Side QuestsSlacking offI know that feeling, most of the times, Grinding feels annoying. You know, it is needed, so you shouldn't give up, but sometimes slacking off is just nice, isn't it?
What should you do when you feel like resting from mindless (or mindful) grinding? This is what the first part of the Side Quests covers.
However, keep in mind, not grinding doesn't mean it may not need hard work, it just breaks your routine with more entertaining and interesting stuff.
[I recommend following this first part of the tutorial after reaching "Those 9000 Electrums were needed, weren't they?".]
PvP1You probably noticed, in the main screen, a button with PvP 1 written over it. What's this? Let's start defining PvP, first. PvP (Player Versus Player) is an enviroment in which Players face other Players, instead of the usual PvE (Player Versus Enviroment) you've been playing most of the time. PvP 1 (mostly called PvP1, as I will from now on) is, then, a place where players fight each other with only a restriction on their decks: they have to be unupped. Aside that, you're allowed to play anything, from Shards to Nymphs. PvP1 meta has been explained in
furballdn's guide to the game so well that I don't feel the need to explain that even more (click on the spoiler called PvP1).
Introduction to DeckbuildingIf you're going to play into PvP1 there's one skill you may need, and it's called Deckbuilding. Deckbuilding is the act of, obviously enough, building a Deck, linked to the process of creating one. You may find building an original deck a pretty hard feat, expecially because of the restricted card pool Elements offers, but it's pretty useful to learn this skill now, because you may need it in a later time. You may like
Scaredgirl's 9 Tips for Better Deckbuilding and
jmdt's guide. Don't let their date scare you, even though years passed over them and some cards were added, some were buffed, some were nerfed, the theory under it is still quite solid.
Let's recap this, though:
1.Think about what should your deck do and build according to that, if it's a rush, adding tons of CCs will most likely be useless, while a couple of PCs may be nice;
2.Think about who you'll be fighting with this deck, if it is AI4, you'll have to account that a 100-HP OTK won't be winning, while a 200-HP one may be exaggerated;
3.Unless you plan on making a trio or quartet, try to keep the deck as simple as possible;
4.Play copies of a card according to how much it is needed, 5/6 is a good number for cards you'd want more often in your hand, 3/4 for either support cards or cards which are needed as soon as possible but would clog your hand after the first one, and 1/2 for "techs", cards which aren't really needed in the strategy, but are nice;
5.Balance the deck quanta-wisely, try to fine-tune your deck in order to get a good amount of quanta;
6.Unless you're going for a stall (and even this has exceptions), try to keep the number of cards to a minimum, to improve your chances of drawing a certain card;
7.Test and tune your deck until you think it's finished.
DeckbuildingAn example often is worth more than a lot of guides put together.
Let's say we want to build a deck, but we have no idea. The first thing to do is finding a basic concept. For example, I myself wanted to try a fun deck without aiming to competitiveness using Skeletons+Reverse Time to generate random creatures.
Given that Skeleton is the main card, we will need 6 of it. We then need a thing to Reverse skeleton's time. The options are only two: Reverse Time and Eternity. However, being Eternity a weapon, we cannot play too many copies of it, because other copies would be dead, so we'll just use it to support our strategy and play 6 Reverse Time with 2 Eternities.
Given that Skeleton is a really cheap creature, costing 1
, we may as well "splash" them (splashing is a term that refers to playing some cards fueling them only with the mark's quanta).
For now let's just fill out the rest with Time Pillars.
I played the first game against AI3. It kind of worked out, got definitely too much quanta and won just by spamming Eternity's reverse times on opponent's creatures locking down the AI's game and beating the opponent with a Mummy obtained from rewinding a Skeleton and Eternity. This definitely has too much Time quanta, so we may drop some of the 16 pillars we have for something else. Looking at Time cards a couple of cards seem acceptable: Fate egg, to keep the random theme, Procrastination, to slow down the opponent, and Precognition, which should increase the probabilities of drawing needed cards sooner.
Let's review them:
Fate Egg probably isn't needed, it's kind of costy (4 Time Quanta total) to do the same thing a Rewind+Skeleton does, so we may discard this idea;
Procrastination looks good, but 6
isn't simply ignorable, but we were just complaining how we had so much Time Quanta;
Precognition looks good, too, doesn't cost much and lets you see your opponent's hand while drawing a card.
There are, then, two builds we should try: -2 Time Pillars +2 Procrastinations AND -6 Time Pillars +6 Precognition.
I decide to start from the latter.
I barely win this game, too, but it was way too close. Dropping to 10 Time Pillars resulted being too little and my hand overflowed with Precognition, while an opponent's Discord made me have so little quanta that I couldn't reverse time anymore at times (even though it let me activate my card's effects). As we saw in the theory, a support card should be played in 3/4 copies, so let's try that. Let's add back 2 Time Pillars and drop 2 precognitions.
