The Dragon's Arena Decks

[dragonsdemesne]

200hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 2x mark
Oracle Card: FRACTAL
wins: 7 losses: 5 rank: >500 Rating: -136 age: 1



I thought this deck would be a royal pain in the ass.  If I'd farmed more SoF to put into it, it might've been.  After taking the screenshot, I did a double-take at seeing 5 overdrives and only 3 SoF, but I guess the fractal copies need some overdriving love, too!  And with all those black holes alone, I'm surprised the deck didn't do better, given how well some of my previous decks did that used black hole and random whatever, like this fire deck  http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php/topic,28528.msg463444.html#msg463444 and this air deck  http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php/topic,28528.msg460607.html#msg460607 did.  Oh, well, back to the drawing board   Today's card is otyugh.

[dragonsdemesne]

Okay, I officially have no idea what people are using against the arena anymore :p  I'm trying to imagine in what universe fractal SoF/BH could not kick ass, but otyugh/heavy armour is dominating.



That's me kicking the crap out of my own arena deck when I came across it in plat, and I'm using a SoSebow with no damage sources, unless I get them from SoSe :p  The number of AI fails in that deck was astounding, and I saw them all with my 6 precogs.  It kept overdriving the wrong things, playing other things instead of black holes at the wrong time, pulverizing the wrong stuff, etc.  The deck is 25-5, including the loss I just gave myself, yet the fractal SoF that is better went 7-5. 

edit: Hehe just got home from work and the very first deck I face is my own again!  This time it beat my sosebow.  I still can't believe it's doing this well, after seeing even more AI fails.  On turn 2, for example, the AI played Heavy Armour on Shard of Focus :p  At least I still got 24 gold for thumbs upping myself!

[Elite arbiter]

Well, I can see how the fractal SoFo deck would be worse with the AI. First off, Shard of Focus is actually quite expensive in a mono, similar in cost to Oty or Charger. Secons, you have exactly 4 cards to fractal, 3 SoFo and a Nymph, none of them very cost-effective. The deck is probably severely underquanta'd.


But the main problem I see is hand clogging. Black Holes rarely need to be played all the time, Overdrives need one of those 4 playable cards, and same goes for Fractals. And thats assuming the AI plays overdrive and Fractal perfectly. (And even if not, hand clogging I mentioned earlier will actually neuter fractals). I'd have to see, but if you're running Fractal Shard of Focus as your main strategy, you need some kind of rainbow. Otherwise it's way too costly to actually play them.

Fun deck ideas, but just mentioning that that last deck might not have been as practical as you're saying it was.

[dragonsdemesne]

Maybe so.  I can see it suffering from low quanta, and it probably would've done better with more towers and less overdrives.  Also, I tend to use rainbow control decks with a lot of permanents, so black holes and SoF tend to rape me hard, and that's likely causing some bias.

[dragonsdemesne]

200hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 2x mark
Oracle Card: OTYUGH
wins: 48 losses: 15 rank: >500 Rating: -116 age: 6

Interesting; I've never had a deck drop out of platinum in 6 days before, I don't think.  Every other time that I can recall, it was either in 1 day or less (when it sucked) or after 8 days (when it had 1hp).



So, despite all the misplays I saw this deck make (bad overdrive timing, fail pulvy targeting, heavy armour on SoF, etc) it still managed to last six days.

Today's card is reflective shield, and I have no desire to make a deck based on that, so it's farm time today.  I'm also level 74 now, so all decks from this point on have an extra point to work with.

edit: Plat must be really filling up with people... it only took 3 losses for my farm to get knocked out; it used to take 6 or 7.  Anyway, today's card is holy flash.  I built a simple pseudo-farm based on flying morning glories and SoW/SoFr.

