The Dragon's Arena Decks

[Elite arbiter]

People hate direct damage on the forums (quite illogically)

Hm, just a thought, but do you think that a significant portion of people hate direct damage because it hard counters their SoSa farm strat and thusly get frustrated at it like rainbow users do against BH?

[dragonsdemesne]

Hm, just a thought, but do you think that a significant portion of people hate direct damage because it hard counters their SoSa farm strat and thusly get frustrated at it like rainbow users do against BH?

No, because people hated it before shard of sacrifice even existed in the game.  The unpredictability of it is probably a big factor, I think, though, and that same unpredictability does mean that it's hard to know how to use shard of sacrifice against it.  That same unpredictability means that lesser skilled players have a harder time beating such a deck, and is probably a factor in why people hate it.

Arena deck update: 1-2 so far, without a thumbs up.  That person must have been very stingy, because I have never once seen the deck I have posted up now in the arena before :p

[dragonsdemesne]

200hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 2x mark
Oracle Card: AMETHYST PILLAR
wins: 2 losses: 4 rank: >500 Rating: -142 age: 1



The fact that this got 0/2 thumbs is sad; two of you are cheap bastards who obviously never thumbs up anything :p  I've never seen this deck done in the arena before.  Anyway, the point was obviously to get a protected dissipation shield early, and then wait :p  Pandemonium and granite skin would hopefully keep it alive, and shard of bravery to try and get through the deck quickly.  The deck suffers from several key flaws, however. (which I ignored in making something unique :p)  The first is that due to the deck size, it might not actually draw the dissipation shield/protect artifact combo before losing the game, yet it needs to be a large deck size in order to actually deck people out.   The second problem is that multiple copies of the shield/PA combo are dead cards in hand, clogging it up and wrecking double draw/shard of bravery, yet multiple copies are needed to ensure it was drawn early.  (the high number of towers/pends, 30, partially offsets this, but not enough)

Today's card is nightfall.  I refuse to make a deck with 10 copies of nightfall, so it's farm time today.  Enjoy

[dragonsdemesne]

200hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 2x mark
Oracle Card: DRAIN LIFE
wins: 12 losses: 6 rank: >500 Rating: -112 age: 3



Every time I look at the arena window, the rank keeps shifting between about 509 and 474, so I figure I might as well just make a new deck.  I couldn't think of anything really unique to do with siphon life, so I decided to make an oversized deck and threw in everything and the kitchen sink.  It managed to garner 5 thumbs ups, although I really don't know why.  Despite the pest/gargoyle use of earth quanta, I don't usually see this combination done, so I figured I'd try to make use of it, and pest/quicksand seemed the best way.  Unfortunately, about the only interesting part of this deck is the black nymph making 7/23 gargoyles vampiric, and most people probably never saw the lone nymph.

Today's card is earth pendulum.  I've already done an earth/light stoneskin/miracle stall, and I don't really like pendulum supernova decks (PSNs) so that removes two of themost obvious choices, besides monoearth.  I could do a monoearth, but that wouldn't be particularly unique, either.  I'd been thinking perhaps a nymph's tears duo; throw in a few congeals, purifies, tridents, and fun things like that.  Or maybe some sort of firestall with stoneskins?  There's still a few interesting possibilities like those that I haven't seen done... we'll see what I end up doing.

edit: Update on the earth pend deck.  It's 30-4 so far, rank 27, with exactly 50% thumbs ups, so I think I've hit on a great idea as people think it is both creative, and it's actually winning games, too.  You'll have to wait (or face it in the arena) to know what it contains, though
edit: It's 40-5 now and rank 12 with an amazingly high 26 thumbs ups so far!  I mention that now because if it goes over rank 10, I won't be able to calculate thumbs ups anymore.  The win/loss record is pretty strong, but it's clearly rising in rank due to thumbs ups, because if you compare it to the decks with similar ratings, mine has a worse W/L record but is still up there.  This deck is definitely my most successful creative deck so far.  I've been in the top 5 several times, including one deck at #1, but those were very uncreative decks like SoSa poison, immorush, and DBH.
edit: Posting this screenshot to show just how well the deck is doing in terms of thumbs ups:

Spoiler for Hidden:

