and fire t1.
Hello! I’m LagOps, a former bandits main from the old days of Battleforge. A bandits guide has often been requested, but I was just too busy playing Battleforge and never got a guide done ;). Even now I am haunted by never-ending guide requests and I think it is about time I got this over with!
Faction profile:
Bandits combine the elements of fire (aggression) and shadow (risk). It has access to some of the best offensive t2 options but suffers from deckslot issues and a weak defense. The overall playstyle is dominated by fast and decisive gameplay, which must be heavily adapted to the individual matchups because of the defense issues.
In contrast to most other factions, bandits don’t have many standard tactics (i.e. usable in most matchups), and are forced to play around the weaknesses of the faction to succeed.
Thus mastering bandits requires solid faction knowledge, (pre-match)-planning and theory-crafting, but above all, creativity and the ability to read your enemy’s moves and preferences (playing “mindgames”) is going to win you matches!
Do not be afraid to try out underused cards (IF, and only if, you know which holes they can fill in your deck)!
T1:
Usually, the choice about which t1 to play in other factions is very simple: If you are a shadow splash, play shadow. If you are a fire splash, play fire.
Bandits gives you the choice between the most popular and also most similar t1s in the game. The most frequent deck building questions are without a doubt: Which t1 do I play? Why is everyone playing fire? Before getting into the actual deck building section I would like to answer those questions beforehand. In t1 itself, both fire and shadow are very strong and there really is not too much of a difference between them. What makes most players chose fire is the synergy of certain t1 cards with the bandit t2.
Nasty surprise vs. eruption: In a bandits deck, there are not many high hp units in t2 to make good use of nasty surprise. Out of all shadow splashes, bandits has by far the most low hp units. If you nasty something it usually is a nightcrawler and your enemy will be aware of this! Sending a single NC into the enemy units is just very, very telegraphed in defense and usually gets rooted at the power well right away by nature splashes and fire splashes usually erupt right before you would want to nasty, often resulting in a catastrophic fail nasty! Also heals can provoke fail nasties a lot! Even simple micro management can ruin your day as you have nothing to keep enemy units in place.
Lavafield in t2 seems like a much better choice as bandits do have a very good air defense and do not need to rely on nastiess vs. drakes and other flying units. When playing shadow t1, lava field is no longer a core card, but I would still recommend it for dealing instant (non telegraphed) damage and it’s synergy with aura of corruption (“AoC”).
Eruption has an a lot lower aoe, but it isn’t telegraphed and can punish micro mistakes heavily. Despite its lower aoe and lower damage in comparison to nasty, but being able to cast it with no delay is a huge advantage when used in a bandit deck. If bandits ever have to defend, they want to get rid of the threat quickly and reliably without ANY chance to mess things up. Extended sieges usually end with a well down for the bandit player. Often it is best to use eruption to shut down dazed summons before the attack gets rolling. In addition to all that, it is used differently enough from lavafield to have lots of use in t2 in contrast to nasty surprise. For instance, you can spam it in an attack against units summoned at the well. You will do damage to both the well and the unit without pulling your attackers away, and it’s often worth the power cost. I’m not recommending this as a frequent way to use eruption, but it’s a tactic that eruption makes available that can’t be done with nasty.
Firesworn vs. nightguard: In other shadow splashes, nightguard is really useful in t2 because those decks can provide cc and in case of frost even cc + building repairs to prevent the well from dropping and making sure the swap is a success. This is not the case with bandits! If your nightguard (“ng”) gets cc’ed or killed, there is suddenly a full hp L unit hitting your well. If you failed the swap, the well is down: you’re even too late for AoC most of the time! The preparation time and the high risk (literally betting everything on one card) make this card a poor choice in a bandit deck. In addition, bandits have little-to-no way of preventing a return swap.
Firesworn on the other hand delivers high burst damage and forces cc early on. The red affinity helps taking down the enemy L unit with a stanced darkelf assassin squad quickly before your well is in danger. Firesworn is just so much more reliable in a bandits deck and can remains your main L counter in t2, if you chose not to bring gladiatrix or windhunter. Even if you bring gladiatrix, I’d suggest starting with a firesworn because it forces a cc, allowing you to bring out your other units.
Motivate vs. other fire t1 options:
Motivate seems like a great choice if you are doing a rallying banner attack in t2 with assassins and nightcrawlers since you are relying on those units a lot in t2 anyways. However: all of your t2 units (yes, ALL of them no matter what you play) are highly susceptible to enemy cc. Using a poorly timed motivate only makes this issue worse. Motivate also excels in multi base attacks, but again I usually am not doing too much of those as rallying banner attacks usually have a higher efficiency. That’s still a personal preference, however. If you have really good macro-management skills and start shadow t1, motivate is a good choice.
T2 Cards Overview:
Now that we’ve got that sorted out, on to t2!
· Small
o Banditos—these guys have pretty good stats for power cost, but you run into the same problem as northguards in frost t1. Darkelf Assassins are just better S/S than bandits because they have range; they can also do that extra damage early on, so a group of darkelves will annihilate a group of banditos. Additionally, Scythe fiends are great M/S melee units so there’s just not a place for banditos as an S counter. They may find some use as a spam to many places, but I would say they are pretty ineffective at that, so you won’t find me recommending them for any other roles either.
o Windhunters—their knockback is a little funky. I’ve found that this makes it better for use on melee units and worse on ranged units. You’ll not be spawning a 120 power unit just for the knockback (except maybe if you’re faced with an undead army spam), but it can help if you’ve already got one out.
o Darkelf Assassins—these are great cards. They’re cheap and have great stats which meets both the criteria for a spammy unit. Additionally, the way they can do extra damage in the beginning really helps them hit hard in a fast attack. These are essential for your deck.
o Fire Stalker—the knockback can be useful, but it’s slow and not worth 70 power to use. You’ll need an additional unit to actually kill the S units, and why spawn a fire stalker and darkelf assassins when you can just spawn 2 darkelf assassins and kill them faster?
o Ripper—suffers from the same problems as banditos. They’re too expensive for not enough stats. Maybe I’d use them in another deck, but darkelves are just so much better.
o Scythe Fiends—great damage for S units, and will work great if you have to kill some darkelves yourself. Unfortunately, darkelves and MA are really the only S/S units you’ll ever face; which means you’d be bringing scythe fiends to use against one or two cards. Additionally, but darkelves and MA are only dangerous when spammed, and lavafield will usually make quick work of that. In defense of scythe fiends, they have the most attack and health of any unit you can play. This makes them good candidates for buffing and can potentially make them “everything counters.” If you’re struggling against pure shadow (which has a hard time against strong solo units), you may want to consider scythe fiends; otherwise, they just don’t fill a role that needs filling.
o Viridya—ehh, I’m not sure how well she fits in with the bandits. That’s lot of power for something with less stats than scythe fiends, and we’ve already determined that they have limited use. Her passive heal isn’t that great either for 2 reasons: bandit cards have atrocious health, and you won’t be have large armies sitting around.
o Bandit Sorceress—truthfully, I’ve never seen her used. Her stats look comparable to darkelf assassins (I don’t know how she looks upgraded), although most of the reason DA are good is because they can stack and do double damage in the beginning. Her ability isn’t very good because bandits have no real good buildings (please someone take this as a challenge to make a building-themed bandits deck starring Bandit SorceressJ), and have no way of ensuring the buildings go up. She also only has 3 uses per charge, which really infringes on her spamability. I don’t really think there’s any way she is better than DA, but I also don’t see the reason for her being as rarely used as she is. @Mental Omega said that her damage is actually 366, rather than the 550 stated on the card. He also brought up a good point that she could be used on mortar tower.
· Medium
o Bandit Spearmen—yowza! Those are some nice stats. The slowing ability may be useful as a pseudo-cc against XL units, but the spearmen themselves aren’t swift which sort of negates the usefulness there. They could work with magma hurlers and bandit lancers, but there may be a more effective t3 combo available…. They do crazy damage and have among the best health of any unit available to you, but the bottom line is . . . they aren’t necessary? Well, we’ll see later. This is one of those cards that seems really nice to have in theory, but it’s just too easy to find 20 cards which are nicer to have. You don’t really need them for the M counter since nightcrawler and skyfire drake will cover that. All this said, they still have great stats. You may want to consider them a bit more if you play shadow t1, since these are probably your best nasty candidates.
o Commandos—you’re not using them for their M counter. However, they are great for camping an offense with, particularly against non-frost splashes. They are almost impossible to kill. Unfortunately they deal damage very slowly and cost a lot. Also mauler shuts them down.
o Eliminator—sure, he has good stats. But no frenzy or charge, which means he’s fodder for nightcrawlers or enforcers. The only reason to take him over nightcrawler is because elimator has more health, meaning a better nasty if you have it.
o Nightcrawler—depending on whom you ask, the best M/M unit is either nightcrawler or enforcer. They both have their pros and cons, but I would list nightcrawler as essential in any deck that has shadow. Aside from their swift, cheap cost, good stats, and useful frenzy, they have just enough health to kill a skyfire drake with nasty surprise. This is less important to bandits than to other shadow splashes because you have eruption and tons of other good anti-air.
o Skyfire Drake—a flier with good M damage. I can’t laud it enough. You know the drill.
o Rogan Kayle—with so many good M counters, do we really need one more with subpar stats? Actually, I’d suggest Bandits is probably the deck Rogan is most useful for. Everything has high attack, which pairs especially well with Rogan’s damage buff. If you pop him up at a rallying banner he won’t die as quickly, and he can do a good cc. Unfortunately, all of these things are niceties; bandits has no lack of niceties. Don’t drop something essential to take him, but don’t write him off as useless either.
o Rageclaws—not so useful as M counters, but do better at hitting wells. Unfortunately, your deck is especially susceptible to cc and rageclaws are hurt extra hard by cc.
· Large
o Fire Stalker—sure it has L counter. It’s reasonably sturdy, but just doesn’t have the damage output.
o Firesworn—don’t bring him if you go shadow t1, but he’s still useful here if you’ve got him. The biggest downside to firesworn is that he can’t hit air, but Windhunter covers that part.
o Gladiatrix—normally a staple, gladiatrix is actually a bit redundant here. Windhunter can do the disenchant and L counter for just a bit more (the disenchant is actually cheaper). It’s still a powerful unit if you want to bring her, but she is not the only card that can fill the anti-air niche. Also, firesworn can cover ground L units almost as well as her.
o Moon—nah … If you want to bring her, go for it. I don’t like her though.
o Nightguard—it has its uses if you played shadow t1; unfortunately bandits’s biggest struggle is with time because they have no cc or defense. Proactive is the name of the game. If you can successfully bring the Nightguard out early, you’ll be fine, but that’s often punishable elsewhere. Bandits really need to be able to erect a defense quickly, and nightguards are not quick.
o Windhunter
· X-Large
o Skyfire drake—has the most dps
o Gladiatrix—also high dps, but suffers from dying easily. Disenchant is also a plus.
o Windhunter—pretty bad dps for the cost, but has a cheap disenchant.
o Darkelf Assassins—the best way to rack that damage up as soon as possible.
o Moon—actually, since bandits have such bad XL t2 defense, Moon can actually be useful for her ability.
· Siege
o Sunderer—yes, they have terrible stats for the power cost when you’re t2. BUT, these guys still have the most siege dps of any of your available cards. If you play fire t1, sunderer is a recommended card. It will definitely not be your most-used card, but it can help in certain matchups.
o Fire Stalker—while they do have siege, they don’t do a ton of damage to begin with. Usually it’s better to just attack with a bunch of nightcrawlers or darkelf assassins. If you find that you have the room, try these out those.
o Nightcrawler—frenzied and/or buffed, these guys do a lot of damage to everything, including wells. They’re also nice because they can attack en masse in one place, or spread to pressure many places at once, aided by their swift.
o Commandos—they won’t take a well down quickly, but they can add lasting pressure. I like them; unfortunately it comes down to the question of reliability versus gimmicks. I really doubt we’ll have the deck space to bring them. One can only hope.
o Darkelf Assasins—similar to the nightcrawler, but better at attacking one place than several. You’ll need a rallying banner to use them for offense, but they’re quite good at dropping wells, especially since their ability does damage early on. Even if they die, they’ve gotten more than their fair share of damage in.
o Shadow Phoenix—so you don’t really have any dedicated siege units. That means your attack will just be with a lot of units, most of which die very easily. Plus you’re really good at killing other units. That means Shadow Phoenix can hit wells very aggressively and confidently revive because of all the units that die on both sides. The biggest downside to the phoenix is that it begs a cc from your opponent.
· Special
o Skyfire Drake—a flying unit. Also great because of buffs. A buffed skyfire drake is nothing to laugh at. If you rush t2 and have power for a buffed skyfire, frost lightblade is the only thing with any sort of defense. Not that you even need to buff a skyfire against frost, because their dps is so low.
o Windhunter—flying also. And has disenchant. Not so useful for buffing and attacking wells or M units because the skyfire has more dps. It can work quite nicely with ravage because of the disenchant, however. Until I met LagOps, I always thought that the purple one was better. However, LagOps knows some good techniques with the green one and taking the green allows a nice synergy with the purple disenchant. The green windhunter can self-disenchant to avoid coldsnaps or nightguard/parasite swarm swaps.
o Shadow Phoenix—like a lavafield, but with a smaller aoe, waiting time, and the possibility to revive. These can be very good for offensives.
o Bandit Stalker—uhm, what are these guys doing? They have buff penetration, which can be good. And the one with beast damage is really good against scythe fiends, nightcrawler, and burrower. Still, it’s such a highly specialized card that I doubt it will be worth it. Only recommended to take if you have a particular matchup that you are really bad at and this will help you.
While Bandits does have some decent buildings (and bandit sorceress, which really rewards buildings), it really struggles getting them up without any form of cc or building protection. The closest thing to a building combo would be an aggressive rallying banner and AoC combined with building spams, but that takes an IMMENSE amount of power and is simply not as good as the Lost Souls equivalent.
· Bandit Tower—sure it has good stats. But it’s just a stationary building. Next.
· Furnace of Flesh—works quite well with cultist masters, but nothing else. If you want to use this card, play a different shadow splash.
· Rioter’s Retreat—once again, just a building. The passive heal to bandits isn’t even that good because there are so few “bandit” cards worth bringing.
· Skydefender—only hits air? Why did I waste the time even mentioning it.
· Soulsplicer—actually can be quite useful. For sure don’t use it if you start fire t1, but if you’ve got it for shadow t1, it’s still good here. The green version heals, which can be quite nice for you.
· Stone of Torment—nope
· Termite Hill—I’ve always wanted to use this in a real deck. It’s such a neat card, and so overpowered and underpowered at the same time. It’s super difficult to get these up, but if they get up they do massive damage. I can’t even imagine what would happen if a bandit sorceress got in one. Unfortunately, bandits have a particularly hard time getting buildings up.
· Time Vortex—just a building, and not even useful because you have no void manipulation
Spells! Bandits have some really good spells, especially buffs.
· Eruption—great for so many reasons. Check out the other places for more details.
· Life weaving—practically essential for bandits. Fire damage cards with buffs is really the reason to play this faction.
· Mine—can be quite useful as a quasi-cc and for defending. AoC and lavafield do so much damage, however, that mine is not as useful as you would think.
· Motivate—works well with spam. See LagOps’s section about it above.
· Nasty surprise—see LagOps’s section above.
· Scorched Earth (red)—can be quite useful, particularly for bandits. Since you struggle against building repairs, it’s often nice to stop a monument from getting up in the first place. Plus, the 20% extra damage effectively drops 600 health from the monument; while that’s not amazing, it’s nothing to scoff at either.
· Aura of Corruption—immensely powerful, this one is a staple because of its great defensive abilities. Perhaps you can get by without this, but with a defense as bad as fire-shadow’s I’d take anything I can get.
· Disenchant—you have 3 ways of getting this ability (glady and windweaver as the other 2), so it’s not really essential. Still useful though. The purple is almost definitely better (you have no juggernaut), especially if you take the green windhunter.
· Lavafield—great for the aoe damage. It stops spams very well. However, you have cards with a similar function: AoC, lavafield, and shadow phoenix. Each has their own role obviously, and it’s perfectly conscionable to take all 3, but are they really worth 3 decks slots . . . ?
· Ravage—healing? Please yes.
· Unholy power—bandits are commonly perceived as being the deck that revolves around buffs. As such, you should take as many as you can, right? Well . . . maybe. Ultimately it’s a matter of personal preference, unholy power usually isn’t as good as life weaving because it costs more power, making disenchant or cc cost effective for your opponent.
