The Dragon's Arena Decks

[Laxadarap]

For the record, your entropy/darkness deck is awesome, and I can't see how it got 0 thumbs.  Especially since my immorush has like 50% thumbs.  Possibly just a small sample size?

[dragonsdemesne]

Yeah, most likely; no wins means no thumbs ups :p  If it had somehow gotten 20 wins, I'd imagine it would have had a decent number of thumbs ups, although people just hate certain cards, like discord or nightmare.  The deck I have up now I think is fairly creative, but it hasn't gotten any plays yet, although I guess that's only been 3 hours so far.

[dragonsdemesne]

200hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 2x mark
Oracle Card: NIGHTMARE
wins: 46 losses: 16 rank: >500 Rating: -134 age: 7



I -almost- made it to that magic 8 days with this.  I think it should be called "I can't believe it's not ghostmare".  I wonder if anyone quit without even playing it when they saw the card and mark :p  It was about 43-8 and rank 60-70 at the best point I saw it at.  I tested one game with my usual arena grinder, and I won easily (31hp EM :p), so I'm not really sure how this deck did as well as it did.  At 16/46 thumbs up, it's not great, but not bad.

Today's card is earth pendulum, which gives me lots of options to exercise creativity.  I've also got another green nymph (from Sunday oracle) and a mark of light (from Saturday's tourney) added to my ultra rare collection (I have everything else, as I've mentioned) although I don't think I'll be using those this time.  Eventually when league codes are sent out, I'll get another mark, and it will be entropy.  (mark of light to honour the light decks I used in the tourney, and mark of entropy to honourthe speedbows and DBH I used in league :p)  I did a monoearth awhile back with earth pendulum, and it was my highest ranked creative deck and highest thumbs up ratio attempt to date, although I've had higher ranked uncreative decks.  Hopefully I can find something to replicate that success with, and I do have an interesting idea I'm going to try...

[dragonsdemesne]

200hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 2x mark
Oracle Card: EARTH PENDULUM
wins: 9 losses: 5 rank: >500 Rating: -109 age: 1

I'm not sure what happened here; when I went to work this morning, the deck had a 7-1 record, and now it's knocked out of platinum league :p  (just barely, at 509)  The strategy should be fairly obvious, and it's quite heavily quantaed in order to make use of the granite skins and icelances, as well as the nymph/squid activation costs and the queen's ability eating up pillars.  Purifies because SoSa can go to hell, and poseidons for fun.

Today's card is Wings; I'll usually skip most shields and put farms up, but wings and dimensional shields are still doable with ten copies in the deck, where most others are really hard to succeed with that many.  There's a few possibilities I can do with that card, and I think I know the one I'll do; it's one I've never seen before, and I think it might actually do well, too.

Edit: 4/9 thumbs ups was the total for this deck.

edit: helps to have a deck to talk about; fortunately the image was still on my desktop

[dragonsdemesne]

200hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 2x mark
Oracle Card: WINGS
wins: 4 losses: 4 rank: >500 Rating: -118 age: 2



I think this deck probably just didn't have enough damage output.  Ten copies of wings probably also clogged the hand, but there was nothing I could do about that.  I can't ever recall seeing the vampire/sky blitz combo used before, so I went with that, and everything else in the deck supports that combo.  I got 2/4 thumbs ups for it, but with only 4 wins, it's hard to read anything into that.

Today's card is mind flayer.  That's a tough one to get creative with, especially since I know I've already had that card before.  One time I think I did shard of patience/fractal, and another I did some sort of control deck with lightnings and such, and I don't think either one did very well.  The only creative thing left I can think of to try is to go with a mostly monoaether and just use the mark for the flayers, so I'll try to make something work with that.

[dragonsdemesne]

175hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 3x mark
Oracle Card: MIND FLAYER
wins: 54 losses: 18 rank: >500 Rating: -130 age: 8



Woo!  Managed to make it to 8 days, even with only 175hp and no SoDs.  18/54 wins were thumbs ups, so exactly 1/3, which is probably about average.  I went with the triple mark so that an ulitharid could be played every turn without having to include any water quanta sources.  An aether duo made sense, given the lobo skill cost.  I figured I'd go for a fairly simple rush and pack it full of spiders.  The longsword made sense over posideon (noearth) and lobotomizer (I've already got 10 lobos in creature form) so I went with that.  SoSas for survivability and Purifies to stop the ubiquitous poison dials and splat farmers.  I had a few spare slots so I threw in a TU for fun, some silences for fun, and my nymph for fun.

Today's card is enchant artifact.  That tends to lend itself to a large rainbow stall with lots of permanents, as there is little else that can benefit from all those EAs.  I was tempted to just put up a farm, but I'm going to try to do something with it.  I think I'll try something with mindgate/hourglass/SoSe for draw power, as well as means to get things to put EA on so they aren't wasted.  It should be a really fun deck to play against, if nothing else.

