The Poisoning of District 109 [AI3/Bronze] [Unupped] [Rareless]

[Basman-1453]

What the heck it's composed of?

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5i4 5i4 5i4 5i4 5i4 5i4 5i4 5i4 5i4 5i4 5i4 5i4 5i4 5i4 5i4 5i4 5i4 5i9 5i9 5id 5id 5id 5id 5id 5ie 5ie 5ie 5ie 5ie 5ie 8pr

This deck contains the following:

• Mark of Air
• 17 Water Pillars
• 6 Toadfishes
• 5 Ice Dragons
• 2 Ice Shields

What the heck it's named after?
Kaku P-Model's The Flood of District 109, from their (or, rather, his; Kaku P-Model's basically Hirasawa Susumu's another label) second album, Gipnoza.

(Protip: If you're pissed off with my bizarre deck names, why don't ya design an effective, efficient, and fun deck, then give the deck you designed even more bizarre name just to piss me off? )


What the heck is its agenda?
If you think the answer's "mono-Water rush", you're about 90% correct. The last 10% is slow CC with the toadies and Ice Shield, if I manage to get that thing.


How well did it do?
Out of 80 test matches against Bronze, I won 70 of them, 4 of them were won with EM. During those tests, it won within an average of 9.314 turns (to three SF).
The tests were done across two day; first day's results were 30(3)-5. Feel free to infer the results of the second day yourself. The answer's 40(1)-5.
By the way, during those tests, too, I managed to pull a streak of 24 consecutive victories in the second day.
Ai-chan daishouri~ (big victory for Ai-chan~) \(^^)/ XD (Sorry, couldn't get rid of that ear worm I got from OreShura.)


How to use this deck?
This deck is comprised of two parts, the rush part and the creature control part.

For the rush part, simple: use the Toadfishes and Dragons to overwhelm their defenses before they can set up theirs.

For the creature control part, use the Toadfishes to poison enemy creatures with the Air quanta provided from your mark. Try to spread the love poison to all enemy creatures before you poison something old.

Do not poison an enemy further than 1 counter unless that exact counter will hasten its demise (for example, poisoning a creature with 4 HP / 1 poison to 4H/2P is OK, but further poisoning in that same turn is not advised unless you are willing to cough another Air quanta and poison it even further to 4H/4P). This might sound like common sense, but in the heat of battle it's not that hard to forget that.

Your mileage may vary, but this spoiler contains a few targets worth poisoning before most other creatures, in no particular order:

Spoiler for Hidden:

• Dragons, particularly Crimson Dragon. Their damage, man~ T_T
• Otyughs / Scarabs. Before it goes cannibal and eat any of their ally, make sure it can't wise up and eat your Toadfishes.
• Maxwell's Demon. This thing is a 'deal with me quickly or lose your offenses' deal of creature. Good news is, you can poison them. Bad news is, all your creatures have more Attack than HP.
• Vulture. Before anyone else dies, try to get them die. Fortunately, their 1 HP makes this not a very difficult feat.
• Growing creatures (particularly Lava Golems and Forest Spirits), preferably before they can grow into a menace.
• Schrodinger's Cat, unless the enemy does not seek to make use of death effects.
• Scorpions, particularly Dune Scorpions due to their neurotoxin. Fortunately, the AI doesn't seem to be astute enough to hold Dune Scorpions or Deathstalkers before they're sure it can attack the very same turn it's deployed by buffing them with, say, Blessing, Momentum, what have ya.
• Devourers, particularly if they have access to Earth quanta. Unfortunately, once more than a few are deployed, good luck protecting the scant Air quanta you have T_T
• Creature with sufficient momentum to get past any kind of shield, even the dreaded Dimensional Shield. If the thing has more than about 15 HP, don't bother poisoning the thing and just strengthen your offensive. Especially if the enemy's devious enough to momentum a Voodoo Doll.
• Shriekers. They tend to burrow once the fishes show up.
• Creatures with the capability of messing up another creature (Mind Flayers and Fallen Druids, among others, comes to mind)
• Nymphs, particularly Purple (they will make use of your offensive to heal their master/mistress T_T), Auburn (six turns of immovability is nothing to scoff at), and Air (unless they don't have access to Fire Quanta, it'll fart at you at 20 HP per bottle)

Okay, so in what order should I upgrade this?
First and foremost, please excuse the tone of my next sentence.
IN NO CIRCUMSTANCES YOU CAN UPGRADE THE TOADFISHES AND PUT THEM INTO THIS DECK.
It just won't work. Toadfishes work very differently from its upped counterpart, Puffer Fishes. Toadies poisons their creatures, while Puffies poisons them directly.
(Note that while Toadfishes can poison the enemy directly with the help of an allied Voodoo Doll, good luck getting that doll in the first place with this deck.)