· Warrior’s Death—LagOps hates this cardJ. I’ll let him rant a bit more about its downsides below, but as a non-bandit player I think it sounds wonderful. You can’t be cc’d? And you more damage or—better yet—take less damage? You mean I can have an invincible unit (against non-disenchant splashes) and then buff him really hard? Let’s do some math: NC has 815 damage, double with frenzy, an extra 2000 with unholy power, along with warrior’s death = a WHOLE LOT of damage. Of course this can be countered by disenchant and takes a lot of power to pull off.
T3 Cards Overview:
Bandits have arguably the best options for t3. Everything is so good! How to choose . . . ? Unfortunately, the weaknesses from t2 persist. It’s also easy for you to get rushed by something like burrowers when you go t3, because you have no cc to stop it. These are things you ought to consider when building your t3.
· Offensive cards
o Ashbone Pyro—such a great card. Especially with buffs. He doesn’t have such great synergy with the rest of the bandits t3, however. Still, you can’t go wrong with him.
o Corsair—this can get you wins in lower ELO, but not so much in higher levels. Yes, many players don’t even bother with t3 anti-air. But corsair is slow and a good player will be able to use that 230 power more efficiently to kill you faster than you kill him.
o Backlash—deals a lot of damage, but it’s rarely used because it only does half damage against structures.
o Blood Healing—it’s a heal that could help you launch an offensive, but it doesn’t synergize well in bandits PvP. You won’t have large armies with lots of health.
o Brannoc—sure, he’s really good. But the real reason he’s good is because he has no orb requirements. You can combine him with heals, buffs, cc’s, ice shields, or really anything any deck can support. As far as the bandit deck goes, Soulhunter is better because you can’t support Brannoc with heals or cc or any other shenanigans.
o Curse Well—very slow. If you use this card, you need to play a mostly defensive t3 and bleed your opponent dry. Using this card immediately awards you the title “lamer.” Nothing about this card synergizes with bandits.
o Evocator’s Woe—basically a worse sandstorm. You’re bandits. Play the sandstorm.
o Giant Slayer—when he gets his rage up, he does great damage. Pretend you have an ashbone and a GS attacking a well, and the enemy plays something like a silverwind lancer or Virtuoso to kill the ashbone. The GS can take a break from attacking the well to charge and kill the unit trying to kill your ashbone.
o Gunner—these are one of the most underestimated units in the game. True story, before I could afford ashbone pyro I played fire-nat-shadow for this card. They have good siege and knockback, and also cover your anti-air base. Bandits does NOT struggle with anti-air, but it’s still a plus. The way part of the shot penetrates allows easy wins vs avatar of frost, or ice shields in general. I believe the shot also goes through shield building. They also knockback small units which helps against silverwind lancers, but not giant slayers. Their biggest downside is the splash damage; if you really want to drop a well, it’s relatively easy for the opponent to place units in between your gunner and the well, which spreads the damage across both, lessening the damage done to the well. I believe ashbone pyro also suffers from this problem, but to a lesser extent.
o Inferno—if you want an expensive, high damage spell, just play sandstorm.
o Magma Hurler—these guys combo with bandit lancers quite well. Still, they’re slow and you have no cc to hold them down, so you’re probably going to miss all your attacks.
o Magma Spore—I think Fallen Skyelf is better.
o Mutating Frenzy—a good card if you decide to play 2 shadow orbs. He’s solid, but I don’t think he’s as good of an XL counter as giant slayer. He’s probably your best choice to nasty, if you have it.
o Nox carrier—this is just curse well in unit form. No thank you.
o Sandstorm—for sure you want the red version. It does great damage and prevents cards from being played; that means no defenders and no building repairs. It used to be that a sun reaver and sandstorm would guarantee a whole base dies. Now it’s not so sure because sun reaver got nerfed, but the card still works with other units (esp ashbone).
o Shadow Insect—requires too much micro to use effectively.
o Soulhunter—amazing stats, and a great ability (do you know how much damage 4 mines deal?). Purple might be a tad better, but the affinities make almost no difference. It has the best stats of any t3 unit except Lord Cyrian, and he’s not worth using because he cost so much. It absolutely nukes bases, and it’s a hard call whether soulhunter or sandstorm is a better use of your power.
o Soulshatter—it does a lot of damage, but when you have sandstorm, don’t bother with this second-rate nonsense.
o Sun Reaver—this used to be a fantastic card, but it got nerfed pretty hard. It still has its uses, but there are simply better cards available.
o Unstable Demon—great stats, and it’s almost impossible to kill because of its massive life stealer. Unfortunately, it also requires some pretty intense micro so you don’t kill yourself, so I wouldn’t recommend it.
o Virtuoso— fairly good stats. The ability does a lot of damage to structures. Also a good L/L. It’s solid, but not fantastic.
o Vulcan—great attack, but low health. He dies a bit too easily for my taste, and there’s just something disappointing about a ranged unit that can’t hit air. Still, his graphics are awesome.
· Defensive cards
o Church of Negation—if you’re playing bandits, you’ve obviously repented from your laming ways. You don’t want to mess with this card.
o Bandit Lancer—their branding ability is great for killing XL units. I don’t think the affinity makes a huge difference? LagOps used green, if anyone cares. The lancer ability is particularly used to prevent the XL from using its own ability (juggernaut stampede, brannoc burn, Grigori taunt, etc). Branding is a bit hard to pull off because you must hit the unit with a melee attack, and XL units will stomp on you, requiring very good micro to pull off. You need to come from behind. The lancer ability does not help bandit gunner or ashbone pyro, but does work on windhunters or magma hurlers.
o Cultist Master—3 frenzied nightcrawlers? And you can make them any time your cultist master has health? This is great for defense because it forces a cc, and then you can make another? On the downside, they are highly susceptible to cc. But if you struggle against spammy M units (giant slayers and silverwind as the most prominent), cultist master is the easiest way to deal with them.
o Fallen Skyelf—I suspect people play this card because they like it more than because it’s good. Hey, I like it too! And yeah it flies so there’s that, and it’s a good L counter. I just find that flying units die pretty easily if the enemy has t3 anti-air, so it’s usually a gamble whether flying units work. On the other hand, how do bandit lancers change things . . . ?
o Frenetic Assault—I hate this card with a burning passion. I’ve never seen it in a bandits deck, but I don’t see bandits that often either. The green is better because it prevents heals. It’s very useful for defending against large armies, but not so much for small attacks. Bandits tend to do well against large attacks because it allows you to launch a large attack of your own, which will inevitably be better than your opponent’s; where you’re more likely to struggle is if someone sends something like 1 silverwind and 1 ashbone pyro to every base, and frenetic assault won’t help you there. Also, AoC kills massed units just fine.
o Giant Slayer—lots of damage in the charge, and slows the enemy down as well. In this aspect, giant slayer and bandit lancers do about the same role; however, lancers are much better at killing that XL unit if you have supporting archers.
o Infect—honestly aura+lavafield will get your more mileage than this card.
· Spammy cards
o Bandit Lancer—cheap and fast? Did I hear someone say “spammable?” They can be knocked back, however, which is significant in t3. Their branding ability is also very good. It doesn’t pair with much besides magma hurler though, and those have their own problems.
o Cultist Master—not great at hitting every base if they’re far away, but they’re good for applying lasting pressure, especially if you have close wells like on Haldur. The best way to use them like this is to summon 2-3 and send out he nightcrawlers in waves. The thing I see most often is that someone will make 3 cultists masters and then send 9 nightcrawlers at the same time. One root or oink or freeze and it’s over. Still, it’s a good distractor if you want your opponent to use his cc so he can’t use it elsewhere.
o Giant slayer—probably the best t3 spammer in the game. It’s much better at spamming than bandit lancer is.
Building the Deck:
Alright, so let’s start in t1 for this one. I’m a fire player, so I have to start fire. You can also look to LagOps’s suggestions on what to play t1. I’m going to add Scavenger, Sunstrider, Eruption, Thugs, and Sunderer. We’ll also put in firesworn, mortar tower, and mine. I highly doubt we’ll have room for scorched earth, but that will be something to think about if we have room in the end. My reason for making sunderer an essential card from the get-go is because you need him for some t1 pressure options. Mortar tower doesn’t synergize that well with the rest of your t2, but you’ll need that or firesworn to deal with sunderer or early L units. One of them will be added for sure (I strongly suspect it will be firesworn, but that’s because I have already started formulating plans for t2). Mine may be good for the cc; it’s nice to have, but I’ll keep an open mind to drop it if I need more room.
For t2, let’s add the essentials right now. Darkelf Assassins are used for basically everything. Same with Nightcrawler. Rallying Banner helps those a lot as well. Obviously Skyfire Drake goes in; that card is 100% essential in every fire splash except bandits, but it’s still really awesome to have here. Maybe 85-90% essential. We seem to have hit most of our bases right here, but let’s do this formally. For our small counters, Darkelves are great. Let’s continue thinking about scythe fiends, but I don’t think we’ll have the room.
Nightcrawler and Skyfire Drake cover our M base. I’d really like to put Rogan in; let’s list him tentatively. Currently the deck is Scavenger, Sunstrider, Eruption, Thugs, Sunderer, Darkelf Assassins, Nightcrawler, Rallying Banner, Skyfire Drake, Rogan Kayle, mine, scythe fiends, firesworn, and mortar.
For L counters: to gladiatrix or not to gladiatrix? That is the question. I really want to take advantage of the fact that I can play Windhunter, so let’s bring him as our first L counter. We’ll take the green as per LagOps’s preference. Windhunter is expensive though, so we really need another L counter to supplement. We don’t really need both firesworn and gladiatrix, especially since windhunters can hit air. If we bring firesworn, it allows us to use him as an L counter even in t1. Also, gladiatrix isn’t so useful without cc. Pure fire needs it for the anti-air, but bandits has the even better Windhunter anti-air. So it’s settled. No gladiatrix, Firesworn will become permanent. I’ll probably drop Mortar Tower as soon as I need the room.
We don’t have any dedicated XL counters or siege units, and Commandos and Shadow Phoenix are really the only notable units I’ve left out that can help us there. Let’s tentatively add them both. Sadly I can already see the deck slots filling up and I know we’ll have to drop at least the commandos.
Currrently, the deck contains Scavenger, Sunstrider, Eruption, Thugs, Sunderer, Darkelf Assassins, Nightcrawler, Rallying Banner, Skyfire Drake, Windhunter, Rogan Kayle, mine, scythe fiends, firesworn, Shadow Phoenix, Commandos, and mortar. Clearly we’ll need to drop some cards to make room for spells and t3.
Lifeweaving and Ravage are easily the most important spells (goodbye mortar tower). Your ability to buff is half the reason to play bandits. Warrior’s Death and Unholy power are also nice considerations. On one hand, is it overkill to play 4 buff spells? On the other, if you have a strength shouldn’t you abuse it as much as possible? In this case, that’s not true. It’s better to cover holes than to attempt to compensate by being really good at one thing.
Now, we really need a defensive spell. Aura of Corruption is the best one. It does way more damage than lavafield, but it can’t react very quickly and sometimes its overkill. Since defense is one of your biggest concerns, I think we can warrant Lavafield as well. But what about Shadow Phoenix? Doesn’t that have a similar role? Yes, and no. Shadow Phoenix is much better at offense than defense, although it can work in a pinch with AoC instead of Lavafield. Still, I don’t really think that’s ideal. As I’ve mentioned several times, bandits really needs to be able to react quickly and both phoenix and AoC take time. For this reason, I would rather have AoC and Lavafield as essentials and play phoenix if I really need it.
Scavenger, Sunstrider, Eruption, Thugs, Sunderer, Firesworn, Darkelf Assassins, Nightcrawler, Rallying Banner, Skyfire Drake, Windhunter, Lifeweaving, Ravage, Aura of Corruption, Lavafield, Rogan Kayle, Shadow Phoenix, Commandos, Unholy Power, Warrior’s Death. You’ll notice that I dropped a few that I gave up on having. I know deep down in my heart that I’ll need to give up commandos and probably Rogan, but I really don’t want to.
The deck will also need a disenchant. We neglected glady, so yeah. Even if we had her, a spell disenchant would be nice. Still, you’re unlikely to need a disenchant away from your base, and an extra 30 power will give you a half-dead windhunter. I don’t think disenchant is essential, especially not in lower ELO levels. I really ought to take the purple disenchant without thinking further, but I’m stubborn and we’ll see just how far I’m willing to bend over to keep my Rogan. When I first wrote this I actually called the disenchant essential, but I had to cut out another card I really wanted. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I’d rather have the other card than disenchant. So there’s a hint that we’re not going to have disenchant in the final deck.
So including that disenchant, we’ve hit 21 cards. Too much. Time to look at t3 and balance what I can drop with how much t3 firepower I need. What do I need for t3? 3 cards is a good rule of thumb. You can pore over it and see what you want to keep or get rid of, and I hoped I’ve given you the tools to work out the pros and cons yourself. But since I’m never going to actually play this deck except for giggles, and I have 7 more factions to write, I’m going to go with the rule of thumb on this one.
That means I need to drop 4 cards. Sorry Commandos, but you knew this was coming. I can choose 2 cards out of Rogan, Phoenix, Unholy power, warrior’s death, and disenchant. The most traditional way would surely be to choose disenchant and phoenix. But let’s not limit ourselves. Unholy power is surely enticing, but it cost a lot of power—cc and disenchants become quite cost-effective for against it. Additionally, unholy power doesn’t give the half-damage buff the whole time. Still, the card is amazing on ashbones. But I think warrior’s death is probably the better choice because it prevents cc. Bringing both buffs when we’re this low on card slots is probably not a good idea. I really want Rogan, but remember what we said about filling holes in the deck first? Rogan is just more situational than shadow phoenixes. If I took them both, there would be no disenchant. Do I really need disenchant? Upon deliberation, I’ve decided that I don’t. I’m going to keep Shadow Phoenix, even though I do feel a sense of redundancy between lavafield, phoenix, and AoC. They’re just different enough to still all be quite useful. And at the end I’ll take Warrior’s Death, despite all the hate I’ll get from LagOps, because it’s a cool card and this is the only chance I’ll get to play it.
For t3, I instinctively reach out for giant slayers. I don’t think they work as well in the bandit deck as they do in fire-nat, but I’m still familiar with them so that’s what I want to use. They cover the defensive and spam requirements for t3 quite well. I’ll also take Ashbone Pyro to cover the anti-air and siege. Finally, I’ll go with Soulhunter. I’d really like to take sandstorm, but I don’t feel comfortable with only 2 units in my t3. If I had 4 or 5 cards I’d drop soulhunter for sandstorm and maybe add bandit lancers and something else (L counter, preferably), but I’ll stick with my rule of 3 t3.
Cue @LagOps’s horrified criticism of my deck: Your deck isn’t that bad, but you may regret the lack of disenchant and bandit lancers in the future.
Reality Check:
How does our deck do in our double check?
1. Defending walls
2. Defending t3 rushes (or harvester)
3. Defending cheap spams for spread-out agro
4. Performing cheap spams for spread-out agro
5. Defending a full-on attack at one place
6. Performing a full-on attack at one place
7. Preventing a large standing army
8. Building a large standing army
I don’t think we’ll need to change anything, but this examination will surely point out the areas most likely to need a tune-up.
1. Defending walls is impossible. Don’t let them get up in the first place. Don’t bother with wallbreaker; if you’re are worried about being caught sleeping and your opponent catching a lucky wall, you don’t have what it takes to be a bandit player.
2. Defending t3 rushes . . . rush ‘em back! If the enemy goes t3, you should drop everything and just rush down. Scorched earth would help you here, but you should do fairly well on your own. You’ll want to hit 2 bases so that a lavafield/AoC/cc doesn’t wipe you out at once. If the enemy has enough power to successfully t3 before you and defend a t2 rush, you are lost; you have no chance because you’ll die while your t3 goes up due to lack of cc. Bandits are unforgiving in that manner. Harvester can be defended with 1 windhunter and darkelf assassins. You can also try to annoy it with a scavenger while it’s walking, if you want. If a harvester comes and uses nether warp, you have an easy counter. Aura of Corruption and 2 skyfire drakes kills everything for the same 300 power as the harvester (Nightcrawler and windhunter also work). You’ll also get 2 skyfires out of it. Don’t rely on this though, because a good nether warp will save him from the aura.
3. You are the boss at defending cheap spams—all your units are cheaper! Nightcrawlers and/or Darkelf Assassins will kill any spam unit.
