Dealing with pesky cards in PvP – The Guide
Not all cards are created equal. Unfortunately for Elements, some cards a bit too… unequal (read: Overpowered). This makes them extremely frustrating to play against, especially when you start your PvP career and can’t even enjoy a leisurely BL game without having to power through a dozen of these oppressive cards. But while these cards are overpowered and warp the metagame around themselves in a vicious cycle, they can be beaten if you have a deck prepared to face them, and if you play your cards right.
This guide is written with the 6-12 upgrades metagame in mind. Most of the concepts should translate to other metas, but note that in a fully unupped meta you won’t have access to the power of upping specific cards to make them much more powerful counters. In the upped meta the games speed up quite a bit and the options are somewhat different, so something here beside the general concepts might not work.
So without further ado, let's begin:
DiscordDiscord is perhaps the most oppressive card of them all, at least by itself. One Discord could hypothetically remove all your useful quanta for turns on end, and when combined with some other denial card like Black Hole or Earthquake can lock you out of playing cards for the entirety of the game.
In practice Discord rarely locks out ALL your quanta forever. Its main power in PvP is that it can use the denial to effectively remove one or two of your turns. Suppose you did not play anything beside pillars for turn 1 or 2 (which is usual for many decks unupped) and thus accumulated around 7-10 quanta. Well once your opponent plays Discord, all the quanta is scrambled and at most 1/2 quanta will stay in a pool you can use. Next turn after you generate quanta, you should have around 5-7 in your main element and about 6-9 scattered around the others by Discord. Once again, your main element is almost emptied and you have to spend another turn doing nothing. You just spent two turns doing nothing – gaining no useful quanta, playing no cards, doing no damage. In a competitive environment, those two turns should be enough to seal the game in your opponent’s favor.
So now you know why preparing for Discord is a must if it is viable in the metagame. In order to do so, you must focus on its weaknesses and try to exploit them. First off, Discord decks are not amazing at rushing the opponent down. Discord unupped takes 25 turns to kill someone by itself, which is not nearly enough. Unupped, entropy’s in-element hitters are Abomination and Purple Dragon, neither of which have an amazing cost to damage ratio. So a Discord deck can’t really capitalize on its free turns as well as it would like. On top of the creatures being costly they usually can’t use many deck slots as you need 3-4 for Discord and 5-6 for cc/denial support. So if a deck can get past the initial Discord hurdle and somehow negate the limited damage, they should win.
The most obvious way to do this is with a sancstall. Sanctuary by itself completely negates the effect of Discord, healing back damage and blocking the quanta denial. Once you have a sanctuary in place, you can simply build up defenses as normal. Since Discord decks should only have limited amounts of creatures and overall damage, you should be able to win easily.
Another method is to use cheap cc. Lightning and Basilisk Blood both cost only 1 upped, so they can often be played even after Discord scrambles all your quanta (Shockwave is not very useful since most creatures paired with Discord such as Abomination, Purple Dragon and Sapphire Charger have 5 HP). Other forms of cc such as Rage Potion can also work, but since they cost more than 2 quanta it is wise to use them only if they are from the main element of your deck. Your cc should keep you alive till Discord/denial effects wear off, at which point your hitters can come live and finish up the game.
The big question though, is what you can do if you don’t strongly expect Discord to pop up, but it is possible. In that case, the obvious answer is to build a rainbow. Rainbows might seem weak to the infamous Discord Black Hole combo, but in fact it gets around the main use of denial by playing out its cards early on. After that, BH might serve as a powerful Heal but it loses its denial potency.
But if you aren’t using a rainbow, then at all costs avoid investing into two or more elements (i.e. using costly cards from both, perhaps utilizing pendulums). Remember what we said about one element before? Well if your quanta production shifts between two elements you’ll simply be half-assing them both vs Discord, and it will take you three or more turns to recover instead of one or two in case of a mono (interestingly, using two pillar stacks is better on paper here. But it’s still bad and very inconsistent, don’t do it). So your options are to do a full mono, or to splash in a second element using your mark. Splashing in a second element is a bit riskier, but might be worth it if you can use it to include cheap cc.
Using these principles, a deck we might devise to beat Discord (without using sanctuaries):
The 15 pillars are there to ensure that your quanta production keeps up throughout the game. The deck has 8 cc cards in total, which should be more than enough to beat their creatures. You also have fahren to deal early damage and dragons to burst at the end.
Dimensional ShieldDiscord is the standalone most oppressive card, but you cannot go for more infuriating than a nice set of six dimensional shields. If you’re read the amazing article on
who is the beatdown, you’ll know that in any game of elements where both players aim to bring their opponent’s health down to 0 goes like a race. Each player’s damage output decides the number of turns the opponent has left (the clock), and both players aim to optimize this. In a rush vs rush matchup this is often very close, a lot of the time being decided by a cointoss as both decks have a similar clock.
Now, if a player has no bypass damage and the opponent plays a dimensional shield, well, the clock just got delayed by three turns. When you consider that games are decided by half a turn’s difference on the clock, this is just insanely strong. I’m afraid that if you don’t have any answer to Dims in your deck (either permanent control or shield bypass of some form), you are doomed as your opponent will most probably just block all your damage forever till you die. So the one thing which you should always do is bring PC/bypass damage.
