The Dragon's Arena Decks

[Calindu]

It's because SoFo, w/o SoFo it would receive at least 50% thumbs up.

[dragonsdemesne]

200hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 2x mark
Oracle Card: TRIDENT
wins: 6 losses: 5 rank: >500 Rating: -137 age: 1



Queens and queens and more queens.  SoF and purify for hopefully defeating the worst counters to this deck, things like SoSa, dimshields, etc.  And... oh, that's it :p  2/6 thumbs up on this one.  Maybe it would've gotten more without the SoFs... but maybe not, since it probably needed them to actually win :p

Pandemonium is the card of the day.  I think I'm going to make a duo with death.  Bone walls, condors, etc, and profit from death like an arms dealer.

[dragonsdemesne]

200hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 2x mark
Oracle Card: PANDEMONIUM
wins: 35 losses: 15 rank: >500 Rating: -148 age: 8



Pretty simple idea, and it succeeded at making it the full 8 days.  Hide behind the bone walls while pandemonium wipes everything out and grows the walls.  Poison makes the kills.  I had 3 spots at the end, so I threw in three holy flashes just for fun, and I am really hoping they killed some SoSa players   588 electrum and 35 wins means the deck got 14 thumbs up.  It didn't get a lot of plays, particularly in the last two days; I think it got maybe 3 on days 6-7.

Today's card was also pandemonium, so I can't build a new deck today due to the bug/feature (not sure which) disallowing a new deck when you spin the same card.

[dragonsdemesne]

170hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 3x mark
Oracle Card: PURPLE DRAGON
wins: 51 losses: 19 rank: >500 Rating: -139 age: 7



Not bad for a mono, I suppose.  I tossed in all my purple nymphs at the time (won 1 in the last week I didn't include) and chaos powers, then I had 3 more slots so I put in one each of SoP/SoFr/Discord just to mix things up a bit.

Today's card is horned frog.  I can remember doing a speedbow with frog, as well as a death/life creature rush, so I'll look for something else to try that's unique.

edit: forgot to include # of thumbs ups, it was 15/51, likely reflecting the boringness of a mono.

[dragonsdemesne]

200hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 2x mark
Oracle Card: HORNED FROG
wins: 7 losses: 5 rank: >500 Rating: -146 age: 2



3/7 thumbs-up.  I couldn't really think of anything too unique for the frog, so I just threw together an immorush with a couple splashed cards in about 5 seconds without any real thought towards quanta balance or anything like that.

Today's card is parallel universe, which is one I don't think I've ever had before, so anything I do will be new.  The problem is that the AI is so unbelievably bad with it (it won't play it until it's taken a bunch of damage) so I'm not sure if I'll be able to build anything that can actually win :p

[dragonsdemesne]

200hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 2x mark
Oracle Card: PARALLEL UNIVERSE
wins: 0 losses: 4 rank: >500 Rating: -160 age: 0



This had to have been an absolute blast to play against.  Unfortunately, it can't get any thumbs up if it can't win any games, lol.  I'd like to think people would have thumbed this deck up had they had the opportunity.  As I mentioned yesterday, the problem with twin universe is that the AI won't actually play it right away; it'll wait until it's taken a whole bunch of damage, or sometimes if it can kill you immediately, but even when it does play it, it often targets the wrong things.  I was hoping it'd sneak a few wins in from simply getting really lucky mutations, like the one game I tested against it.  It got two dragons right away and something else with lycanthropy that was just as big as a dragon, and it was all over very quickly.

[dragonsdemesne]

170hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 3x mark
Oracle Card: BUTTERFLY EFFECT
wins: 28 losses: 11 rank: 419 Rating: -68 age: 4



13/28 thumbs up, which isn't bad, nearly 50%.  I started by thinking... how the heck can I use butterfly effect?  Damselfly seemed one of the best targets in the game.  After that, air cards seemed obvious, so wyrm went in.  Chaos powers for wyrms, shards of freedom... and I accidentally recreated Chaos Wyrms with 5 BE, as someone (bogtro I think?) pointed out to me in chat.  I should count it a miracle I got any thumbs ups at all :p

Lately I've been grinding my arena decks into the ground, only replacing them after they are eliminated, but I got Nymph's Tears today, and that's got so many possibilities that I figured I'd put it to use somehow.  I was thinking I might recreate the light/water stall I built several months ago, since light nymphs hit pretty hard now with their buff, but I'd like to try and use something else.  If I can find a way to make, say, death nymphs useful, that would be really funny :p

[dragonsdemesne]

200hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 2x mark
Oracle Card: NYMPH'S TEARS
wins: 11 losses: 2 rank: 189 Rating: 10 age: 2



I am in stunned disbelief that this deck only got 2/11 thumbs ups.  Death Nymph's tears?  Come on, I've NEVER seen that done before!  I guess people thought the rest of the deck was too close to SoSa poison, but even with no SoSas, people didn't like it.  It did reasonably well at 11-2, and ordinarily I'd have left it up longer.  However, due to waking up in the middle of the night, I decided to spin the oracle for the heck of it and spun a BLACK NYMPH!  This is awesome, because it was one of the two nymphs I didn't own yet.  (only Light nymph remains!)  It also means that the next arena deck is automatically one that I promised to do if I ever spun a black nymph. 