4. You can also perform cheap spams relatively well. Nightcrawlers aren’t the best at it, but they can do it if they need to. Motivate helps your cause here as well. You usually want to try this technique as a way to bait out more in defense of each base, so you can focus on the attack you really want to launch. Bandits is sort of halfway between pure fire and fire-nature, both in terms of ability to do spread attacks and concentrated attacks.
5. Obviously your defense isn’t as solid as frost’s but if you have enough power you can kill anything. But therein lies your weakness. There once was a chess player named Tigran Petrosian who was known far and wide for his ability to defend any attack, no matter how ferocious. In an account by Garry Kasparov, Borris Spassky once relayed the way to beat him. “Squeeze his balls,” ran the advice, “But just squeeze one, not both!” That’s how bandits function. The most massive attack can be defended with AoC and lavafield; a cheap attack can be overcome with the cheaper nightcrawlers and darkelves. The deck suffers when it tries to counter a semi-involved attack—pressure, but not enough to warrant the AoC panic button. That’s a fine line to walk though, and you can do a great deal to prevent that sort of business.
6. Concentrated attacks are one of your best areas! Rallying banner pairs extremely well with the cheap bandit units. Just be careful of cc or AoC from your opponent. With warrior’s death you can make sure that one unit doesn’t fall to cc, and buffing that unit will doom an enemy power well. If you have nasty surprise in your deck (we don’t), a trick to get out of oink is to nasty a low-health unit so your units take a little bit of damage. This can also work with lifeweaving if your opponent isn’t careful.
7. AoC plus lavafield kills any standing army. Period.
8. You can also build large standing armies efficiently, because your units are so cheap. You probably don’t want to have them just sitting around because it’s better to build a rallying banner and spawn everything there, but if you defend with a lot of units, you may well end up with a large army. However, your army dies as quickly as it appears because it is very susceptible to cc or large AoE spells like lavafield or AoC.
Bandits is probably the deck most able to run away with an advantage, but also most punished by having a disadvantage. This is one of the reasons bandit t1 is so important. If you have power to waste, there is almost nothing any faction can do against you. But if you don’t have power to defend, you’re helpless.
Matchups Check:
Since LagOps knows the matchups much better than I do, I’ll let him write this section as well.
Final Touches:
Evolution of the Deck
Once again, LagOps is here to explain how his deck evolved.
Please take note that this sections is about my personal deck evolution! If you play a different style, the optimal deck and evolution path might look different for you! Keep in mind that you should have the tools to win against any other faction in the game in your deck (mainly IN DEFENSE) before you start considering offensive cards you can make combos with!
When I started out playing bandits PvP, there was not a single sufficiently detailed deck building guide, so I was putting in most cards considered core in other fire and splashes. My deck looked similar to this one:
T3: Sun Reaver (red), Giant Slayer, Soulhunter (blue)
This was my deck until I got into higher gold ranks. There I started having near autolose experiences in certain matchups and had to adapt my deck.
My first realization was that I did not have good targets to use nasty surprise on in t2 and usually defaulted to using lava field instead. As I did play fire t1, I could easily take it out of my deck.
Also I realized that windhunter could not simply replace skyfire drake. Both windhunter and skyfire drake kill an enemy skyfire drake in 3 hits or 1 hit + eruption. However, windhunter can 1 hit+erupt an enemy skyfire drake without being erupted as well. Unfortunately, a single gladiatrix can 2 hit + erupt a windhunter easily without taking a lot of damage from windhunter in return. Additionally I had to deal with burrowers which was a bit easier with skyfire drake. So I swapped nasty with skyfire drake.
After that the matchups vs. fire/nature and pure fire were a bit better. With both drakes and assassins my air defense was really good, so I wanted to take out gladiatrix. When facing ground based L units I usually wanted to get rid of them quickly and used firesworn. I also often wanted to use disenchant without delay (especially in t3), so I swapped gladiatrix for disenchant (purple affinity!) Additionally, double (or even triple) buffed drakes became less and less effective at the ELO I was playing at. To keep up the pressure in offense I added rallying banner to my deck and removed unholy power. cc became just too effective vs. unholy power compared to using life weaving. If I had to disenchant afterwards I was spending 250+ energy just to have a single buffed drake on the field which was rarely worth it.
T3: Sun Reaver (red), Giant Slayer, Soulhunter (blue)
I still had major issues vs. frost splashes in offense and scythe fiends were mainly in the deck because of the pure shadow matchup (also not super effective there) and weren't used much otherwise. My t1 was also not very solid at this time, so I did not want to weaken it too much. I especially struggled vs. shadow t1 (thugs were not buffed at that time).
I removed scythe fiends and replaced them with sunderer to be able to rush pure shadow players (and shadow t1 in general when going t2) and use it with buffs against pure shadow in t2. This way I was at least able to kill a well before they used harvester.
I also had to sacrifice the mortar (only used vs. frost and nature, but those were so rarely played... also not useful in t2 due to lack of cc) to be able to play shadow phoenix in t2. There is hardly another way to get enemy clusters down if they have frost protects. I highly recommend playing both phoenix and lava field as they are mainly used in offense and defense respectively.
T2: Life Weaving, Nightcrawler, Darkelf Assassins, Shadow Phoenix, Skyfire Drake, Windhunter (green), Rallying Banner, Ravage, Disenchant (purple), Aura of Corruption, Lava Field, Sun Reaver (red), Giant Slayer, Soulhunter (blue)
At this point I tried out new cards from the Amii edition such as bandit spearman and warrior's death, but they did not really help in any matchups I was having issues with. Especially warrior's death is entirely broken and abusable. You will learn nothing by relying on this card, at best don't even touch it!
After I tried all kinds of stuff, I defaulted back to this deck and focused on my t3. I did not really touch my t3 yet since I did usually win if I managed to get into t3. While the t3 cards were really strong (bandits t3 is strong in general), they did not synergize with bandits very well.
I had to keep up the pressure in t3 and rarely had the chance to use soulhunter often enough to make the card worth it. I decided to swap it with ashbone pyro and played quite a while with it. However, I really didn't like it as I already had a good basenuke (sun reaver(pre nerf)).
I felt more like I needed better counters because sun reaver didn’t have many charges and was not fast enough to intercept enemies before they reach your base (very, VERY important in a bandits deck).
Finally sun reaver got its long deserved nerf and more importantly, bandits lancers got a well deserved buff and were able to fill huge holes in my t3 (strong kiting, strong interception, prevents lots of strong abilities, lots of L dmg...). I swapped sun reaver for bandit lancers (green) and finally my deck looked like this:
But still: the deck was having issues. Each time I went t3 vs. nature splashes I got rushed by burrowers and destroyed. In t3 the omnipresent silverwind lancers were destroying my ashbones, which struggled at taking down clusters (damage is split up) of wells with protects. I did not really have the deckslots to put in a proper m counter, so I got creative. I put in bandit gunner(red) for the knockback and replaced ashbone pyro with it. If I now get burrower rushed, I can counter it very easily and use the units to counter-attack right away. +100% siege and 25% protect penetration (=50% base dmg vs. buildings when protected) were a lot better than expected! Additionally silverwind lancers get knocked back and torn to pieces by bandit lancers.
I really did lots of experimenting but I doubt any other bandits t3 manages to be this strong in defense while having such a huge offensive potential. Just go ahead and give the gunner a "shot"! The card is only underplayed because of its orb requirements and is a very solid unit with surprisingly many uses.
It is a good starting point if you want to play bandits as well, but you will likely adapt it to your playstyle. Bandits is about playing it smart, so plz no copy pasterino! Always consider what the cards will provide for the deck.
If you can't answer why card x is in the deck instead of card y, you probably don't understand the deck well enough and don't use the cards in the way the player who made this guide intended them to be used.
Fire-Frost:
One thing to keep in mind when you build a fire-frost deck is that you will likely rely a lot on hit-and-run tactics, and use a lot of micro. If you decide to play an ice shield guerilla tactics game, you’ll usually prefer to have a single strong unit than many weak ones, so keep that in mind when choosing units.
T2 Cards Overview:
As usual, let’s first lay all the cards out on the table, organized by role.
· Small
o Firestalker—listed here because of the knockback. The knockback is not bad actually.
o Frost mage—a t1 card that probably dies too easily in t2, it’s still your best S knockback for the cost. If you have no other S counters and you play frost t1, frost mage might save you a t2 slot.
o Icefang Raptor—this has no real purpose in life except as a M/S unit, and it’s not amazing at it. It’s not bad, don’t get me wrong, but I think it will just be outclassed by other cards.
o Scythe Fiends—swift, so that’s good, and with great damage. It also has the highest HP value of any t2 fire unit.
o Viridya—she seems good. She definitely has her uses. Pretty low attack, so not that useful as a S counter, but maybe her special powers will help? One of them is a slow healing, which works well in this deck while units hide behind ice shields. She’s a bit pricy and has low health. She does knock back small units, but something like a fire drake or a nightcrawler would destroy her, although this can also be mitigated by giving her an ice shield. Her treespirits may function as M counters if you find yourself lacking in that department.
· Medium
o Rageclaws—unlike the other fire decks, rageclaws are not redundant here. They’re one of your only S/M unit, and one of your only M counters in general. They are highly susceptible to cc and knockback, but this fire-frost is pretty good at handling both of those, especially compared to fire-shadow and pure fire. Rageclaws aren’t the best defensive units because their rage take so long to build up, however, and they can be kited quite easily due to this.
o Rogan Kayle—these are great stats! Much better than Moon or Viridya. Unfortunately, most M/M units have great stats. He will lose to nightcrawler or enforcer in a heartbeat, and he cost much more than them. On the upside, he makes units deal more damage, although that may not be so useful because fire-frost tends to rely on hit-and-run strategies, rather than full-scale attacks. He also has a cc, and although it’s not that good, it’s a lot cheaper than freeze. If you bring rallying banner, Rogan might have some interesting uses.
o Skyfire drake—the real M counter of the deck. You should probably have a supplementary M counter to beat archers and stuff that take out skyfire drake, but this will be your bread-and-butter. Essential.
o Stormsinger—an alright M counter, although it’s particularly useful against flying units. You shouldn’t have too much trouble in that department if your skyfire drake has an ice shield, though. The green is definitely better.
· Large
o Defenders—these are not L counters. Most of your non-L counters do more damage do L units than defenders do. They can camp, but they’re not impossible to kill. If your opponent has mauler in his deck these defenders become completely useless. Defenders are situational, but if you use them in your deck, it’s not to fill the L counter position.
o Fire Stalker—they do extra damage vs. large units. They have mediocre-to-poor stats, but they can work.
o Firesworn—even though it’s a t1 card, it still does great damage vs L units. Especially with the ability. Note that they can’t hit air though. Also, they die easily and can be cc’ed without much difficulty. They are t1, after all.
o Gladiatrix—a ranged L counter that does tons of damage. The green one is swift, which is nice also. The purple has a better disenchant, but both work. It’s not efficient to use the gladiatrix for its disenchant (cost 150 power) but it’s very nice to have if you have a gladiatrix already out. Which you should, because most of the buffed cards will be L anyway. As a general rule of thumb I prefer the green because you’ll usually have 2 gladiatrix to counter a L unit anyway, so if he buffs twice you can disenchant twice. If you pack the purple disenchant, the green gladiatrix is definitely the way to go.
o Lightblade—an L counter, and cc’s the unit. Fire-frost generally doesn’t have too large of a problem with L units because of gladiatrix, but if you still do, take lightblade. It’s not uncommon to take lightblade even if you don’t play frost t1, because it’s still the best frost L counter even at t2.
o Moon—terrible stats. Well, actually, they’re not bad. But she costs a lot and dies pretty easily to M counters. Her necroshade can be good, especially if paired with a ranged attack like gladiatrix. Her dark arts can also be a situationally useful heal, although fire-frost can usually just ice shield or ravage and retreat a well to heal.
o Phalanx—meh. They’re alright. The trample payback will obliterate anything that steps on them, but it’s not so useful without a lightblade. Still, they’re useful if you are having a problem with knockback (i.e. Stonekin).
· X-Large
o Phalanx—I don’t know if it ever got resolved, but I believe it was MaranV who once told me there used to be a big debate about whether lyrish knights or lightblade and phalanx were the better XL counter.
o Skyelf Templar—not really an XL counter because there are no t2 XL fliers, but it provides a nice reassurance that you don’t need a t3 anti-air to combat the rare corsair/northland drake/spitfire/etc. She’s more useful as a special unit.
o Lyrish Knight—the only actual t2 XL counter for ground units. It’s great for a lot of things, and I’d highly recommend it as an all-around unit. At some point you’ll have to decide if you want to support your units with rallying banner or ice barrier—ice barrier will usually work better with lyrish, so that’s something to keep in mind.
· Siege
o Fire stalker—I suppose you could use these with a rallying banner and homesoil, but that’s sort of just an inferior fire dancer. If that’s your strategy, maybe you should play pure fire. Fire stalkers are surely playable, but I think there are stronger/more efficient options available.
o Mountaineer—widely considered one of the strongest/lamest cards in the game, mountaineer is a staple of try-hard fire-frost decks. He’s super strong with ravage and possible rallying banner support, but his true strength comes from his microing ability. He’s also super expensive. I would not advise that you start a deck playing mountaineer, but add him in after you get stronger at Battleforge fundamentals (plus, there’s no way you’ll be able afford him until you’ve gained a lot of experience).
o Rageclaws—not technically siege units, but that’s sort of their main purpose. Their biggest weakness is their susceptibility to knockback and cc. Rageclaws are probably most useful in fire-frost than any other deck because of certain frost cards like homesoil that can really make them hit hard. Also, rageclaws pair much better with a cc like freeze than oink.
· Specialty
o Defenders—these guys are super hard to kill, especially if you ravage. The problem is that your opponent can usually ignore them. They also get shut down super hard by mauler or amii phantom. I don’t think such a slow card belongs in a fire-frost deck, but I could see situations where they would be useful.
o Lyrish Knight—these are your all-around units. Swift, cheap, and with good stats, many frost decks rely on them as the primary ground attacker (similar to enforcers in pure fire). I’m not sure that fire-frost needs an all-around unit, but they’re a solid choice regardless.
o Skyfire Drake—flier. Essential in any fire splash.
o Skyelf Templar—this unit is great to shore up your air defense, and it does a great job of repairing wells. I can’t attest to the accuracy of this statement, but I’ve heard that it can replace glacier shell or kobold trick in some scenarios. Templar might also be essential in some decks against some matchups where a flying unit hovers over cliffs so it can’t be gravity surged, and you can’t get enough dps otherwise. I’m not sure how important that is to a fire splash, where dps is rarely a problem.
o Frost Sorceress—ice shields are the main reason someone would play fire-frost, although there are a few players who feel they should keep their honor intact and not use them. For 20 power, she can put a 660 hp ice shield on a unit for 30 seconds. This combos especially well with t2 fire creatures such as skyfire drake, which have good dps but suffer from lack of health.
Fire-frost has some of the most interesting building combinations.
· Cannon Tower—a very strong tower, basically. It knocks back small units, but mostly it’s good because it has a lot of health and is one of the easiest towers to build aggressively.
· Construction hut—meh, you’d need to build a lot of buildings for this to become useful. I want to say 250 power worth of buildings, but I’m too lazy to look up the exact number. If you’re building 250 power of buildings, you’re already taking a lot of buildings and I don’t think you can spare the deck slot.
· Ice barrier—great for using with homesoil or lyrish knights. They can also absorb splash damage. The reason to play over rallying banner is that ice barrier is a lot cheaper.
· Ice Shield Tower—a less mobile version of frost sorceress. Its shields have 880 hp and cost 30 power, and can be cast every 20 seconds. The building has a worse shield-to-cost ratio, but the shields do have higher health which may be important for keeping a unit alive. Also ice shield towers are harder to kill than frost sorceresses.
· Juice tank—absolutely not.
· Morklay trap—can be very strong, but it’s really hard to actually use them.
· Rallying banner—an ice barrier that costs more but allows you to summon units undazed. Deciding which one to use will come down to how much your units are handicapped if summoned dazed. For instance, Skyfire Drake and Frost Sorceress are pretty useless dazed, while rageclaws or mountaineers are not so bad.
· Termite hill—crazy dps on structures. Getting it up can be quite difficult, but rewarding.
· Mortar tower—a strong defender, but not so useful for fire-frost because freeze is generally power inefficient and makes units take half damage. Possibly a good attacking tower if you can find some way to ensure it goes up….
· Warden’s sigil—the most important card to play if you’re trying to do aggressive termite hill/mortar/cannon tower/morklay trap. The blue is the one you want to use, because it allows you to shield building while they construct. If someone attacks your base, you can also apply the shield to a well or monument, just like glacier shell.