If you do have PC or bypass damage, be mindful of your clock against your opponent’s. Dims do take up card slots and cost 6
every three turns, so he should have a slow going on the damage front. If you can maintain chip damage from poison/momentum/spell damage you may be able to win even through dims. But if all you have is PC or burst damage, then a good idea is to slowly build up your damage (in the form of creatures, growth skills or quanta for bolts) and then unleash them in 1/2 turns at the end. e.g. your plan with a grabbow v dims might be to slowly build up your creatures until you have enough damage to kill your opponent in 2 turns, then either use 2 deflags in hand or use a deflag when you have a read that his contains no more dims. Of course, you need to remember your opponent’s clock and try to ensure that he doesn’t win before you can break through the dim chain.
NightmareNightmare is an interesting denial card, and it is very strong at what it does. Playing a nightmare on someone means their hand is full at the start of their turn, and so they have to skip out on a draw. On top of that, the person playing nightmare gets to drain a good amount of health from the opponent. When both players are in a tight race, this is devastating. Nightmare also has the auxillary effects of decreasing hand size for fractal, and when cast on ghost of the past can be a pain (since discarding them cause you to take damage).
The best way to counter nightmare decks (more commonly known as the
archetype of dark domin) is to bring a sancstall or some other resilient control deck capable of taking down the deck’s particular attack strategy. Rushing down a dark domin is often a bad idea, because vampire dragger provides a 12 HP swing every turn and nightmare provides both huge HP swings and denies draws. Since rush decks tend to empty their hands faster, nightmare is much more effective vs them.
If you are playing a rush deck and face nightmare, then an effective strategy is to only play the necessary cards. So, suppose your deck only has cards costing 5 quanta or below and you’ve already played 5 pillars. Then you don’t really need to play more pillars, since any card you draw can be played immediately from the quanta generated last turn. If you’re up against nightmare, at this point a good strategy would be to just keep the pillars in your hand. As this decreases the free slots in your hand. This reduces the HP your opponent drains by a little bit. If you are playing fractal, this greatly reduces the effectiveness of nightmare since you just discard their nightmare creature to reduce their amount in your hand, and when you fractal you just play out all your stored pillars to instantly generate 3-4 slots in your hand. If your opponent is playing nightmare on ghosts of the past, you can choose to not discard aa ghost and just play a pillar instead.
StallsStalls incorporate a lot of infuriating cards, such as Miracle and Sundial. They all focus on one playstyle though, and if you want to beat these cards you have to be able to beat that playstyle. The style we’re talking about is
Stall. The obvious answer to stall decks are of course break decks – decks which are resistant to cc/pc and have the damage output to power through a stall’s healing in the long game. The trouble with breaks is that they are usually either too inconsistent or too slow to measure up to rush decks or even domin decks (rush decks with some control cards). So unless you strongly expect a stall deck, taking a full on break deck into pvp might not be a good idea (there are exceptions which are break decks that are extremely strong or fast enough to beat rushes/domins, some examples are Catatitans and Fire bolt dials).
So how do you beat stall decks while using a more conventional deck? Well one idea which was used to great effect in war is to give your deck the option to one-turn kill (otk) the opponent given enough time. While there are
decks and guides dedicated to OTKs, what we’re aiming for is to give a normal deck a chance to OTK the opponent. Here are some decks where it’s done:
Spoiler for Hidden:
Air Dark Domin
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5oc 5oc 5oc 5oc 5oc 5of 5of 5of 5of 5of 5of 5og 5og 5op 5pu 5pu 5pu 5pu 5up 5up 5v1 5v1 5v1 7mt 7mt 7mt 7mt 7mt 7tb 7tb 8ptAether Grabbow
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4su 4vj 4vj 4vj 4vj 4vj 4vj 52q 590 590 61o 61o 61o 61o 61q 61r 61r 61r 61r 61r 63a 63a 63a 63a 77g 77g 77g 77g 7dm 7dm 8pmIn the air dark domin, one could choose to not play any dragons until he had all six in hand. Then with a steal removing any pesky shields, 6 dragons + Sky Blitz would deal 108 damage – more than enough to finish off the opponent in one hit. The aether grabbow can just keep graboids burrowed until it just evolves them all and Pus them over and over to push damage over 100. This sort of strategy negates all the control and healing cards your opponent brought, and thus gives you a huge amount of card advantage over them.
Another way to get around the power of stalls is to use the best tool available to generate card advantage: Fractal. As Higurashi said, ‘Fractal anything is viable’. A standard fractal deck can use its natural card advantage to easily beat most stalls (see chargertal, giant frogtal, minor phoenixtal/fractix). But if you have a deck that already is an aether duo, you can also splash in one or two copies of fractal with a strong creature to act as a surprise finisher:
Spoiler for Hidden:
Bonebolt
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52h 52q 52q 61q 61q 61q 61q 61q 622 63a 63a 63a 63a 63a 63a 63a 63a 63a 63a 63a 63a 63a 63a 718 718 718 718 71b 71b 71b 71b 8pkAether Sancstall
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5la 5li 5li 5lm 5lm 5lm 5lm 5lm 5lm 61q 61q 61q 61q 61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 61t 61u 61u 61u 622 63a 63a 63a 63a 63a 63a 63a 63a 63a 63a 63a 63a 7q9 7q9 7q9 7q9 7q9 7q9 81q 81q 81q 8pqBoth decks have a specific game plan: the first wants to control your board and build an insurmountable defense using bone wall + lightning synergy while beating you down with poison, and the second just wishes to prolong the game until it can force deckout. But if you are faced with a large stall deck, neither of the strategies is really good. In that case, these decks can just use the dragon+fractal combo to do huge amounts of damage, which will hopefully close out the game over a couple of turns.
