The Dragon's Arena Decks

[Elite arbiter]

I've started to concoct the hypothesis that most people don't bother or care much about the 'creativity' of the deck at all, and instead care about how much it frustrated them. This is a hp restoring deck, which takes a while to win OR lose in a matchup. Therefore, when it finally beats the player, they give it thumbs down. This theory also would explain why my current rank 3 deck got so many thumbs up despite being basically a generic shardless mono-water rush. Overall I'm not sure how valid this is, but the position of the deck on the rush/stall spectrum does seem to have at least some effect.

[dragonsdemesne]

200hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 2x mark
Oracle Card: HAMMER
wins: 36 losses: 13 rank: 489 Rating: -101 age: 6

13/36 thumbs up



I got the idea for this from a deck I built for a tourney a few weeks ago, but did not use, with the one main difference being that quicksand was banned that day and I had 2x warden instead.  I don't know if the AI played it right, but it hopefully blessed the flying gavels and endowed the blessed gavels, but most likely it just blessed/endowed the first legal target it found :p  I wanted to make a deck using gavel that wasn't either immorush, monoearth, monogravity, or monoother, and this was the result.  I expected a lot more thumbs ups for it than I got.

Today's card is ice bolt, and I had a rather nifty idea that I want to try, so I'm going to switch now in case I get a crap card tomorrow.

edit: thanks laxa :p I knew there was a reason I let you kick my ass in CL... (I forgot the deck image)

[Laxadarap]

Hey dragon, you forgot an important part of your last post XD

[dragonsdemesne]

200hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 2x mark
Oracle Card: ICE BOLT
wins: 6 losses: 4 rank: >500 Rating: -125 age: 3

Thumbs up: 0/6 (wtf?)



A water/life stall seemed fairly unique to me, (waterstall? :p ) but apparently nobody at all liked it; maybe it bore too strong a resemblance to firestall.  Stall, stall, and stall some more while pumping spectres and watching them blast pass shields with shards of freedom.  AI probably couldn't play it very well; knowing when to use your quanta with this sort of deck is critical, and it probably did things like spam the early turns with shards of freedom and slow the important stuff down. 

Today's card is luciferin.  It's a weak card in terms of raw power, but absolutely fantastic in terms of creative deckbuilding, since it's an other card and can therefore be put into any deck I want.  It's also a card I haven't ever gotten before from oracle.  This one should be getting tons of thumbs ups.... as soon as I conceive of it.

[sinyor]

Im sure you will find the ultimate powerful CREATIVE awesome deck dragon !! Just keep doing them

[dragonsdemesne]

200hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 2x mark
Oracle Card: LUCIFERIN
wins: 4 losses: 4 rank: >500 Rating: -115 age: 1

2/4 thumbs up



Ghostosis with a bit of a twist.  I'd done that light nymph/mummy/skele hope thing recently, so I didn't want to do something like that again.  Many luciferin decks I see in arena use monolife and hope, so I didn't want to do that either.  Another one I often saw was just monolight, usually with dragons, and that's boring; since luciferin can fit anywhere, not just with light, it's more fun to put it somewhere unexpected.  Unfortunately for this deck, it would have been completely destroyed by splat or poison dials, which likely accounts for its poor showing.  At least a couple people liked it, so I'm not disappointed in the thumbs ups like I was for the icebolt deck above.

Today's card is damselfly.  That one's got a fair amount of room for creativity as well.  It of course tends more towards rush decks, like immorush or chaos wyrms, but there's all kinds of things that can be done with it.  I'm not going to do either of those, since I've done both before.  Immorush has been done to death, and I did chaos wyrms when I had butterfly effect as a card, and used damsels as the target.  Shard of freedom monoair decks are another common choice, so of course I won't be doing that, either.  I could maybe try something with shard of freedom and shard of patience, but I doubt the AI would play it correctly.  I'm sure something will come to mind that's unique...