Spells:
· Coldsnap—the only cc available to you. Pretty essential in my opinion.
· Disenchant—you should definitely have some form of disenchant available to you, either with the spell or with gladiatrix, because coldsnap is a pretty inefficient way to counter buffs. I’d suggest the purple disenchant unless you go for some unusual t3 that uses a really expensive unit.
· Eruption—a powerful card for air control. It allows you to knock back S units (relatively cheaply), kill tightly grouped units, force kobold tricks and heals 300 hp earlier, and punish dazed unit summons. It also helps against shadow because you can erupt something that obviously wants to nasty.
· Frost Bite—the purple one is the only one worth using. It’s really great for picking on a single unit and it helps you achieve power advantages. It will help you out a lot against L units and is another good tool for air control (especially combed with eruption). That said, fire-frost has undoubtedly the best air control options (eruption, frost bite, gladiatrix, freeze, stormsinger, ice shielded skyfire drakes, skyelf templar, and gravity surge), so I think using all of them will be a bit overkill. If you realize you have a problem with L units, I’d suggest using this card.
· Glacier Shell—considered core in pretty much every frost splash. I feel like that’s close-minded thinking and there are ways to not use it in a deck, but I don’t have enough experience to really say. It absorbs up to 1550 damage, which is actually more than a kobold trick repairs (if the enemy hits that well). It’s a great defensive card, so why not use the tools at your disposal?
· Gravity Surge—I can’t think of a good reason to use this over stormsinger, but some people did prefer it. I don’t think there were many though (and it may have been before the stormsinger buff).
· Home Soil—a fantastic card, especially with that fire dps. Since it’s pretty much given that you’re going to use some sort of support building, either rallying banner or ice barrier, you should probably keep a slot open for this card. If you decide to go for some unusual deck without either of those buildings, you probably don’t want home soil.
· Kobold trick—if you’re playing a frost splash and not using this spell, you’re doing it wrong. It repairs 1100 health on a structure.
· Lava Field—a great AoE spell. It can help you get out of a swarm of enemies. This is a pretty defensive spell, but perhaps fire-frost doesn’t need to be as worried about proactively removing enemies before they get to your base as other fire factions do.
· Mine—I don’t see any real reason to use it in this deck. Perhaps if you are assaulting a frost player’s well with rageclaws, you could drop a mine to kill and frost mages that spawn, but meh.
· Ravage—you have a good healing spell, use it. It combos especially well with mountaineer and ice shields in general.
· Wallbreaker, Girl Power, and other Shenanigans—Please no. Please.
T3 Cards Overview:
As usual, let’s keep our “Offensive, Defensive, Spammy” paradigm. You have a lot of options for t3, including a t3 shadow for lost souls and bandits OP-ness, but I’m going to say that you’re not allowed to t3 a different color until you feel confident enough to explain why exactly you can t3 a different color. So: should you t3 fire or t3 frost?
As far as I’m concerned, double frost orbs in t3 is one of the strongest t3 options, regardless of the third orb. Silverwind lancers and giant slayers are the best spammy units (sorry shadow and nature), Tremors are fantastic siege units (probably the best, actually), and timeless one is unparalleled in its defensive capabilities. You also have shield building for some serious base defense, and we’ve already exceeded my rule of three without even considering what color the third orb could be. Fire-frost also has some super awesome tactics with buildings in t3, especially with Ward of the North and perhaps offensive Towers of Flames. I don’t think these tower combos are worth trying in ranked, but they can be fun to mess around with.
On the other hand double fire orbs gives you access to Giant Slayers: the most useful t3 unit in the game, in my opinion. It’s quite possible to take Giant Slayers as your only t3 unit, although it does require a certain playstyle. Unfortunately, the rest of your options for a double fire orb are not very good. Silverwind are just slightly worse Giant Slayers if you have access to both, and every other frost unit requires two frost orbs. So my advice is to go t3 fire if you don’t have a ton of room in your deck, and t3 frost if you do have more room.
· Offensive Cards
o Brannoc—extremely powerful. Probably the best XL unit this faction can support without a different colored t3. The biggest problem with him is what happens when you rely on him but your opponent pulls him first. Most people think he’s lame because he can be supported by nature and shadow really well. In fire-frost, Brannoc is actually fair. Sure you have ravage and ice shield, but those buffs are pretty minor compared to surge of light or lifeweaving. Brannoc does fill a hole in the fire-frost metagame, providing both a solid XL unit and XL counter, but the lack of available buffs means he’s not as useful as he is to other factions.
o Core Dredge—even with 100% siege, this unit does barely more damage to structures than Brannoc, and completely loses a fight with against units. There are some mobility advantages and you can use it instead of Brannoc as a matter of principle, but I don’t think fire-frost necessarily needs an XL unit anyway and there’s just not a good reason to use Core Dredge.
o Giantslayer—when raged up, they deal a ton of damage (1000 per charge). They are especially susceptible to cc’s though. If you do decide to bring the disenchant spell, a well-timed use on a giant slayer may turn the tide in your favor. The biggest plus of this card is that it’s difficult to cost-effectively defend against, making it very spammable.
o Tremor—fantastic health, damage, and ability. They also have a lot of charges. They are a bit susceptible to roots because they are melee units, but that’s pretty much their only weakness. You can usually spawn these dazed because of how much health they have.
o Timeless One—the free cc is very strong when launching attacks.
o Backlash—deals a lot of damage, but it’s rarely used because it only does half damage against structures.
o Curse well—very slow. If you use this card, you need to play a mostly defensive t3 and bleed your opponent dry. Using this card immediately awards you the title “lamer.”
o Inferno—sure, it does a lot of damage. But you’re probably better off just using enlightenment and earthshaker for that much power
o Shrine of War—a great card, but I doubt you’ll be able to make much use of it. That’s a lot of power to bind and the cooldown is long. The match will probably be over before it’s ready.
o Sun Reaver—used to be the fire equivalent of the ashbone pyro. Then it got nerfed to oblivion. It’s hardly worth using now. It takes so long to build up its flame that a giant slayer will kill the well faster. I would like to see this card get buffed so it deals regular damage against structures and slower damage against units. But until this happens, you have a large, slow giant slayer that can’t charge or hamstring. I’d also put the unnerfed one as defensive, but this is useless at killing units.
o Virtuoso—fairly good stats. The ability does a lot of damage to structures. Also a good L/L.
o Vulcan—great attack, but low health. With homesoil he can do a ridiculous amount of damage, but he’s a bit of a glass cannon. Ward of the North might help him in that area.
o Retreating Circle—although this card may seem defensive, it’s an aggressive spell. Use it to save your units when they are are about to fail an offensive, or if you want to trick your enemy into building a defense at one base and quickly change the focus of the attack. Or maybe don’t use it, and spend the slot on something stronger.
o Curse Well—maybe you can get away with this, but c’mon, it’s lame.
o Ward of the North—offensives get much easier because your units are very hard to kill. It’s especially fun to use it to build offensive buildings right next to someone’s base.
o Architect’s Call—can also be used for offensive buildings, but I think Ward of the North is more useful. Still, if you have a 2v2 partner who plays Mark of the Keeper…
o Random offensive building—your choice. You can read the descriptions on the cards and figure out which (if any) you want to combo with Architect’s Call or Ward of the North. I’d recommend Tower of Flames.
o Skyelf Sage—are you really going to spend more deck slots on this building nonsense? But if you do, Skyelf Sage is pretty cool J.
o Magma Spores—you wouldn’t normally think of these as offensive, but fire-frost isn’t “normal” either. If spawned from a rallying banner, these guys drop wells super-fast. I believe 2 with homesoil will take out a well cluster. You might need to aim so the splash damage doesn’t spread to more than 2 or 3 targets, or that will detract from the main target and you won’t drop it. As great as the combo is, it does take a lot of power. However, it can be a great sneak attack if you get into a war of attrition with a Lost Souls player and he’s going for dual Brannoc and Lost Grigori lameness.
· Defensive
o Frost shard—basically a giant freeze that deals damage. Use timeless one if you want a freeze.
o Kobold Engineer—basically counteracts a unit that does 2750 damage to a well. A tremor does 2550 (w/o ability) to a well for the exact same cost. In other words, use a tremor and drop someone else’s well instead. Still, I think Kobold Engineer is possibly underrated (but only by a little bit, and because he’s rated very, very low).
o Backlash, to kill attacking enemies. The problem is that backlash is expensive and has a large cooldown, making it inefficient against spammy t3 units.
o Magma Hurler—not great stats, but it’s ranged and knocks back M units. They’re also nice anti-air. Air units are typically bad in t3, but every now and then you have that one guy who uses them and if you don’t have an answer, you start to rage and call him a lamer in the chatbox. Pointed out by @RadicalX: their biggest downside is that they take 4 seconds between shots, allowing your opponent to micro around them and kill the magma hurler without taking any damage. This isn’t that bad an issue, however, because nobody has time to micro one unit obsessively in t3 and 2 de-synced magma hurlers or a cc can prevent the dodging. Also, a magma hurler does not want to attack anything that also wants to attack it.
o Magma Spore—good anti-air defenders. Not good at defending much else (actually, they can do a lot of damage to L units with their ability). Also good at spamming.
o Vulcan—can do massive damage with his ability and roots. Unfortunately, he cost a lot, so he doesn’t defend against cheap spammy cards well.
o Shield Building—super useful for defense. Many people think it’s overpowered.
o Timeless One—the quintessential defensive unit. He’s cheap and has a great freeze, stopping enemies in their tracks. A lot of high ranked players are calling to nerf him.
o Virtuoso—as a defensive L counter, pretty standard. Slightly better at offensives because of his horn.
o Silverwind Lancers—basically these are just cheap and have good stats. They’re not the best L counters, but they work.
o Giant Slayer— despite their name, they’re not the best XL counters. They can do a good job, but you’d think that 240 power of giantslayers would beat 220 worth of a juggernaut, right? Especially since giantslayers counter XL, and juggers don’t? But giantslayers suffer from very low health, so most XL’s 2-shot them before they can get rage built up. If the GS is raged, a single one can take out an XL unit (if you support it with cc and heals and get the 1500 damage charge). But if they aren’t raged, they don’t do so well. I believe it takes 4 giant slayers to kill 1 juggernaut if they start from rest. Nasty surprises, lifeweaving, or wildfires defeat them easily. However, giantslayers are still very useful because of their hamstring effect. It slows enemies down to give you more time to prepare your defenses. They’re also good for defending spammy units, because giantslayers are just as cheap as them.
· Spammy
o Giant Slayer—yes, you knew this was coming. They’re cheap, do a TON of damage, and are swift. Also can’t be knocked back. They are very susceptible to cc, however. And they lost to most t3 units 1on1. However, giantslayers should primarily be used to spam 1 to every base, forcing the enemy to waste at least 120 power at each one. This gives you a power advantage, and you push harder at the weakest one with your offensive unit. Spamming 1 to each base also negates the efficiency of cc.
o Magma Spore—cheap, and their ability is good. They’re also air units, which makes them especially good against any non-shadow faction (that has no ashbone pyro). The biggest problem with them is trying to micro them. They’re easy to forget about. If memory serves me, it takes 6 to drop a base of 2 wells and 1 orb.
o Silverwind Lancers—good stats, useful to transport your heavy hitters to the scene quickly. If you decide to play two frost orbs, I highly recommend this unit.
Building the Deck:
As usual, let’s start building in t2. I might break my rule about not building a deck around sick combos for this this faction, because fire-frost has too many sick combos, but I’ll try not to. To start with our essential cards, we have: Skyfire drake and scythe fiends. Probably homesoil, kobold trick, and glacier shell/eruption as well. Glacier shell and eruption may not be as essential as the others depending on our t1 and what other cards we play. We also have a few essential pairs. You’ll need either rageclaws or mountaineer, and rallying banner or ice barrier. (Note that there are actually many playable ways to build a fire-frost deck that doesn’t have some of the rules I’m mentioning, so what I claim as “essential” for a fire-frost deck is not as absolutely needed as something I would claim as essential in another deck. Skyfire drake is the only card it is impossible to play without).
Before we go any further, let’s decide what sort of theme we want to use for this deck. The building theme, while very cool, is probably more viable for 2v2 than 1v1 and I think it requires too many deck slots. You have the deck that focuses entirely on the mountaineer, but I’m poor and those decks are easier to build than the alternatives, so let’s focus on something else for this guide. You can build a generic deck that doesn’t really have a theme (it just puts as many strong units in as possible), as well as a t3-centric deck. The problem with a t3-centric deck is that you’ll have to choose between giant slayer or tremor: giant slayer is especially strong in a light t3 deck, and tremors with fire lose to tremors with shadow. I’m also of the school of thought that games should be won or lost in t2 rather than t1 or t3. Because of this, I’m going to go with what I feel is the strongest (and probably lamest) fire-frost theme: the ice shield guerrilla tactics. This means that I for sure need ice shield tower or frost sorceress. I’m going to choose frost sorceress primarily because she cost less bfp, but good arguments can be made for both. I also appreciate the mobility, especially if coming from a rallying banner.
If we’re going with an ice shield style, we’ll want to make sure to include a larger percentage of solo units. Skyfire Drake and Scythe Fiends are going in for sure, along with Frost Sorceress. For now, I’m going to be optimistic and plan for the “best” t3 options available. I’ll try to save 4 deck slots for silverwind lancer, tremor, timeless one, and shield building/brannoc.
Let’s add Ravage because it’s pretty essential in every fire deck. So the base of my deck is Skyfire Drake, Scythe Fiends, Frost Sorceress, and Ravage. This half covers my S and M counters—I say half because both skyfire drake and scythe fiends are susceptible to cc because of their high cost, so I would like something to supplement them. M counters are easy: let’s add Stormsinger (green) and Rageclaws. These are good in different situations, and together gives us 3 M counters. It may be overkill, so let’s make a note if we need to drop a unit, it will probably come from here. Stormsinger has pretty bad dps, so let’s also add Frostbite (purple) to help her out. It’s also really good against L and XL units, so that might allow us to go a little bit light there. For S counters, we don’t really have a good supplement to Scythe Fiends. Something with knockback would be nice, and firestalker might do the trick. However, I think I’d rather spend this deck slot on an extra t1 unit, either frost mage or firesworn. Let’s add Coldsnap because cc is good in general, but especially necessary when you’ll be having a problem with a particular size unit. Lavafield will also be necessary, I think, to deal with spammed units. The high dps units we’re planning to use (skyfire drake, rageclaws, and scythe fiends) are pretty susceptible to cc, so lavafield can be a good counter to that.
The deck is now: Skyfire Drake, Scythe Fiends, Frost Sorceress, Ravage, Coldsnap, Frostbite (purple), Rageclaws, Stormsinger (green), Lavafield. Let’s add in Glacier Shell and Kobold Trick to get them out of the way now.
Our S and M is taken care of, but what should we do for L and XL? Should we use lyrish? If we allot 5 cards for t1 and 4 cards for t3, we’re out of cards. But I’m not sure our t2 is sufficient, so let’s add some more things and then swizzle our deck around.
Since I already notice that I’m going to have deck slot problems, I’m going to take fire t1. I feel more comfortable with it and I think fire is more viable than frost when you don’t have many deck slots. The reason I’m choosing my t1 now is because I’ll have to decide whether to play rallying banner or ice barrier. If I play frost t1, I’ll have to use ice barrier. But since I’m going fire t1, and I wouldn’t have access to my supporting building until t2, I figured I might as well just straight play a Rallying Banner. This allows me to get some quick saves on units with sorceress ice shield, and I can spawn offensive drakes. With that, let’s finish the 3-part combo and add Lyrish Knight and Homesoil. (I’ve also given up on a 4 card t3 and I have an interesting idea for t3 rallying banners).
The deck is currently: Skyfire Drake, Scythe Fiends, Frost Sorceress, Ravage, Coldsnap, Frostbite (purple), Rageclaws, Stormsinger (green), Lavafield. Glacier Shell, Kobold Trick, Rallying Banner, Lyrish Knight, and Homesoil. 14 cards. Yeah, that’s probably too much for t2. Let’s just finish up our wish list and then see what we need to drop or be more efficient with.
The biggest t2 weakness now is a lack of disenchant. There are pros for the spell and for gladiatrix, but I think I’m going to use Gladiatrix (green)—for one, I have a rallying banner which allows me to spawn gladiatrixes on-site. I also think it will be good for L and XL counters (especially because I’m not sure I’ll be able to keep lyrish knight in the deck). It might make my air-control a bit overkill, but if I have total air control, that will go a long ways toward Skyfire Drake offensives.
