Eirias

Link to the discord is not advertised? I didn't get a manual invitation to the discord, and no notification that the forum post was edited. I had no idea the discord even existed until I stumbled onto your comment on another channel. Came here to check if it was public or staff-only.

Probably obvious, but t4 must be obtained by building the monument, not using amii monument, right? And per @pierakor's question. You could finish the map with all master archers and then build t2-4 when the archers are already amassed, right? As long as you don't summon more of them by the time t2 is available. Do we even need to beat the map or can we quit once t4 is up and chests are open?

Unfortunately, there are many maps that require ranged attacks to beat (for example, the boss on Oracle can't be accessed by melee units). While it's probably possible to beat these maps by spamming spells and buildings, that sounds more tedious than challenging 🙂

The people have spoken! Next up is pure shadow, with a slightly amended deck list.

Howdy folks! As many of you know, I've been streaming my "One Deck" Challenge recently, and I'm almost done with Pure Frost! If you missed these and want to catch up, you can find them in the livestream tab of my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Eirias_h4/streams At some point I'll probably clip these videos into their own Youtube videos, but for now I'm just linking them in a spreadsheet, in case you're interested in checking out a specific map. The rules of the challenge: Beat all Expert campaign maps with the same "Pure" deck (no modifications between maps) No Neutral Orb cards (especially Amii Monument) If any teammates join on the map, they also have to use the One Deck At the moment, the only map left in my Pure Frost challenge is Nightmare Shard. I have a couple unsuccessful attempts trying to solo the map, and I'll probably revisit it in the future, but by the time you're reading this I have probably finished it with a partner and am ready to move on to the next deck! Speaking of which, I promised I'd put it up to vote! I want to take care of the pure decks first, so that leaves Pure Fire, Pure Shadow, and Pure Nature. Vote! I'll also include my deck lists here, if anyone wants to prepare their own decks to join me in the challenge. Since I haven't started any maps with these decks yet, I'm also open to suggestions for modification. In particular, I might need to adjust the Pure Nature deck to beat Ascension map 2. Pure Fire decklist: /importdeck MiFaFCNEUNSCP0MkV_KKUKMiEdIcTZXEGWLGNCGlK Pure Nature decklist: /importdeck MgGqFLaZFuLUMgVvGkGwGOMsPGQHQYUzMULsXELoR Pure Shadow decklist: /importdeck MvExENLuMRPXKdUeUKKyIEVKQrYZM8M6V9MQLBVgS

You're alive! Hope to see you ingame again 🙂 No extra advice to @LichterLoh but if you want to stop by the stream sometime we can get some sparring games with live coaching!

Hope you enjoy! If you join the balance discord ( https://discord.gg/FyeYNpsE ) and comment/attach replays with thoughts on certain card before they go to the real server, you can also get rewards sent do your real server account (obviously don't need them in your test server account). Plus if you like trying broken combos, the test server is exactly the place to find out if certain cards are overtuned/undertuned!