[dragonsdemesne]

195hp, 30 wisdom, 2x card draw, 3x mark
Oracle Card: DRAGONFLY
wins: 9 losses: 6 rank: >500 Rating: -112 age: 3

5/9 thumbs ups



So I ended up doing the shard of patience/freedom thing after all, when I thought of using my nymphs to adrenaline them.  The flies will make extra quanta, attack extra times, grow from patience and still attack, and bypass shields.  I also threw in a few other fun cards to go along with the theme.  Adrenastaves makes a small appearance, mitosis/bond on flies means you can make more flies for free and gain life every turn, and elite queen and sky blitz are for any extra quanta kicking around.  I went with only 30 ups this time, since after putting in my nymphs and druid staffs I realized there was no point wasting points on more ups, as I was already not using them all.

Today's card is phoenix.  That'll be hard to do something unique with.  Firestall is out, immorush is out, fractal phoenix is out, mitophoenix is out, monofire is out, shard of bravery and/or shard of freedom is out.  I'll come up with something, but I'm not sure what, yet...

[dragonsdemesne]

200hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 2x mark
Oracle Card: PHOENIX
wins: 5 losses: 4 rank: >500 Rating: -104 Age: 1

2/5 thumbs up



I mentioned all of the decks I didn't want to do last time.  I ended up using some shards of freedom anyway, because it synergized with both the phoenixes and the maxwell's.  The demon/buckler combo lets the deck theoretically kill most creatures fairly quickly.  The discords stall for awhile in order to get set up.  The freedom shards get past pesky shields and increase the damage output, which is fairly low.  The shards of patience are solely to counter opposing shards of sacrifice, and my own shards of sacrifice keep the deck alive hopefully long enough to win.  I playtested one game, and it turns out the AI is pretty bad with it, and will play shards of freedom before anything else, which stalled it by several turns.  I kept them in anyway, since I didn't really care if the deck bellyflopped, I just wanted something interesting that hadn't been done.

Today's card is stone dragon.  The most obvious choices in my mind for that are monoearth and an earth/light stall with the dragons for damage, so of course I won't be doing either one of those.  The elements that I think I see least often paired with earth would be death, life, and entropy, so I think I'll do one of those.  (or more, if I can think of a neat trio)  If I do entropy, I won't do a discord/quicksand deck, though.

Also, I gained level 76 now, so +1 arena point.  I also finished getting the trainer edition of cards (24 of each pillar/pend upped) so I'll have enough upped quanta for all but the very fattest of duos.

edit: fixed typos.  Also, I should mention one of the wins was against me; I faced my own deck.  The win was legitimate; I didn't concede or anything, but I did of course thumbs up my own deck

[Higurashi]

Boo, Imageshack is blocked in China. Use imgur!

[dragonsdemesne]

Imgur doesn't usually work for me; I'm not really sure why.  I've seen a bunch of people link things in chat to imgur, but usually I just get a blank page, so I've never been too impressed by it :p  It's a bit of extra work, but have you tried using proxy servers to get around that sort of limitation?  (assuming it's not illegal in China or something)  I'd imagine there are other sites China's blocking as well.

[Higurashi]

Photobucket? I'm getting a proper VPN later.

[ddevans96]

Thumbs up: 0/6 (wtf?)

Looking at the deck list as a whole, I'd probably thumbs it up...but in the game it's slightly different, and basically comes down to RNG.

An early SoFo, which is unlikely but possible, would probably get a thumbs down from me. Another factor is what deck I'm playing - if it pretty much slaughters me, I'd be more tempted to thumbs it down than if it was a close match, in which case I'd thumbs it up. Hopefully, though, the game would probably play out in such a way that I'd thumbs it up, because waterstalls are pretty cool :3

This is completely disregarding the fact you have my respect as a player, and I'd usually thumbs you up regardless, especially considering you tend to go for more original decks, like the LuciGhostosis. That would be awesome to see in action