Let’s also round out the deck by finishing our t1: Scavenger, Eruption, Sunstrider, Thugs, and Firesworn (red). The firesworn is to help out a little bit in t2 S counters, as well as t2 L counters. I’d like to use Mortar Tower, but I just don’t think I’ll have enough deck slots.
. . . And that’s all 20 cards. Note that this type of deck would be terrible to try not using t3. It doesn’t have hyper-aggressive options like burrowers (or even mountaineer), but rather uses a moderately slow buildup. This is the exactly the compromise of being too slow to rush someone’s t3 (unlike certain fire-nature decks), while also not strong enough to steamroll the opponent despite t3 (unlike certain stonekin decks). While this deck’s t2 is strong enough to prevent the opponent from getting an opening to t3 in many maps, on some maps (especially random generated) it will just not be possible to prevent the opponent from stalling the game into a long t3. Even modified specifically for that purpose, I’m not sure if a fire-frost deck will ever be the best at staying t2 against t3. It’s also not a good idea play a single card t3 (Giant Slayer can do that in fire-nat because of nature assisting spells).
So we have to remove 2-4 cards. The easiest cards to remove, I think, would be the rallying banner-homesoil-lyrish knight trio. Remember, necessities over niceties. That gives us room for Silverwind Lancers, Tremor, and Timeless One.
Our final deck build:
T1: Scavenger, Eruption, Sunstrider, Thugs, and Firesworn (red)
Now our t2 is not quite as solid as it used to be, but I think we can still play around our weaknesses. This deck is a very . . . moderate deck. T1 is a little light, as well as t3, but they are both manageable. Our t3, in particular, has the potential to be quite strong as long as we don’t drag it into those higher power levels.
Reality Check:
How does our deck do in our double check?
1. Defending walls
2. Defending t3 rushes (or harvester)
3. Defending cheap spams for spread-out agro
4. Performing cheap spams for spread-out agro
5. Defending a full-on attack at one place
6. Performing a full-on attack at one place
7. Preventing a large standing army
8. Building a large standing army
I’m a little less comfortable with this deck than the previous ones, and a few practice games with this deck will do more than this theoretical discussion because there may be some exceptional combos or weaknesses that you just can’t anticipate without experience. Still, let’s go!
1. By default of having a frost orb, we have above average wall defense. With good foresight we can prevent walls from going up (every faction can, but sometimes mistakes happen), and scavenger makes this easier. A coldsnap won’t work because it’s too expensive and the opponent could quickly spam another unit. We also don’t have frost barrier. BUT we have glacier shell and kobold trick, and S archers typically have low dps. If the archers are mounted so they only hit one well, use glacier shell. Otherwise, a combination of appropriately timed glacier shells and kobold tricks will usually allow you to stall your demise indefinitely, and if the enemy spends too much power putting all his units on the wall, you can either freeze them or launch a counteroffensive, confident that your attack come through faster. Fire and frost should have the best combination of offense and defense.
2. Harvesters can be dealt with by gladiatrix and frostbite. Rageclaws also work well, and you have coldsnap if you need it. Your cc isn’t as good as fire-nature’s, but you can use glacier shell or kobold trick as a pseudo-root or oink. Make sure to save power for a disenchant, and be prepared for the harvy to warp to attack another base. T3 rushes can be handled the same way; firesworn can also be used against L units, especially in conjunction with frostbite. Buffed ashbones will give you trouble if you don’t have enough power to spawn a glady and use the disenchant (and you’ll also need to summon more units to kill the ashbone). However, you should play aggressively enough that your opponent doesn’t have a chance to save power for t3 or a harvester.
3. Defending cheap spams is one of this deck’s greatest weaknesses. You really have to play around that and just prevent your opponent from infiltrating your side on too many fronts. If we had lyrish, they’d be perfect for this. Stormsinger will be the card you usually use to defend nightcrawlers and burrowers, but it has fairly low dps. You usually don’t need to worry about dropping wells because of your repair spells, but your opponent will try to make you expend too much energy defending in multiple places and—when your defense is spread thin, hit one area hard. This leads to point 5, but where your opponent has a strong temporary advantage.
4. You definitely can’t do spread out agro (except for maybe rageclaws, but they’re slow and too easily countered). Stormsingers can largely be ignored because of their low dps. You CAN do concentrated agro, however; which is sort of the point of this deck. You hit and run using ice shielded drakes or scythe fiends, draining your opponent’s power and keeping him from gathering his power for a strong attack.
5. Defending full-on attacks can be tricky, but doable. The trick will be to know when coldsnap is efficient and when it is not. Again, you can use building repairs as a sort of cc, but that becomes less effective against bigger armies (which complements coldsnap well). You’ll probably be making liberal use of lavafield as well (be careful against nature). Stone shards will be super annoying do deal with, and I’d probably suggest using rageclaws against them.
6. For full-on attacks, this deck probably falls slightly below average. We have no siege units, and no rallying banner or homesoil buffs. Rageclaws can definitely do the trick if you let them rage up, but that’s not going to happen against most decks. You’ll usually want to do a sort of medium attack, annoying the opponent (possibly on several fronts), and then come in with more units to gain full control at one base (stonekin style), and surround it (most of your attackers are archers), suffocating any defensive counterplay until the base is demolished. Mountaineer, rallying banner, and/or homesoil would help us in this category.
7. If you keep the pressure up (and you will, because you’re good, right?), you should have a fairly easy time of preventing a large army from being built in the first place. If it does get up, lavafield is useful when you opponent doesn’t have a nature orb, but you’ll have a very hard time against, say, stonekin. The trick will be not to let that standing army appear—and if it does appear, you’ll need to know when to go t3 and how well you can defend until your t3 arrives.
8. You can build a large standing army only if you are attacked multiple places. Usually this won’t happened because you’ll be using spells to help defend, but if you have enough power to use two stormsingers to kill one burrower, you’ll have two stormsingers left over to help attack. Otherwise, you’ll generally avoid spawning more units than you have to.
I feel good about this deck. It’s not super good at anything, but it’s also not really bad at anything. This deck should be competitive against almost every other deck. I’d like to have mountaineer, I think, but we can do without it.
Matchups Check:
· Pure Fire
o Mountaineer would make this matchup a lot easier, but it should still be fairly strong for you. You have a strong enough dps to kill fire units before they kill your wells, especially with repair spells to keep your base alive. You’ll have to be careful in t3 because nothing beats juggers, but you should be able to keep a t2 advantage and go t3 earlier and use tremors to kill his base before he gets a monument up. Use your superior air control to get and keep skyfires up (with ice shields, fire has a hard time dealing with them), and use the skyfires to snipe fire’s M units before they build momentum. Fire also has a hard time dealing with rageclaws if they get to the base (wildfire will be the usual counter). If fire does get a strong attack going, you have lavafields or coldsnaps to prevent the attack from getting too powerful. This deck takes a light t1 and pure fire has plenty of room for a large t1, so I’d recommend not trying to press too hard in t1 and just make it to t2 on even footing.
· Fire-nature
o Speaking as a fire-nature player, this matchup (particularly the ice-shield style of fire-frost) was one of my least favorite. In my opinion, you only have a slight advantage, but you have the tools to be the aggressor—a particularly annoying situation for a fire-nature player. You both have similar advantages and disadvantages. Fire-nature has better cc, but you have much better air control. That will be important for getting rid of burrowers. Map control will be essential. If you can get a chokepoint and prevent the burrowers from infiltrating multiple bases at once, you’ll do quite well. You’ll have a bit of trouble attacking because rageclaws will get hurricaned easily. This will likely turn into a very long t2, and the game will be decided in t3. Mountaineers would make this matchup easier, because you’ll scale up in t2 better.
· Fire-shadow
o I really have no idea how this will go. You have one of the worst S counters of any faction, but you do have lavafield and coldsnap. In contrast, bandits have no cc, but will rely on spammed darkelves a lot. In t3 it’s hard to tell who is better. T2 will come down to who gets an advantage first (likely in t1) and that side will likely run away with the advantage. Mountaineers would help this matchup quite a bit—rageclaws don’t do super well against darkelves.
· Fire-frost
o This deck is a little different from the “normal” fire-frost deck. A lot of fire-frost decks don’t lean on ice-shield so heavily, but they do use mountaineer. You should not have too much of a problem against mountaineer: rageclaws do well, and you have gladiatrix and firesworn (good burst damage) as well. On the other hand, rageclaws are not so easy for fire-frost to deal with. However, many fire-frost players will take a larger t3, so you’ll want to win before t3 comes around.
· Pure shadow
o You should have a very easy time with this matchup. Skyfire drakes with ice shield will stomp pretty much all of shadow’s units. You should be concerned about a couple of combos, but with frost to protect your bases, you don’t have a ton to worry about. There’s really no reason you would give the shadow player enough power to take a harvester. If it does happen, lyrish knights or lightblade would be nice. Still, you have frostbite and gladiatrix. Rageclaws can be useful because they have a lot of health. You also have a freeze, so use it as needed. You can further stall by using kobold trick or glacier shell. This isn’t the best deck to deal with XL units, but you’ll survive.
· Shadow-frost
o You’ll likely have a slight t2 advantage, and shadow-frost will have a slightly more significant t3 advantage (due to more deck slots). I think this comes out about even though, because t2 is more important than t3. You have tools to deal with lost reaver and mountaineer, but you should probably be harassing your opponent enough that he never builds up enough power for mounty. You’ll mostly use ice shielded skyfire drakes to attack because rageclaws die pretty easily to darkelf assassins. You’ll need to secure air control and make sure to kill stormsingers ASAP, so keeping some rageclaws around (or a stormsinger of your own, although that’s a bit slow) will be quite useful. Scythe fiends are good, but nightcrawlers kill them a bit too effectively for you to rely on them. Ideally, you’ll harass your opponent until you can get 2 shielded skyfires up. If that happens they can fairly well protect each other and you be on the fast track towards gaining a tangible advantage. Still, lost souls players are used to stalling until t3 and gaining that advantage.
· Shadow-nature
o This is such an unusual matchup that I really have no idea what would happen. It will come down to whether the shadow-nature player can spam M units faster than you can kill them. My guess is that that shadow-nature player has an advantage, because fire-frost won’t really get strong until higher percentages. You’ll need a skyfire drake or multiple stormsingers to deal with the M pressure, and if multiple fronts get hit, I’d imagine you’ll have a tough time. His cc is better than yours, he can hurricane your rageclaws, and if you try to mass attack with your defense (that’s grown very large trying to kill his small attacks), one AoC could wipe it all out. Still, skyfire drakes will be tough for him to deal with, because shadow-nature tends to struggle with aerial control. Also in your favor, he has no frost splash, so if you get a large army and attack at 2 fronts, he can only protect one with AoC. Mountaineer might help because rageclaws get hurricaned easily, but nightguard is pretty standard for a shadow-nature player, so mountaineer is also pretty easily countered.
· Pure Frost
o Frost depends very heavily on war eagles. Since you can contest the air just as much as him, you have a pretty strong advantage. It’s not so big you can’t lose it, but you have the same air units, except with skyfire drake instead of war eagle (which is better for air control). The frost player will likely take skyelf templar, but you can work around that. If you bring templar yourself, the frost player will basically have no advantage.
· Frost-nature
o This seems pretty even to me. Both sides will have a bit of difficulty attacking their opponent because of the defensive options. Rageclaws will lose to hurricane, so mounty would make this matchup stronger. Stone shards will make your life miserable, but they’re not as bad for you as they are for other fire factions. Still, you don’t have a good counter for them. Try to build up an army yourself, without letting the stonekin player do so. Whoever gets their ideal setup will win (for you, that’s skyfire drakes or rageclaws with ice shields from sorceress; for the stonekin player, it’s probably a massive army of archers with ice barrier and homesoil). You’ll probably use a lot of lava fields to finish off stonekin units before they heal.
· Pure Nature
o You should have a definite advantage. Deep ones can be dealt with using gladiatrix or skyfire drake and frostbite. Stormsinger can work against lone energy parasites in a pinch, but you also have the best parasite counter: skyfire drake. Your cc isn’t so good against them, however. Your biggest worry will be parasite swarm, because you depend on a lot of expensive units. It’s definitely better for you to have rageclaws than mountaineer in this matchup, even though your rageclaws will get hurricaned. Eruption and frostbite does 375 damage, just shy of the 438 health of parasite swarm. Another hit from a gladiatrix or stormsinger will finish it. Note that both gladiatrix and stormsinger need 2 hits and eruption to kill a parasite swarm without frostbite, while skyfire drake needs 1 hit and eruption. If you have a stormsinger, just gravity surge the parasite swarm (if he’s over a cliff, just move any units that could be captured away). As usual, burrowers are annoying for you to deal with at lower power levels, because skyfire drake or rageclaws get cc’d and stormsinger has low dps.
Final Touches:
It seems pretty clear that this particular deck would benefit from mountaineer in a lot of matches. If you have the bfp for him, go for it. If not, you’re still fine. You have plenty of other aggressive options, and defensive options as well. Brannoc would make your t3 a lot stronger, so you might consider dropping a t2 unit for him.
Evolution of the Deck:
If you want to write this section, feel free to PM me or just reply in the comments!
Pure Shadow:
From Anonymos:
if ur looking for a pure shadow deck i would advice smtng like this:
Shadowphoenix, corpse explosion (one of those 2 at least)
(Unholy power )
t3 depends
if splashing to frost u could use smtng like grigori, silverwindlacers, ashbone and shild building
if staying pure shadow voidstorm should be included
if ur really tryharding for an basenuke u could try nexus portal + cultistmaster + evocators technicly nexus portal can be used in t2 to close the gap to ur enemy but sadly it needs a lot of micro since u always have to pull ur units back from the portal once they retreaded trough the portal station in case the station gets focussed if used perfectly u can use this builing to start unexpectet strong attacks by shifting ur units around but since the portal station is so low on hp with like 1000 hp (not really sure atm) it can backfire really hard
Shadow-Frost:
Shadow-Nature:
When I get to this section, keep RadicalX’s post in mind:
Apparently there is a very good reason to start with Shadow T1 since it's way better compared to nature T1. Shadow does very well against Frost, destroys nature (Phasetower op ^-^) and has got a skill matchup against fire. Nature has got a very poor matchup against Shadow and Frost, which is pretty bad and even Fire can give you alot of trouble with wrecker or mortar.
In addition to that Shadow takes less deck slots. Dreadcharger, Forsaken, Nox-Trooper, (Motivate), Nasty, Nightguard & Phasetower create a very solid T1.
-> Dreadcharger Forsaken & Nox are core units for your T1
-> Phasetower helps you to destroy nature and does well against frost
-> Nightguard is pretty imporant against T2, since shadow nature doesn't have strong a L counter, it helps you against Air units and she has got a pretty good synergy with your deck since you've got pretty cheap cc spells. Motivate & Nasty are also very good for your T2
-> Motivate is pretty useful for your T1 and your T2 since Shadow nature has got alot of cheap high damage units. Motivate provides pretty much bonus damage (way superior to life weaving and unholy power, which are trash cards in this deck).
-> Nasty is very versitile and always a solid pickup for every Shadow deck. Can help you to defend against large attacks (also very good vs skyfire drakes) and is also usefull to finish off powerwells or create huuuge aoe attacks with Shadow Phoenix.
That makes 7 T1 slots (+Ensnaring roots, Surge of light & Hurricane). And Motivate isn't even "must have"!
Nature needs Swiftclaw, Spearman, Windweavers, Dryad, Shaman, Primal defender, Surge of light, Ensnaring roots and Hurricane, which are 9 cards and you need every single one to prevent an autolose matchup (and even then Frost T1 is pretty much unbeatable without instant T2). With the addition of Nasty and Nightguard for T2 you have only 9 deckslots left. You can't compete with such a deck on a decent level. In Theory you could go for Treespirit (a card which is ridicilously broken) to save some slots since it's kind of an allround counter that deals with everything, but this doesn't solve the main issues of nature T1. You will still lose against Frost since Ice-barrier can prevent the damage from Treespirit & you will still get destroyed against Phasetowerspam. A nature T1 start would be only viable for 2v2 (You don't need stuff like primal defender to deal with phasetower as long as your teammate can support you).
For T2 - your core cards are:
-> Nightcrawler & Darkelf Assassin (Your "must have" cards, main M & S counter - they are useful in litereally every situation, especially Darkelf Assassins.)
-> Curse of Oink (The best T2 cc spell)
-> Shadow Phoenix (This is maybe just personal preference, but I always love to have this card in my deck. Helps alot to support your attacks and can be very usefull against stuff like Shadow mages.)
