Seriously... What am I doing?

[Hankroyd]

Hello,

Here I am ... Checked the rules, fought Ragequit on beginner's mode and lost. Again. And Again.
I checked on BGG to see how people were able to win this game. I found a few post about what to put in the nine cards to defeat 'easily' Rageborn. I tried and lost. Again. And Again.

And the problem is, I did nothing wrong ... Well, let's be honest, I sure did a lot of thing wrong, so let's rephrase it: I have no idea what I'm doing right and what I'm doing wrong.

Is someone has a link or something about the strategy: when to buy spells or shards, when focus or open breach ... stuff like that to make the game playable. Because right now the game for me just resume to buy some cards, deals a few damages while the bad guy destroy everything ... And yes ... that is not very fun to know before the game even start that you will lose and there is nothing to do that will change this.

[tryraptor]

Hi Hankroyd,

I play most of the time solo mage but I advice to start with 2 or 3 mages.
But Aeons End is not an easy win. If the nemesis has 2 or even 4 turns in a row it is possible the game is over.
How many mage do you play?
You need to find the balance in the game and it takes a bit of time to learn.
Here are some things I do.

Park sparks in the breach. Till you really need them. Other spells do a lot more damage.
Try to destroy bad cards like sparks & crystals asap these are trash cards.
Relics can have more value then gems but don't buy to much.
Mage powers can be important but it takes time to invest from the start.
It can be usefull to not cast a spell and to use it the next turn.
Clearing minions can be more important then damaging the nemesis to get control over the game.

Try to sort your cards in the discard pile. A lot of the time you will put the beter cards first in de discard pile. Sometimes it is better to discard a crystal, spark first if you are able to destroy them with the next hand.

Beter gems result is faster charging, faster opening breach, getting better spells.

My end hands are most of the time about 10 cards with no crystals & sparks.
In my last game I bought first 2 or 3 'Spectral Echo' (Cast: Deal 2 damage. You may destroy a card in hand.) Once all my sparks and crystals where removed I even destroyed 'Spectral Echo' and replaced them with higher dealing spells. But keep in mind you will need to replace some crystals for better gems.

If you play with more mage you can use one mage as support while an other does the damage. Depending on there powers.

I hope this will help you for the next games.

[Hankroyd]

Hi

So far I played only 2 mages (the recommended setup in the game)
Getiing rid of the starting trash cards is my priority (Star Realms and Ascension taught me this, already :) ) and I get better shards andd buy spells. But spells deals low damages with two spells, dealing 8 damage barely controls the minions, and the boss suffer almost no damage. And that's a best case. Usually the damage output is more between 2-4.
To do more damage you have to open or focus, but if you do you can't buy spell and if you do you don't do damage which means opening your breaches is useless because you won't be using them. Hence my little problem.
However I usually discards the best cards first to get them sooner without thinking what will my next hands be. I guess I should be more careful of that.

[Makoto Naegi]

The Amplify Vision spell really helped me with that issue. It focuses your lowest cost breach when it's cast and deals 2 damage, 3 if all breaches are opened. It gave me a lot more leeway with what I could use my energy on in each turn while still working towards opening the breaches.

[Jaguar]

Aeon's End is a deck building game. It differs from other deck building games in a couple key ways.

First you don't shuffle the deck when you draw new cards. I think this actually makes weak cards weaker. You really don't want to buy many cards. The ether you generate will be used to open breeches and buy charges.

Secondly the game is relatively short for a deck building game. This once again favors not buying too many cards. You don't have many rounds to cycle the cards you have.

A lot of people play this game by selecting random mages and a random market. Unless you are very experienced this will likely cause a loss. In order to learn the game and improve your skill you need to choose your mages and choose your market.

For a beginner I would suggest Rageborn on easy. Use Jian and Kadir. 2 and 3 player is easier than 4 player and 1 player. 2 player is probably easiest for a beginner. For the market I would select Diamond Cluster and any 2 other gems. For relics select Blasting Staff and Focusing Orb. For spells select Spectral Echo, Amplify Vision, Essence Theft and Planar Insight.

Let's go through a couple of turns for Jian. Prep both sparks to breech one and two. Use 3 ether plus the extra ether for buying a gem to buy Diamond cluster. Next turn cast both sparks to either the nemesis or one of his minions. Prep both sparks. Use 3 ether to focus breech three. Next turn cast both sparks. Prep a spark. Use the 5 ether from Diamond cluster and 3 crystals to buy Essence Theft. At this point you have purchased a good gem and a good spell.