Playing one game, this looked way more balanced. I only drew one Skeleton in the whole game, but that was due to bad luck. I had a slow start, without any skeletons but playing two precognitions made me get a couple of cards and finally managed to get a skeleton which turned into a Phase Dragon which slowly chipped away my opponent's HPs. While I got a slow start, though, it's not like the AI started awesomelly. Instead, it sticked for a couple of turns with only an Owl's Eye which did nothing to my Phase Dragon and, when it finally managed to draw into a Firefly Queen in the fourth turn, I had already a couple of reverse times in hand and a little later I drew into Eternity which definitely sealed the game. The build looks promising, so I'll stick with this for some games.
After playtesting it, the fact that it is a fun deck (not meant to be particularly strong, as I said at the beginning of the deckbuilding) is obvious. Its strong side is the fact that it has tons of CCs and, if you get lucky, you may get up to 2/3 dragons in a game, meaning that you will even outrush your opponent.
By playing this and noticing how CC-heavy it was, it became obvious that Procrastination wouldn't help, so here's my current build.
It indeed is simple, but pretty consistent, even though it's RNG-based.
You may try your hand at this, too, by choosing which combination of cards to base your deck on.
If you want a couple of ideas,
Chapuz wrote a nice list of combinations of cards that you can use to get some ideas to try building your deck.
Deckbuilding Theory, MathWhile, like when cooking, taste-testing a deck by playing games with it is a valid method, some may prefer to use some more mathematical ways to approach a problem like this.
Scaredgirl's Quanta Index is a nice example of a mathematical approach to a problem often solved by continuously testing. It uses a ratio to calculate how many pillars should be needed. It is better used for Monos, because otherwise it may conflict with the probabilities of drawing a pillar before the cards you want to power (example, it may say that having an Abomination and an Entropy Pillar in a deck which doesn't use Entropy is balanced). Trying this on the previous deck, we have 32
only in order to activate cards, and considering how much we use Eternity's skill, we may account for its cost*3, meaning 9, for a total of 50 quanta. The deck packs 12 Pillars, which means that the QI is 50/12, almost 4,17. This means that we are actually flooded with quanta, however, considering that we use Eternity's skill even more than 7/8 times a game, this could actually be balanced.
Most of the times, taste-testing is needed in order to fine-tune your deck, and you'll eventually learn to understand if a deck is balanced of not by just glancing at it.
Coinich introduced the odds of drawing certain cards without accounting for mulligan and working only for a single card.
Here another study is being conducted by me in order to find the easiest way to calculate the odds of drawing a certain combination of cards, without accounting for mulligan yet (even though it's in the to-do list).
Deckbuilding Theory, moar guidesAcsabi44 did an awesome work with some articles regarding the kind of decks around, make sure to read them:
Acsabi44 shows us the
theory behind rush decks in this awesome article. You should try to fully understand this article being, in my opinion, the most useful of them given that it explains one of the most used kinds of deck, which will be useful in the next paragraph;
In
theory behind stall decks, you may guess, Acsabi teaches us about Stall decks, needed in order to get a general idea of the meta;
In
Who is the beatdown? we get an idea of how to behave while playing which directly modifies how we would want to build our deck.
PvP TournamentsAaaand here's where you're going to apply most of the skills you've gained with deckbuilding. PvP Tournaments are weekly tournaments organized by the staff of the forum with prizes. If you get first place, you're getting 7000 electrums and 1 Nymph/Mark. Given that PvP tournaments are the only sources of Marks, and only the first and the second player get Marks as prizes, those are the rariest cards of elements, surpassing even Nymphs which are obtainable from the Oracle.
Thus, PvP Tournaments are quite important (and, if I may add a personal though, they are a lot of fun).
To partecipate into a Tournament all you have to do is abhide by the rules. Those rules will set some restrictions to your decks, making deckbuilding skills really important.
Dragoon's awesome article explains it all, you'd better give it a good read.
Here you will find PvP Tournaments.
PvP LeaguePvP League is an event lasting three months in which you fight other players for the grand prize of 10000 Electrums and 2 Nymphs/Marks.
The League is divided in two "under-leagues", BL and CL, respectively, Battle League and Championship League. Between the two, Battle League is the unupped enviroment where everyone can compete in. Of course, needing only unupped decks means that your decks won't cost much and you can easily afford this after the "Those 9000 Electrums were needed, weren't they?". However, Shards are allowed, and this means that the players will be using them if possible. If you can, get a couple of them from Bronze farming or wherever.
Championship League, instead, is the upped enviroment, meaning you will need more expensive decks to compete in this and, for that exact reason, it has a requirement in order to join it: having at least 20k score. This may look a lot if you're a new player, but you'll think that it even is too little considered the costs of the deck. Usually, you should be a veteran to join this league (almost having Trainer Edition), but in a post,
SpikeSpiegel states that with a couple of decks you may get going (and this means that after building a couple of decks from "This is getting expensive again" you may attempt playing in CL).
You can find the rules for the PvP League
here.
WarWar is the first Forum Event in the list of PvP events and, differently from the PvP Events we have already mentioned, it has no Prizes: war is just for the sake of fun.