[dragonsdemesne]

175hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 3x mark
Oracle Card: ENCHANT ARTIFACT
wins: 4 losses: 4 rank: >500 Rating: -138 age: 1



The win/loss record of this deck is no surprise to me.  The fact that it got 0/4 thumbs ups, however, is a shock.  This should have been quite an enjoyable deck to face, and quite different from most.  I playtested one game against the AI, and I did find that it often made mistakes with aether quanta by playing more mindgates in the early game instead of actually using mindgate, so maybe people punished it for that poor design.

Today's card is earthquake.  Not sure if I've had that one before, but I know I've used it in earth/gravity denial decks as well as monoearth rushes with graboid/shriekers and the like, and I think I used it in a darkness/earth duo with gargoyles and pests once as well.  I also think I used it in a cremation rush a long time ago.  Anyway, I'll be looking for something different from all of those.  I might try a time/earth duo with graboids, ghosts, and nymphs, or maybe try something a little more interesting like entropy/earth with discord or life/earth; we'll see...

[Hiddje123]

Nice originality, very fun thread with a ton of nice decks Starting to see a funny trend here though, the better the deck does the less thumbs up ratio it gets (in general). Many sore losers out there? XD

[dragonsdemesne]

It's because most of the good decks have been done a thousand times, and so any good deck that is creative quickly becomes boring once everyone catches on to the fact that it's good, and then you see it everywhere. 

The monoearth Shard of Patience deck I made a month or two ago was an exception to the trend; it made the top ten -because- people gave it so many thumbs ups.  I've actually been thinking that I should one of these days make the most hateful, unoriginal, asskicking deck I know how to, just to get a baseline for how many people will thumbs up -anything- no matter how unimaginative it is.  Something like a physalia poison/sosa deck, or whatever, that is near-guaranteed to get to the top ranks of platinum.

[dragonsdemesne]

200hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 2x mark
Oracle Card: WINGS
wins: 19 losses: 9 rank: 456 Rating: -101 age: 4



9/19 thumbs-ups on this one; not bad.  It's a deck I'd never seen done before, utilizing an unusual duo combination and a bunch of stuff to synergize with SoP, while earthquakes and wardens/nymphs buy time to grow everything.  Probably the SoSas kept it from getting more thumbs ups.

Today's card is bone pillar.  Usually I let my decks go until they drop out of platinum (or I draft a usable nymph) but I'm going to test the theory I posted above, and make a terribly unoriginal poison deck and see what the thumbs ups ratio looks like, just so I know what the minimum people will give me is.  Apologies in advance for the deck.

edit: Modelled it after this: http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php/topic,28528.msg454283.html#msg454283 except I took out 3x SoSa because apparently AI won't ever play more than 6 now, and then added some shards of focus instead, because everyone hates those!  I also went -1 arsenic -1 spider -1 puffer (figured SoF/SoSa would take away too much water quanta and it would be unplayable) and +2 shard of patience (to help beat SoSa farmers; purify would beat sosa but cure all the poison I do) and +1 tower to help pay for the SoFs

edit: Wow, in less than a minute it already got a win and a thumbs down :p  I wonder if someone just saw the first turn or two and ragequit?

[dragonsdemesne]

200hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 2x mark
Oracle Card: BONE PILLAR
wins: 63 losses: 19 rank: >500 Rating: -135 age: 8



I took one of the most hated decks in the arena, and then added completely unnecessary shards of focus (which probably made the deck weaker) simply to annoy people into thumbing it down.  18/63 people still gave it a thumbs up, which probably means those are people who give -everything- thumbs up.  (29%)  There isn't really much to say about the deck except... sorry, you were all part of an experiment to determine a rough idea of the minimum thumbs ups any deck will get no matter how irritating.

Today's card is emerald shield.  There's very little that can be done with that, but I'll try and find something...

[dragonsdemesne]

175hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 3x mark
Oracle Card: EMERALD SHIELD
wins: 1 losses: 3 rank: >500 Rating: -106 age: 1



On reflection, using a triple mark to cast exactly one life spell all game was extremely stupid.  However, an extra 25hp would have done nothing for such a stupid deck.  I knew it was bad, but I didn't really care :p  I just didn't want to put a farm up.  The one win was a thumbs up.

Today's card is nymph's tears.  That is one of the most versatile cards for building an arena deck there is, so I'm hoping I can come up with a clever idea.  I've already done a light nymph stall, and I think I did a gravity nymph stall once as well.  I'm thinking maybe a golden nymph rush or maybe even Queen's Sacrifice, but I'll try and come up with something even more unique, as those I've both seen done before.  Heck, yesterday's deck was basically queen sacrifice with jade shields.