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[Elbirn]

Epilogue:
I decided to put it to the test and find out how time intensive it really is to start from scratch and get a fully upped FG grinder.  Once you have a fully upped FG grinder, I reasoned, it'd be relatively easy to grind up electrum and upped decks.  I think a lot of vets would point to having a fully upped FG grinder as sort of a coming of age.

Here was my plan:
Day 1: Start up an alt and change it to a mono-death AI3 grinder ASAP.  Grind until I have enough electrum to buy The Essential Halfblood Farmer and then grind until I can afford my RoL/Hope with 6 upped RoLs.  (Note: after grinding AI4 with Essential I can say it's definitely more efficient than the standard advice to grind AI3 for 9k electrum.  Slower games and lower winrates, but winning an upped card is worth 1150 and it happens more often than I'd thought.)
Day 2: If I didn't find a 2nd lobo against AI3 and AI4 yesterday, find 1-2 in bronze.
Day 3: Use my mostly unupped RoL/Hope to grind FGs, upping itself in the process.

Here's how it worked out:
Day 1: I created an account at ~9am on a weekday and by ~4pm I had a RoL/Hope with 6 upped RoLs and one lobo.  Yay.
Day 2: Where all the lobos at?  I grinded bronze a good chunk of the day and never found one.
Day 3: Until I found more lobos, there's really no point in grinding FGs.  My winrate would be worse, but more importantly I set out to get a fully upped RoL/Hope and that includes the lobos.  Here's how it would work out, in theory:

• I'd need to win about 30 cards (sell value of ~1150 each enough to up ~24 cards I need)
• I'd win about 0.5 upped cards per FG I beat, so I'd need to beat about 60 FGs.
• Starting unupped, a winrate of ~30% is prolly an okay assumption.  That means I'd need to play about 200 games.

Conclusion:
I'm told Limitless Speed (an FG grinder utilizing 0 rares) has a good winrate.  If that's true, I'm pretty confident getting a fully upped FG grinder on a brand new account could be done in less than 24 hours.  That's the advice I'd give new players.

The real problem facing new players is that many of the community's tried-and-true decks use rares.  And finding the rares you need, with one exception, is 100% due to circumstance.  Kami recently asked what kinds of quests and rewards zanz should add, and I think this post answers the question.  Grinding for electrum isn't tough if you have the rares.

+rep for research. Nubbins everywhere shall forever appreciate your work

I do agree that rares should be a bit more commonplace for nubbins, if only because there are now so many of them that it's hard to get the ones that you NEED. Maybe there could be a shard quest after the rare weapon quest? Help the nubbys put together splat or poisondials? *shrug?*

EDIT: Lousy page break...Quoted Kev's findings, save you all the trouble of going back a page. Cuz I love you gaiz. <3

[Acsabi44]

Day 2: Where all the lobos at?  I grinded bronze a good chunk of the day and never found one.
Day 3: Until I found more lobos, there's really no point in grinding FGs.  My winrate would be worse, but more importantly I set out to get a fully upped RoL/Hope and that includes the lobos.  Here's how it would work out, in theory:

Have you tired this?
TL;DR: IT is a beginner deck geared specificially towards beating the  elder. If you don't care about score, then you can skip every other AI3, so you can play lots of games in littlie time. Result: fast lobo. (I agree, it is luck dependent, but it should't take more than a day)

[kev]

Day 2: Where all the lobos at?  I grinded bronze a good chunk of the day and never found one.
Day 3: Until I found more lobos, there's really no point in grinding FGs.  My winrate would be worse, but more importantly I set out to get a fully upped RoL/Hope and that includes the lobos.  Here's how it would work out, in theory:

Have you tired this?
TL;DR: IT is a beginner deck geared specificially towards beating the  elder. If you don't care about score, then you can skip every other AI3, so you can play lots of games in littlie time. Result: fast lobo. (I agree, it is luck dependent, but it should't take more than a day)

Did you mean to link something?

