The Dragon's Arena Decks

[dragonsdemesne]

185hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 3x mark
Oracle Card: DIMENSIONAL SHIELD
wins: 2 losses: 3 rank: >500 Rating: -109 age: 0

0/2 thumbs up



I had about 30 seconds this morning to come up with something... and this was the result.  I'm pretty sure it had way too much gravity quanta (and even more fail) but whatever.  Fingers crossed for a nymph tonight... I'm hoping for air nymphs right now!

[dragonsdemesne]

185hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 3x mark
Oracle Card: HOLY LIGHT
wins: 9 losses: 5 rank: >500 Rating: -116 age: 1

4/9 thumbs up



I was in a bit of a rush making this deck again, and I think I have done something very similar before in this thread, only without the holy flashes, but I didn't bother to check if I had.  9 games is a fairly small sample size, but apparently it was well-received, so I'm glad.

Today's card is crimson dragon.  I remember doing a PU/silence duo with that one time, and I've probably done monofire rush with it, too, and I think I did a black hole off the mark as well, so I'll look for a different deck than those.

[dragonsdemesne]

185hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 3x mark
Oracle Card: CRIMSON DRAGON
wins: 5 losses: 4 rank: >500 Rating: -120 age: 2

3/5 thumbs up



This deck is utterly ridiculous :p  It was completely based on overloading a ruby dragon (or seraph) with lots and lots of buffs and TUing it.  It seems that I can't count towers, though, and I had way too few in the deck for some reason.  Still, at least people liked it

Today's card is voodoo doll.  That's always a hard one to build around, since there aren't many ways to do it that the AI will recognize, and I've already done most of them, but I'll try to find something new anyway.

[dragonsdemesne]

185hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 3x mark
Oracle Card: VOODOO DOLL
wins: 4 losses: 4 rank: >500 Rating: -106 age: 1

4/4 thumbs up (100%! yay!)



After this deck went 4-1 at first, I decided to test against it to see why it was doing much better than I thought.  I had a monogravity deck loaded, and I blew away all its burning towers with SoF, and denied fire quanta for a long time.  When it finally got 8 fire quanta... there was no red nymph played.  So, it wasn't exactly a fair test :p  In any event, the inspiration for this deck came from a tournament (I think last year sometime) where I built a similar deck to this one in one of the consolation matches (either bronze or for 5th-6th) just for fun, and actually won with it, to my surprise :p  The perfect 4/4 thumbs up ratio is certainly encouraging; I was not really expecting that, but even with the failure of the deck to last more than 1 day, I'm happy about that.

Today's card is abomination.  The last time I had that, I think I did something with butterfly effect.  I'll see if I can find something even smarter.  Maybe I'll do micro abom/BE and purple nymph and shards of readiness?  I dunno yet...
edit: Hehe, I just built a quintet... and it beat poison dials
edit: WOW... it's 8-3 and NOBODY has thumbed it up yet.. it should seriously have 8/8; it's way more unique than the one above, and it got 4/4.

[dragonsdemesne]

185hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 3x mark
Oracle Card: ABOMINATION
wins: 11 losses: 4 rank: >500 Rating: -85 age: 2

2/11 thumbs up (conclusion: 9 of you suck ass :p )



Honestly, I have no idea how you can downvote this deck.  I mean, surely nobody in the history of Elements has built this :p  (for good reason, but still...)  I'm actually quite surprised it got as many wins as it did; I was only expecting maybe one or two wins before it dropped out of plat.  I just can't believe so many people didn't like it.  How many abomination/werewolf/RoL nymph/hope decks are there that also pack butterfly effect and siphon life?  Pretty sure that the answer is 1, including this one.

Ah, well, rant over.  Today's card is flesh spider.  I should punish you all by making a monodeath human farmer... but I'll try to refrain from doing that.  Not sure what I'll do yet, but it can't possibly be as cool as this deck was.

[dragonsdemesne]

185hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 3x mark
Oracle Card: FLESH SPIDER
wins: 2 losses: 3 rank: >500 Rating: -114 age: 1

1/2 thumbs up



Now this deck, I thought was fun   Originally I had wings in there to combo with the spiders, but then once I built the rest of it, I realized that it conflicted with the bone walls, so I took the wings out.  On reflection, I now realize that this means the deck basically didn't have anything to do with spiders anymore, and could have really been built around any old card.  Still, the deck is quite interesting, I think.  It actually takes advantage of the fact that the AI will blow up unstable gas even when it wipes out half its own field, by growing the bone walls and making skeletons via boneyard.  It will then, because I chose unupped boneyards, blow up its own skeletons the next time it activates a gas, and get even more bonewall counters.  (rather than need 2 gases to do the same job)  The rest of the deck's synergies should be fairly obvious.  The shards of bravery were there to help use excess fire quanta and give the deck a better chance to draw all the different parts it needs to set all that in motion.

Today's card is fire bolt.  I don't know if I've tried it yet in arena, but I've been wanting to do a fire/air direct damage deck using unstable gas for awhile in pvp, but never gotten around to it.  I'll build something like that and see how it goes.

edit: Wow, I just checked, and the deck I put up (the one I described above) is 23-1 with 12/23 thumbs ups so far!  It's at rank 10 now, so it might not be possible to know how many thumbs ups it gets if it does any better, due to the bonus rewards for top 10 decks.  It's been awhile since one of my creative decks did that well; usually they suck because they're too silly :p

edit: Hmm, just noticed that the number of plays I've gotten has been abnormally low... it might not get too much higher after all, as decks with 1-2 less days have had more plays.

