[Official] Virus | Retrovirus

[Malduk]

You seem to have issues with basic mechanic of the game. By your logic, Photon is the best card in this game as it has the best damage/cost ratio.
Maybe I wasnt clear before when I said that deck based on Viruses and Boneyards is countered by practically anything, while being too slow to outrush your opponent.

Virus is slow. It needs 1 turn of doing nothing, before it starts to damage creatures by 1 per turn. It costs 1 card slot aside from that 1 cost to play.
That means, if you want to CC a creature with it, that creature will do its attack multipled by its HP of total damage before its killed.
It is also completely unreliable as that Virus can get killed before he inflicts any poisoning. Is there any reason why you wouldnt simply splash something like Lightnings to kill creature NOW and gain Bonewall counter NOW, without risking not killing anything?

Your deck that relies on skeletons to do damage, has its peak at 23 damage per turn. Issues is, everything is gone with mass CC or some damage shield. Everything is completely stopped by almost every shield there is. Your awesome damage/cost ratio turns to worst damage per cost ratio aka ZERO damage dealt for spending quanta and cards.
Your only win condition here seems going against a deck without any shield, without any healing, without perma control to destroy boneyards, and without mass CC, that is also too slow to kill you before you draw all those cards. Seriously?

[Demut]

Won 15
Loss 5
invaluable:10
Losses due to holding that in my hand rather then something else: 2

Code: [Select]

52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52g 52h 52h 52h 52i 52i 52i 52i 52n 52n 52n 52n 52p 52p 52p 52r 52r 52r 52r
This is after disincluding desyncs and starter decks.

Now what happened an awful lot is that whether I was facing Shriekers, Lava Golems, Dragons, Pheonixes, Adrenalined Scorpions of both poisonous and neurotoxin type

The difference between win or loss was my ability to keep my bone wall standing so my dragon could kill them. For instance against an Aether deck I was facing Phase Dragons coupled with Phase Shields.

I was actually sacrificing my viruses without targeting anything just to keep my bone wall up a little bit longer. And it was because of that I was able to outlast his phase shield and win.

And that was basically the major value of the virus at least 40% of the time that is what I was using my viruses for and I tell you it was a very important use.

However rarely was any one use of the virus the thing that pulled me through it was usually its combination of CC, Bone wall and Bone yards that pulled my through. For instance.

 I was facing a shrieker deck that had basalisk blooded the dragons but I would virus his shriekers as soon as they appeared, the sacrifice of my virus boosting my bone wall so the shriekers didn't hurt me and giving me 2 and then 3 skeletons to do my own damage. Then right before he would get rid of my bonewall the shriekers would die giving me more skeletons and boosting my wall further.

Then near the end when I was running out of bonewall, plagues and viruses he put up a titanium shield. He had two shriekers left and it looked like he would win, when his basalisk bloods wore off and my dragons pulled me through.

It was a memorable win through the use of the combined arms.

And that was actually a common aspect. The combined synergy of all the cards is often what pulled me through.

Take my very last game, he placed a mantle halfway through and was using fractal dragons/devours. However he was wary of my plague and would set his units out piecemeal trying to draw me out. I instead held on to everything and just kept feeding bonewalls and my own dragons, picking off his dragons with viruses, feeding my bonewall and boneyard. He would pick my dragons off with drain.  I had to time my bonewalls to coincide with the death of his dragons though.

Finally he just said hell with it and placed everything out. I plagued him, he fractaled again. And at the end I was facing five dragons, a mantle and with only my bone walls and a shitload of skeletons and one last dragon.

My skeletons allowed me to just barely pull through.

If I hadn't had viruses feeding my  bonewall and taking out his dragons, he would have killed me a lot sooner.

Anyway, this has left me more convinced then ever before that virus is fine. If you doubt me still, I don't know what else to do.

[zse]

I think Retrovirus is pretty good as it is. Maybe it could have Poisonous, but I'm not sure about that Plague-when-devoured ability.

If you don't see how good Retrovirus can be, try something like this:

Code: [Select]

52n 52n 6rn 6rn 6rn 6rn 6rn 6rn 710 710 710 710 710 710 712 712 712 712 712 712 714 714 714 71b 71b 71b 72i 72i 72i 72i 72i 72i 80e 80e 80h 80h 80i 80i 80i 80iOnly thing that has kept that deck concept totally unused is the simple fact that Hope>>>Bone Wall.

[Demut]

That deck uses fractals viruses to create a cheap source of fuel for the bone wall, make a rapid mass spam of skeletons from the bone yard and pump up the condors to super bird levels. But it looks like it has a good chance of not getting the retrovirus and fractal in your hand soon enough.

[zse]

I spent some 3 mins to build that deck after I saw this topic. That should explain why it looks bit random, lol.

[Demut]

Ahh...I don't do upgraded so I can't really say anything beyond the math looking off.

[Malduk]

Demut, you do realize you can put 4 relics in some deck and win against people in PvP1?
You realize that instead of those 4 Viruses you could have some real CC, damage, or hell, even more bonewalls if growing bonewalls is so important to you?
Let me say this one again: you do realize you can put 4 of whatever card in the deck, and still pull out wins? It really doesnt matter how terrible the card is, I'll build you a deck with 4 of whatever you pick (even relics), that will beat your deck. Every single time.

[Demut]

I said I disregarded starter decks and desyncs. Leaving only the better made decks in there. But fine then. If a direct pvp test is the only thing that will satisfy you. I'm in chat. We'll play a series of seven games. Lets see how many I win.

[Demut]

For the first four games he used a deck specifically designed to counter my deck. I changed to try to counter his, almost won the fifth, then he changed again to I don't know what.

I don't think that was a fair test due to the metagame he used against me, but whatever.

I know my test against 20 random PvP decks was positive.  But I won't say anything more, buff it, whatever.

[Malduk]

Lol.

For the general public: Demut asked for me to use mono (not sure why, there's an obvious counter in super terrible shield aka Skull shield). I made a counter with it, obviously. Using poison for damage. After 4-0 he changed the deck to use poison himself, lost another game due to dead cards aka Virus in his deck. After that I decided to give him something to poison, so I packed some Mummies. With no skull shield, fast win, and we left it at 6-0 for me.
Then he decided he wants another 2 out of 3. No thanks, I'm done wasting my time here, feel free to use Virus to dominate the world of elements.

[Demut]

A virus has three uses, soft cc, soft swarm and soft stall.

Virus combined with the boneyards creates a subpar skeletal swarm.

Virus with the bonewall, can create a somewhat weak stall.

And the Virus's poison is a weak CC which is only useful when combined with the stall and/or swarm.

He went skull shield in a poison deck, which as far as I know, skull shield is only really used with Aflatoxin.

That eliminated, Virus's swarm ability. Which would have been fine if he had gone aflatoxin or creature, but he went poison spells going around my stall completely.

By going creatureless he made my plagues dead cards.

I have nothing to do but to assume he used the metagame.

I could have been using Graboids/Shriekers to test of they were UP and using the metagame he could have gotten similar results making them look UP.

And thats why I am aggravated.

[Kurohami]

A Virus is fine, a retrovirus is simply awesome.