The possibility of winning a lobo from the mono-aether elder is one of the reasons AI3 grinding is the standard recommendation by vets.  But when you beat the mono-aether AI3 there's about a 1% chance you win a lobo per spin (3% chance over three spins).  That means you'll win a lobo once every ~430 AI3 matches (on average) but there's a huge amount of variance so it could just as easily be the first AI3 game as it could be the 850th.  New players can't afford 4000 electrum to autoquit 400 matches even if they were willing to take the hits on electrum, score, and pride.  And I haven't mentioned that most RoL/Hope builds require three lobos, not two.


At any rate this has been a learning experience for me.  I'd always thought the goal in starting a new account should be to get a partially upped FG grinder, have it up itself, and from that point gaining electrum is relatively easy.  I'd also though AI3 was more lucrative than AI4.

If a friend started the game today I'd tell him to start with the Aether element, morph his deck into Essential by the time he reaches 150 score, and then grind AI4 for ups until he could afford an arena grinder.  Which is a pretty huge departure.  From there he could grind rares and electrum and the game wouldn't get stale as easily.

[ddevans96]

I'd still suggest getting Instosis as soon as possible, since it can (afaik) grind Arena, FGs, and HBs as the need requires :3

[kev]

I'd still suggest getting Instosis as soon as possible, since it can (afaik) grind Arena, FGs, and HBs as the need requires :3

Aye, but how do you get Instosis, dd?  This is more a discussion of how "as soon as possible" is accomplished.  Grinding arena for shards using an unupped, rareless deck is no easy task.  And even when you get 4 SoRs you still need to up 30 cards.  I'd argue the steps are:

• Morph Aether starter deck into Essential.
• Use it to up an Arena grinder.
• If you need more electrum to up Instosis by the time you find 4 SoRs in arena you still have Essential to fall back on.
• Instosis.

[Bootsza]

On my alt I got almost all of my rares by grinding bronze league.

Shards, weapons, squids, they all seemed to feature regularly in the special spins.  The mono death grinder works well for this purpose.

[willng3]

I think that most of the misunderstanding with grinding HBs instead of AI3 stems from older players being accustomed to AI4 having more HP and less chance of winning upgrades than they do currently.  This is further strengthened by the fact that no one has really done an in-depth study of decks versus AI4 similar to what was done with the TTW Studies back before Jesus was born. 

Starting with Aether seems like a logical decision to me given that it can easily be converted into a HB grinder and can also be used fairly well in PvP1 and against AI3.  I would have suggested sticking with Mono Death for AI3 grinding rather than converting to Mono Aether for HB grinding if and only if the user had chosen Mono Death without thinking of the most efficient path their deck could take.  However, this is only because I had assumed that the cost of buying a whole new deck would be a noticeable setback for the user trying to purchase their first FG grinder (and I believe that Mono Aether is significantly more expensive than Mono Death).  But if winning upgrades from HBs is enough to gain a decent amount of profit then converting to Mono Aether seems to be the way to go again.

And for FG grinders, I'd definitely start with Limitless Speed over RoL/Hope.  It both requires 0 rares and I believe it has similar, if not better winrate than RoL/Hope (stats for both haven't been posted recently afaik).

The question of what to pursue once you've started HB grinding mainly depends on if you believe you'll be able to gain upgrades from AI4 more quickly than you'd be able to gain upgrades from AI5.  If the answer is HBs then it's probably a good idea to get yourself a fully/mostly upped Bronze/Silver League grinder and then start grinding for Shards, rares, or whatever else you need.  After that you can focus on FG grinding if you want to rake in electrum, or go to higher levels of Arena for score grinding.  If the answer to the previous question is FGs then it may be better to upgrade a few cards in your FG grinder just to improve winrate and decrease the amount of time spent attempting to upgrade a Bronze/Silver grinder.

I wish I could help test this as a lot of this stems from theory, but I sadly don't have the time to do that these days :\

[kev]

On my alt I got almost all of my rares by grinding bronze league.

Shards, weapons, squids, they all seemed to feature regularly in the special spins.  The mono death grinder works well for this purpose.