I have six purple nymphs.  I spun black nymph, and have (temporarily) six black nymphs in my arena deck.  Liquid.  Antimatter.  Without.  Spells.

edit: Oh yeah, and I gained level 75 in the last couple days, so 1 more arena point in the future.

[dragonsdemesne]

175hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 3x mark
Oracle Card: BLACK NYMPH
wins: 6 losses: 5 rank: >500 Rating: -129 age: 1



I didn't expect this one to do too well, given the prevalence of things like poison decks, and the fact that it's quite slow, and I'm actually surprised it did as well as it did.  However, I simply could -not- resist making this deck when the opportunity arose.  The community also seemed to think that this deck was quite unique, and 5/6 of the wins were thumbs ups   I suspect that I got the quanta balance way off, but I didn't really care :p

Today's card is gargoyle.  I don't think I've ever had that one before, or even really used it in any of my arena decks much.  It's a good card, though, and hopefully I can find something interesting to do with it. 

[dragonsdemesne]

200hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 2x mark
Oracle Card: GARGOYLE
wins: 8 losses: 5 rank: >500 Rating: -116 age: 1



3/8 thumbs ups.  I've never seen this deck done before, and I knew it wouldn't be very successful, but anything that's a new idea is always good.  Great heaping piles of denial (probably too much) and gargoyles/eclipse/dagger for the kill.  Most likely what happened is that the hand got clogged due to a lack of permanents to target.  I'd thought about trying to do a trio with earth so I could use the gargoyle/pest abilities and pulverizers and earthquakes and stuff like that, but I couldn't figure out a way to do it without making the deck really huge and reliant on good quanta draws, and it would have done much worse for certain.

Today's card is hourglass.  A lot of people whine about large deck oraclebows, so I'll probably skip doing that, even though those are some of the ones I thumbs up the most, because it's often something I haven't seen done.  I think I'm going to try and create a fat fire/time stall and see how that goes.

[dragonsdemesne]

175hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 3x mark
Oracle Card: GOLDEN HOURGLASS
wins: 26 losses: 9 rank: >500 Rating: -122 age: 3



8/26 thumbs up for this deck.  Lots of healing and stall cards, a bunch of nymphs to help along with that, and hourglasses to draw quickly and get the stuff you need.  It's unfortunate that Platinum league is so competitive now that a 75% win rate gets you kicked out, as it means it is hard to make a deck that is both competitive and creative, but that's simply the way it is.  I thought this was a rather interesting deck, but I guess the community didn't agree.

Today's card is firebolt.  That'll be a tough one to make a deck that people like, because for whatever reason, people here really hate direct damage, and fire in particular.  I was thinking of just slapping together 6 fire bolt 6 fahrenheit 6 animate weapon and 17 towers, but that'll probably get zero thumbs up :p  I'll try to figure out something clever to do with it, but I might just throw together some boring monofire if I can't come up with something.

edit: RNG can die... firebolt deck wants more plays :p  It's gotten 5/12 thumbs ups so far; with firebolt, that's already not bad, but it's got twelve shards of focus and it's STILL getting more thumbs ups than some of my other decks   I tested against my own arena deck, and I think a big part of that is a completely accidental synergy between two of the cards in my deck, lol.  (but you have to wait until I take the deck down to learn what that was!)

Spoiler for Hidden:

[dragonsdemesne]

175hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 3x mark
Oracle Card: FIRE BOLT
wins: 35 losses: 11 rank: >500 Rating: -143 age: 5



The basic idea here should be fairly obvious.  Red nymphs to make the steam machines and shards of focus more deadly than usual.  Flying fahrenheits and fire lances work well with the extra towers/pends beyond what I usually put in a deck.  Two ice lances since I was going with the bolt theme and I thought I might have a lot of extra water quanta.  Purifies for healing/antipoison-sosa.

I played a test game a day or two ago, and I found a completely unintended synergy in there.  See if you can spot it...

Spoiler for Hidden:

Purify + red nymph.  The AI would use the rage ability on the creatures, and then purify them, so that it could keep raging, sort of like how the red nymph/archangel combo works.  That was completely unintentional on my part.  It's not a particularly practical strategy, but it was interesting to see the AI try something that even I didn't think of.

The deck only earned 7 thumbs ups, which doesn't surprise me.  People hate direct damage on the forums (quite illogically) and shard of focus (quite logically) and this deck had both.

Today's card is amethyst pillar.  That'll allow for a fairly broad range of decks.  Nothing really obviously creative is coming to me, though.  As usual, I'll try to come up with something unique...

edit: Looks like I did it twice, and did it again with purify instead of SoP, so I'll be trying to find something else.  Maybe I'll go old school and use shard of readiness and steam machine, and not even use fire quanta... :p