-So you just can't go fully upped with this thing, huh?-
Yeah. If you're trying to go fully upped with this, you might as well use Mark of Water since you've no use for those Air quanta.
(Of course, feel free to upgrade them if you intend to use the Puffer Fishes for other decks, like Poison-based decks. )

Fortunately, if you decide to stick to this deck's battle plan with an upgraded deck, you're free to upgrade the other 24 cards. I haven't upped these myself, however, so I don't have an exact idea how it'll go. I guess ... I'll recommend the following order:

• Two pillars and a dragon, until all five dragons are upgraded
• One pillar and a shield, until both shields are upgraded
• Remaining pillars

Note that I don't recommend upgrading all dragons/shields at once before you have some upgraded pillars because after the dragons and shields get upgraded, not only their performance gets quite a boost (particularly the dragons, from 9/6 to 13/5), their cost increases slightly for this much increase.


I think this deck can use a bit more modifications!
Feel free to tweak the deck a bit (tweak it too much, and you'll need to follow its agenda rather than this deck's). Possible modifications to the deck include, but not limited to~

• a sixth Ice Dragon
• Ice Bolts/Freeze
• Blue Crawlers
• Thunderstorm/Dry Spell
• Shockwave
• a few Water Pendulums

Wait, why would you use Ice Shield over Fog Shield? Fog Shields may let you evade an entire attack rather than reducing a few points off each attack!
Yes, and that's why it'll get very painful if it gets stolen. YMMV, but I'd risk my crew getting frozen because they stole my Ice Shield rather than risk missing critical kills because they stole my Fog Shield.
In fact, if they do use a Dusk Mantle (and Fog Shield, to a lesser degree), that's my idea of screwing the AI: park your Ice Shield, without worrying it gets stolen. If they don't steal it, they'll have to worry about their Vampires, Dragon, what have ya, getting frozen. And if they do steal it (and trust me, the AI makes a special note to steal those kind of shields without regard that their shield is inherently much better), your chance to miss have suddenly zeroed after Marisa they stole the precious thing shield. Win-win, in my humble opinion. (As I said before, I'd risk my crews getting frozen for a surefire hit over missing the kill for shields that doesn't harm your own creatures.)

[Chapuz]

I would replace some water pillars for pendulums so all your fishes have air quanta and replace the ice shield for 2 Fogs.

[omegareaper7]

For ai3, I would remove the shields for another dragon and pillar.

And consider what chapuz said and get a couple pendulums in, no more then 4 though in my opinion.

[Basman-1453]

I would replace some water pillars for pendulums so all your fishes have air quanta and replace the ice shield for 2 Fogs.

Actually, I prefer Ice Shields over Fog Shields to a few vital reasons, including (but not limited to):

• Exploit the AI's use of Steal. Y'see, to trick them into replacing the way more superior Dusk Mantle they have with an Ice Shield (I'd rather to risk my crews getting frozen over risk missing critical knock outs).
• Buying time against Immortal/Dragon mono-Aether (since there's no way my toadies can poison them, freezing them is the best bet a mono-Water can hope).
• Buying time against the likes of Maxwell's Demon, Purple Nymph, et al.

For ai3, I would remove the shields for another dragon and pillar.

Noted. I'll edit in possible tweaks to the deck. (It was nearly 3 AM when I submitted this thing, lol XD)

And consider what chapuz said and get a couple pendulums in, no more then 4 though in my opinion.

About the pendulums~ well, without Devourer 'assistance', I don't usually fall into a situation that I ran outta Air quanta without poisoning at least their key creatures (and with too many pendulums, you're going to have insufficient Water quanta to summon your heavy hitters).

