It’s been bothering me for awhile that the really good deck building and matchup threads are scattered across the forum, and it occurred to me that combining them all into one strategy thread would be helpful. None of these are my ideas.
Deck BuildingScaredgirl’s
9 tips for better deckbuilding and Dragoon’s
Strategy Primer are excellent starting points. Both talk broadly about deck building dos and don’ts. Both also reference QI. Scaredgirl’s thread
Using Quanta Index to determine the optimal number of Pillars in a deck gives a starting point for balancing quanta, and that simple concept advanced deck building in a way no other thread has.
Deck MatchupsI made the above image comes from mesaprotector’s thread
Rush, Stall, Break - The Hidden Rock-Paper-Scissors Game Within Elements, specifically RootRanger’s
post therein. I’d been looking for a way to express my thoughts on the metagame when I found that thread. Root hit it on the head there. What follows is really just my take on his idea.
Rush decks contain mainly cost-efficient creatures. The objective with a Rush deck is to get as much damage on the board as quickly as possible. Every card in a Rush deck is engineered to lower the deck’s turns to win (ttw).
Dom decks contain a mix of damage and control. Control cards slow your opponent down and are broken into creature control (cc), permanent control (pc), and quanta control (qc). Control cards help gain quanta advantage and/or card advantage. For example I just used my two-quanta Lightning Bolt to cancel your ten-quanta dragon, which is relevant because you spent eight relative quanta to do only ten damage to me, and also because when you were building your deck you had to add two pillars to power that dragon. Advantage me. Although the ttw from Dom decks is higher, the advantage gained from control cards makes them favorites over Rush decks.
Stall decks are all about control. They usually contain multiple copies of a shield plus heavy control (usually cc) and/or healing. If a Stall deck contains any creatures they usually have control abilities. Of the four categories, Stall decks are most likely to have a deckout win condition. Stall decks are often strong against Dom decks. The control half of Dom deck is less effective against Stalls (good luck using that BB against my critterless deck), and because only half the Dom deck contains damage it’s often not enough to overpower the Stall’s damage reduction, cc, and/or healing.
Break decks circumvent the features of Stalls decks. Breaks come in two varieties - bypass damage or ramp damage. Bypass Breaks feature cards like Fire Bolt or Unstable Gas, which aren’t effected by most shields, aren’t susceptible to cc, and can be triggered all at once which makes healing ineffective. Ramp damage increases throughout the game. Creature growth (Fire Spirit, Steam Machine, etc) and creature multiplication (card advantage gained through Fractal, Pharoah, Nymph Queen, etc) are two ways to ramp. Ramping renders healing ineffective but doesn’t address damage mitigation from shields or creature control, and for that reason resilient creatures and PC are often needed in Ramp Breaks (Steam Machine plus Deflagration, for instance).
Rush decks are often strong against Breaks simply because Breaks are slower and usually don’t have a good way to slow down the rush.
Which brings us back to the circular picture above.
Rushes lose to Doms which lose to Stalls which lose to Breaks which lose to Rushes.
What happens when a Rush faces a Stall or a Dom faces a Break? It depends on the build. Flying Titans, a Bypass Break, would do very well versus a Dom where the control cards were Freeze and Ice Bolt but very poorly versus a Dom where the control cards were Deflagration and Reverse Time.
In fact “It depends” is a good rule of thumb. Like QI, the above is a useful tool in thinking about deck matchups but shouldn’t be thought of as hard-and-fast rules. Although Doms are often strong against Rushes, sometimes your control cards won’t disrupt the specific Rush you’re facing. Also all of the above talks about whether you’re an underdog or a favorite over the long-term, which does not mean you’re guaranteed to win an individual match.
Lastly some cards and some decks don’t fit neatly into one category. Against a Dom, the Fire Bolt in Fire Stall is a Stall card in a Stall deck. Against a Stall, the Fire Bolt in Fire Stall is a Break card in a Break deck.