If you meant the unupped mono-death, I'm definitely not winning five consecutive games consistently.  Maybe the game has changed since you used it in bronze or maybe my sample size was too small.  I dunno.

The question of what to pursue once you've started HB grinding mainly depends on if you believe you'll be able to gain upgrades from AI4 more quickly than you'd be able to gain upgrades from AI5.  If the answer is HBs then it's probably a good idea to get yourself a fully/mostly upped Bronze/Silver League grinder and then start grinding for Shards, rares, or whatever else you need.  After that you can focus on FG grinding if you want to rake in electrum, or go to higher levels of Arena for score grinding.  If the answer to the previous question is FGs then it may be better to upgrade a few cards in your FG grinder just to improve winrate and decrease the amount of time spent attempting to upgrade a Bronze/Silver grinder.

Yeah, that's pretty much the crux of it.  What I learned is that because so many decks (but especially top tier FG grinders) use rares, it's better to go rares first and then electrum rather than electrum first and then rares as had always been my mindset.  As dd sorta pointed out, Instosis is so much better than anything else in today's game that once you have it your account is very different.  I'd always thought lack of electrum was the bottleneck but it's actually lack of rares.  Part of that is due to AI4 being more profitable and easier to grind unupped than I'd thought.

...players that grind more than me are probably thinking that it took me a long time to reach such an obvious conclusion.  Lol.

[10 men]

I'd still suggest getting Instosis as soon as possible, since it can (afaik) grind Arena, FGs, and HBs as the need requires :3

Aye, but how do you get Instosis, dd?  This is more a discussion of how "as soon as possible" is accomplished.  Grinding arena for shards using an unupped, rareless deck is no easy task.  And even when you get 4 SoRs you still need to up 30 cards.  I'd argue the steps are:

• Morph Aether starter deck into Essential.
• Use it to up an Arena grinder.
• If you need more electrum to up Instosis by the time you find 4 SoRs in arena you still have Essential to fall back on.
• Instosis.

I also think that not tackling Arena until you have a fully upgraded arena deck is the way to go, but don't grind AI4 please. Even with a really bad deck FGs drop a lot more money than AI4. The one you can always fall back on is Liquid Antimatter or maybe this Limitless speed deck (don't know how good it is).
There's a couple more possibilities if you have a weapon:
- Got a Lobo? Pick a second one from 500 score quest, make RoL Hope.
- Eternity? Pick a second one and make Ghostal.
- Pulverizer? Pick a second and make that DimShield rainbow from Amilir
Hold off picking your 500 score reward until you get one of these. Hunting AI3/2/4/Oracle for one rare specifically could prove difficult, if 3 different are acceptable your chances become much better...

My roadmap for a newbie would be:
- Pick darkness
- play a few games then make a Grabbow
- play some PvPI
- when that becomes less profitable move to AI3
- when you get one of the above mentioned rares pick a second one of it and make the corresponding FG grinder / if no luck make LA or Limitless Speed
- upgrade an Arena grinder and get rares.

[Bootsza]

If you meant the unupped mono-death, I'm definitely not winning five consecutive games consistently.  Maybe the game has changed since you used it in bronze or maybe my sample size was too small.  I dunno.

Yup, that was the one I meant.  I worked towards poison dials as an upped FG and Arena grinder and some upgrades made the mono-death grinder work a lot better.  I may be remembering those days fondly because of those upgrades.  It is also entirely possible that the game has moved a long way since then.

I spent a load of time grinding for the SoSac I needed for Poison Dials and seemed to pick up the rares I needed while doing that.

A quick check suggests that this was actually 2100 wins and 400 losses... memory is a dodgy geezer.

[Acsabi44]

Did you mean to link something?

Yes, sory I forgot the link.
http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php/topic,43124.0.html
I once tried to get 2 lobos with a fresh account. Maybe it was pure luck, but I won one in a few hrs from AI3.

[eaglgenes101]

Darkness => Toxic Shriekers on AI3 => Grabbow on Silver => Semi-upped Limitless => Fully-upped Limitless

How fast would this be?