-the #7 deck has only 1 more rating point, but 11 more wins
-the #13 and #17 decks have strictly better win/loss ratios yet have less rating
-it's impossible to know for certain, but I suspect that I have the highest thumbs up ratio of any deck on this list, based on the fact that my win/loss is worse than most/all of the decks here, yet it's still #8
-I might have as many as 31 thumbs ups, though some of the electrum I have might be from being in top 10, though it's likely only a small amount, if any

edit: deck is at rank 5 now, so thumbs ratio cannot be calculated anymore

[dragonsdemesne]

200hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 2x mark
Oracle Card: EARTH PENDULUM
wins: 57 losses: 20 rank: >500 Rating: -144 age: 8



Well, this is it.  This is officially the most successful of my creative decks.  It earned a whopping 1212 electrum, and while I cannot be sure of the thumbs ups since it was in the top ten briefly (I saw it peak at rank 5) I can still calculate an upper bound for the number of thumbs, which is 44.  I know it had at least 31 thumbs ups before hitting the top ten, and it wasn't top ten until about day 5 or so.  I think it's fairly safe to say that it had at least a 2/3 thumbs up ratio, since it had roughly that level before hitting top ten.  This deck even managed to win two games with 1hp while I was at work today.  I have no idea how this is even possible with this particular deck, and the only way it could have been done is against either purely deckout decks, against extremely bad draws, or against decks that were hosed/slowed by an early diamond shield, all of which are quite unlikely.  Maybe the quicksands screwed a few people long enough that it managed to win before they could play anything?

The basic premise of the deck is quite simple.  I started with the warden/SoP combo, since I figured that's fairly rare to see in arena.  Shriekers seemed a good choice for damage, since the AI usually burrows them.  It won't ever unburrow them (to effectively double any built up SoP attack) but I figured even with that fact, they were a better choice of attacker than anything else in monoearth for this deck.  Quicksands were to slow the opponent long enough to make all this happen, since SoP takes awhile to build up.  Lastly, a single diamond shield and gavel rounded out 35 cards.  I could've added my two nymphs to the deck, but I didn't trust the AI not to screw up with guard + petrify on the same target.  (I've seen the FG jezebel screw up petrify + siphon life so I considered this quite likely)  I also suspect that the deck is overquantaed, but I did that on purpose to make sure there was always plenty of quanta for the wardens, even if the AI misplays and puts something else down first that it shouldn't, instead of activating them first; with the extra quanta, it could hopefully do both.

I'm quite surprised that the deck won as much as it did.  I've made very similar water decks with squid/SoP that didn't do nearly as well.  When I got up this morning its win record was still something like 55-9, so it was still winning the majority of its games with 72hp.  The SoP clearly hoses SoSa decks, and a few quick wardens/SoP would stop certain types of creature decks, and I suppose burrowed shriekers would be tough for some deck types, but I did not expect this deck to last more than 2 or 3 days at the most.  I also didn't expect so many thumbs ups for it, either, especially when compared to some of my other more creative decks (in my opinion) that got half or less as many thumbs ups percentage wise as this one did.

Anyway, today's card is steam machine.  Not too long ago I did a fire/water duo using steam machine/SoF and rage pots/nymphs when I got fire lance, and I don't want to do that again.  The problem is, steam machine requires either fire quanta or shard of readiness to do anything.  Given that I did a fire duo recently, I'll go with some sort of bizarre SoR deck that will probably fail within a day.

[dragonsdemesne]

200hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 2x mark
Oracle Card: STEAM MACHINE
wins: 4 losses: 4 rank: >500 Rating: -106 age: 2



Yeah... turns out AI plays SoR on squid before machines :p  The rest is history...  I did get 3/4 thumbs ups for it, though, so in that sense it was actually slightly more successful than the last deck, but with a small sample size of only 4 wins, that doesn't mean too much.

Today's card is abomination.  I've got a rather silly idea for this one... :p

[dragonsdemesne]

200hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 2x mark
Oracle Card: ABOMINATION
wins: 6 losses: 4 rank: >500 Rating: -111 age: 1



The W/L on this one didn't surprise me at all; I didn't think it would really be any better than about 50/50.  The low number of thumbs ups did surprise me; I can't recall ever seeing this done before.  It only got 1/6 thumbs ups despite being a deck I've never seen in the arena.

The idea was dead simple.  I didn't bother with pillars, and instead just used the mark to power the 1 cost entropy spells.  Shard of Patience hopefully helped vs stalls, and is fairly effective with so many small creatures in the deck, and Shard of sacrifice hopefully kept it alive long enough to win.