[omegareaper7]

Thing about not switching out enough pendulums is that you can't really slow down there damage as fast. 4 pendulums pretty much guarantees that you have enough water quanta still, while also providing more air quanta in which you could poison more creatures, or kill creatures faster.

Consider this, you can get a toadfish out turn two, you are going to have 2 air quanta by the time you can use it, cool. You can then summon another turn 3, because you have 5 pillars. You now run out of air quanta turn 4 on and can only poison one creature a turn. While not a big deal, it still is going to possibly cost you games here and there, more so in bronze where you want stuff dead asap because of hp difference.

Now if one of those were a pendulum, you would still be getting enough quanta for a toadfish every other turn, not including possible pillar draws, which would be over a 50% chance per draw still.

[Basman-1453]

Thing about not switching out enough pendulums is that you can't really slow down there damage as fast. 4 pendulums pretty much guarantees that you have enough water quanta still, while also providing more air quanta in which you could poison more creatures, or kill creatures faster.

The thing about switching out too many pendulums is that, in the end, it's mainly a rush. When I'm on the top, I noted that the pendulums often translate to wasted Air quanta; when I'm on the bottom, I tend to struggle to summon the fishes and dragons to try to outrush them. When the toadies come up late, it's important to be able to summon your dragon as soon as possible to pressure their HP.

Also, with 4 pendulums in place of pillars, the QI for Water goes past 6, which is not a good thing to have in a mono-Water rush. The recipe I listed have its QI for Water just below 5.5, for the sake of comparison.

[omegareaper7]

Thing about not switching out enough pendulums is that you can't really slow down there damage as fast. 4 pendulums pretty much guarantees that you have enough water quanta still, while also providing more air quanta in which you could poison more creatures, or kill creatures faster.

The thing about switching out too many pendulums is that, in the end, it's mainly a rush. When I'm on the top, I noted that the pendulums often translate to wasted Air quanta; when I'm on the bottom, I tend to struggle to summon the fishes and dragons to try to outrush them. When the toadies come up late, it's important to be able to summon your dragon as soon as possible to pressure their HP.

Also, with 4 pendulums in place of pillars, the QI for Water goes past 6, which is not a good thing to have in a mono-Water rush. The recipe I listed have its QI for Water just below 5.5, for the sake of comparison.

Four pendulums isn't a whole lot though, thats the thing. If you want it to be a rush, then rush, but it would work better as a rush with more ready control, that way you can kill opposing dragons easier and make up for loss of speed. Also, allows you to generally wear down there creatures and cripple offense much easier.

Also, the QI is a rough estimate at best, I wouldn't rely on that at all.

Stats via simulator vs ai3:

Your current model:
Wins: 4301
Winrate: 86.02 %
Average TTW: 9.946756568239945
EMs: 69
EM rate: 1.6042780748663101 %


Pendulum changes: Ice shields and two pillars dropped for pendulums
Wins: 4280
Winrate: 85.6 %
Average TTW: 9.212616822429906
EMs: 64
EM rate: 1.4953271028037383 %

Now of course these should be taken with a mild grain of salt, it is the ai playing. But it is a rush deck, pretty straight forward. Marginal change in speed and win rate. In fact, its faster. Then cutting one pendulum for a pillar raised that speed and win rate by roughly .1 and 1% respectively.

All i'm trying to point out is that the pendulum thing isn't nearly as cut and dry as you seem to think.

[Basman-1453]

Ah, I see~ You replaced the shields and two pillars. I replaced four pillars; perhaps that's why it didn't work as well as you advertised ^^;

I was still on the edge whether the pendulums will work out to be better, especially for more control-oriented modifications.

The recipe I posted, rather obviously, is more rush-oriented. If you do take a few pendulums, I'd suggest to replace a dragon with a pillar or something.

[omegareaper7]

Ah, I see~ You replaced the shields and two pillars. I replaced four pillars; perhaps that's why it didn't work as well as you advertised ^^;

I was still on the edge whether the pendulums will work out to be better, especially for more control-oriented modifications.

The recipe I posted, rather obviously, is more rush-oriented. If you do take a few pendulums, I'd suggest to replace a dragon with a pillar or something.

I even did one with just 3 pendulums in place of pillars, did marginally worse. Like 1% worse win rate, 1 turn slower. Not much of a difference at all either way really.