As the game progresses you will want to purchase a second Diamond cluster. If Gravehold is taking a lot of heat you may want to buy a Focusing Orb instead of Amplify Vision. Once all the breeches are open Focusing Orb can heal Gravehold or it can be destroyed any time to heal Gravehold if it get below 10 - 15 life.

Once you have purchased 2 Diamond Clusters don't buy any more gems. You should have enough. With practice you should be able to keep the Diamond Clusters together to generate extra ether. Only buy more than one Focusing Orb if you need to destroy it to heal Gravehold. You may also buy a Blasting Staff, but you want to keep your non spell card count as low as possible. Eventually you will be buying only charges and spells. Planar Insight is a great spell for Jian because Jian starts with 2 breeches open.

The goal is to get a few good spells and cycle them as fast as possible to your open breeches. Even with that you can still get a run of bad luck that snatches a loss out of victory. I have had countless games where the outcome was decided on who went next from the turn order deck.

Good luck and have fun.

[Hankroyd]

Thanks for the tip, Jaguar.

I won't be able to play this week, but I'll give it a go next saturday.

[tgb]

I've never played the physical game, and from what I'm reading this seems a lot more complex than the average deckbuilder. Is there a tutorial in place yet?

[lord wolfhunt]

Originally posted by tgb:

I've never played the physical game, and from what I'm reading this seems a lot more complex than the average deckbuilder. Is there a tutorial in place yet?

Not yet. It is in the works though. I imagine they will announce it when it is done.

[Dragen3]

No In Game Tutorial yet but if you check Youtube you can find some complete Game Play Throughs which may be helpful.

You have to keep in mind that most cooperative games seem to aim for about a 30% Success Rate which means that people playing them have to be either very lucky, fairly houghtful, or some amount of both to win.

Most Deck Builders have a way to either thin out your deck or cycle through extra cards above the pretty standard 5 Card Hands. Some of the more complicated ones have both.

Games that have those sorts of mechanics are balanced to expect, if not require them being used.

Some of the mechanics that need to be considered and used for best chance of victory in this game include.

Static Market which means you can tell from the very start of the game what sorts of resources you have available or can acquire to acheive victory.

This is magnified by the fact that while the game does have Random Mage and Random Stock for the Market as an option. You may pick Spells and Mages that synergize well with each other instead of selecting at Random.

As far as i can tell their is no timer for your decisions so taking the time to consider what each card does by itself and what can be done with groups or combos of them is likely to make your Play Experience much nicer.


Not shuffling your deck also provides a very important opportunity to maximize the potential you get from those Mage and Card Combo Synergies you should consider either during initial Set Up if you pick your Market and Mages or before you start taking turns and making decisions if you went Random Mage and Market.

[archonsod]

Don't beat yourself up too much; Rageborn isn't a particularly easy nameless to defeat (he's usually recommended as a first play because he's fairly straightforward in terms of rules - pretty much all he does is deal damage. That means he has something of a single minded focus on one of the quickest ways to end the game, making him a tad more difficult to actually beat than those which split their focus or attempt a win via other means). Also worth noting one of the reasons many of us love Aeon's End is that it subverts a lot of the regular deck building mechanics; if you try and approach it as a more traditional deck builder you'll usually lose. I suspect part of your problem is focusing on thinning out the deck and acquiring cards; there's only certain mages (and Nameless for that matter) that's going to be viable with.

There's a lot of variability in the approach you'd want to take based on the number of mages (and who those mages are) and the market. The number of mages is going to determine what your 'critical' resource is; fewer mages means you need to be a lot more careful about taking health loss, more mages means you need to worry more about Gravehold damage. It's also going to affect the turn order deck; the players always have four turns between them while the Nemesis has two, in terms of difficulty this usually makes three mages the sweet spot thanks to the 'wild' turn card.