-> Aura of Corruption (I wouldn't usually call this card must have, but it's your only reliable way to get rid of cliffdancers (even if it's not power efficient). Aside from that root aura is a pretty good allround counter, but be careful with this card Stonekin can abuse AoC super hard and spam cannon towers into your aura and you wont be able to destroy them anymore).
-> Amii Phantom (Amazing card! Very versitile and very strong. It's biggest strength (and the reason why it's must have) is the fact, that it helps alot to deal with stonekin, which used to be a pretty hard matchup for shadow nature. You can just disable stonetempest and razorshard and destroy your opponent. Aside from that a pretty good adition in many matchups. The stats aren't great, but it can help you with kiting and even in T3 the Amii Phantom is still useful, she can disable Ashebone-Pyro for example.)
This are the most important cards for your T2 (Shadow Phoenix is debatable and keep in mind that Ensnaring roots, Hurricane and Surge of Light are also included!). I will mention some other stuff now, that can be viable.
-> Burrower (even if alot of people consider him the core card of Shadow-nature some top tier players used to play without him. With alot of success. Since Shadow nature has got the strongest skirmish-units with nightcrawler + darkelf assassin and the strongest cc (Root, Oink & Hurricane) it was a pretty interesting strategy to apply pressure at multiple places with nightcrawler & Darkelf assassins, but you would just focus the units to create an overwhelming army. You had either stronger units or superior cc. It is very hard to counter this strategy, it even felt impossible when you got slightly behind in T1 and your opponent executed it very well. But Burrower is still a viable option, pretty much the easy way to play the deck - they could apply super much pressure, especially with the use of Motivate (don't think about using Life-Weaving ... it's bad).
-> Mauler (used to be good, but get's outclassed by Amii Phantom super hard, because it's cheaper and faster.)
-> Spirit Hunter (Allround Counter - Can be pretty efficient, but I don't feel like you need the card since you have litereally a counter unit for every unit type. Nightguard vs L Units, Darkelf Assassins vs S Units, Nighcrawler vs M Units. With your strong cc support that was more than enough, even XL Units aka Harvester could get countered with Darkelf spam + Root.)
-> Rogan Kalye (If you think you won't be able to counter Harvester fast enough with Darkelf Assassin spam (Harvy can get very tanky with lifeweaving or unholy power) Rogan is your choice! He can create cc chains with his ability to give you tons of time to deal with the Harvester. But aside from that he was pretty useless ...)
-> Ghostspears (As a counter unit outclassed by Darkelf assassins & Nightcrawler. But there is still use for this card! It can be pretty decent against pure Fire (Fire has strong M counters, but litereally only M Units and a S Unit with M Counter damage is pretty decent against that).
I don't feel like there was much more viable stuff (maybe I forgot something, dnno). There are also some weird cards with good deck-synergy like dyrad greed, but that's not the most serious stuff. For T3 you have alot of choices. Just try to keep in mind that Ashebone with cc support is super strong and you have to be able to counter juggernaut (strong XL counter) and you have to be able to pressure against timeless one defences (XL Unit or basenuke).
Just as an example: This is the SN deck I used to play:
Nightcrawler, Darkelf-assassins, Amii Phantom, Shadow Phoenix, Aura of Corruption, Ensnaring Roots, Curse of Oink, Hurricane, Rogan Kayle
T3:
Ashebone, Fathom Lord, Mo, Revenge
Matchups:
Bandits: pretty easy matchup for T2. Bandits doesn't really have any superior units, but have superior CC which gives you a massive advantage.
Pure Nature: Nature struggles alot against Burrower. If you have problems against Nature, just include them. Should be a very easy matchup then. But Shadow is superior to nature in T1 (especially with phase tower) so you can get massive early leads to snowball or even finish the game straight.
Stonekin: Amii Phantom makes one of the hardest matchups for you pretty simple. But the matchup gets still super annoying if you fall behind at any point. Try to get a T1 advantage since Shadow can deal very will with Frost and Nature.
Shadow Frost: Shadow Nature does pretty well into Shadow Frost, but you have to pressure constantly. Otherwise you won't be able to do anything against Stormsinger defense and end up against the invincible Shadow Frost T3. Nightcrawler + Darkelf Assassins + CC support are your way to go!
Pure Frost: Not really difficult. Nightguard will deal with wareagles -> you have better cc to get rid of the nighguard. And that's it ... play some Darkelf assasins to round up the unit composition and smash your opponent.
Pure Shadow: Can get a little bit tricky, because shadow mages are superior to your units. Amii Phantom can deal with single ones, Shadow phoenix + nightcrawler-nasty can delete magespam+nether warp. Use Rogan Kayle if you get issues against Harvester. Skeleton Warriors can help very much to win the T1!
Shadow Nature: The mirror matchup is pretty weird (much unit spam). Shadow Phoenix can help you alot to deal with that.
Fire Frost: Nightguard helps alot to deal with shield-drakes or shield stuff in general. Can get pretty difficult to attack against fire frost (Stormsinger + Lavafield gives you a hard time).
Fire Nature: This deck has an advantge over your one. Lavafield is annoying an in addition to that Fire Nature has stronger support for the skyfire drake compared to Fire Frost which makes it even harder to play this matchup. The T1 doesn't save you this time since Fire is able to match Shadow and Sunderer can get annoying at some point.
Pure Fire: Honestly my most hated matchup (okay I hate pure Fire in general, but that's a different story). Cliffdancer are soooo annoying on some maps and you don't have a real counter for that - you are forced to play AoC, which is super expensive. You have to win this matchup early. Ghostspears can help here, but if the Fire player gets in the postition to attack you you are doomed. Wildfire supports attacks super well and it gets really painful to play against that. Playing a short T1 against Fire helps often, because your Units are cheaper and your cc is also cheaper than his damage aoe spells. Stay at a low power level and finish your opponent asap.
Also YaBro0
Radical pointed out that certain cards give you an advantage versus certain decks and that you can play without cards many consider to be must haves. The thing is that Radical was one of the top players of the game (and I don`t mean the top 10 players that got in top 10 in the last month of the game since that was pretty easy) so he can easily play very effective without cards like burrower and lifeweaving (which really is unnecessary in high ranked games). But since you`re no high ranked player there`s no need to play an effective deck that is very hard for a beginner to handle. So I'll try to name the must haves in shadow/nature deck and then name some common cards and what their advantanges in certain matchups are so you can try to figure out what suits you best.
T1
Dreadcharger / witch claws (if you don't have the cash for dreadcharger)
Forsaken
Nox troopers
Nightguard
Nasty surprise
T2
Ensnaring roots
Curse of oink
Hurricane
Surge of light
Aura of Corruption
Darkelf assassins
Nightcrawler
T3
Is completely up to you and I won't point out this, because you have so many options
In theory these cards are enough to play shadow/nature effectively and you still have 8 slots left. In the following I'll try to mention cards I would highly recommend you to play up to cards that are very uncommon to play since they are weaker or harder to use in order.
Motivate
The strongest buff for a shadow/nature deck. Your units are cheap and your strenght is to attack multiple bases due to your swift attack options. Very strong in every tier and the best buff you could possibly have. You should play it.
@SilenceKiller99 Amii-Phantom
As I said before this card is extremely powerful. First of all it is a decent ranged m/m counter which slows down units and good to play with roots. Now to the crazy part. It is able to switch to a swift melee unit which has the ability to unable ranged attacks and abilities of attacked units for 10 secs. This makes it a counter for every ranged ground unit in the game from T1 to T4. Due to your cc's you'll nearly always be able to get your hits of and unable ranged attacks. Compare this card to mauler (75e) which has the same ability with the difference that Amii-Phantom is swift and costs 60e and has the possibility to become a ranged unit at any time. Being a swift unit makes this extremly more powerful, because most units won't be able to run away. Very powerful and definatly a great option.
Burrower
A swift basenuker which is spamable. Most powerful when you attack multiple bases with motivate. On a higher skilllevel you could play without them but on a beginner and advanced level this will become your most powerful attack and even in highranked matched your opponents will struggle against this.
Shadow Phonix
Great unit and most useful vs Pure shadow. Nasty + Phoenix can be a very good method to defend and a good unit to cast in a AoC vs mass units. It can be very powerful combined with embalser's shrine but a bit harder to pull of but if you're able to pull it of you will most likely nuke some bases. Many beginner's have the problem to miss the moments to play this card or to overuse it but it is very powerful if you're able to use it right.
Ghost spears
A great unit vs pure fire in which matchup you will struggle even more as a beginner. Due to its high life points it a great nasty unit and is great method for beginners to defend. Don't play this unit if you already play Amii-Phantom, there's no reason to play 3 m-conters in T2.
Phase Tower
A good add if you have problem's dealing with nature or frost in T1 since this card is usually a auto win vs nature T1. It will also add a good defense if you want to play T1 vs T2 since you can port it to different bases but depends on the map.
Skeleton warriors
Gives you a very good advantage in a shadow mirror and is also of great use vs fire. Since you will play vs shadow or fire most of the times, this card adds more to a deck than it looks at first.
Embalser's shrine
Becomes very powerful with shadow phoenix (remember wrecking Radical with this :D) and most powerful at wellclusters. The problem I mentioned is it might be hard for beginners to play this combination but is certainly very powerful but its use can depend on the map. You could also use it with Furance of Flesh and spam burrowers and/or phoenixes but won't ussually work vs advanced players.
Spirit hunters
This is usually a good s-unit and mass unit counter. But vs s units you have the stronger darkelfs and vs mass units you already have enough counter options. You could still play this effective but usually you'll have better options.
Rogan Kayle
His cc's will add some defense motly in the lategame and best if you struggle vs harvester.
Life weaving
On a advanced level I wouldn't reccomend this but a lower level many people tend to not use their energy enough when in offense or overuse cc's and heals. This is good easy way to support mostly split burrower attacks or your T3. Just don't overuse it.
Mark of the keeper
I wanted to mention this so bad No one really plays this card and it's useless vs fire. But this card is a defensive monster and can also be played in offense vs an AoC of your opponent. But you'll think twice about binding 70e in one base. Also depends on matchup and map.
Dryad (green)
Can be combined with Darkelf assassins to enable their debuff. The problem is that many factions have a way to deal with mass s-units without split. But it strong vs shadow/frost since you can prevent nasty's with cc's and we all know how often we met and will meet shadow/frost
Portal nexus
Simply said it's like a railling banner only way harder to use and combined with more risks. But what many people forget is that you can play it in AoC of your opponent. If your able to get it up in a 20m radius of your opponent well/orb istantly destroy it and everything your opponent has is down. The problem is that it is extremely situational, ussually you won't be able to get any use of this card but since so many people play shadow splashes you could give this a try
Envenom/Parasite
Is useful vs Airunits especially if you have problems dealing with skyfire drake. Luckily many people even in high ranked don't know how to deal with this card.
Decomposer
Highly depends on the map. Can be very useful at closewell situation in T1 an T2 and at keypositions. Requires a decent amount of micro and is not easy to play effectively.
Tunnel
Can be played with burrower. Attack bases and once your burrower goes low on health you use the ability to port it back to your Tunnel. Hard to pull of effectively and requires decent amount of micro.
Mauler
The way weaker version of Amii-Phantom. If you don't want to play Amii-Phantom for any reason you could use this to minimize your disadvantage vs stonekin.
Puhhh... I tried to mention many cards and many varities that are actually playable. Of course some of them are stronger than others but the main thing is what suits you best and in which matchups you struggle most. Of course there's no way to make you a perfect deck without any experience but I hope that I could help you when the day comes.
And Hirroo
He had no mauler? Is it really safe to just depend on the NG? Isn't there a long cooldown on the ability?
The maulereffect of the amiiphantom. If you use it in meele it stops ranged attacks.
Yes there is a cooldown on the ability. Nightguard is still an autoinclude in s/n or pure shadow purely for tier 2. While ng also helps in a t1 vs t2 battle or sometimes vs sunderer the most value will come out of the tier t2 fights.
S/N has nature ccs and can easily stop the Ng or the L unit from escaping. Its probably the strongest deck to play Ng into.
Just like Ng is great in s/n such is aoc + cc. This allows to easily trade efficient against costly balls of units making an L counter unnecessary in many cases.
The only real L counter would be mauler and he would only be more valuable against non ranged units since there a amiiphantom already does the job of stopping attacks.
The amount of L counter mechanics in that deck are more than enough.
Pure Nature:
This deck has two main playstyles: the root network, and the “lamer” void manipulation. A lot of players consider pure nature to be broken because it’s very good in some situations, but very bad in other situations. Nonetheless, it’s a fun deck to play (especially in friendlies, when both parties agree not to lame).
T2 Cards Overview
Pure Nature defies categorization the way I’ve been doing it previously. I can (and will) still group them according to counters, but most nature cards fit in the specialty category. Most of nature’s counters are just cards that pair well with the cc that works best against the cc of choice.
· Small
o Energy Parasite—technically a S counter, but please no. There are better things to do with this creature.
o Ghostspears—stat-wise, some of the best t2 nature units. Deep One might be slightly more efficient, but ghostspears cost less, can switch between M and S counters (super useful), and since they are a squad, they can also hit all the members of an S squad, killing them faster. More than likely, however, you’ll just use ghostspears as an M counter because hurricane is great against S units. Also, melee units pair slightly worse with hurricane than ranged ones do, because hurricane moves the S units around a little and your melee units have to walk around to catch them.
o Spirit hunters—you’ll want the green ones, and they’re really great all-around counters. I mention them here because they are especially good against a large army, and if the enemy is going to spam a unit, it will likely be a small unit (probably Darkelf Assassins, honestly). They’re also good for getting a finishing shot off on S units, to kill the whole squad at once. Usually you’ll play spirit hunters in conjunction with hurricane or ensnaring roots.
o Viridya—sure, I guess she’s an S counter. Her knockback and dps isn’t great, and her passive healing isn’t special to you because you have the more useful surge of light. She’s more useful for here treespirit ability, because nature has no M/M unit.
o Windweavers—these are still pretty good against S units, with 960 dps. I’m not suggesting you should spawn them new (although it is possible to continue using them in t2 instead of spirit hunters, I would not recommend this), but if you’ve got any left over, they do a great job.
· Medium
o Ghostspears—because of their great stats, they will be your main M counter. As noted previously, they can change to deal extra damage to S or M units. One of nature’s biggest weakness is that this card is the only viable M counter.
o Parasite swarm—countering M units is totally not what this card is for, but it’s actually quite viable because of the lack of better M counters for the faction.
o Spikeroot—this card is really too expensive and too weak to use without a root network. With only 1200 base damage, it deals 1800 damage to M units. By contrast, Deep One deals 1650 base damage. In other words, don’t spawn this guy simply to use as a M counter.
o Rogan Kayle—he is most useful to make unbreakable cc chains. It’s super cost-inefficient, but sometimes you have to do what you have to do. He’s slightly useful as the only M/M nature can use, but his stats-to-cost ratio and unspammability is not good enough to warrant using him for that. His passive is also not very good for nature because it has naturally low dps. That said, the Rogan + Deep One wandering duo can be very strong against some decks on some maps (especially decks without a cc).
o Viridya—her treespirits are pretty good M/M units, but they cost a lot and come up a bit too slowly to be counted on for defense.
· Large
o Deep One—I think most players consider the green affinity to be better, but both affinities are viable. This is easily one of the best units in terms of stats. Most players would rather use it to attack buildings and force the enemy to engage it in a fight, but they’re still quite good for defense, especially with their ability. It’s especially nice, if the enemy uses something like a mountaineer or Lost Reaver, to use the Deep One to catch the enemy away from the well and then kill it. Then you’ll already have a Deep One spawned and ready to agro.
o Mauler—I like this card in other decks, but I think it’s a bit redundant in a pure nature deck. Deep One is such a fantastic unit that he can pretty much fill all your L-countering needs. If you really need to disable an enemy unit’s special ability, you have cc options available. Of course, if you choose the honorable root network style of playing this deck and don’t use Deep Ones, mauler becomes much more important.
o Moon—not useful at all for Pure Nature. You don’t need her healing, and you already have great L counters.
o Parasite Swarm—the other reason you don’t really need L counters. This guy can just take over the enemy L units! (He can take over other units as well, but you generally want to take over high-cost units, and those tend to be L). Obviously there are a lot of counters to parasite swarm, so don’t use them alone, but they are a very nice tool to have.
