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« on: July 05, 2010, 06:18:05 am »
I wrote a lot, 'cause I felt like it. This comes from my starting out with mono-time because I liked it.
The concept seems solid enough in playtesting, but if you're worried about quanta denial, mono-time only has one option: draw more pillars. A couple Golden Hourglasses would get you to your pillars faster, but slow down early opportunities to play dragons. However, I don't think you'd really need 5 Shards of Gratitude if you could get to more cards. I'd drop a SoG for 3 hourglasses. Yes, that puts you at 32 cards. You'll have the speed to get to what you need, but you can't afford not to have the pillar count you do. If you don't want to drop one of your precious upgraded cards, just make it a 33 card deck.
However, with 3 Eternities and 3 hourglasses, you're going to be eating up 5-7 quanta per turn quickly. The first few turns is getting to and controlling the board with Eternity and Shards of Gratitude. Drop an hourglass ASAP, play a second if you don't need the quanta for Procrastination, but mainly focus on drawing and playing all the pillars and SoG's you can. If you don't need your shield, feel free to not spend the quanta on it. By the time your hand starts to clog up, you'll have enough pillars to cover most of the costs. At this time, you can play the dragon(s) and time your EM.
For the time/earth deck, I'd take special care to let Graboids evolve into Shriekers before using Eternity on them. The more quanta he wastes, the better. He can't make full use of his Pulverizer, so drop Procrastination ASAP to prevent burrowing of Shriekers and the occasional Pharaoh. Having 2 turns to respond before abilities and a 2nd attack is clutch. Finally, since he has only 2 earthquakes, you can usually get an eternity going to prevent both from being played and still recover with the extra ability to get to pillars. If he gets a few creatures out, focus on living while minimizing his quanta. Getting control is key, your dragons just happen to end the game.
For the darkness/entropy deck, your early threat is having Devourers and Discord slow you down too much to take control. Dealing with Devourers is similar to dealing with the earlier earthquakes: ignore, get more pillars, then laugh at them. Discord tends to ruins your fun, but it can sometimes be played around due to how it works. Discord doesn't pick a random quanta and shuffle it, it picks a random element of quanta you have and shuffles it. Once it's given you several different elements of quanta, it tends to have only a minimal effect beyond damage. Stock up quanta for a few turns, playing only SoG's, until you can built up time quanta again. Rewind the most expensive of his Entropy creatures so that he spends all his Entropy quanta on them instead of surviving with Dissipation Field. Eternity takes off 2 quanta, Maxwell's Demon and Abomination cost 5, Purple Dragon costs 10, and he only packs 9 Amethyst Pillars, so unless he got 7 or more pillars out fast, you should eventually control his Entropy usage. Procrastination is key in surviving the onslaught of those cheap 6 attack Lycanthropes he always has. Surviving long enough to gain control is the key to winning, but if that plan doesn't work, just keep his demons away and power through with whatever dragons you have and hope you get lucky.
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