Game Theory of Rush with Stall Decks: A Guide for the Aspiring PVPer
Section 1 - Introduction: What is a "Rush with Stall" Deck?
Every aspiring PVP player should know at least the basics of the seven basic archetypes of decks, so that they can succeed with and against them! While each of these archetypes goes by several different names, I'm going to use the names PoLdeR used in his decklist, as they seem to be the most common names: Rush, Stall, OTK, Allaround, Denial, Rush with Stall, and Deckout.
The first three of these decktypes already have fairly extensive guides made, and I'll link them here for your convenience:
Rush - by
Acsabi44 -
Strategy of Rush DecksStall - by
Acsabi44 -
Strategy and Game Theory of Stall DecksOTK - by
Chapuz -
OTK Deckbuilding GuideOf the remaining 4 deck types, Deckout and Denial are essentially specialized versions of Stall decks, and while their means to an end might be different, a lot of the same general theory applies. The final two archetypes are fairly similar, with only slight differences between Allaround Decks and Rush with Stall Decks, and the differences aren't particularly important to how Rush with Stall Decks play in practice.
The most important thing about Rush with Stall Decks is what I like to call the "doubled core" - a set of key cards in the deck for rushing, and a set of key cards in the deck for stalling. Consider briefly another great Acsabi article,
Who is the Beatdown?. This article talks about a given match of Elements as a race between two decks. One deck takes the role of the Beatdown, or the deck which is fast enough to win if the opponent does nothing to stop it, and the Control, which seeks to lock down the Beatdown until the Control can cross the finish line itself.
Building a pure rush deck, as Acsabi explains in his article, means that you focus solely on killing the opponent as fast as you can. The weakness of a rush deck is exactly the same as its strength - every card in the deck is devoted to killing the opponent as quickly as possible, with no way to slow the opponent down, or catch up after a poor draw relative to the opponent. When you build a pure rush deck, if you don't have the fastest deck, you will lose. The advantage of a stall deck is also quite apparent - card and quanta advantage stack up quickly when playing such a deck, and often a stall deck will have confirmed its victory long before the final point of damage is dealt by completely locking down the opponent.
A Rush with Stall deck seeks to take the best of both playstyles and merge them into a single deck. Fundamentally speaking, a Rush with Stall deck is a Rush deck that has a backup plan if it's facing a deck that's more of a Beatdown. The faster your rush is, the less of a stalling core you'll need to give it a chance to succeed against faster decks.
Section 2: Constructing a "Rush with Stall" Deck
Like with any other deck, constructing a Rush with Stall Deck starts with an "idea". In the context of a Rush with Stall Deck, this idea can come in three forms: a rushing core, a stalling core, or a synergy of rushing cards and stalling cards. In this section, we'll build three sample Rush with Stall Decks starting with each type of idea.
Catatitans:
Catatitans is one of the classic Rush Decks of EtG. By playing a Catapult and a Titan, then using Flying Weapon to turn it into a massive creature before hurling it at the opponent for 34 points of damage, it takes just a few cards to put a lot of hurt on the opponent. Let's check out a sample core of a catatitans rush:
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55s 55s 55s 55s 55s 55s 561 561 561 5oi 5oi 5oi 5oi 5oi 8prThis rushing core is actually extremely fast, and will be fast enough alone to overcome many decks if supplied with decent quanta. Furthermore, it's a fairly robust rush - even in a bad scenario against heavy PC aimed at your catapults, you can hold titans in your hand until you can fly them immediately, then fly multiple Titans and deal fairly significant damage - and Titans are quite hard to CC with their 50 HP! Such a strategy wouldn't work against a rush deck, of course, but few rush decks can draw the PC to take out all of your Catapults. The other weakness of this rush core is its weakness to fast, hard hitting creatures, such as a quick Immorush or Grabbow. That's where the stall core of this deck comes in. What does this deck forever have too much of? Air quanta! In a match where your rush succeeds, you'll only need 2 or 3 air quanta the entire match, but you produce one per turn from your mark. This leaves you room for cheap
cards that can improve your stall!
What have we already done? Made our opponent spend all their PC that they'd normally spend on shields on our catapults? What does that leave us? Oh right, shields that are hard to break! With your spare
, you can power a fog shield, and reduce a pretty significant chunk of the damage your opponent would deal to you. Since this deck is currently pretty roomy, I'm going to go ahead and add 3 of them - draw chance on the Fog Shields is really nice, as getting them out ASAP goes a long way towards keeping you alive, and you don't need a ton of the combo cards to make this deck's combo work wonders.