· X-Large
o Spirit Hunters—can hit and run, while still doing almost full dps.
o Deep One—good stats for power cost, and doesn’t get knocked around like ghostspears do. You really just have a hard time against XL units, so just use CC liberally, maybe use some offensive spells, maybe use a Rogan cc-chain, and attack the XL units with your highest dps units (i.e. Deep One). Usually pure nature avoids the XL problem by preventing the opponent from going t3, or escalating to t3 first.
· Siege
o Burrowers—these guys are fairly cheap (read: spammable) and have good stats. Their most useful feature is the swift. These guys are pretty necessary for any nature deck.
o Deep One—basically it just has OP stats. Use it to hit wells and keep it alive with heals. If you have one up, it essentially costs 80 power to make a “new” one because you can just heal it all the way.
o Spikeroot—these are used as base nukers, but you need the slowly built-up root network for them to be much good.
· Specialty
o Energy Parasite—step one in void manipulation, which is the main selling point of pure nature. Many factions cannot counter these efficiently, and it’s often a viable strategy to instantly go t2 and spam these.
o Mauler—useful for negating a special ability, as you know by now
o Parasite Swarm—for 150 power, you can take over another creature. This is useful for several reasons. For one, it’s simply power efficient to take over any creature that cost 80 or more power. Also, you get an unbound unit. When you take over something with parasite swarm, you get the void power back from your parasite swarm (because it dies) and then you have a unit that gives no void refund. For instance, if you used a parasite swarm to take over an enemy burrower, you would have 135 more void power and your opponent would have 63 more void power than if you simply spawned a burrower. If you take over a strong unit with parasite swarm, you get a huge advantage because nature is very good at keeping strong units alive.
o Rogan Kayle—cc chains are his biggest use in this deck.
o Spikeroot—connects to the root network.
o Spirit Hunters—as previously discussed, they are an all-around counter.
Pure Nature is probably the faction with the largest number of useful buildings, particularly in the root network build.
· Breeding grounds—it sounds like a good idea, but it really doesn’t make much of a difference. In 2v2 it has slightly more use because of larger power levels from both players, but in 1v1 it’s probably a waste of a deck slot. This reduces the power cost and void refund—which is good, sure—but you need to spend over 280 power in units to make up for the power investment, not including the time investment, and it’s usually just better to take another well than spawn a breeding grounds.
· Living tower—this building has great stats, and only gets better with a root network connected. These are great for defense while you set up other root network creatures, and it’s pretty common for someone to build a large base of them and root nexus to a spikeroot.
· Mark of the Keeper—this is highly situational, but has very strong uses. Many factions have a terrible time attacking with melee. It pairs very well with roots. One thing I’ve heard of is to trick a shadow player into making an Aura of Corruption, and then building a Mark of the Keeper to prevent any more unit summons at the well.
· Root Nexus—if you’re doing a root-style deck, these are essential. The buff is nice enough that I’ve seen some players take both affinities.
· Shrine of Memory—a fantastic card that gives you a massive amount of power. Often times nature players will turtle, build and defend a Shrine of Memory, and then come out of nowhere with a huge power advantage. There is no real downside to this card, and it makes a common t3 strategy, Mo, possible.
· Tunnel—if you used it in t1, you will probably use it even more in t2. The question is, why were you using it in t1?
Nature also has some of the best spells in the game. There aren’t really any good spells you get from double nature, but you got some awesome units and buildings, so stop complaining.
· Burrow Ritual—perhaps there are scenarios were it is worth the power, but I can’t think of how you’re going to spend 2 deck slots (this + tunnel) for something that will be useful, but not necessary, once every ten games.
· Creeping Paralysis—it makes sense that this would be the best cc in the game, right? Not so much. Yes, paralyze is the only cc effect that allows you to attack the cc’d unit with no consequences (freeze does half damage, and units wake up from sleep or oink), but the spell is very telegraphed. In addition, you should already have oink, roots, and hurricane, and you’re probably overdoing it if 1/5 of your deck is entirely devoted to cc spells.
· Curse of Oink—this is better than paralysis, because it happens instantly. You can still focus on units to attack them one at a time, or you can ignore them and attack the enemy base instead. This card does not synergize well with Spirit Hunters, however.
· Ensnaring Roots—great cc for melee units. It’s super cheap and lasts a long time.
· Hurricane—great cc for S units. This also deals a small amount of damage, so I’ve seen nature players use it to prevent a well from repairing.
· Envenom—pure nature is probably the only deck that gets use out of this card, but it’s solid for killing a single unit that you’re having trouble with (usually a buffed skyfire drake). You can usually try to take over the unit with parasite swarm, but it’s nice to have an option if you don’t have enough power to parasite swarm.
· Parasite—it’s really not worth the power or the deck slot because it has such low dps. Spirit hunters can usually do the trick. But if you need to use this card as a crutch (pair with roots), no one is judging you.
· Ray of Light—maybe good for PvE, but it’s just too slow for PvP
· Surge of Light—literally the biggest reason to play a nature orb. You should be using this card as much as possible.
T3 Cards Overview
I’m going to focus on t3 for the non-root style pure nature deck, because the root decks often use minimal or no t3 because they use so much power in t2. Nature-Nature-Fire used to be a very strong combo because it allowed sun reaver, but sun reaver is not good anymore. 2 Nature orbs and something else is all you’ll need for t3, so it’s really your choice. Some players prefer to just use a 3rd nature orb for security, others might play something like a frost orb just for shield building. I’d recommend t3 shadow, because ashbone pyros are extremely strong when healed.
For this overview, I’ll just look at Pure Nature cards.
· Offensive Cards
o Forest’s Vim—either way you look at it, this is an offensive card, designed to bolster your root network. It’s not super useful without a massive root network, however, and you’ll have won the game already if you’ve gotten that up. I don’t think it’s worth a deck slot.
o Abyssal Warder—this costs a lot and has really low dps. Sure, it’s hard to kill, but many factions can just ignore it and hit you harder with that 250 power.
o Brannoc—obviously he’s good, but he’s a bit redundant as an XL counter because Fathom Lords are amazing. If you want an XL unit, I’d suggest Mo.
o Curse Well—don’t be a lamer, and this doesn’t really synergize with Pure Nature. Even root decks are NOT defensive, contrary to popular thought. Root decks are an aggressive, constricting style of play that rewards investment. Curse well is a hit-and-run tactic. One of the reasons this is hard for you is that your t3 swift unit (drones) cost much more than something like silverwind lancers.
o Deepcoil Worm—many players like this card, and I’ve certainly seen it used, but it’s just really squishy. The siege dps is much better than Abyssal Warder’s, but you’d still have more damage and health if you just spawn 2 Fathom Lords.
o Enlightenment—Yes, this card is stronger than just going t4 for a lot of reasons (I’m not sure how it compares to Amii monument, but I’d rather have enlightenment). You can look at one of my math guides for why enlightenment is good. Sometimes people pair enlightenment with Batariel, although that’s just too much power for me. I would just use earthshaker. Consider if you want 2 decks slots for a 350 power combo that essentially instant kills a single base.
o Equilibrium—Nah, this is for PvE. There don’t tend to be a lot of units for either player, which really makes this spell less useful.
o Fathom Lord—One of the best t3 cards in the game. He has super solid stats and a powerful ability. This will likely be your most-used t3 card.
o Lord Cyrian—Pure Nature is pretty much the only deck that can even think of using him because of how much he costs, but Mo is just better (because of Stampede)
o Mo—he’s not the best XL unit in general, primarily because of his cost, but he does have really good stats. As a nature player, you should be able to get astronomically high power levels and be able to keep him alive, so many strong players recommend Mo as a Pure Nature t3 unit. He has stampede, which is a very strong skill.
o Razorleaf—the problem is that this card as really low dps without a root network. If you have to build a root network up (not to mention that razorleaf just walks really slowly), you’re going to be too slow in a t3 fight. If you already have a solid root network up, why didn’t you win in t2? I can think of only a few scenarios where I would like to have razorleaf instead of, say, Brannoc or Mo.
o Revenge—I rarely see this in PvP, because it’s more of a PvE card, but it’s really not bad for what it is. It can help with damage output as well, similar to lifeweaving, but on a mass scale. The problem is that revenged units can be cc’d, and nature doesn’t usually have a problem keeping units alive because of heals.
o Swamp Drake—useful for attacking, not because it has good stats, but because it’s an air unit. Many people don’t bring anti-air to t3, and this card is difficult to counter. It can also do hit-and-runs, and general annoyance. However, such techniques require a lot of micro, and are generally too slow to be worth it. The cc sleep is also much better for offense than defense, but sleep is pretty much the worst cc in general.
o Sylvan Gate—yes, that’s a lot of healing. But towers are especially suspect in t3 because they are so slow. Additionally, they can’t move, so your opponent will just attack you somewhere else.
o Thornbark—if you really want something else in t3 for roots . . . maybe you can use this. It just has really subpar stats. On the plus side, it is one of the few t3 M counters, and silverwind lancers are probably the most-played t3 card.
· Defensive Cards
o Drones—these are going to be your best t3 creatures for L defense. Which, in a way, is rather sad. Drones have good stats, but they can also get knocked back and they cost a lot.
o Parasite Swarm—even though it’s a t2, it can still be one of the best way to counter things like ashbone pyro. In theory, you can even use them to take over silverwind lancers.
o Fathom Lord—good stats, and they are especially useful for countering XL units. The paralyze is what makes them so good for defense.
o Mindweaver—again, a building. This will just prevent your opponent from sending XL units your way; he’ll either attack another base, or take a power advantage because you’ve bound power and then attack with many cheaper units.
o Swamp Drake—it can be good for kiting XL units, especially with root, but you can actually chain cc XL units with fathom lord, so I really don’t see much use for swamp drake as a defensive card. It is, however, your primary anti-air unit. Thornbarks have bad stats, and Lost Vigil, Northland Drake, and Spitfire (the 3 most common flying t3 units) cost too much for parasite swarm to take over.
o Thunderstorm—a spell of massive destruction. Many players feel that if you have reached a point where your opponent has amassed a large army, you’ve already lost. That army should be split to attack 2 places, which protects a bit against thunderstorm. Still, it’s quite good with roots and provides a great defense if your opponent tries to rush you with t2 units as you t3.
o Timeshifter Spirit—you can just play this guy to an enemy base, and then it is completely defenseless. It’s really powerful, but many players view it like a crutch.
o Wheel of Gifts—this is pretty much only for PvE (or maybe the deviant 2v2 team). You don’t have enough units to make this cost effective.
· Spammy Cards
o Drones—these are swift. And they’re pretty much your cheapest cards, at 120 power. The role of a spammy unit is no so imperative in a pure nature deck, because you don’t really have many devastating spells you can drop on your opponent. If you decide to go the route of enlightenment + t4, or curse well, then spammy cards become important and your deck will suffer because drones are so expensive.
o Fathom Lord—not because it’s cheap, but you should have a lot of power and these units are really good. Be careful of the lack of charges though.
Building the Deck
Since this is pure deck, we know which t1 we’re going to play. T1 is a very important phase of the game, and if you lose the game in t1, you won’t get to play your t2 cards. However, I’m of the philosophy that t1 should be decided by the type of t2 we play (for instance, treespirits would be stronger in a root deck) so as usual, I’m going to start in t2.
I’m first going to add the strongest cards that Pure Nature has. After all, if we didn’t want to play these cards, we should probably play a different faction. I’m also going to make what I believe is the strongest/easiest to play Pure Nature deck, rather than a roots deck. Our strongest Pure Nature cards are: Deep One, Parasite Swarm, Energy Parasite, and Shrine of Memory. You should either be playing these four cards, a root deck, or a different faction. I’m going to use the green Deep One, because it is a bit better for defense or for killing a specific unit.
Pure Nature also has a few no-brainer spells: you should add Surge of Light, Oink, Ensnaring Roots, and Hurricane basically any time you play a nature t2. Many people want to add creeping paralysis because they assume it is the best cc in the game, but it’s really not. The paralyze effect is the best cc in the game, but the t2 spell is bad because it gives a warning before things get paralyzed. This makes oink better. I might consider envenom and parasite to kill things such as skyfire drakes, but spirit hunters generally do more damage over time, and I’m not sure I’ll have the deck slots.
Now that we have these core units and spells, let’s fill out the rest of the deck. We have hurricane to deal with S units, but we still need a way to kill them. Nature actually has no t2 S counters (besides parasite swarm, which really doesn’t count because of its abysmal dps; and Viridya, but I don’t want to commit her to my deck yet). Ghostspears can turn into a S counter, so I’ll add them.
For M counters, Ghostspears will still be our main one. Parasite swarm also does a pretty good job. I have the temptation to add Spikeroot, but I don’t think we’ll have deck slots for him. I also considered Rogan Kayle, but his damage buff isn’t as strong with pure nature because we don’t have high dps units. His cc is also a bit redundant, because we have oink and roots. Even if you were trying for a cc chain in t3, you also have paralyze from fathom lords, so I think his cc is just overkill.
For L counters, we already have Deep One. Let’s throw in Mauler to be safe, and we can remove him later if we need to. If you notice, most of our counters are not really satisfactory. They’re generally weak and/or expensive. Adding in Spirit Hunters to our deck will help us out a bit here. They’re equally good against every unit type, and they’re also very good against large armies (for which we have no defense yet).
Our deck currently looks like: Deep One, Parasite Swarm, Energy Parasite, Shrine of Memory, Surge of Light, Curse of Oink, Ensnaring Roots, Hurricane, Ghostspears, Mauler, Rogan Kayle. The last 2 are tentative and will likely be removed.
We don’t have a dedicated XL counter; but then, we also don’t have access to lyrish knight. Spirit hunters and deep ones, with liberal use of cc’s, will have to work to kill XL’s. Rogan will help a lot in this department, and is a major argument to bring him. Another way we can combat XL units is to just hit harder somewhere else. (I’m talking about a burrower spam, if you didn’t notice). Burrowers are one of the best siege units in the entire game, so it’s about time we added them.
I think this gives us a well-rounded t2, so let’s focus on our t1. I’d like to try to save 4 deck slots for t3 (because Enlightenment is really cool, so I need a t4 card to use it with and at least 2 t3 units in case I don’t get the power for Enlightenment), which leaves 5-7 cards for t1. I think we can work with that, but I’m also willing to compromise on the t3 I had planned. I’d rather have a solid t1 than an overwhelming t3, because Pure Nature struggles in t3 without a power advantage, or at least a lot of power in general, and other decks (double frost splash t3, *cough cough*) also scale up with a lot of power.
As a general rule of thumb, Swiftclaw is the best nature swift unit (it also has crazy dps and even has the highest dps against M units in t2). If you are taking a minimalist t1, amazon tends to be better; however, we won’t be taking a minimalist t1. Windweavers are also essential, as our archers. Dryad is very strong because of the damage reduction and the sleep, and Shaman is good for its heals. I also want to add Spearmen because they are strong against shadow, and this nicely completes my 5 t1 cards. I might consider adding envenom, primal defender, or treespirit, but I would have to drop mauler for any one of those and treespirts are kinda lame. The blue dryad also has its uses, but again; I think I’d rather have mauler.
So the deck now has Swiftclaw, Windweavers, Dryad (green), Shaman, Spearman, Surge of Light, Ensnaring Roots, Hurricane, Deep One, Burrower, Parasite Swarm, Energy Parasite, Shrine of Memory, Oink, Ghostspear, Mauler, and Rogan Kayle.
This leaves us with our 4 t3 cards. I really want to use Enlightenment, because this is pretty much the only chance I’ll have to use it. Mo would probably be stronger because it saves a deck slot, but this is still fine. I just need to make sure I stall the game out into high-power situations. To combo with enlightenment, you really only have 2 choices: earthshaker, or bloodhorn. Earthshaker cost about 400 power to instantly nuke a base. If you are going to play a unit, it will probably total close to 600 power. If your opponent has a nature splash, you will get cc’d continuously. In a 2v2, I once saw xHighTech play t3 fire so he could enlightenment + construct, and then disenchant the construct. I feel like that’s a lot of deck slots to spend, when you can just play a red bloodhorn that has stampede and can disenchant itself. I’m going to go with the Bloodhorn because I only have a few enlightenments before I run out of charges.