Spoiler for Hidden:

[dragonsdemesne]

185hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 3x mark
Oracle Card: FIREBOLT
wins: 28 losses: 8 rank: >500 Rating: -78 age: 7

16/28 thumbs up (>50%!)



Well, that was a simply great thumbs up ratio, and at least up until the last two days, a very nice win-loss record as well.  Had it had a more typical number of plays, it could have been more of a contender in the top ten, but if memory serves, after getting to rank 10 in the screenshot, it lost the next few games, so it never actually earned any bonus electrum, and the thumbs up count is accurate.  I'm quite surprised that people liked this deck so much, but perhaps the idea of fire+air in a direct damage deck hasn't been done very much; on reflection, I can't recall seeing it very often at all before.  I'd actually been thinking of trying a similar idea for a BL deck next season, and the success of this deck makes me think that perhaps it has a chance in pvp.

I don't normally mix weapon types in a deck, because the AI tends to play over one weapon with a higher costed one, but with animate weapons and the fact that both fahrenheit and eagle's eye are both very strong in this deck, I felt it was worth it to do it anyway.  The other thing that I was worried about initially, but proved to either not be an issue (or the deck was simply good enough that it win in spite of this flaw) was that the AI would make its red nymphs into 6/1 creatures and then blow them up with unstable gas.  Perhaps the AI would use gas first, so that it wouldn't be able to rage pot a 1/5 nymph?  I'm not sure, but I think the AI usually activates creatures before permanents, though... so I really have no idea what went on with that.

I almost took the deck down yesterday (it was 28-6 then) because I had nymph's tears, but then I calculated the thumbs up ratio, and realized it was one of my highest ratios of all time (I think only my top ten monoearth SoP deck, when SoP was 'other', had a higher one here at around 60% http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php/topic,28528.msg533554/topicseen.html#msg533554 ) so I figured I'd leave it up since people seemed to like it so much.  Today I got blessing, which at least is a card I don't think I've ever built an arena deck around before.  It's also a card I don't usually use much at all, because my playstyle doesn't really favour creature buff cards, but in any event, I'll try to think of something interesting with it.  Some of the more common ideas I've seen are blessed dune scorps or wardens or otyughs, speedbows, and things of that nature.  I might try something a little more bizarre, like blessed deathstalkers.  I did a crusader/flying weapon/shard of patience deck once, which could benefit from blessing, assuming the AI played it in the right order, but while very creative, I don't think that deck lasted more than a day.  I'm not sure what I'll do yet, but I'll try to pick something really weird.

[TribalTrouble]

200hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 2x mark
Oracle Card: FOREST SCORPION
wins: 38 losses: 10 rank: 120 rating: 70 age: 4



Pretty straightforward deck.  Cast arsenics off the mark, play epinephrined scorpions, and hopefully win!  Awfully hard for the AI to misplay, and the draws should've been pretty consistent.  The unupped pillars were just because I didn't have any more upped ones; I figured unupped pillar > upped pend in this deck.  If you don't have a green nymph, a 6th epi would be just fine.  (which I also didn't have)

*snip*

My use of my oracle card, Graveyard, was to look in the forgotten first pages of this thread, the decks of old, take one, and modify it to my liking.  Ended up just ignoring Graveyard and using this deck idea. Having 5 Life Nymphs didn't hurt. (Although I only put in 2 due to their high cost) A quick test run revealed that the Graveyards didn't hinder the speed at all, just added reinforcements if the opponent decided to use CC.

[dragonsdemesne]

Usually I use a card like graveyard to synergize with my own CC (or dying creatures like spark, immolation, etc) rather than rely on the opponent to use it, but it certainly is a more interesting take on it to do it the way you did.  And yeah, if you were just using graveyard off the mark primarily, and using life towers for the rest of the deck, then it shouldn't have hurt the speed much at all.

Since I'm posting anyway... my arena deck with blessing is 34-5 with 10 thumbs ups so far.  Also, I will be out of town and most likely without internet from Monday to Saturday, starting tomorrow.  I'll probably post a new arena deck Monday, regardless of what card I have or how my current deck is, and hope it lasts.  I'll also be joining leagues again (probably BL again) but I'll wait until after I get back for that.

[dragonsdemesne]

185hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 3x mark
Oracle Card: BLESSING
wins: 40 losses: 7 rank: 302 Rating: -12 age: 6

12/40 thumbs up



For some reason, the idea of shard of patience + shard of freedom + wyrm has been something I've been trying to make work in pvp, but I haven't been able to make a good version yet.  At least it works better in the arena   Fireflies let the blessing be cast, and hopefully the AI will put it on the wyrms :p

Today's card is nymph's tears.  I took the deck down early because I probably won't have internet again until Saturday.  We'll see if I can find something that will last that long

[TribalTrouble]

Well my use of Graveyard turned out to be only somewhat effective. The deck went 6-4 in 1 day before reaching rank 500.

[Submachine]

Hey Dragon! How can you count the thumbs up/down ratio for your decks?