We're looking to hit pretty close to 30 cards, and this deck's going to want a lot of gravity quanta in it to speed up the combo, but we've got room for one or two more stalling cards. A great choice here is Armagio, giving you effectively 25 extra HP (or more!) to buy you a couple more turns against the rushier rushes. With these stalling cards added, you've got something like this:
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55m 55s 55s 55s 55s 55s 55s 561 561 561 5og 5og 5og 5oi 5oi 5oi 5oi 5oi 8pr.
Since we built the air quanta in this deck to be fully mark-powered, we can fill the rest of the deck with gravity pillars, and voila! A Rush with Stall deck built from a "rush core" idea, with winning chances against a wider range of decks added by combining 4 key cards worth of stall.
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55k 55k 55k 55k 55k 55k 55k 55k 55k 55k 55k 55k 55m 55s 55s 55s 55s 55s 55s 561 561 561 5og 5og 5og 5oi 5oi 5oi 5oi 5oi 8prChargetal:
Suppose now we wanted to build a Rush with Stall Deck from a Stall core. Everyone seems to think that the two most OP cards in the game are Dimensional Shield and Fractal, both of which are right at home in Stally decks, as Dimensional Shields can block many attacks, and Fractal lets you create card advantage by generating many creatures from just two cards.
A simple stall core for this deck might look something like
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61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 622 622 622 8puIn just 8 cards (not counting the needed quanta, of course, you've created a massive stalling core which can in theory generate up to 24 creatures and prevent all opposing attacks for 15 turns. In actual gameplay of course, you'll rarely reach either of these numbers, but it gives a bit of context to how powerful these 8 cards are. Since, however, you're likely taking up nearly 1/3rd of your deck with stalling cards, you need the creature you intend to fractal to be both efficient (having a good damage/cost ratio) and robust (hard for its damage to be prevented). One great example of this lies in a classic combo with Fractal - Sapphire Charger. With this deck being a Fractal based deck, you don't need to draw a ton of them, and you don't want useless cards clogging up your hand, but as your main source of damage, you still probably want 5 of them. Chargers' 4 damage for 5
might not be the most efficient card in the world, but they have 5 HP, making them immune to a decent number of CC cards (<20 quanta bolts and Shockwaves, most importantly), and their momentum renders your opponent's shield or Gravity Pull useless. Since a huge portion of our robustness of the deck lies in Momentum, and we've got a decent amount of gravity to pair well with the Fractals, we can go ahead and toss in a Titan or two while we're at it. As a general rule of thumb, unless you've got a compelling reason to do otherwise, toss a weapon or two of the element you expect to have the most spare quanta of into your deck - it rarely hurts to draw it!
Our dual core for Chargetal looks something like this:
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55l 55l 55l 55l 55l 55s 55s 61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 622 622 622 8puAt this point, you're pretty much ok to just quanta up your deck, though it's not a terrible idea to toss in a Shard of Focus or an Amber Nymph if you're playing in a meta that allows it. 15 quanta cards might seem like a lot, but when you consider that you're looking to Fractal up and win, having a lot of quanta immediately is usually quite important. A completed Chargetal Rush with Stall looks something like this.
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55k 55k 55k 55k 55k 55k 55l 55l 55l 55l 55l 55s 55s 576 576 576 576 576 576 576 576 576 61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 622 622 622 8puSimple, Brutal, Efficient.
Grabstall:
Next, let's look at a Rush with Stall made by noticing a cool synergy between a popular rush core and a devastating stall tactic. Earth happens to have one of the best rushing cards in the game, the Graboid, and one of the best Stalling cards in the game, Basilisk Blood. 6 turns is practically forever in a rush, but Basilisk Blood doesn't feature in true rush decks, as it's a waste of a card slot that could be used for damage (Catapult-boosting exemptions barred, of course). A Rush with Stall deck is the answer! First, let's place both cores into a deck and see what else we could use!
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590 590 590 590 590 590 595 595 595 595 595 595 8psThis deck, like our Catatitans earlier, needs only 6
to use every card in it so far, so we have room to add an inexpensive time card or two to help the deck out. While neither Eternity nor Procrastination is cheap enough for a role in our deck, Time has one of the lynchpin stalling cards - entire games can be turned on a single Reverse Time, and many decks lose a lot by having a creature rewound. Flying Weapons, Buffed Creatures (Pegasus and Otyugh in particular), Growth-based creatures, Overdriven Dragons, any remotely expensive card in a nonrenewable quanta deck (i.e. a Nova/Immo based deck) - there's so many cards that your opponent can be devasted by playing just a single Reverse Time on! Let's toss in 2 of them!
Remember when I said above that most decks could benefit from adding a weapon of the spare quanta element? Here's a slight exception to the rule - the spare quanta in this deck is clearly going to be
, but a Pulverizer is of only marginal use, especially since we're not packing any
sources. Instead, we'll pack an Other weapon, specifically a Short Sword.