Speaking of splashing to a different color t3, what is the best color to splash to? You gain nothing by playing 3 nature orbs (well, you can get timeshifter spirit—which is pretty good—or abyssal warder . . . which is abysmal). We need to use Fathom Lord because it’s just a great card. This does not put any restrictions on our third orb. Traditionally, people splash to fire because of sun reaver. However, that got nerfed to uselessness, and I believe that fire-nature is the worst t3 in the game. You might splash to shadow for extra siege damage with ashbone pyros, but I think Fathom Lord does a good enough job as siege. No, we’re only missing one role in this deck, and that’s the role of a swift spammy unit. Drones do a fair job at this, and there is something to be said for the safety that 3 nature orbs offers. However, I propose that there is a better spammy card: Silverwind Lancers. They’re cheaper, which means more can be at each base. They also have more charges. They don’t have as much damage, but your parasite swarm should do a pretty good job protecting you against L units, regardless of your t3. So the choice is between staying pure nature, which is safer because you go to full t2 if your first monument drops, or of going t3 frost and getting a slightly more useful card. I choose to go frost for this deck.
With regards to the roles of cards in this deck, but @RadicalX and @Hiroo have offered a few nuggets of wisdom. @RadicalX said:
T1
Swiftclaw -> best swift unit
Spearman -> strong stats, good vs nature & shadow
Windweavers -> multishot insane vs small units, essential vs shadow
Dryad -> super versatile, strong abilities, decent splash damage
Shaman -> core unit against nature, very versatile unit, free heal is always good
Hurricane -> s counter-cc
Root -> melee counter-cc
Surge of light -> main reason to play nature
T2
Energy Parasite -> core T2 unit, gives you free power advantages
Shrine of Memory -> Important void manipulation, allows very strong power plays
Deep One -> insane stats & sick L counter, very efficient with cc & heal support against everything (except air units)
Burrower -> Strong Siege unit - allows fast & powerful attacks
Ghost Spears -> main M counter since Pure Nature doesn't have a M/M T2 unit
Spirit Hunter -> Allround counter, dps super high against multiple units
Curse of Oink -> top tier cc
Parasite Swarm -> Your opponent has powerful units? Just take them away, getting a drake or maybe even a T3 unit can be devastating for your opponent since nature provides good support for strong units
T3
Drones -> Main L counter
Fathom Lord -> Main XL counter
Mo -> Basenuke
Apparently I don't remember the last card atm, I'll add it later, but this is the best possible pure nature 1v1 deck (apparently a treespirit T1 would be an upgrade, but treespirit is lame & that's why I didn't mention it)
Best regards
RadicalX
Hiroo said:
Parasite is simply not worth the slot or power.
Envenom is a solid choice to deal with ravaged skyfire drakes. To run 4 cards t3 in pure nature for 1v1 is not a very smart idea since frostsplashes or better basenuke-decks outscale you at that point if your Mo does not finish. Thunderstorm does little to change that.
The last slot for pure nature has some cards. Breeding grounds, envenom, or primal defender to deal with overextending magespams or t2 rushs vs long nature t1 or spikeroot for those situations where this card is worth the cost (or treespirits but let’s not talk about those) are all viable options.
Reality Check
How does our deck do in our double check?
1. Defending walls
2. Defending t3 rushes (or harvester)
3. Defending cheap spams for spread-out agro
4. Performing cheap spams for spread-out agro
5. Defending a full-on attack at one place
6. Performing a full-on attack at one place
7. Preventing a large standing army
8. Building a large standing army
1. Defending walls is a piece of cake for you. You’ve got both hurricane and burrowers, so we really don’t even need to continue talking about it.
2. Defending t3 rushes with L units is one of your specialties. Assuming that your opponent doesn’t have power for XL units, you can use parasite swarm to take them all out. With enough power, you can defend almost any non-XL attack. Additionally, mauler does great against ashbone pyros. For harvesters, things get a bit more tricky. You’ll have to use cc a lot, and spirit hunters will be good for dealing ranged damage. Envenom might help you out here. Rogan is also going to come in handy because of his cc, allowing an infinite cc-chain. All in all, nature is one of the worst factions to rush t3 against. However, you’re not going to fare too well against t3 XL units, so make sure you avoid that as much as possible (if your opponent can t3 and spawn a juggernaut before your t3 is up, that’s your fault).
3. This is easily your biggest weakness. Your counters are good, but they are slow and expensive. This is the reason you need to have a lot of power. There’s nothing you can really add to your deck to fix this problem.
4. You’ve got burrowers and some support for them, so yeah. Mostly this will be useful when you have a huge power advantage because of energy parasite or shrine of memory.
5. You should be fine here. Spirit hunters, Deep Ones, and loads of cc. Granted, there’s very little that being Pure Nature adds here that a nature splash doesn’t have, except that you should generally have more power. Parasite might help in this department.
6. Your full-on attacks can get massive. You can often run in with a single Deep One and spam heals. You can spawn burrowers for more damage, and you can use these as a distraction for energy parasites.
7. You should be pretty good at this, because you can root units as they try to escape. You also have your choice of cc: roots, hurricane, or oink, so should be able to fight on your own terms.
8. This is one of your specialties. With good micro and cc’s, you should be able to let your units escape right before they die. You can also heal to make sure all your units stay alive.
The key to this deck is having a lot of power. Since this is a pure deck, we don’t have a ton of options to explore, and I feel like we’re in a solid position.
Matchups Check
· Pure Fire
o I think this is, by far, your hardest matchup. What type of units does Pure Fire spam? M units. What type of counter do you most lack? M counters! Additionally, pure fire doesn’t need to come in close to your well to hit it with firedancers. Since your main mode of defense is keeping units away from your wells, this is a problem. It’s even difficult to use energy parasite, because Skyfire Drake is one of the best counters to it. In the games I’ve seen of nature players being successful against fire players, they often rely on parasite swarms. There’s nothing we can add to help us in the Pure Fire matchup (except changing decks) and as far as Pure Nature decks go, rogan kayle should make this one just a bit better than average against Pure Fire. If you really, really want some additional help against Pure Fire, envenom and parasite are good against skyfire drakes and fire dancers.
· Fire-Nature
o Firestalkers really destroy you, but few people carry them. Again, it’s the same principle of nature’s defense revolving around keeping units away. Firestalkers are especially terrifying for you in a fire-nature deck because the fire-nature player can use cc to keep his fire stalker safe, but you can’t use cc to keep his firestalkers away from your well. This makes you near defenseless (your only option is parasite swarm) if you don’t see his firestalker coming from very far away. Luckily for you, almost no one carries firestalker, but you can add parasite to you deck if you know someone is going to use that tactic. Fire nature is tough to deal with because he can also spam burrowers to each of your bases, but his burrower counters are better than yours. He can also finish off wells and units with eruption, while saving his own units with heals. All is not lost, however. By playing Pure Nature you’ve already accepted that your faction loses t2 on equal power to most decks, but you can manipulate power so that you’re not fighting on even ground. If you can stall out the game until Shrine of Memory kicks in, or if you last until a high-power t3, you should have an easy time from there. Effective use of Parasite Swarm is key.
· Fire-Frost
o Again, many fire cards like skyfire drake are difficult for you to deal with. Also, stormsinger renders your parasite swarms ineffective. However, you do have one large advantage when dealing with Fire Frost: your opponent will likely rely heavily on mountaineer or skyfire drakes. If you can catch one of them with parasite swarm, it often means a won game for you. Additionally, Fire-Frost sacrifices some aggressive power to get frost defense, which means a greater chance that you’ll survive until your Shrine of Memory wins the game for you.
· Fire-Shadow
o Yes, I’m sorry, even bandits has an easier time against you. The hyper-aggressiveness of the faction can often overwhelm you before you get enough power to be efficient, and bandits doesn’t carry anything big enough to be worth taking over with parasite swarm (I mean, scythe fiends, but who wants those anyway?). Your best bet is probably to bait out a scythe fiend by using lots of ghostspears and spirit hunters and hurricane/oinking the darkelf assassins, and taking over the scythe fiends. Alternatively, you can use burrowers or deep ones to bait out one of the bandit fliers, and take them over. Bandits has a relatively difficult time killing L units, so you can also use that to your advantage (Deep Ones is one of the best L units in t2). Be prepared to use cc very proactively, because if your opponent gets a rallying banner up near your well, it’s probably as good as dropped. You also want to play a bit more aggressive against a bandit player, because if he isn’t defending his own base, he’s attacking yours (and you don’t want that).
· Pure Shadow
o Harvester is very difficult for you to deal with, but at the very least, you can perma-cc it. Shadow mages and nightcrawlers are pretty effective against burrowers, but Deep Ones destroys Pure Shadow. However, you also have a very difficult time countering shadow mages and nightcrawlers. Basically, whoever is defending, loses. This is one of the matchups where you can play aggressively, basically soloing with Deep One and healing him. You’ll want to try to skip that awkward range of power around 300, by timing your shrine of memory such that it skips to 400 or 500 and you can cc the harvester while you wait for t3 and fathom lords. Overall, Pure Shadow is one of your best matchups.
· Shadow Frost
o Pure Nature actually does respectably against Lost Souls. Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but I would go so far as to say that from the Lost Souls perspective, Pure Nature is the worst matchup. You have adequate tools to deal with the darkelf assassins/Lost Reaver/Mountaineer, and the only real problem is if someone rushes nightcrawlers the same way one might rush burrowers. But if you can defend the burrower spam, you should be able to defend the nightcrawler spam. Additionally, Shadow Frost players tend to be in the habit of playing to a high-powered t3, and with your bloodhorn, this caters exactly to your plans.
· Shadow Nature
o This can be pretty rough for you. Just accept that you’re going to have to deal with a lot of burrower and nightcrawler spam. Use a lot of cc, and be proactive in keeping those swift units away from your wells. Shadow Nature tends to struggle a little bit against L units without a pre-spawned nightguard, so use Deep One to provoke the nightguard and then make him bind power with that nightguard. Again, you’ll want to survive the early game to make it to that stage where you have all the power.
· Pure Nature
o There is very little difference between this Pure Nature deck and the standard one. Our t3 is a little bit stronger, and our t2 is a little better at defending against burrowers. If the game doesn’t end in t1 or t2 because of micro differences, it will probably come down to how much power you have in t3. This deck benefits from as much power as possible in t3. There is no deck that can outscale you. (Actually, that’s a lie. The only deck that can outscale you is a nature splash that runs earthshaker in t4 and can perma-cc your bloodhorn. But since that deck is worse than your deck against frost splashes, that type of deck is very rare).
· Stonekin
o Are you a lamer? If yes, rush t2 and play energy parasites. GG. As Aragorn once told me, he and Dekka had an agreement to play fair, otherwise the person who got t2 up first won. Stonekin can’t defend against energy parasite rushes, and Pure Nature can’t defend against burrower and razorshard rushes. Stonekin can slowly grind you to death in t2, but the attack is so slow that it will likely give you an opportunity to play t3, and even the best t2 can’t defend against a t4 unit with heals.
· Pure Frost
o This is almost definitely your easiest matchup. Just keep the Frost player from dominating the air, and you’ll be fine. Use parasite swarm aggressively to prevent him from using powerful air units like war eagle or skyelf templar (or mountaineer). You’ll want to use something like ghostspears to take out stormsingers. Deep Ones will be countered by lightblade, but ghostspears are also good at killing those. Mauler murderes defenders (and stormsingers) and Pure Frost basically has no offensive options. Win in t2 or win in t3, the choice is yours (although I do need to confess that 2 frost orbs is super strong in t3).
Final Touches:
I can’t say there are a ton of unexplored options, but you can play around with envenom, primal defender, parasite, and mo to see what helps you in the broader spectrum of matches. Keep in mind that the most common decks will be Shadow Frost, Pure Fire, and Fire Nature. After looking at our matchups, I’d be tempted to add parasite just because it can help with Pure Fire and (to a lesser extent) Fire Nature, but I ultimately feel that the card is too weak to warrant it. As for the t3, I know the conventional path is to take Mo, but I figure style is worth at least something and I can’t imagine losing many matches because of my t3 choice. That said, practical application in games will do more than any amount of theorizing.
Evolution of the Deck:
Comment below or shoot me a PM if you want to write this section!
Pure Frost:
Stonekin:
Before I go any further, let’s just clear up some nomenclature. If you’ll notice, I named this faction slightly differently than normal. I have a couple reasons for doing so. First and foremost, most people call it “Stonekin.” It’s also common to see “Lost Souls,” and “Bandits,” but it’s also common to see “fire-shadow” and “shadow-frost,” and sometimes “Amii” to refer to shadow-nature. You almost never seen anyone call fire-nature “twilight” because the twilight units are terrible. Stonkin units, on the other hand, are quite good. Also, with all the other factions, one starter faction typically dominates the other (this faction is listed first). With stonekin, it’s a lot harder to tell whether a player will start nature t1 or frost t1. (Bandits is also a bit difficult, which is why it’s probably the 2nd-most used term). But it’s rare to see people call stonekin “nature-frost,” or “frost-nature” (and there isn’t a consensus on which one it should be) so I’ll stick with the more common term from this point on.
What considerations should I make for 2v2?
Special thanks to @TBPeti, @RadicalX, @Hirooo, @LagOps, @Aragorn, @Taker, @YaBro0, @Morathyls . . . for their help in keeping this guide accurate.
Good job on this guide, i especially like the addition of a "new player experience" section. a lot of guids lack this section and i think it is really important since mostly new players need a guide.
You guys have some pretty impressive game knowledge there, on most points i can agree. The matchup ranking for bandits really depends on the deck build and since i am playing a quite different build, it is understandable that your ranking is a bit different than mine.
Since you allready have a NPE section, how about adding a sentence or two about how good a job a deck does in teaching you how to improve your play? I feel that some decks really don't help the player improve much, especially in low elos. For instance, lost souls is so forgiving, that you can just make your way through t2 somehow and then defeat your enemy with your powerfull t3. There is no real incentive to improve your t1/t2 play much and i often meet high ranked lost souls players who still just rely on t3 camp and categorically never take risks (even if the play would end the game).
On the other hand, fire/nature players seems to have a much better understanding and better mechanics and a more proactive playstyle on average. There are hardly any poor fire/nature players in high rank and the game teaches you a lot more about adapting to matchups, timing, defensive play and micromanagement (to some extend).
Due to this, while new players surely will have success with lost souls/pure shadow/ pure fire, i wouldn't reccomend these factions to new players (as strongly as this guide does), as they do not promote player improvement the way fire/nature does.
Why didnt you make a bug report about the trades not working? I only see one bug report of a one time crash when trading.
And if you make a bug report, please use the bug report template.
NAME: Loading screen freeze/match doesn't start SEVERITY: 1 LOCATION: (End of) Loading Screen, PvE random; also every other match (Battleground lvl 5 1 player) REPRODUCIBILITY: ALWAYS DESCRIPTION: Every time I start a new match, the loading screen does not finish to load as you can see on the screenshots below. This error started on both, my laptop and my PC about 1-2 hours ago. SCREENSHOT: ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: Might have to do with the latest updates?
Hi guys, just made a forum account to (like 95% of the ppl) tell u that u are still doing a great job.
I became a patreon since the day u made it, and i still am, and i will also keep supporting u guys.
The reason why after al those years i made this account is to also support you guys verbally and to let you know that there are alot of "grown-ups" not taking time to fill these forums with...chatter but who are also "hyped" ?
Good luck with pushing the last few bugs out of the window.
P.s some of you guys work more hours a week on this game then i do for my "boss", respect.
Hi there...
For those who are whining, I just want you to remember Skylord reborn is not a company, neither staff and dev are professionals.
They give their free time for this project, for us all; that we can again play this game. I don't think most of you have any idea how big, hard and complicated this work can be, and if you do and keep whining, then sorry but you are stupid.
I follow this project since the begining and get closer after the rewrite annoucement, saw the evolution. Got some luck and get into CBT and then saw the behind of the scene.
Sure it's not perfect, but it can't be, even a big company has their problems and mistakes.
Things go in the good way, so yeah it take longer than expected but is it a reason to harass the staff like some people does ? I really find that totally unbelivable, even for a 12 years old child... Keep in mind staff are people like other and want the game as much as anyone there, so show some respect for the work they give.
Devs are doing everything they can to get a stable server working, even disconnect, we just have to tag and they connect as fast as they can to restart the server after a crash or have new info; meaning, they stop their real life to come check why they are tag, to work for free, how many of you will make it, for years without giving up... And it's not just about knowledge, this dev's side, you need to create something, not just fix something already working before. You need to be organised, smart and creative without of course talking about programming knwoledge for the base.
I could write long post about how much I'm amazed about you, whiners but will not change so much right now; better keep energy for supporting this team.
They are many things not write in the stone for sure, but one is clearly sure, you will all come back playing in this community like little kitties, so show some respect for those who will allow you to play again this game one day.
Cyber liked a post in a topic by Zyna in Server Maintenance - 22nd May 2021
Loriens liked a post in a topic by Cyber in From Pure Fire -> To Other Fire Decks (PvP)
