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6ts 6ts 6u3 6u3 6u3 6u3 6u3 6u3 6u4 6u4 6u4 6u4 6ve 6ve 6ve 6ve 6ve 6ve 7an 7an 7an 7ee 7ee 7qb 7qb 80b 80b 80b 80b 80b 8puWhile this is not a, "high win rate vs. FG deck," nor is it a, "cheap deck for farming AI3," it is a deck that utilizes a lot of the cards I already have and works with a pretty in depth and carefully considered strategy for easily producing several of the strongest creatures possible for the game of EtG. Also it's really f***ing fun.
Ok, lets get this thing rolling!
If you have seen any of my other decks chances are you know I love the element entropy and I love upgraded cards; that should be kind of a given since entropy is by far the most widely different element in terms of unupped vs upped cards. Long story short, the only cards I had to upgrade for this deck were a few none entropy cards. I guess what I am saying is that, while I may have said in the above paragraph, "this is not a... cheap deck for farming AI3," actually for me it basically was/is.
strats:
1: by far the biggest downside to the deck is that you have to use 2 supernovas in 1 turn or you can't really do a whole lot. Of course you could PU an enemies monster and then mutate it, or mutate and enemies monster and the PU it but it's not the preferred method for running the deck; I would rather wait 1 or 2 turns to make a singularity to work with than either waste a PU on an enemy monster that I'm just going to mutate or possibly give my opponent a really powerful mutant.
2: So... while playing another of my favorite games, Path of Exile, I've recently realized the the power behind the strategy, "get the most 'bang for your buck' out of one aspect of your build and put all of your other resources into the rest of your build; for path of exile that means a lot of defensive stats, for EtG that means better card drawing percentages and more reliability for actually utilizing the given card combo the deck is based on.
3: The power behind PU+a mutant is pretty obvious, but how do I really take full advantage out of the combo? I tried chaos power, all sorts of standard creature buffing cards and what I finally came up with was adrenaline.
'explanation': mutants can be treated as an average of the base stats of every creature in the game but with a lesser form of chaos power added on to them and a random ability. so, on average mutants are slightly stronger than normal creatures: slightly better stats + a guaranteed ability. avg attack of non-upped creatures is 330/89=3.7, avg attack of upped creatures is 424/89=4.76. A bonus of 0-4 attack can be gained implicitly on mutants so on avg a gain 2 is achieved, so 3.7 + 2 = about 6 attack. With an attack of 6 we have a creature that deals higher than avg damage yet lower than avg when compared to the damage of cards generally used for damaging purposes so, eh. PU is of course a cool option as every time you PU you also essentially add another chaos power and gain a new ability but that is a lot of quanta to spend on a card that probably has about 8 attack and an ability that you cannot rely on because you just don’t know what you’re going to get.
Adrenaline is the answer. Adrenaline does what most support cards are supposed to do for entropy decks, or I guess I should say the support cards used with entropy decks. It takes the power of the random chance entropy has implicitly and makes it much less random and much more reliable. Let say you got a bad roll and received a creature with an attack of 3 instead of your avg of 6, with adrenaline they literally do the same amount of damage. Also because of the relative starting point of your avg mutant, around 3 – 9 attack, you start off in kind of a ‘sweet spot’ for adrenaline. In fact the avg attack for a 3 – 9 attack stat + adrenaline is 88/7= 12.6; much higher than your avg upped creature and still higher than most attacking upped creatures. With 1 PU your next creature will have about 5 – 11 attack giving it an avg attack after adrenaline of, 13.7; after you’re second PU, 7 – 13 attack, avg attack of 15.3.
Obviously if you get a very lucky roll and get above 15 attack ever then it doesn’t really matter that adrenaline doesn’t do anything because your creature is already doing plenty of damage.
The Combo: 2 SN + improved mutation + adrenaline + PU. The two SN means I generate all the quanta needed for the adrenaline so I don’t need to focus any attention on generating life quanta as I will do the combo on the same turn and don’t have to fear denial. I generate all but 2 quanta needed for the PU so I go a mark of Aether, and my towers and pendulums are entropy based to expedite my ability to start the combo: when I have 3 entropy quanta for my improved mutation. The pendulums are designed to allow me to play multiple PU’s and the extra mutations are in case I get a bad mutant at first and have the resources to reroll it or in case I draw another 2 SN’s, they’re also there to simply improve my chances of drawing one in my opening hand. The last 4 cards of the deck are also designed to help my draw chances as well. I went for 2 precogs and 2 SoB over getting 4 of either kind to ensure that with just 1 SN played I could theoretically play all 4 cards in hope of drawing another SN on the same turn to perform the combo; sometimes you have to just say, “I’m three turns into this game and I just need 1 more SN to start my combo. I have 20 cards left and 5 of them are SN’s; my chances are about 1 out of 4 cards are SN. If I have 2 cards that can draw more cards then it starts to be more in my favor to take the risk and use my 1 SN, even though I don’t know for sure if I’m going to draw the other on this same turn, and use the quanta gained to play my draw cards.
TLDR: adrenaline works well with mutants as they generally have a good amount of attack get the most out of adrenaline. The deck is based around a singular combo where every card not having to do with that combo is designed to improve the chances of drawing that combo to increase the success rate of getting the combo off.
Please tell me what you think and offer any suggestions. To my knowledge I don’t know of any deck that uses this same strategy, but here is one that utilizes part of it:
http://elementscommunity.org/forum/rainbow-decks/mutant-evolution-(fun)/msg1071213/#msg1071213