In the early early days, we decided that for most players, the "grind" was the fun part. A lot of players said that they played until they unlocked everything, then quit. That said, there's also the test server. You get everything unlocked, fully upgraded, and can even test new cards/balance changes before they go live on the main server. Unfortunately, most people don't log onto the test server, so you'd have the coordinate with someone on discord ahead of time. But if you want to play PvP with unconventional decks, the "grind" is still at most a couple hours, all of which can be spent doing PvP. 1. Free PvP decks can be mixed and matched with each other, or even your regular cards. If you build an even somewhat-viable deck, you'll be using at least 10 cards from a regular deck (don't pretend it's a PvP deck if you don't have basics like t1 archers, core spells, etc.) 2. Of your remaining 10 cards, at least 5 will be common/uncommon (because most cards are). These cards cost only a few bfp. Even 5 minutes of queuing PvP will get you 30 bfp, so getting enough bfp for those cards is trivial. 3. For your remaining 5 cards (in the worst case scenario) they might cost up to 2000 bfp. You can sell boosters at a rate of 420 bfp per 1 booster, so 4 boosters should get you pretty much any card. 4. To get the ~20 boosters needed to fill out your deck, you can play every day and get ~1 booster just for playing 30-45 mins. You get an extra 100 bfp discount the first time you buy a booster each day. Do some daily quests and it can be even faster, but we can just assume 1 booster/day. 5. For beginners, you'll get achievements even faster than the daily quests. if you beat all campaign maps on expert one time (not a grind by a long shot), you get 16 boosters. You'd probably double that in other, smaller quests (like, 1 booster for beating any map with deck level 30). TL;DR playing 30-45 minutes every day would get you over 50 boosters in a month, which is enough to build a PvP deck from scratch. If you use the free PvP decks as a base you should be able to make any reasonable deck in only a couple days. I see lots of players who have been here for ~1 week and have made their own modified PvP decks. It might take slightly longer if you're going for something crazy expensive like enlighten batariel in PvP, but even that can be easily achieved in a month. If 1 week of regular playing is still too much grinding, you can always go to the test server 🙂

No, as soon as you know what color your opponent plays, there's no need to stall. Each color tries to achieve different things (map control, early t2, etc). It doesn't matter if shadow's first card is nox trooper or dreadcharger (spoiler, it will always be dreadcharger), nature does not want to play swiftclaw vs shadow because nox trooper can be played at any time. If nature sees that their opponent is frost, swiftclaw is perhaps the most useful unit in the deck. You don't need to wait to see the first unit, if you know their t1 color you already know what cards they have access to.

This is a very minor problem, but it's actually "optimal" to stall for the 1st minute. If you are nature, the starting unit depends a lot on what deck your opponent plays. For instance, you usually want to start swiftclaw to contest map control, but shadow's nox trooper make swiftclaw a bad choice. So a nature player usually waits to see the opponent's deck, before deciding to start swiftclaw or something else. There was actually a funny game where radicalX put a t1 nature card preview into his deck which actually started t1 shadow, to trick his opponent into starting with the wrong card. If you suspect your opponent is nature, stalling can be good because 1. they might give up stalling and play swiftclaw into your shadow, or 2. it gives you more power to burst in an early encounter (for example, fire having 2-3 eruptions in reserve can be devastating vs nature. Nature has to play units in advance but if that happens, fire can just go t2 and clear the t1 army).

What counts as a "faction" card? Would firedancer be allowed in the bandits faction (e.g. if I played fire fire shadow shadow?) Or is it literally only pure nonsplash cards, so fire stalker would not be allowed either?

Fun event and nice idea, but I really dislike that tiebreakers were decided by submission time 😕 This gives such a huge advantage to players who know about the event beforehand, and heavily penalizes people who don't have the availability to play every day.

Or implement it somewhere in the deck itself, so your orb auto-builds even faster at the start of the map (e.g. pre-define that I want my first orb to be fire). This has a few advantages 1). New players don't accidentally start with the wrong unit and thus build the wrong orb 2). PvP stalling is reduced (this is a strategy where neither player wants to play the first card, because they decide this based on what the opponent is playing. In fact Radical recommends this to 100% of nature players) 3). No problems with half orbs or neutral orb creatures in t1 4). Additional searchability (e.g. is that my stonekin deck with nature t1 or frost t1?) Implementing this feature could be clunky. Maybe it could be an icon in the deck thumbnail (like small red circle for fire t1) which you can click to change? Or maybe give the deck some kind of border?

As in, higher elo bans 1, lower elo bans 1, higher elo bans 1, lower elo bans 1? The typical way to do this is ban order 1-2-1 and it's generally considered that the player banning last has the advantage. Since leagues are specifically trying to match elos, I wouldn't use that as the basis of granting an advantage. I would recommend using "/roll 1" to generate a random number 0 or 1, let other player choose which one wins (it's just a coin toss). Player who wins the roll gets to choose whether they ban first/last or mid, in the 1-2-1 format. Who hits "ready" first?