Useful Tips for Noobs
Have at least one high cost, high damage card in your deck. For example, if it’s the beginning of the run and you’re offered a card that says it costs 4 energy and deals 110 damage, you pick it even if you don’t have 4 energy! You can easily and quickly fix the energy cost afterwards with a wide variety of antiqorum or other cards. Being able to one-shot a medium enemy or slap a huge chunk off a boss’s health means you get through fights faster and take less damage. It doesn’t matter if you take some damage that turn if you can remove that foe from the fight altogether.
Pick cards that can discount the cost of other cards. This combo is most powerful when combined with tip 1, but works with your regular 1 and 2 cost cards, too. Sometimes a card will need to be upgraded in order to get the discount ability, so prioritize those when upgrading. If a card can both pull another card from the discard pile and discount it, you can redraw and cast your high damage card several times before you even need to shuffle your deck.
Pay very close attention each round to the blue icon next to every enemy, even if it’s grayed out. This information is just as important as the cards you draw on your turn. I lost a good run one time because it was grayed out and I thought the boss wasn’t doing anything that turn, but it activated against far enemies. I started off near to it and attacked a far enemy, triggering the effect. I was out of energy at that point and immediately died at the end of my turn.
Have at least a couple cards that can either move yourself (gunslinger cards that say “evasion”) or the enemy (“point blank” or “knockback” effects). Sometimes you need to switch between being near or far to an enemy due to its blue icon ability. There are also a lot of attacks, program cards, and antiqorum that trigger when you switch zones or attack an enemy in a particular zone. Being able to reliably control this is very valuable, especially if you already have a few of those antiqorum & cards.
Take your deck size into account if deciding whether or not to save your fade cards. If you have 30+ cards in your deck and it’s not a floor boss fight, you probably aren’t going to see that card again unless you can pull it from the discard pile with another card’s ability. Fade might as well say fleeting at that point and it’s use it or lose it. Ideally, you don’t want a deck that big, but sometimes it can’t be helped. As is the case with other deckbuilding games like this, a smaller deck makes your draws much more consistent. It’s extremely difficult to get a tiny deck in this game due to being forced to choose a card every combat, though.
You will not win if you rely on 3 mana and no cost reduction. But its not unreasonable to do a lot better than that, a boss 1 artifact to get you to 4, plus some cards that get you extra mana or reduced cost. Blue buff cards help in a similar way because they add some value to every turn without spending mana in exchange for being weaker the turn you play them.
Paying one card to discount 2 cards in your discard by 1 and put them back into your deck is huge for example. It doesn’t necessarily help right this instant (it can if you have card draw) but it is a net positive mana over the course of a fight and it puts the best two cards you’ve played back into your deck. Whether that’s just a value 1 mana card or a 3 or 4 cost heavy htiter that you can’t do much more when you play it, its good.
And on deck size, a card with fade stops existing after the first pass through your deck. So it makes your deck thinner, plus they tend to be better than normal cards anyway. I am personally a belief of there’s never a good reason to not play a fade card unless it just doesn’t do what you need at all. If you can choose between playing the fade or two weaker cards that do the same thing, play the fade, it gets you a better turn right now even if not strictly necessary. Same deal with cards the draw an extra in addition to themselves whether that’s a free card with draw or an on draw effect. Between the two you can pretty easily get even a 20 card deck down to the point where you see the whole thing in 2 turns. Even less sometimes. The 0 cost look at 3 cards, discard one of them, draw another, boost its damage if its an attack for example is really good, even without the damage boost. For free you are getting rid of it and another card while also replacing itself, so it gets rid of two cards at actually no cost with upside if you trigger its damage boost.
The exception to smaller being better is the virus characters if you don’t have a good way to quickly shove all the virus into your discard. It’s better to have a huge deck with some weaker cards than risk having complete dud turns where your hand is entirely viruses. Anchor effects can help with that. Doesn’t help if you have 8 mana but nothing to play it on.
Last thing I’ll say is life is a resource, use it. A lot of new players in every game try to avoid losing hp at all costs. But if your options are take 5 damage now but eliminate an enemy/make them able to be killed next turn (e.g. they have 30 hp right now and you don’t have anything that does more than 9 left in the deck) you are probably taking less over the fight by just eating a bit of damage right now. The best form of crowd control is death. This includes wiping out the smaller enemies in an elite fight if you can quickly, while they may do a fraction of the damage, 2 extra hits coming in at 16 a round you are having to block really hurts your ability to clean up the big enemy quickly if you can deal with the adds using less than a turn. and if you can’t you probably lost anyways.
Be the first to comment