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How to Build a (PvP) Deck [Guide]


Eirias

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18 hours ago, Darian DelFord said:

I had planned on making a Video guide for Nature in the future, after I get done with this infernal trailer.

Define, "Evolution" ;p

On my guide, each faction has a subsection called "evolution of the deck."

In this subsection, I ask a player who played that faction (LagOps and Taker are my previous volunteers) to explain their process on how their deck changed as they became better players. Obviously this section isn't useful if you picked up a faction after you were really good. The point is to illustrate the reasons you changed your deck to make it better, and why you made those changes.

Speaking of this, I still need a Fire-Frost player to do this section as well.

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16 hours ago, Eirias said:

On my guide, each faction has a subsection called "evolution of the deck."

In this subsection, I ask a player who played that faction (LagOps and Taker are my previous volunteers) to explain their process on how their deck changed as they became better players. Obviously this section isn't useful if you picked up a faction after you were really good. The point is to illustrate the reasons you changed your deck to make it better, and why you made those changes.

Speaking of this, I still need a Fire-Frost player to do this section as well.

yeah thats easy to do, been playing Nature since beta.  Started with my root deck then went DO then Tunnel and flip flop between the three for PvP. 

When I am done with the trailers I can do this.  expect a few PM's though ;p

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12 minutes ago, Darian DelFord said:

yeah thats easy to do, been playing Nature since beta.  Started with my root deck then went DO then Tunnel and flip flop between the three for PvP. 

When I am done with the trailers I can do this.  expect a few PM's though ;p

Great!

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  • 3 months later...

Overall the nature section looks good! The deck building part & the unit descriptions are accurate and very well done. I just disagree with some stuff in the matchup-check.

On 30.7.2015 at 2:07 AM, Eirias said:

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.

I know you really like the card, but Firestalker just isn't strong enough to be worth a slot. Burrower deals twice as much damage to buildings for the same amount of power and is the true threat for pure nature. Every nature splash does well against pure nature because they can apply pressure with burrower attacks while having better counters against your own burrower attacks, but i think you mentioned this already. 

Just a short comparison between Firestalker and burrower: 

1 Firestalker needs 70 seconds to destroy a power well

1 Burrower needs around 33 seconds to destroy a power well

The range advantage for Firestalker just isn't enough to make it viable.

On 30.7.2015 at 2:07 AM, Eirias said:

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.

The pure fire matchup wasn't as bad. Pure Nature doesn't have a M/M counter, but ghostspears are apparently amazing against pure fire since there is no chain-cc to stop them. Parasite swarm and ghost spears are really good to stop aggression on a low power level. Just stall to get your SoM running and then start attacking with Deep One spam and there is nothing that can stop you anymore. Fire gets just super annoying on a higher power level due to massive aoe damage support with firedancers in the backline, who destroy your buildings. If the game reaches that point you need your SoM, otherwise you are done. This is why the key against pure fire is a short T1 and an aggressive playstyle if your opponent tries to build up multiple power wells. You don't want to have more than 3 power wells + SoM, otherwise the power level ramps up way to fast and you get destroyed before your SoM + Deep Ones + heal combo starts hitting. Even if nature scales with a big army in T1 you shouldn't wait to long with your attacks and your T2 as long as you aren't 100% sure to end the game in T1. I sill think the matchup favors Fire, but it's not the hardest one. The nature splashes are way harder to deal with.

Additional comments:

-> Rogan Kayle does not help you against Fire at all. He gets destrooooyed by Enforcers and is nothing but a waste of power in this matchup

-> Parasite is not a good card. Not just for the points Hirooo pointed out, but it's also bugged as hell. It didn't stick to new units when the first target died and you could sometimes even dodge the initial hit on the first target which is awful for a 100 power spell

On 30.7.2015 at 2:07 AM, Eirias said:

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

Pure Nature was indeed one of the worse matchups for Lost Souls, but not as bad as pure Fire. You have a solid advantage in T2 due to a strong offense, that can crack the shadow frost defense + there is no EP counter that stops them from sucking unlimited power out of your power wells. In addition to that Shadow Frost attacks are really weak against nature, because nature has (like you already mentioned) adequate counters to every unit shadow frost posseses. But here comes the bad part about the matchup. Your T3 might be able to strike back against the Lost Souls T3 due to Mo or Bloodhorn, but it's still inferior. You have no power efficient counter against Grigoris (unless you carried the green dryad in your deck, which was ... lets say uncommon). Timeless one would stop every "Non-stampede" offense and silverwind lancers are super power efficient units (If you try to play parasite swarm to steal them, nasty would just leave you with an super unfavourable trade as long as they already reached your base). It is still super hard to overcome a Shadow Frost T3. But I think the most important part was the T1. Shadow is superior to Nature T1 and surviving against Phasetower spam wihtout massive disadvantages is next to impossible on small maps.

On 30.7.2015 at 2:07 AM, Eirias said:

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).

A Pure Nature mirror starts and ends in T1 (treespirit trash-games excluded ^-^). You can't stop a T1 push with an instant T2, since you have no AoE spell or Unit that can clear the map. I played for more than 3 years on a high ranked level and I don't remember a single nature mirror, where my opponent and I went both T2. This is why I don't think scaling makes the difference in this one. In theory T2 looks also a little bit weird, since both player can spam burrower without having an efficient counter against them.

On 30.7.2015 at 2:07 AM, Eirias said:

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).

 

I don't feel like pure Frost was the easiest matchup for nature. I mean it's easy to deal with pure Frost attacks in T2 due to Parasite swarm, but launching an efficient attack yourself was hard. I saw dekka losing sooo many games against freemka, despite being the better player, because he got just straight up outscaled by freemkas deck. And it's also difficult to crack such a player in T1 since he used his turrets to prevent an early defeat. Usually nature even gets crushed against magespam in T1 (it's nearly as bad as phasetowerspam), but I guess freemka wasn't confident enough to play it. Because a magespam made things even worse, because that blocked your possiblity of preventing T3 spots. Northstar is in addition to that an incredible annoying card, because it protects an entire base for 30 power, especially with timeless one later in the game there is no way to break this defense even with strong basenukes. It is easy to "not lose in T2", but hard to win the game here and this transitions into a T3 stage which is unfavourable for you. 

 

The other matchups feel pretty accurate. Good job on your guide, keep it up! :)

Best regards,

Radi

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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@RadicalX Thank you! I shall be sure to add your comments to the guide. Your approval means a lot to me, especially since I've never played a single game of Pure Nature :)

@QuickSilver Thanks! I think I wrote it wrong one time and then referred back to the first time I wrote it :( Should be fixed in my word doc now!

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  • 2 years later...

Now this is a hell of a guide, gonna be reading through it for quite some time. Though a bit sad pure frost is relegated to eagle spam in it. Might have to get back into pvp to remind people how strong a pure fire style artillery approach to pure frost with white rangers can be. Slower to the kill but extraordinarily annoying to properly dislodge and can really irritate people into making mistakes. 

Edited by Torban
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