[dragonsdemesne]

170hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 3x mark
Oracle Card: HOLY LIGHT
wins: 9 losses: 5 rank: >500 Rating: -128 age: 0



That's an awful lot of plays for such a young deck... sadly the deck sucks.  At least 5 people got a shot at farming my shards.  New deck tomorrow; since it's age 0 I don't have a new card to put up, yet.  That's the first deck I've had drop out of plat after 0 days, I think, other than a farm :p  I guess that makes it my worst arena deck ever.

edit: because I put the wrong deck image up

[mservando]

This is the second arena deck I submitted. (the first was in gold)

200hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 1x mark
Oracle Card: BONE DRAGON

by dragonsdemesne

Hover over cards for details, click for permalink

Deck import code : [Select]

52h 52h 52h 52h 52h 6u2 71f 71f 71f 71f 77e 77e 77e 77e 77e 77j 77j 7dm 7dm 7dm 7dn 7dp 7dp 7dp 7dp 7dp 7dp 7dq 7dq 7dq 7dq 7dq 809 809 80a 8pk

Mark of DEATH
(all cards in this deck are upgraded, and the bone dragons were ivory dragons from the oracle and my max wisdom, but I don't actually own any ivory dragons, so I used bone dragons to show you the deck image as close as possible)
wins: 97 loss: 16 rank: 58 rating: 373 age: 5

Just thought I'd let people see what I'm using, since I'm about to change it up.  I'm getting a bit nervous with that age, since it's already at -32hp and tomorrow it's going to be -64.  I'll post the next deck after I quit using it as well.  It's in my best interests not to reveal the deck while it's actually up in the arena, but there is no harm in revealing it after I'm done using it.  My oracle card now is Aether Pendulum, which is another reason I want to switch it now; that's a decent card, and I'm worried that if I get a crappy card tomorrow I'll either have to build a junk deck or play with -64hp.

The idea of the deck was to Cremate the gemfinders/balls and drop lava destroyers, obviously, but with the added twist that when you cremate stuff, the soul catchers give death quanta for the ivory dragons that I had to use.  I really don't like the death element and I couldn't think of any good deck based on death as the main element, so I decided to splash death in this way, and it did a lot better than I thought it would.

how will you play the lightning?

[Elite arbiter]

Cremation?

[TheAccuso]

how will you play the lightning?

creamtion generates 8  quanta + 1 quantum for every other elements, he can actually play 6 lightings.

[Laxadarap]

how will you play the lightning?

creamtion generates 8  quanta + 1 quantum for every other elements, he can actually play 6 lightings.

Pfft, you guys are getting it all wrong.  Ball lightning costs 0 quanta, so he could play an infinite amount, or atleast 48 of them.  On the other hand, this is double draw, so he could technically play 12 thunderbolts  

[dragonsdemesne]

200hp, 60 wisdom, 2x card draw, 2x mark
Oracle Card: GRAVITY PENDULUM
wins: 7 losses: 5 rank: 766 Rating: -146 age: 1

[deck]

The deck won its first 4 games, then took a bellyflop.  I'm pretty sure it suffered from the 'AI plays like a moron' handicap.  The TUs for example; the AI tends to not want to play them until the late game.  Timing silences correctly also takes a skill the AI lacks; it just plays them as soon as it can.  It wasn't a great deck by any means, but a human would have done far better with it.

Today's card is basilisk blood.  I really wish the AI could play a deck like voodoo universe or catapult-BB-whatever properly for that card, but I'll probably end up going with something far more basic, though I haven't decided what yet.

Usually I just put >500 for decks that fall out of platinum.  I put the 766 because it was so much lower than normal, and I've never seen it go past the low 600s before :p

[TheAccuso]

how will you play the lightning?

creamtion generates 8  quanta + 1 quantum for every other elements, he can actually play 6 lightings.

Pfft, you guys are getting it all wrong.  Ball lightning costs 0 quanta, so he could play an infinite amount, or atleast 48 of them.  On the other hand, this is double draw, so he could technically play 12 thunderbolts  

of course i wrote lightings instead of thunderbolt, definitely not talkin' 'bout ball lighting, if you can see what i had quote....