In War, teams are formed by the Generals by bidding in order to get a certain member in their team, and to do so they have to spend cards. This means that a General won't bid on you if they don't think you are needed in their team. In order to be thought useful, you have to (1) actually be useful and (2) convince them you are. While the first part can only be achieved by hard work, the second is, basically, exposing your curriculum vitae in an Auction. Every player who wants to join War has to make an Aution topic in which the author explains what s/he managed to do, like winning some tournaments, some PvP Events or having a Trainer Edition and so on. The last point is greatly valued by Generals because every team has a vault in which cards that team can use are stored, however a player cannot simply take them from the vault and use them like that: the player has to actually own those cards in order to use them. This means that a General has to choose carefully the cards he wants in the Vault, because picking cards some players cannot use would be a waste.
Acsabi44 explains it well enough in his article.
If you are interested, the board for war is
here.
TrialsTrials are a Forum Event in which you try to become the Master of a certain Element, based on the trial you partecipated in. Trials are continuous trials (hence the name) of Deckbuilding and fighting amongst the players who try to become Masters of an Element, with a final, epic (?) battle with the current Master in order to decide whether the current Master retains the title of Master or the challenger becomes a new Master.
However, this being a Forum Event with an important prize (honor-wisely) it has a couple of requirements: at least 50000 Score, at least 200 Posts in the Forum and having joined the forums not less than 3 months ago.
However, being a Master bears no real advantage or responsability, so it's highly recommended to try this out as soon as you have fulfilled the requirements. If you for some reason don't want to become Master (example: won't have an internet connection for a couple of months and I wouldn't want to steal this title from someone who could be active in that period), you can as well forfeit the last match and let the current master keep the title.
If you are interested and have fulfilled the requirements,
here is the board dedicated to Trials.
PvP2I kept this last because designing decks for PvP2 needs a pretty huge upped card pool, expecially if you are going for new and original decks. Aside that, what I said for PvP1 is valid for PvP2, aside from the metagame part, the reason that makes everyone like PvP2: it has an incredible variety of decks. This will be where you'll most likely spend most of your time after you reach trainer edition, and you will play here pretty often after building a couple of fully upped decks.
Deckbuilding 2And here's our last paragraph about deckbuilding. While it doesn't differ much from unupped deckbuilding, upped deckbuilding gives us more possibilities because we can use both the unupped cards which may have different skills from the upped ones and be (relatively) better. You can always refer to Chapuz's guide I already linked you and consider the cards who greatly vary from unupped to upped, as
furballdn shows us in his tutorial (check "Slight overview of some upped cards").
Upped deckbuilding alone was one of the reason I wanted you to get a PSNBow to farm Silver with in "Here comes the big money" given that having the cards for a PSNBow give you a lot of possible decks to play with (aside other PSNBows, having Supernova gets you access to a lot of decks and even a boost to some FG Grinders).
Experiment and have fun.
Working even harderWhile, until now, we covered "Slacking off", it's time to describe the other Side Quests. These Side Quests are pretty hard to accomplish, but that's what they were made to be: hard.
Trainer Edition and Level 80I have already named them, but it's never enough underlining how nice having those is.
Trainer Edition, as described in
Dragoon's topic, means having 6 copies upped and unupped of each card and 24 upped and unupped of each pillar/pendulum. If you're wondering how much it would cost upgrading and buying every buyable card, well, that's around 2,5 millions Electrums. To keep stats of which cards you have and which ones you need, percentage and other cool stuff,
Antiaverage's Spreadsheed is an awesome tool.
Level 80 is, instead, the level where you "win" the game. If you've just started, you may have not noticed, but level-upping in Elements is pretty hard when you reach higher levels (for example, at the moment of writing, I've got 132116 Score, which is 13,21% of the score needed to be Level 80). In fact, if you look at the owners of the Trainer Edition in the link I've posted before, you'll notice that they are 46 (known, there may be others), while in the
Dragonsdemesne's Level 80 Club there are only 17 known, which is, roughly, one third of known owners of a Trainer Edition.
No Baazar ChallengeProps to
ColorlessGreen's Challenge which recently got attention and started gathering players. The No Baazar Challenger (mostly called NBC) is a Challenge in which you create a new account and play without buying cards from the baazar. There's only one exception to this rule: you can buy pillars and pendulums. This is to make it possible to do some major changes to the deck.
As of now a dozen of players are attempting this and finding it useful from every point of view. It needs some knowledge in deckbuilding, but can ultimately improve them with this challenge.
DuelsThere's a whole board of the forum dedicated to duels. Duels are, simply put, challenges between players. You can either duel other players who have a Duel Profile or create your own Profile (or both). In Duels, if you create a Duel Profile, you can create challenges and face various players with those rules. Here you can create your Challenges and let other players partecipate in them. One of the most known Challenges from the Duels section is
Marsu's Beat the Highscore. It's not necessary to have codes to give as prizes, but it's often appreciated if you start a big challenge.
"Alt"Alt is how an alternative account is called. Most veterans create an alternative account for two main reasons: to experience what a new player experiences when he enters the game and to dominate a lower league.
While starting the game from scratch is enough a challenge by itself, some also like to put some restrictions on themselves (like NBC) or try to speedrun the game.
You could create an Alt in order to test some tutorials for beginners, expecially if they are interesting, like
Chapuz's Path of OTKism.