Today's card is sundial.  I've had this one before.  I think I did monolight stall and poison dials before, so it's time for something different.

[dragonsdemesne]

200hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 2x mark
Oracle Card: SUNDIAL
wins: 4 losses: 4 rank: >500 Rating: -125 age: 1



It's basically RoL/Hope, but with life for mitosis/bond instead of fractal, to make it more creative.  Shards of Patience help grow the little rays, and it actually synergizes with sundial a bit; since you're not attacking anyway with one of those cards, you might as well play the other.  (though if the AI actually figured this out, I'll be stunned)  The green nymph was there also mostly for fun, but light quanta generation on the rays is increased by adrenaline, and shard of patience will only skip the first attack of a creature with adrenaline, so the rest still go through.  The shards of freedom were obviously to help get around shields, since any damage reduction shield owns this version otherwise; the SoPs were there to do the same thing.  I had no illusions that this would do well, but I did think it would get more than 1/4 thumbs ups.  I guess it was too close to more standard RoL/Hopes.

Today's card is fire spirit.  I don't think I've ever used that one before.  It'll also be a pretty tough one to come up with something unique for.  Obviously, it'll have to tend towards either a monofire or else a deck that's heavily invested in fire, which limits things quite a bit.  I'll figure out something, though... I usually do :p

[dragonsdemesne]

200hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 2x mark
Oracle Card: FIRE SPIRIT
wins: 5 losses: 5 rank: >500 Rating: -144 age: 1



3/5 thumbs up for this one, which is a good ratio, albeit a small sample size.  My first thought for something creative was to incorporate sky blitz somehow with the fire spectres, and most of the rest of the deck followed fairly quickly from that.  The cremations were added at the last second (I'd had 4 of each of the shards before that) because I figured that might help actually play the shards and spectres that one crucial turn quicker, particularly after playing SoB.  Most people were probably expecting monofire when they saw the fire spirit/mark of fire come up, and maybe they were just happy I did something that wasn't monofire with that card :p

Today's card is nightmare.  Not sure what I'll do with that yet, but I guarantee it won't include ghost of the past :p  That deck is quite annoying with double draw, plus I really don't like decks like GotP/nightmare that depend too much on the double draw feature; without double draw, that deck sucks in arena and is easy to beat, but with it, it's really annoying.

[furballdn]

Sheesh. It's really sad that your creative decks get such terrible results.

[dragonsdemesne]

Hehe, well the earth one I have up a few decks back was rank 5, but other than that, most of them haven't lasted more than 2 or 3 days.  Also keep in mind that I grind pretty much all of them into the ground, so I only post them onc ethey drop out of the top 500, whether that takes a day or a week or anything in between.  The one I just put up for nightmare is pretty silly, too.  It's basically just all my entropy nymphs and dark nymph, with a few support cards like discord, cloak, SoP, and some werewolves.  At least they're fun to look at, and hopefully will inspire something that's actually good someday.  Part of the trouble is that with so many people in platinum now, you need better than a 75% win rate to keep your deck active.  That's no problem for most oracle cards if you're playing arena just to win, but making something people will thumbs up and that still wins is hard; unless it's really way out there, it won't get many thumbs ups at all.  And since I no longer have a use for electrum, and there's no prizes for excelling in arena (besides more electrum in top 10) I have no incentive to actually build a noncreative killer deck, so I might as well build fun ones

[dragonsdemesne]

200hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 2x mark
Oracle Card: NIGHTMARE
wins: 2 losses: 4 rank: >500 Rating: -142 age: 1



Pretty much described the deck in the previous thread.  My creatures were picked such that if they were nightmared they were usually useless to the opponent; werewolves need two types of quanta and the nymphs need tons of quanta. (and the player's entropy nymphs are countered by my entropy nymphs)  Shards of patience were because the creatures don't really hit that hard except the werewolves, and due to SoSa being rampant.  Of the two wins it somehow managed to get, 0 were thumbs ups.

Today's card is Eternity.  My first thought was mummy/mitosis with SoR, but I got thinking that the AI would probably do stupid crap like rewind a mummy with mitosis/SoR already on it, so I went with a darkness duo.  I won't say anything more, but it has zero nightmare and zero ghost of the past, so it's not the hated ghostmare :p  (actually, it's barely got any darkness cards at all)