Generally you have two flavours of mages, economic and spell casters. Spell focused mages usually don't want to acquire too many cards from the market - you have a maximum of four breaches available, and it's much better to be drawing and prepping four good spells every turn than having to spend two turns drawing through sparks and crystals to get to them. Since most mages start with around seven crystals in their deck you won't even want to buy gems in most cases, you can already buy most spells if you can manipulate your deck to draw into the needed crystals. Economy mages on the other hand will usually want to get better gems while ignoring most spells (their job is mainly to nuke any powers the Nemesis puts out before they trigger), though even then it's important to consider the deck tempo; if you need to go through two rounds of crystals and sparks until you can draw your 10 aether hand it's likely too slow to deal with anything beyond T1.

When it comes to breaches and charges there's no real hard and fast rule, and it's going to depend a lot on the market and mages. A spell focused mage might switch to charges and breaches as early as turn two if he can be fed cards by another player. Similarly always assess the actual threat a minion or nemesis card presents before expending resources and time to deal with it - Rageborn doesn't particularly benefit from having out minions, and he's far more likely to end you (or Gravehold) before a one damage minion can manage it.

[Oncus]

Just beat Rageblade on expert with 2 heroes. Just keep trying.


Rageblade is not an easy nemesis actually, you might have more luck with the other nemesis instead.

Don't want to write a novel here, but the key here is balance and deliberation. Don't just do stuff because you can.

Sometimes it's best to keep a card in hand, then to use it. Same goes for spells.
Buy gems early so you can buy more expensive spells, but don't overdue it because minions will kill you. On your second-third turn you should have at least one stronger spell.

It's okay to have one character act as support, buying relics or spells that give charges to the other hero.
Don't destroy cards at all costs! Sometimes that 1 gem in hand could mean you buy the final charge, or sometimes you can lose a hp to destroy a card. Not every time is this worth it.
Some abilities are more useful than others. Sometimes it's better to spend 6 ether to charge up and use the ability.

[Du-Vu]

Picking a strategy and sticking with it is usually the key in these kinds of games. A big deck with lots of round-by-round versatility and buying power, or a small efficient deck that runs on a steady supply of cards to destroy? Lots of spells in lots of slots, or only a few slots with expensive but powerful cards? Which character do you want to prioritize as far as their special ability is concerned? Sometimes it can be very useful to have one mage dedicate themselves almost entirely to farming charges for others.

I haven't played the base game, but at least with Broken Mask and Rageborne, it does seem like any strategy can work, just as long you focus on one. And, of course, that includes deciding whether you need to kill a minion or take out a card based on what it does, or if you can mitigate its effect some other way in favor of focus-firing on the Nemesis.

[XcessiveNinja17]

I haven't played the video game version much yet, but I have played the board game solo with 4 mages.

What helped me the most:
- Rageborne's gimmick is simply his DPS, and the amount of DPS that you need to do to clean up his minions. So think about how to put out high damage quickly, and how to heal both mages and Gravehold, possibly doing both with the same cards if you can find any that are like that.
- Don't have more than 15 cards in circulation per mage. Getting to less than 10 cards in circulation is the end goal. Therefore, each mage should get a card that destroys another card, ASAP.
- One mage should get a more-damaging spell ASAP.
- One mage should get two Diamond Clusters (or other means of having 6+ aether in one turn) ASAP. Keep the two Diamond Clusters together.
- One mage should be spamming relics - whether to open breaches, give charges, or whatever else is helpful.
- Designate one or two mages to get all the charges. Then design your strategy around doing their ability as much as possible. I usually designate Adelheim and Brama to get all the charges, since they block and heal.
- The mage responsible for spamming the same spells or relics over and over again should be the main one to buy Bottled Vortex. Other mages should only buy Bottled Vortex if they already have at least two Jades (or better) and are having a hard time getting rid of their Crystals.
- Remember that you can skip opening the 2nd breach and go straight for the 3rd breach. If you really badly need DPS then you might have to do this.

This is based on a party of Adelheim, Brama, Jian, and Mist (the tutorial party of the board game). I haven't checked the tutorial of this video game version yet.

You can try out other strategies if they work better for you.

[tgb]

Jaguar -

Thanks to your tips I was able to defeat Rageborne in my second game, and I gained a lot more insight as to how to play.

[Hankroyd]

Yup ...
I tried, but this game is definitively not for me ... See you with Spirit Island :)

[Ghostlight]

Well so far I have only played with random Mages and random Market and have yet to lose a game. Only played versus Rageborn so far though, but I've beaten him about a dozen times, and I've never played this game before now, so you don't need all that setup.