Time to ask the key question - is it time to quanta up? Let's see what the deck would look like if we did.
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4t4 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 590 590 590 590 590 590 595 595 595 595 595 595 5rk 5rk 8psThis deck looks ok, but only 6 creatures for damage, and those creatures only having 3 HP, isn't the most robust source of damage in the world, and 15 quanta cards in a deck whose most expensive card costs 3 is most definitely overkill. I recommend switching out 3 of the pillars for additional creatures, but what creature you choose to add is up to you. This still leaves you 40% quanta, and a pretty good chance of 3 pillars in the starting hand for a second turn graboid to start the rush with. The original version of this deck runs Hematite Golems, another fairly cheap creature that still contributes to the attack, and rarely do you fail to have the quanta to play it. If you have tons of spare quanta in your playtesting, switching the Golems for Shriekers or Stone Dragons is also an option, dealing a bit more punch per card, but harder to rush onto the field.
The final version of the Grabstall with the Golems looks like this.
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4t4 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58o 58q 58q 58q 590 590 590 590 590 590 595 595 595 595 595 595 5rk 5rk 8psNow, you've seen a sample building process for each of the three ways to come up with a Rush with Stall, and seen a variety of different decks that can result. Now, it's time to talk about actually playing the decks.
Section 3 - Playing Tips[/color]
The key to playing a Rush with Stall deck successfully is to focus on determining the speed of your deck compared to your opponent's. If you are piloting the faster deck, you should spend as much of your quanta as possible on your damaging cards, forgoing your own safety with confidence that your opponent will fall to 0 HP first. On the other hand, if the opponent is playing the faster deck, you need to focus your efforts onto slowing them down, and counting on the fact that your damage will come later.
Choosing dual-function cards for your deck, such as Gravity Pull, can come in very handy in making your deck more flexible, as you can either use it to kill a dangerous enemy creature or to set up a tanky creature of your own as an extra line of defense. Speedbumping, using Gravity Pull on a weak creature such as a Photon, to block a large attacker in the opponent's 1st slot is a useful strategy when only a little bit of stall is needed, and it can often buy you an extra turn of staying alive.
Remember the key rules of both rushes and stalls - if you're faster, keep rushing and ignore damage, and remember the power of card advantage.
Look at your deck, and consider the types of decks you're most likely to see that could screw you over. Make a list of these, and see if any of these decks could be neutralized even partially by including a particular card. Sanctuary, Deflagration, Steal, Reverse Time, Empathic Bond, Bonewall, and Titanium Shield, for example, each severely weaken a fairly significant number of decks, so considering the inclusion of any of these cards if on-element is usually not a bad idea - though testing is the only real way to be sure.
Practice your deck in PVP1 if possible before the event you intend to use it in, unless it's a tournament with a heavy amount of restrictions. There's just no substitute for human opposition, and 100HP as opposed to 150 or the variance of HP in the Arena gives a very different dynamic to some decks. In highly restricted tournaments, using AI3 as a testing ground is probably your best bet.
Know what cards you have and what cards you want to draw at any time, and plan your quanta usage carefully. It does you no good to draw your Dimensional Shield if you just spent all your
on a Fractal. Know what card is most important to you at any time, and play accordingly.
Section 4 - Bonus Decks[/color]
In this section, I present a few more Rush with Stall Decks without extensive commentary to showcase the great variety of decks possible.
Psiontal
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61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61o 61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 61u 61u 622 622 622 625 625 625 625 625 625 63a 63a 63a 63a 63a 63a 63a 8puWingsbow
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4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4sa 4vh 4vh 4vj 4vj 4vj 4vj 4vj 4vj 52q 52q 55q 55q 590 590 5c1 5c1 5f6 5f6 5lb 5oo 5oo 5oo 5oo 61q 61q 8prOwls and Queens (sharded)
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5oc 5oc 5oc 5oc 5oc 5oc 5oc 5oc 5oc 5oc 5oc 5oc 5oi 5oi 5oi 5oj 5oj 5oj 5oj 5ol 5ol 5ol 5ol 5ol 5pa 5pa 5pa 5pa 5pu 5pu 8pnCocktosis (sharded)
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5bs 5bs 5bs 5bs 5bs 5bs 5bs 5bu 5bu 5c0 5c0 5c0 5c0 5c0 5c0 5c5 5c6 5c6 5c9 5c9 5c9 5c9 5cq 5cq 5de 5de 5de 5de 5de 5de 8pnLycansteal
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4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4vc 4ve 4ve 4ve 4ve 4vh 4vh 4vh 4vh 4vh 4vh 50u 50u 50u 50u 50u 50u 50u 5uo 5uo 5up 5up 5up 5up 5ur 5ur 8pt
